The Press

This week on Three Tune Tuesday, we’re spending an episode with the press itself — inspired by a week that saw the White House bar three credentialed news outlets and the RNC pull CBC’s press pass — and we let three records from a hundred years ago do the arguing for us. First, “The Washington Post March,” which John Philip Sousa wrote on commission in 1889 for a newspaper’s own self-promotional essay contest, back when a paper could be proud enough of itself to order up a national anthem; then “Death of Floyd Collins,” Vernon Dalhart’s 1925 hit about a trapped Kentucky caver whose ordeal turned into the single biggest news story in the country — a story that produced both a Pulitzer Prize for genuine heroism and a literal carnival of souvenir stands at the rescue site; and finally “Monkey Biz-ness (Down in Tennessee),” a Billy Murray novelty number that turned Tennessee’s Butler Act — a state law making it a crime to teach evolution in a classroom — into a dance-floor joke within months of the Scopes “Monkey Trial” that made it famous. Three records, one press, arguing with itself the whole way through.