“A Cat-astrophe” is a 1919 Columbia Orchestra record that does one thing: it interrupts cheerful instrumental passages with cat yowls, credited to Columbia in-house musicians Howard Kopp and William Daniel. The shrieks were almost certainly not made by a real cat, but as the PDR’s Mathilde Montpetit notes, they are recognisable to anyone who has stepped on a tail. Orchestral and slapstick at once, it plays like a Looney Tunes short avant la lettre.

It arrived at the end of a strange boom in cat-themed music:

  • Stravinsky’s Cat’s Lullabies, written in 1915, had its first Paris performance in 1918
  • Columbia released the Jockers Brothers’ one-step “Me-ow,” whose “universal appeal” — per the April 1919 Talking Machine World — pushed music dealers in Newark and Los Angeles to build elaborate cat displays in their windows
  • William Daniel is credited with a 1918 track called “Cat-Fest,” which was not preserved
  • The only cat song from the period with a lasting life was Zez Confrey’s ragtime “Kitten on the Keys” (Brunswick, 1921)

The suggestible explanation for the yowls is a hoax with a long afterlife. The early-nineteenth-century French writer Georges Duval claimed the revolutionary concert miaulique used a “piano” of cats who screamed individual notes as their tails were struck with a pointed blade. The story is spurious, but in 1919 the conservative daily Le Matin was still joking — and being racist — by calling it the true origin of jazz.

What the record really documents is the industry discovering comedy as a product. Vaudeville and comedians had been on records from the beginning, but the postwar market got stranger. Berlin’s 1920 “laughing record” — a mournful cornet solo repeatedly drowned out by the escalating hysterical laughter of opera singers Lucie Bernardo and Otto Rathke — became a worldwide hit, possibly by accident, selling millions of copies and spawning imitations.

Montpetit’s one-line context for the whole cluster is hard to improve on: “The war was over; the flu was here; it was time to have your laughs (or meows) at home.”

The record is public domain worldwide and downloadable from the collection as MP3 or WAV, sourced from the Library of Congress’s National Jukebox. It is three minutes long, and the joke is exactly what the title says.