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A comedy skit apropos of springtime –
Casey as Umpire at a Ball Game by Russell Hunting (1898).
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One of the early stars of the humorous talking record was Russell Hunting, beginning in 1892, with his "Michael Casey" series of Irish comedy skits.
Here, the multi-talented Hunting, with his trademark "uh" announcement ("of New York and, uh, Paris") for the Columbia Phonograph Company, performs all of the main speaking parts in this Casey installment.
To hear an excerpt — 
For help playing these sounds, click here. |
As was the case with many talking records of the brown wax era, this selection was recorded at a relatively low number of revolutions per minute (RPM) – in this case 94-RPM as compared with the more typical 120-RPM for musical records – in order to squeeze the nearly 3½ minute skit onto a single record.
To hear other examples of wax cylinders, see the
