Think you know everything there is to know about music? Prepare to be blown away as we take a look at some of the most interesting, unbelievable facts about musicians and the music industry!
1.The oldest discovered musical instrument is 40,000 years old;
Two flutes found in a cave in Germany are made of bird bone and mammoth ivory. These instruments are dated to what is considered the prehistoric period of music, or the time before music was notated. Due to the lack of notation, it’s difficult to know what music was like in the prehistoric era, but one can safely assume it was used in similar ways to today: for recreation and religious rituals.
2. The oldest recorded melody is over 3000 years old Hurrian Hymn H6 on stone tablet;
Hurrian Hymn Text H6 (circa 1,400 BCE) is the world’s earliest written music so far discovered. The 3,400 year old Hurrian Hymn was discovered in Ugarit, ancient northern Canaan (now modern Syria) in the early 1950s, and was preserved for 3,400 years on a clay tablet, written in the Cuneiform text of the ancient Hurrian language.
3. Yuri Gargarin, sang a Shostakovich tune during his first mission.;
The music for the song was composed by Shostakovich at the request of Dolmatovsky for a play he was producing which needed an “aeronautical beacon,” or a song for a pilot to sing to help him navigate through the Alps. The song apparently proved popular with real pilots because cosmonaut Yuri Gargarin sang “The Homeland Hears” while in orbit around the earth in April 1961..
4. The Rolling Stones: Exile On Main St (1972);
Exile On Main St was one of the quintessential DIY albums by a major band. Keith Richards and his then partner Anita Pallenberg had settled into Villa Nellcôte, an estate described as “a mini Versailles.” But the ritzy decadence of the palatial scene stood in stark contrast to the raw recordings after the band brought in a mobile unit to record in the cavernous, unfinished basement. The title The Basement Tapes had already been taken, but this was the album The Rolling Stones could have more rightfully called Dirty Work.
5. Katie Melua: Concert Under The Sea (2007);
From weird places to low places. Not to be undone by Beatles or Floydians who record merely on the water, British singer Melua and her band made the Guinness World Records in 2006 by recording a live concert at the bottom of an enormous drilling platform, attended by an audience of 20 oil rig employees. Sadly, her set did not include any Little Mermaid covers.
6. Prince Harvey: PHATASS (2015);
The title of rapper Prince Harvey’s debut album is an acronym, standing for “Prince Harvey At The Apple Store: SoHo.” Shoppers may find Apple stores weird places for other reasons entirely, but for Harvey it was the locale where he pulled off an entire a cappella recording, using only GarageBand on the shop’s laptops over a period of four months. Prince Harvey claimed he was driven to recording in a retail environment after his own computer was seized while being left with an evicted friend. After his unauthorized in-store performances initially led staffers to warn him not to hog the mic, they eventually came around to giving the stunt their unofficial blessing, as customers took to the ongoing performances.
Weird Music History
Johnny Cash: At Folsom Prison (1968) and At San Quentin (1969)
Johnny Cash never did an actual stint in the penitentiary, but his mid-50s smash “Folsom Prison Blues” did such a convincing job of making the world believe he had served time that plenty of fans assumed he was making a homecoming when he recorded a live album at the song’s namesake. At the time, Cash convinced Columbia to let him take a mobile recording unit into the slammer, along with a touring revue that included June Carter Cash, The Statler Brothers, and Carl Perkins.
Was it a deeply felt gesture toward the downtrodden or an amazing, career-rejuvenating gimmick? Why not both? A year later, At Folsom Prison was succeeded by an even bigger-selling sequel, At San Quentin (with its guaranteed-to-get a-rise-out-of-the-inmates “SOB” cry in “A Boy Named Sue”). Soon, prisons were no longer seen as weird places to record albums, as Cash inspired other rootsy performers to release their own prison sets, among them BB King (Live In Cook County Jail), Little Milton, Tracy Nelson, and Marshall Chapman.
VIDEO
AUDIO