ONCE UPON A TIME · PROLOGUE
Two different answers, four years apart. One of them you can still hear.
Ask “what was the first record made in Quebec” and you get two honest answers, because “made” is doing double duty. There’s the first record pressed here — stamped out from masters recorded somewhere else entirely — and there’s the first record actually recorded here, a real voice in a real room. They’re four years apart, and the second one has a name attached: Joseph Saucier, a Montréal baritone, singing “La Marseillaise.”
PRESSED
January 2, 1900
Berliner’s Montréal plant begins stamping 7-inch discs — from masters recorded in Europe and the U.S.
RECORDED
c. 1904
Joseph Saucier sings “La Marseillaise” at Berliner’s new studio, 138A Peel Street — the first recording actually made in Montréal.
Hear Saucier Sing
“La Marseillaise,” recorded roughly 1904 — the actual performance, preserved and shared on YouTube.
▶ Play on YouTube1900: needle down
Berliner’s Montréal operation starts pressing in the first week of January — 2,000 records in the whole first year. The discs came out a light-to-medium brown, a material collectors have never found from any other plant; they still call it “brown wax.”
1901: from 2,000 to two million
One year after the first pressing, Berliner sold over two million records out of Montréal. Whatever novelty hesitation existed around the gramophone, it didn’t last long.
Aside
A trademark, pressed right in. A handful of Canadian Berliner 7-inches didn’t just print the His Master’s Voice dog-and-gramophone mark on the paper label — they etched it straight into the playing surface of the disc itself.
1904: a voice, finally
Berliner opens an actual recording studio at 138A Peel Street. First through the door: Joseph Saucier — Montréal-born baritone, choirmaster and piano teacher — singing “La Marseillaise.” He’s thought to be the first French-Canadian musician to record on cylinder or disc anywhere in the country, not just in Quebec.
The disc is Berliner Gram-O-Phone catalogue number 9. That is how early this is: the Montréal label’s numbering had barely got out of single digits, and the ninth thing it ever put a number on was a Montréal voice.
Saucier was 35, born on rue Saint-Denis in 1869 into a family of musicians — he learned piano from his father and was performing in public at ten, then at eighteen gave it up for singing. By 1904 he was the soloist you hired: the Gesù, the Saint-Jacques cathedral, Saint-Louis-de-France, where he was also choirmaster. He would twice preside over the Académie de musique de Québec.
He did not stop at one. Eight more Berliner sides followed the same year — Minuit chrétiens, Panis angelicus, the Sérénade from Don Giovanni. Then, in 1905, he moved to Victor and to Columbia and started putting the Québec songbook onto discs: Un Canadien errant, À la claire fontaine, En roulant ma boule, À Saint-Malo, beau port de mer, Vive la Canadienne, O Canada, mon pays, mes amours. He was still recording in 1921.
And in April 1907 he got on a train. La Patrie reported that Saucier had left on the Sunday evening for New York with his wife, Octavie Turcotte, for his second engagement with the Columbia Graphophone Company — his best songs plus sacred repertoire, the finished records to be sold in Montréal by Foisy Frères, piano dealers, and nobody else.
Hold that thought. Ninety years later the DJ at Lime Light was flying to New York every week on the club’s money to bring records back, and the owners of Stereo were commissioning a sound system out of Brooklyn. The trip is older than the nightlife.
1906–08: outgrowing Peel Street
Berliner buys a corner lot at Saint-Antoine and Lenoir and puts up a five-storey plant. It outlives the company that built it: Victor bought Berliner in 1924, RCA bought Victor in 1929, and the building spent decades after as an RCA Victor recording studio — one of only five the label ever ran worldwide, alongside Nashville, Rio de Janeiro, New York and Los Angeles. It’s also the only one of the five still standing with its original wooden polycylindrical walls, built on purpose to bend the sound inside them.
One last thing, and it is the reason this runs in front of the series rather than beside it. On 17 March 1982 the city named a street after him — avenue Joseph-Saucier, up in Ahuntsic-Cartierville. Montréal decided the man who made the first record here was worth putting on a sign. What this city does and doesn’t put on its signs is episode 02.
Ninety-some years and every genre this shop sells stand between “La Marseillaise” and a 12-inch house single. Different room, different corner of the city, same basic trick: figuring out how to keep a performance after the air’s gone quiet.
A note on what we didn’t print. The sources don’t agree on when Saucier first recorded. The City of Montréal’s own toponymic record calls him the first French Canadian to cut cylinders and discs in Canada “vers 1900”; the surviving discography starts with the 1904 Berliner sides. Both can be true — cylinders leave a thinner paper trail than catalogue numbers — so we’ve dated what can be dated and flagged the rest.
Sources: Ville de Montréal, Répertoire toponymique (avenue Joseph-Saucier); Disqu-o-Québec, Joseph Saucier discography; La Patrie (Montréal), 30 April 1907, transcribed by Jean Provencher; The Canadian Encyclopedia (“Joseph Saucier” and “Berliner Gramophone Company”); Westmount Magazine, “How Recorded Sound Came to Montreal”; Musée des ondes Emile Berliner. Saucier portrait via Library and Archives Canada / Flickr Commons, CC BY 2.0; other images via Wikimedia Commons (public domain). Recording: Joseph Saucier, “La Marseillaise,” via YouTube.
The prologue to Once Upon a Time, our series on Montréal nightlife. Next: episode 01 — Playground, Groove Society and Parking, three clubs in the building we now sell records out of.
