This original 10-tune music roll was made for the Tangley Calliaphone, a powerful air-powered street organ that once echoed through carnival midways, fairgrounds, and traveling medicine shows. Each perforated roll fed vibrant, brassy melodies into the machine’s pneumatic belly, turning any public square into a makeshift ballroom.
This particular roll features a delightful and sentimental selection of 1930s favorites, all arranged in infectious fox trot tempo:
Love In Bloom
Stars Fell on Alabama
Two Cigarettes in the Dark
The Very Tho't of You
The Continental (Fox Trot Rhumba)
Sweetie Pie
If I Had a Million Dollars
Wild Honey
Isn't It a Shame?
I'll Close My Eyes to Everyone Else
Whether wistful or swinging, each tune conjures the emotional tone of a bygone America—bright on the surface, but sometimes shadowed behind the curtain.
The Tangley Calliaphone Co. was founded in Muscatine, Iowa by Norman G. Baker, a man whose life reads like a pulp novel. Originally a vaudeville magician, Baker was a natural-born showman who used his flair for spectacle to create and promote these melodic machines. But music was only the beginning.
In 1925, Baker launched radio station KTNT (short for “Know The Naked Truth”), where he railed against medical professionals and began promoting a so-called cure for cancer—despite having no medical credentials. His rhetoric made him a populist hero to some and a dangerous fraud to others.
Eventually, Baker turned the historic Crescent Hotel in Arkansas into a “hospital” for cancer patients, charging desperate people for false hope and unproven treatments. His career unraveled in 1940, when he was convicted of mail fraud and sentenced to federal prison. Today, he is remembered as both a marketing genius and one of America’s most notorious medical charlatans.
If you want to learn more about Norman Baker and his various crimes, head over to our Lantern Light blog post here.
This music roll is more than just a charming collection of tunes—it's a surviving piece of the showman's arsenal. These mechanical melodies would have played at live Tangley demonstrations or in bustling fairs where Baker’s brand of spectacle and salesmanship thrived.
