Welcome to Three Tune Tuesday
A Journey into the Soundtrack of the Past
Why Three Tune Tuesday?
Because it’s more than nostalgia—it’s a time machine. By listening closely to these century-old voices, we rediscover the roots of today’s music and the stories of the people who sang them. Each crackle and hiss carries history: resilience in hard times, laughter in the face of change, and artistry that still resonates.
Where to Listen
- Right here at Blind Skeleton, the podcast home of Three Tune Tuesday.
- On Apple Podcasts.
- Or wherever you enjoy your weekly dose of vintage sound
Whether you’re a history buff, a music lover, or simply curious, Three Tune Tuesday offers an inspiring window into the past. Tune in each week to experience the melodies and stories that laid the groundwork for the music we know and love today.
Browse All Episodes
Every Tuesday, Boneapart and Yulia spin three songs from 78rpm records more than 100 years old: ragtime, early jazz, blues, vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, dance bands and forgotten hits from the 1900s to the 1920s.
Each episode follows a theme of the week, and every track is an acoustically recorded, public-domain gem played on period-appropriate phonographs and gramophones from a private collection of 78 rpm records. Along with the music come the stories: who made these recordings, what the world sounded like when they were new, and why these voices deserve to be remembered.
Whether you’re a record collector, a lover of old-time music and the Jazz Age, or just curious what people were dancing to a century ago, pull up a chair. Three tunes, every Tuesday, played the way they were first heard.
A Blind Skeleton production.
This week on Three Tune Tuesday, we went looking for skeletons and found something better: three Columbia records, six years apart, that cannot agree on what a graveyard is for. First, “Death Letter Blues,” recorded in 1924 by Clara Smith — the “Queen of the Moaners,” no relation to Bessie, though the two of them cut duets together. It’s a song about the piece of paper that tells you somebody has died, written by Ida Cox, and the clarinet and cornet behind her belong to two of Fletcher Henderson’s men. Then we go back to 1918 for “Graveyard Blues,” where a white society dance band at a Broadway lobster palace plays a white ragtime composer’s “blues” as a fox trot — the label actually says so — with a xylophone handling the spooky parts. Nobody in that room has buried anybody. And we finish with “Cemetery Blues,” Bessie Smith in 1923 on Columbia 13001-D: the second record the label ever issued in its first Race series. Just her voice and a piano, standing at a grave and laughing. For five years the graveyard was a dance step. Then somebody opened a door, and it turned out the bones had been singing the whole time — we just hadn’t been pressing the records.
