The “Talking Machine Story Teller”: Cal Stewart and the Remediation of Storytelling

Abstract

I offer in this paper a preliminary exploration of one historical instance of what I term the remediation of stardom, the process by which a performer for whom the qualities of stardom in the community milieu of copresence become a resource for stardom in the mass-mediated world of mechanical reproduction. I focus on the performance career of Cal Stewart, one of the earliest stars of commercial sound recording in the United States, who fashioned himself as “the talking machine story teller.” The recontextualization of a performance form from one medium to another involves both formal and pragmatic transformations as performers adapt communicative forms and practices to the affordances, participant structures, sensory modalities, and other constitutive features of a new medium. Those factors in turn will have a shaping influence on the process of symbolic construction by which stardom in one medium serves the creation of stardom in another.