Saydisc's cumbersomely titled The Gay 90s: Popular music from the Victorian musical shows and other favorites of the 1890s on musical boxes was compiled by Bristol-based collector Roy Mickleburgh in 1980 and originally issued on LP. That doesn't mean that it runs short -- Saydisc compilations of this kind were noted for their unusually long running time, and The Gay 90s lasts for one minute short of an hour. More than half of the program consists of medleys assembled by Mickleburgh from discs, cuffs, cylinders and rolls of selections from popular -- and mostly English -- musicals of the 1890s, A Runaway Girl, Robin Hood, Floradora, and The Geisha among them. Nineteenth century music boxes were not like the plastic one you might have, shaped as a piano that plays "Feelings" -- some commercial music boxes were huge, sophisticated mechanisms the size of a grandfather clock or larger, utilizing interchangeable discs that could be as large as 28 inches in diameter.
At the beginning of the Stephen Foster and "Miscellany" Medleys, you can hear the coin drop into the slot. Most machines of this kind weren't intended for use in private homes, but for arcades, restaurants, and hotels for a bit of musical amusement. Models and makes of antique music boxes varied greatly both in terms of hardware and software, and locating either more than 100 years after manufacture can be a daunting task; most often one finds only the empty cabinets of what was once a Regina or Polyphon. Mickleburgh died in the early twenty-first century and his collection was dispersed. Though a small fraction among his 600 instruments landed in museums in the city of Bristol, the only place one is likely to hear such a concentration of them in one place is on this disc and its companion volume, Music of the Streets, devoted to street pianos. Speaking of pianos, a couple of selections here are reproduced from an Orchestrelle player attachment wedded to a Bechstein grand and included for the sake of variety. The sound of the Saydisc is not at all dated, and while it is impossible in the twenty-first century for very many -- if anyone -- to listen to The Gay 90s with a sense of "nostalgia," it certainly does evoke the essence of the period it represents.