This is the memory palace. I'm Nate Demet.

It's been generations now that people have been trying to sort out just what they'd heard.

The question, one of the questions, has centered it around the instrument itself.

This one.

Playing just for a bit there at the top of the A side of the Columbia 78 RPM release of a mother's last word for her son, 1927.

It's brief before the vocals kick in.

Just let me loop it here and let it run.

It's not a mandolin or a cop-o-d banjo.

Someone had the idea that it was the inside of a piano, but it doesn't really sound like that.

It's hard to picture how you could drag that thing around the back roads of the American South in the 1920s.

In the 1960s, Britain.

Musicologist heard these sounds.

Heard the 18 songs written and performed by a man named Washington Phillips for the Columbia label in Dallas, Texas between 1927 and 1929.

The instrument listed only as a novelty accompaniment on the black label of the 78 was a doceola, said the British musicologist.

What? Said you in your head just now, Shirley.

For why would you have heard of an instrument made by the Toledo Symphony Company for only four years at the turn of the last century?

The doceola looks kind of like a tiny grand piano.

Like something Schroeder from peanuts would play Beethoven on.

There's a keyboard in the front in a zithery thing sticking out the back.

There are fewer than 50 known to exist today.

Because it's such an odd anomalous thing, made some sense that it might make this odd anomalous sound.

But it turns out if you play one of those 50 or so doceolas, doesn't really make that sound.

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