Egalite

This week on Three Tune Tuesday, Boneapart and Yulia explore the theme of Égalité — equality — through three recordings from the acoustic era. We open with a "This Day in History" spin: the All Star Trio's rollicking fox trot medley "You Ain't Heard Nothing Yet," recorded by Victor Arden, George Hamilton Green, and F. Wheeler Wadsworth in New York City on this very date in 1920. Then we turn to the theme, beginning with the Manhattan Harmony Four's stirring 1923 recording of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" — the Black National Anthem, written by James Weldon Johnson and his brother Rosamond, and pressed on Black Swan Records, the pioneering Harlem-based label founded by Harry Pace as an act of racial pride and cultural self-determination. We close with Emile Van Bosch, a Belgian-born operatic baritone, delivering a thunderous Dutch-language performance of De Internationale — recorded in Berlin in August 1925, just as the tensions that would define the coming decades were beginning to gather. Three songs, three movements, one enduring question: what does it mean to demand a more equal world?