It’s “A Cat-astrophe”! (1919)

The shrieks in the 1919 record “A Cat-astrophe” were probably not made by a real cat, but they will be intimately familiar to any cat owner who has accidentally stepped on their beloved’s tail. Interrupting a refrain of cheery instrumentals, Howard Kopp and William Daniel’s yowling cries give credence to the record’s title. It is a catastrophe, or at least it is for that cat. The three-minute track, at once orchestral and slapstick, feels like a Looney Tunes short avant la lettre, conjuring visions of a levitating kitten scrambling in mid-air, its tail bristling like a bush.

Kopp and Daniel both worked for the Columbia Orchestra, the recording studio’s in-house group, and collaborated on several recordings. “A Cat-astrophe” is one of the strangest. Perhaps the two were inspired by the early-nineteenth-century French writer Georges Duval’s spurious account of the revolutionary concert miaulique, which he claimed consisted of a “piano” made up of cats who would scream individual notes as their tails were hit with a pointed blade. (In 1919, the conservative French daily Le Matin would jokingly — but also racistly — claim that this was the true origin of jazz music.)

Or perhaps they were simply following a trend. “A Cat-astrophe” came on the tail end of an odd 1918 boom in cat-themed music: cat enthusiast Igor Stravinsky first performed his vocal suite, “Cat’s Lullabies”, written 1915, in Paris that year. Columbia had also released a Jockers Brothers one-step called “Me-ow”, whose “universal appeal”, the April 1919 issue of Talking Machine World reported, had inspired both the Chalmers Co. in Newark and the Southern California Music Co. in Los Angeles to construct elaborate cat decor in their windows to advertise their stock. Daniel himself is also credited with a track called “Cat-Fest” in 1918, but this, unfortunately, seems to have not been preserved for posterity. Ultimately, however, the only post-war cat song to have been a lasting hit was the ragtime pianist Zez Confrey’s “Kitten on the Keys”, released for Brunswick Records in 1921.

“A Cat-astrophe” is more obviously a comedy record than any of these, its cat-like yowls played for laughs. Comedy had been a mainstay of the record industry from the very start, a boon for comedians and vaudeville acts, but things got a little stranger in the postwar era. A so-called “laughing record” became a surprise worldwide hit then: originally recorded in Berlin in 1920, the record featured a mournful cornet solo being interrupted by the increasingly hysterical laughter of a man and woman, the opera singers Lucie Bernardo and Otto Rathke. Possibly a genuine mistake — the laughter sounds impressively unforced through its three-minute runtime — it quickly became an interwar meme, selling millions of copies in various countries and inspiring a slew of imitations.

The war was over; the flu was here; it was time to have your laughs (or meows) at home.