JoeMc (Curator)

Being partially of Polish extraction, I always get interested when I stumble across Polish-related music on the FMA. Today I spotted a little number called "Polish Dance," and I clicked on the little arrow next to it expecting to hear a brass band, or perhaps a little village orchestra. What I heard instead was both thrilling and ridiculous: It sounded like some oversized canary had snorfed up some Benzedrine with its birdseed and began to trill maniacally.

I soon realized that this was not a real bird, but a whole different type of bird: a loon named Charles Kellogg, who flapped his wings and chirped his way to immortality in the 1910s. Dubbed "Nature's Singer," Chuck was kind of like that other Bird, the one with the saxophone, except his axe was his nimble larynx. Yes, folks, prepare yourselves for the awesome technique of the Charlie Parker of bird imitation records, Mr. Charles Kellogg, spotlighted below.

Charles Kellogg was not your everyday bird imitator. It may be hard to believe now, but bird imitation records were fairly popular in the early days of the recording industry. People liked stupid human tricks even back then, and imitations of birds were high on the list. Most bird imitators, though, simply whistled their impressions of birdsong. Chuck Kellogg was one of the very few who sang it like the birds sang it: from the throat, and with feeling!

He had years of practice. With a dead mother and a negligent father, young Charles had plenty of time to wander around the woods in his Sierra Mountains homestead. By the time he was a teen, in the 1880s, Charles found that he could pretty accurately mimic some of the birds that hung around the local woods. Concerned relatives, alarmed by Charles' naturalistic bent (he would walk around for days living off the land and making campfires with sticks), eventually sent him east for schooling, but it was too late. Although Charles made an effort at going to college in Syracuse, he soon dropped out and went into vaudeville, where a fella with a helluva bird imitation could really go places.

And go places he did. He traveled the U.S. and abroad, thrilling audiences with his throaty vocalizations. Victor Records, never one to sleep on exciting new talent, signed him to a recording contract in 1911. By this time technology had caught up with Charles (who was already in his 40s) and could record him properly. Kellogg recorded mostly classical and light classical pieces during his tenure with Victor, which makes sense, since so many composers have used birdsong in their work. Charles recorded until 1919, with most of his records sounding as if a bird had gotten into a conservatory and decided it was a piccolo. A unique body of work it is.

"Polish Dance," or more accurately "Polish Dance No. 1 in E-Flat Minor, Op. 3" for solo piano, was written by Franz Xaver Scharwenka (1850-1924), a Polish-German emigré who played him some mean Chopin before composing his own works: piano concertos, chamber music, and even a symphony. Despite a lot of fine work, "Polish Dance" turned out to be his Big Hit, the piece that defined him in the popular imagination, and many vaudeville folks took a poke at it. It's safe to say that Charles Kellogg did something with it that no one else had done. Or even could do.

Charles, in fact, claimed to have not only an extraordinary gift for imitation, but unusual equipment for the job. According to the U.S. Bureau of Standards, who apparently tested him, Charles' voice could vibrate at unbelievable speed, closer to that of a songbird than a human being. A regular human voice vibrates at 1000 cycles per second. An unusual voice can vibrate, beyond human hearing, at 4000 cycles per second. Charles' voice was off the meter at 40,000 cycles per second. His voice was so powerful that it was alleged that he could even extinguish fires with it! An episode of Mythbusters from a few years ago found that this wasn't true, but an account that Kellogg put out a fire in Berkeley from a radio station in San Francisco may be. With amplification, it's been proven that auditory tones can put out a fire. If anyone could do it, it was probably Kellogg.

Although there was clearly demand for his services, Charles elected not to become a fireman. Instead, he continued to travel the world singing his (bird)song, always coming home to his beloved California. He bought a ranch and became a big fan of the Redwood Forest, which at that time was under some risk of being chopped up by big business interests, with their usual regard for the environment. Kellogg got the Save-the-Redwoods League underway and amassed enough money to buy the land and give it to California to oversee and protect.

Around this time, Charles also basically invented the mobile home. He hollowed out a fallen redwood tree trunk, slapped it on the back of a Nash Quad chassis, installed a bed, a stove, and a bathroom, and tooled around in it for quite awhile, preaching the benefits of protecting the Redwoods and our environment in general. Charles' tree truck even had running water and electric lighting. Not without a sense of humor, he called it The Travel Log.

Charles hung around doing cool stuff like this for quite a while longer, being an activist, traveling the world, and singing like a bird until he died at age 81 in 1949. He wrote a book about his adventures, which you can still get here, and somebody even recently wrote a play about him. The Travel Log still exists, and you can see it at the Humboldt State Redwood Park. Best of all, you can still hear some of his records, here on the FMA as well as here and here.