The Unique Quartette was a black vocal quartet in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. Founded in the mid-1880s by Joseph Moore, they are best known for a handful of

wax cylinder Waxes are a diverse class of organic compounds that are lipophilic, malleable solids near ambient temperatures. They include higher alkanes and lipids, typically with melting points above about 40 °C (104 °F), melting to give low ...

recordings made in the first half of the 1890s. They are the earliest known black vocal group to have been commercially recorded, with their first recordings made in December 1890 for the New York Phonograph Company. Several of their wax cylinders survive, most recorded by the

North American Phonograph Company The North American Phonograph Company was an early attempt to commercialize the maturing technologies of sound recording in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Though the company was largely unsuccessful in its goals due to legal, technical and financ ...

, and are among the earliest extant recordings of any African-American musicians, along with recordings by George W. Johnson and a single surviving cylinder recorded by Louis Vasnier.Brooks, ''p.'' 88 The earliest surviving wax cylinder recording of the Unique Quartette — and thus the earliest surviving recording by any African-American musical group (as opposed to soloist, since George W. Johnson's “The Whistling Coon” predates this by two years) — is Edison 694, “Mamma’s Black Baby Boy,” recorded in 1893. There are two copies left: one is in the

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library is ...

and one is privately owned. This may also be the earliest

Barbershop quartet A barbershop quartet is a group of four singers who sing music in the barbershop style, characterized by four-part harmony without instrumental accompaniment, or a cappella. The four voices are: the lead, the vocal part which typically carries t ...

recording by any quartet of any ethnicity, providing further evidence that Barbershop is of African-American origin, being derived from the

Negro spiritual Spirituals (also known as Negro spirituals, African American spirituals, Black spirituals, or spiritual music) is a genre of Christian music that is associated with Black Americans, which merged sub-Saharan African cultural heritage with the e ...

and being part of the gap between the Spiritual and later but still early African-American musical styles and genres such as

Blues Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the Afr ...

and

Jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major ...

References

External links

Sound clip of The Unique Quartette
African-American musical groups {{US-singing-group-stub