The Unique Quartette was a black vocal quartet in New York City.
Founded in the mid-1880s by Joseph Moore, it is best known for a handful of wax cylinder recordings made in the first half of the 1890s.
[4] The earliest surviving wax cylinder recording of the Unique Quartette — and thus the earliest surviving recording by any African-American musical group (as opposed to soloist, since George W. Johnson's “The Whistling Coon” predates this by two years) — is Edison 694, "Mamma’s Black Baby Boy", recorded in 1893.
There are two copies left, one in the Library of Congress and one privately owned.
This article on a United States singing group is a stub.