[The Novachord, closed and open (click either photo for an enlargement); both photos per Wikipedia]

When you grew up in the US during a certain window of time (and maybe in certain geographic areas, within certain socioeconomic strata), the culture you could absorb from the adult world was this weird amalgam of past and present. The mass media hadn’t quite figured out what “mass media” might mean. Television still felt like an extravagance. Pop-culture artifacts from the early decades of the 20th century could still be found lying around in basements and attics, waiting for (re)discovery by kids with maybe a little too much time on their hands.

One such sort of artifact in our household was 78rpm record albums. I have no idea from which side of the family most of these things might have come to us — or, rather, to the cardboard boxes in the second-floor “storage room” and in dark back corners of the basement. If they were Big Band-related, odds were good that they’d arrived trailing in Dad’s wake. But the others…?

We had a couple of records by Arthur Godfrey, for instance, including one on which he and a would-be comic country-singin’ group sang an embarrassing number called “Slap Her Down Again, Paw.” (That was the refrain, in a narrative about an adolescent girl who’d stayed out later than her parents allowed — but finally came in at sunrise.)

And we also had a collection of recordings on a musical instrument called the Novachord.

Like the Mellotron (covered here in a Midweek Music Break some time ago), the Novachord was an experimental keyboard instrument straddling the analog/digital divide. Wikipedia says only about a thousand were manufactured by Hammond (the organ company) between 1939 and 1942; production lapsed during World War II because of the shortage of parts, and never resumed afterwards because, apparently, the thing just hadn’t caught on anyway.

I don’t ever remember Mom or Dad playing the Novachord records on the family hi-fi (or later, stereo). But I listened to them myself, for some reason, and often enough that one song really lodged in my head. The label identified it as “Estudiantina,” a waltz by a composer named Émile Waldteufel. Although (as Wikipedia says) Waldteufel is considered a French composer, he was born in Strasbourg — as German a city as a French city may be, right down to the geography. (And his surname is German, meaning — I love this — forest devil.)

Given all that, maybe it should not surprise that “Estudiantina” — certainly as rendered by the Novachord, in the hands of someone named Collins H. Driggs — has so much a lilting, oomp-pa-pah beer-hall quality:

Maybe the main reason why this performance struck me with such force was that I recognized the tune well before I heard it from the Novachord recording — and even then, when I must’ve been only ten or twelve years old or so, I recognized it for an unlikely reason: it provided the melody to the advertising jingle for (yes!) a Germanic-sounding brand of beer, Rheingold. That’s Miss Rheingold* of 1949 in the ad over there on the right. I can almost hear “Estudiantina” tootling from her concertina, which perhaps sounded much like the Novachord: thin, reedy, and rather, well, burbly. I can even almost hear her singing the jingle — whose words, indeed, included the announcement: My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer…!

Background: When I set out a couple days ago on this general topic, for no reason that I can put my finger on, I had exactly two facts at my disposal:

• The word “Novachord.”
• The remembered connection between that old 78rpm record, and the Rheingold jingle.

I certainly couldn’t remember the song title, “Estudiantina.” And I don’t think I’d ever even registered the name of Émile Waldteufel.

But as I continued to think about the recording, I vaguely remembered that the overall album title coupled Novachord somehow with the word magic. It wasn’t Novachord Magic… nor The Magical Novachord… it was… was… was it The Magic of the Novachord?

And folks, I wanna tell you: I just about fell out of my chair when a quick check of Google led me to that very album on iTunes.

I love the Internet.

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* The very first Miss Rheingold, in 1940, was Jinx Falkenburg. (I might have been able to invent that name, but I’d never have had the nerve to use it in a story. Too implausible.) Her autobiography, Jinx, came out in 1951, but apparently went out of print long ago. (Hers, I’d wager, is a potential best-selling story in search of the right biographer or filmmaker, especially in our beautiful-celebrity culture.) There are many pictures of her online (and yes, Jinx appears to have been something of a minx), but one of my favorites is the one at the right. She is here not signing the accordion, as it appears. She’s signing a short snorter. You can be forgiven for not knowing what a short snorter is; according to the site of The Short Snorter Project (where I found the photo), it is:

…a banknote which was signed by various persons traveling together or meeting up at different events and records who was met. The tradition was started by bush pilots in Alaska in the 1920’s and subsequently spread through the growth of military and commercial aviation. If you signed a short snorter and that person could not produce it upon request, they owed you a dollar or a drink (a “short snort”, aviation and alcohol do not mix!).

Did I say, I love the Internet?