Music of Boardwalk Empire

HBO’s fledgling series “Boardwalk Empire” is taking off with the winds of history under its wings. Working shoulder to shoulder, historians, archivalists and producers cobbled together a staggeringly, compellingly detailed duplication of Prohibition-era Atlantic City. Art departments got deep and dusty researching American antiquity, but an unfortunate void in historical audio record nearly overcame music supervisor Randall Poster and his team.

In an interview last May, Mr. Poster described his team’s archaeological, nearly necromantic, effort to recreate the unrecorded music of nickeldeons, the first popular cinemas. Without of single note of it recorded to wax, the music department became band leaders, hiring musicians to perform from the original sheet music. No one knew what they had to work with until they heard it performed for the first time, said Mr. Poster.

Check out more Early 20^th Century Classic music from Lost Gold Records here.