Selling the Sounds of the South:

The visual and verbal rhetoric of Race Records and Old

Time Records marketing, 1920-1929

Luke Horton

Submitted in total fulfilment of the

requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Dec, 2011

School of Historical and Philosophical Studies

University of Melbourne

Abstract

In the early 1920s, the phonograph industry in America began producing two very

distinct record catalogues of racially segregated Southern vernacular music, one called

Race Records and the other called Old Time (or 'Old Time Tunes', 'Songs of the Hills and

Plains', 'Familiar Tunes Old and New' and towards the end of the decade simply 'hillbilly'

records). In the marketing for these new catalogues, two completely separate streams of

Southern music were presented, one purely white and one purely black, a separation that

denied any possibility or history of the intermingling of the races, a bifurcation of a

shared tradition which became a revision of Southern history, and a segregation in

keeping with the race policy of the Jim Crow era.

‘Selling the Sounds of the South’ argues that the verbal and visual rhetoric of the

marketing for these new catalogues of music (contained not only in catalogues

themselves, but in advertisements, window displays, and other promotional material),

presented a unique utilisation of Southern images that offered a new definition of

Southern black and white music. While heavily reliant on existing constructions of white

and black musical culture, the creation of these catalogues involved the recasting of

major cultural tropes and resulted in an intertextual construct that itself was something

new. The record industry's Old Time artist remained at the mercy of Southern stereotypes,

but these musicians were neither simply the pious folk relics projected by folklorists nor

the comic caricatures of the radio hillbillies, but rather more complex characters,

personified by the dignified mountain entertainer who sometimes sang contemporary

songs as well as traditional material and who was a product of both the modernist and

anti-modernist impulse. Likewise, the verbal and visual rhetoric of Race Records drew

heavily on existing models for selling black music, such as minstrelsy and songbooks of

folklorists, and yet the mostly sophisticated, professional, urban, vaudeville performers

who became the first Race Records artists, and the music they made, also had a

significant impact on the marketing images of Race Records. While these rhetorics were

decidedly Northern white conceptions, the fact that both catalogues were created in

response to consumer enthusiasm for a vernacular musical culture had a huge impact on

their marketing, and it is the matrix of cultural and commercial forces that makes these

constructs such interesting examples of the commodification of culture in the burgeoning

consumer culture of the 1920s. Put another way, the record industry's marketing imagery

for these musics ultimately combined well-worn stereotypes with modern images that

were inspired by, and to some degree produced by, this music and its practitioners, and

this created a new version of Southern black and Southern white musical culture in 1920s

consumer culture.

This is to certify that:

(I) the thesis comprises only my original work towards the PhD except where

indicated in the Preface,

(ii) due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used,

(iii) the thesis is fewer than 100,000 words in length, exclusive of tables,

maps, bibliographies and appendices or the thesis is [number of words] as

approved by the RHD Committee.

Acknowledgements

It has been my greatest pleasure and privilege over the past four years to work closely

with my supervisors in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the

University of Melbourne, David Goodman and Barbara Keys. Besides reading countless

versions of these chapters, and assisting me with every stage of the PhD writing process,

their enthusiasm, encouragement, and academic rigour, has sustained me through this

project and I have learnt a great deal from both of them.

One of the great things about writing a PhD is that, over a period of several years, you get

to share your project with many people, and through papers given at conferences etc., I

have had feedback from countless academics that has helped sharpen my ideas and

clarify my arguments. Among the many great scholars that have commented on my work,

I must make special mention of Susan Smulyan and Patrick Huber, whose enthusiasm for

the project and whose advice I appreciate a great deal. I must also thank the staff at the

libraries and archival collections where I did my research in the USA. The staff at the

Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and at the Recorded

Sound Archives at the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., were incredibly helpful

and patient.

While it is customary in acknowledgements to thank ones parents for their support and

encouragement, I would have to thank my parents, John and Judy Horton, regardless of

familial bonds, as this project would not exist if not for them. It was in my parent’s

bookshelves and record collection that I found my love for both history and music. These

treasure troves have provided me with the initial inspiration for much of my scholarship.

My honours thesis at Latrobe University on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk

Music was inspired by the copy of the Anthology in my father’s record collection (and his

expert commentary on much of its contents). Again, with this project, it was my parent’s

record collection and their excellent library, which contains a large section of historical

works on early blues and country music, that awakened me to the visual and verbal

rhetoric of the advertising for these records and their import. Therefore, I owe my parents

a huge debt of gratitude for the passion for books and music they have instilled in me, as

well as for their constant encouragement and support.

I am also in the incredibly fortunate position of having several brilliant academics in the

family. Jessica Horton’s passion for good history has been a constant inspiration to me,

and her insights into my own work vastly improved it. Undine Sellbach, with a PhD in

Philosophy, has always offered new perspectives on the material of this study, and our

many conversations over the years about the process of writing a PhD have been

incredibly helpful. Lastly, and most importantly, I must thank Antonia Sellbach, whose

love and support I could not have done this without, and whose experience with

completing a Masters helped both of us keep perspective through all the ups and downs

of writing a PhD.

i

Contents

Illustrations......................................................................................................................ii

Introduction.....................................................................................................................1

Chapter One: Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream……………….24

Chapter Two: Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask: Race Records Advertisements

in the Black Press in the 1920s……………………………………………………….50

Chapter Three: The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist as Presented

by the Record Industry……………………………………………………………….90

Chapter Four: Cultural Uplift and the Talking Machine World…………………..117

Chapter Five: The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality: Race Records and

Old Time in the Talking Machine World …………………………………………...139

Chapter Six: In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press….168

Epilogue: What the Depression Did to the Marketing of Southern Vernacular Music

………………………………………………………………………………………...194

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………....201

Bibliography.................................................................................................................205

ii

Illustrations

1.1 Victor ‘Race Records’ catalogue 1930……………………………………………..1

1.2 OKeh ‘Old Time Tunes’ catalogue 1927…………………………………………...2

2.1 Victor Talking Machine Company's 'New Victor Records' supplement,

June 1907...................................................................................................................33

2.2 'A Musical Galaxy', Victor supplement, 1927........................................................37

3.1 Minstrel and Coon Song covers…………………………………………………..61

3.2 ‘Argufying’ and ‘Oh Boy’, Chicago Defender, September 21, 1927 and March

21, 1928…………………………………………………………………………….63

3.3 ‘Mr Freddie’s Blues’, Chicago Defender, October 11, 1924……………………..65

3.4 ‘Jazzbo Brown’ and ‘Mean Papa turn in your Key’, Chicago Defender, July

10, 1926, and June 21, 1924……………………………………………………...66

3.5 Columbia Ethel Waters ad, Chicago Defender, July 4, 1925…………………...69

3.6 ‘Sorrowful Blues’, Chicago Defender, May 24, 1924…………………………...71

3.7 ‘Organ Grinder Blues’ and ‘Aint Nothin’ Cookin’ what you’re Smelling’,

Chicago Defender, November 17, 1928, and October 23, 1926………………..72

3.8 ‘Roamin’ Blues’, Baltimore Afro-American, January 4, 1924………………….76

3.9 ‘Brownskin Mama Blues’, Chicago Defender, April 21, 1928………………….80

3.10 ‘Hard Road Blues’, Chicago Defender, February 4, 1928……………………..80

3.11 ‘Ash Tray Blues’, Chicago Defender, September 1, 1928……………………...82

3.12 ‘He’s in the Jailhouse Now’, Chicago Defender, December 31, 1927………....83

3.13 ‘Jonah in the Belly of the Whale’, Chicago Defender, October 1, 1927………85

3.14 ‘Reverend J.M Gates’, Chicago Defender, Oct 20, 1928………………………86

3.15 ‘The Prodigal Son’, Chicago Defender, September 10, 1927………………….87

iii

4.1 OKeh ‘Old Times Tunes' catalogue, 1926…………………………………...107

4.2 OKeh ad for Fiddlin' John Carson and Henry Whitter, Talking Machine

World, June 15, 1924…………………………………………………………...109

4.3 Columbia 'Familiar Tunes Old and New' catalogue………………………....112

4.4 ‘The inside story of the Hillbilly Business’, Radio Guide, 1936……………..115

5.1 Victor, Victorla ad, Talking Machine World, June 1924……………………...145

Introduction

In the early 1920s, the phonograph industry in America began producing two very distinct record

catalogues of racially-segregated Southern vernacular music, one called Race Records and the other

called Old Time (or 'Old Time Tunes', 'Songs of the Hills and Plains', 'Familiar Tunes Old and New'

and towards the end of the decade simply 'hillbilly' records). Victor Talking Machine Company, the

industry leader throughout the period, took longer than most to enter these new fields of recording,

but by 1927 it had relented and began aggressively pursuing the markets for both. Figure 1.1 shows

the cover of one of Victor's last Race Records catalogues from 1930, before the stock market crash

severely curtailed record production:

Figure 1.1 (Source: Southern Folklife Collection, Manuscripts Department, University of North

Carolina, Chapel Hill)

Introduction 2

Figure 1.2 is the cover of an Old Time Tunes catalogue produced by OKeh Records, one of the

pioneers in the field, probably from 1927:

Figure 1.2 (Source: Jim Walsh Collection, Recorded Sound Archives, Library of Congress)

The images used here to represent these catalogues of music are strikingly dissimilar. In the first we

are presented with a black man sitting on a dock, a ferry in the background, plucking at his guitar

and, one imagines, singing a plaintive melody. In the second we are presented with a white man, in

a suit and tie, sitting on a stump of a tree in an idealised mountain setting, a log cabin in the distance

behind him. These images convey different moods; the Race Records catalogue cover is sombre, the

artist possibly a down-on-his-luck itinerant worker, an image in keeping with the blues contained

inside, while the fiddler in his suit and tie on the Old Time Tunes catalogue cover (modelled closely

on OKeh’s promotional photograph of Fiddlin’ John Carson) suggests a humble respectability and a

more harmonious, pastoral idyll. But there are similarities between them. Both covers present a

solitary artist without an audience. There is no element of formal performance to either of these

images; this is music played to entertain or sustain the player himself, therefore both suggest the

Introduction 3

authenticity of the 'folk' musician.1 Another similarity is that both of these images evoke the South;

the first a river port such as New Orleans or Memphis on the Mississippi River, and the second a

Southern 'hill country' or mountain region (the artist probably had the Appalachian Mountains in

mind). Of course, if the reader does not recognise instantly that this is supposed to be the South, this

implication is reinforced as soon as one opens the catalogue and finds blues ‘expressing the true

heart of the South’, the ‘rollicking, jazzing boys from the Sunny South’ or the 'genuine songs of the

Southern mountaineers’.2

This study examines the visual and verbal rhetoric of both Race Records and Old Time marketing.

The two catalogue covers presented above suggest some of the key questions and underscores the

central contention of this research. What we see in the covers of these catalogues are two separate

streams of Southern vernacular music, separated rhetorically by region: the Deep South as the South

of blacks and the mountain South as the white South. But how did these images come to define the

various musical genres featured in these catalogues in the 1920s? What were the true determinants

of this imagery? What ultimately did it present and what did this say about blacks and whites, and

in particular Southern blacks and whites, in the 1920s? These are the questions of this study.

In pursuing such questions, this research has led me to a central contention: that what is presented in

the visual and verbal rhetoric of Race Records and Old Time was something new in the consumer

culture of the 1920s. As can be seen in the catalogue covers above, these images present familiar

images to present day viewers, the down-on-his-luck blues musician and the white Southern fiddle-

playing mountaineer. To a certain extent these figures were not unfamiliar in the 1920s, the blues

musician and the Southern fiddler were well-known popular entertainers to some, and to others the

image would have been familiar through songbooks and popular fiction that contained such

characters. Yet neither of these figures are simple stereotypes. The most popular image of the black

performer in the 1920s was still the minstrel performer. Al Jolson 'The Singing Fool' was the

biggest black star of the decade. Besides the pious image of the Jubilee singers who sang black

spirituals, minstrelsy was still by far the commonly used imagery used to sell black musicians. As a

result, most scholarship on the imagery of Race Records advertisements and marketing has likewise

focused on the imagery of minstrelsy and what some have described as the demeaning and

inappropriate representation of blues musicians in the 1920s by the record industry. While this study

1 Here they different stringed instruments, but many Old Time covers featured guitar players as well, although the opposite, a black man playing a fiddle, would never be used on a Race Records catalogue, as the instrument became synonymous with white mountaineer folk music. 2 ‘The Paramount Book of Blues’ (Southern Folklife Collection, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and Victor ‘Olde Time Fiddlin’ Tunes’, 1924 (Jim Walsh Collection, Recorded Sound Archives, Library of Congress).

Introduction 4

recognises the lingering influence of minstrelsy, it contends that the visual and verbal rhetoric of

Race Records transcended minstrelsy. The above catalogue cover is one example of how. What we

see here is a black man free of minstrelsy’s performative gestures, simply playing his music.

Likewise, the most enduring image of the 1920s hillbilly is the comic hayseed character in a straw

hat and a plaid shirt. This is not what is presented in Figure 1.2. The fiddler presented to the reader

in 1927 by OKeh is a man in a suit and tie, a proud and dignified character, simply playing his

music in his mountain home. Undoubtedly these are romantic images, but not crude stereotypes.

What we are presented with in Race Records and Old Time marketing are not simple caricatures,

neither minstrel characters or hillbilly hayseeds, but something new. This study seeks to explain

how the record industry, while fumbling for new markets for phonographs and phonograph records,

produced these new figures in the 1920s.

This side-by-side analysis of the marketing of Race Records and Old Time is underpinned by the

understanding that, while we are presented with two parallel, yet apparently completely unrelated

musical traditions in these segregated catalogues, the reality of Southern musical culture of course

was quite the contrary. Music historians such as Charles Joyner, Archie Green, and Tony Russell

have persuasively argued that, prior to its commercial segregation, there existed in the South a

shared musical tradition from which musicians both black and white drew. Tony Russell has

described this well as a ‘common stock’ that contained songs from every conceivable source, from

Anglo-Celtic folk songs hundreds of year’s old to contemporary Tin Pan Alley parlour and 'event'

songs. There was an extraordinary array of musical approaches in the South, and this music was

found in many forms – sung by a solo singer with any kind of instrument or none, duet, jug band,

string band and jazz band.3 Highly original and regionally-specific interpretations of this common

stock are what are invariably found on the earliest Old Time and Race Records 78s, yet this is not

what is presented through the rhetoric used to sell this music.4 In the marketing, two completely

separate streams of Southern folk music are presented, one purely white and one purely black, a

separation that denies any possibility or history of the intermingling of the races, a bifurcation of a

shared tradition which becomes a revision of Southern history, and a segregation in keeping with

the race policy of the Jim Crow era. This segregation has largely been observed in studies of the

early years of blues, jazz and country music. While many studies have challenged the assumption of

segregated traditions, the organisational structure of music scholarship has often perpetuated this

3 Tony Russell, Blacks, Whites, and Blues (London: Studio Vista Ltd., 1970), 27. 4 Certain styles were of course considered the preserve of certain groups. The blues for example was certainly intrinsically linked to black culture, with whites adopting it self-consciously. But as Tony Russell and others have argued, the blues was not the most common music for Southern black musicians prior to the creation of Race Records; in fact while the blues can be traced back to the 1880s, the common stock was probably more widespread than the blues before the twentieth century. Russell, 31.

Introduction 5

segregation, the separate-but-equal status of Southern white and black music, by telling the story of

one stream or the other, missing the opportunity to compare the process of the transformation of this

shared tradition into discrete categories. Analysing the marketing rhetoric of Race Record and Old

Time side-by-side serves to keep the prior communal state of this music in mind, while

underscoring the way that the racial politics of entertainment during the Jim Crow era influenced

the commodification of each in different ways.

The verbal and visual rhetoric of these new marketing categories, presented in catalogues,

advertisements, window displays, and other promotional material, employed Southern images and

pre-existing musical and marketing traditions, to offer a new definition of Southern black and white

music. While heavily reliant on existing constructions of white and black musical culture as we

shall see, the creation of these catalogues involved the recasting of major cultural tropes and

resulted in an intertextual construct that was something new.5 The record industry's Old Time artist

remained at the mercy of Southern stereotypes, but these musicians were neither simply the pious

folk relics projected by folklorists nor the comic caricatures of the radio hillbillies, but rather more

complex characters, personified by the dignified mountain entertainer who sometimes sang

contemporary songs as well as traditional material and who was a product of both the modernist and

anti-modernist impulse. Likewise, the verbal and visual rhetoric of Race Records drew heavily on

existing models for selling black music, such as minstrelsy and songbooks of folklorists, and yet the

mostly sophisticated, professional, urban, vaudeville performers, who became the first Race

Records artists, and the music they made, also had a significant impact on the marketing images of

Race Records.6 While these rhetorics were decidedly Northern white conceptions, the fact that both

catalogues were created in response to the popularity of vernacular musical styles had a significant

impact on their marketing, and it is the matrix of cultural and commercial forces that makes these

constructs such interesting examples of the commodification of culture in the burgeoning consumer

culture of the 1920s. Put another way, the record industry's marketing imagery for these musics

ultimately combined well-worn stereotypes with modern images that were inspired by, and to some

degree produced by, this music and its practitioners, and this introduced a new version of Southern

black and Southern white musical culture into the national marketplace.

Specific studies have informed my way of thinking about the rhetorics used to sell Race Records

and Old Time. While it does not cover the creation of Race Records and Old Time marketing

5 My use of Julia Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality will be explained shortly.

6 While not all Race Records can be characterised in this manner, the first stars of Race Records were 'classic' blues or 'vaudeville blues' singers, such as Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters, and were professionals on the vaudeville circuit prior to their recording careers.

Introduction 6

rhetoric, David Suisman's account of the 'commercial revolution' in music in the early twentieth

century which transformed the music industry from a haphazard enterprise dominated by small-

scale publishing firms to a highly organised, transnational industry dominated by mass-producing

record companies using mechanical reproduction to mass-market music, provides us with a vivid

picture of the political economy of music in the early twentieth century. Suisman examines how the

music industry 'rationalized the business of musical culture according to the principles of industrial

manufacturing', allowing it to produce innovative products and advertising to cultivate and

consolidate new consumer markets.7 This completed the commodification of music and now sounds

could be manufactured, marketed and purchased like any other consumer good.8 More broadly,

Suisman's work underscores an important point about the industry in the 1920s: that as a relatively

new industry pedalling a relatively new product, the marketing and advertising of genres of music

to specific markets was a concept still in its infancy, and that this was an industry grappling with the

cultural and commercial potential and meaning of various musical styles.9 Broadening the variety of

entertainment available on phonograph records was justified using the rhetoric of democracy and

consumer choice, and initially both Race Records and Old Time were viewed as somewhat akin to

the 'foreign language’ records which catered to the large numbers of newly-arrived immigrants from

Europe and Asia in the 1910s and 1920s.10 Race Records and Old Time catalogues were also

designed for a specific group, and were similarly nostalgic, racialised formulations that were

considered marginal, niche, and often, regionally specific. Neither attained the status of the 'popular'

catalogues that contained the huge hits of the 1920s such as the 'symphonic jazz' of Paul Whiteman,

the sentimental 'torch' songs of crooners such as Gene Austin and Rudy Vallee, and Broadway and

movie tie-ins such as Al Jolson's 'Sonny Boy' (from 1928's huge 'talkie' hit The Singing Fool). Nor

were they as important to the corporate image of the leading companies as their highbrow

catalogues of classical music, however both new catalogues proved to have surprisingly strong

markets and assumed an importance beyond their initially tentative and marginal status.11

7 Suisman, 'The Sound of Money: Music. Machines, and Markets, 1890-1925' (PhD, University of Columbia, 2002), 2. 8 Suisman correctly notes that while this commodification was happening, music was being dematerialised at the same time, through new copyright law, which came to recognise music as intellectual property removed from physical forms. David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 9. 9 Suisman also reminds us that the modern conception of marketing only took hold around the turn of the century. The shift in meaning of the term from simply, and literally, bringing things to market to speculating what an abstract consumer might want, 'any activity to create or appeal to a market', was a still a relatively new concept by the 1920s. Susiman, 'The Sound of Money', 5. 10 Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 205. 11 Paul Whiteman's 'Whispering', a slow, polite ballad that owed little to jazz despite being called 'symphonic jazz', is considered to be the biggest selling record of the decade, selling 2 million copies. The biggest Race Records sold around 500,000. Andre Millard, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 107.

Introduction 7

Other studies have more directly addressed the construction of the Race Records and Old Time

catalogues. Karl Hagstrom Miller's work on the segregation of Southern music in the era of Jim

Crow importantly identifies three different groups – musicians, folklorists, and phonograph

companies – and analyses how their divergent and at times competing conceptions of the musical

culture of the South contributed to the commercial categorisation of Southern music as racially

segregated, separate streams of musical culture.12 Miller's work builds on the assertion made by

earlier historians and music scholars, such as Archie Green, Tony Russell, and Charles Joyner, that

there existed in the South a history of musical interaction and cross-pollination between white and

black that was denied and ignored by both the commercial segregation and folkloric definition of

this music. Through an investigation into the rise of the folklore movement from the 1880s, and the

changes in the minstrel tradition over the same period, he argues persuasively that the new folklore

definition of authenticity (in isolation from modern life), was combined with the minstrel

conception of authenticity (as a product of racial contact and interaction through the market), to

create ‘a series of mongrels that often tendered authentic minstrel deceits as authentic folkloric

truths’.13 His focus is on musical repertoire, and while the Old Time and Race Records catalogues

of the 1920s play only a small part in his story, and he spends very little time on record industry

promotional material and advertising (the primary sources of this study), my work draws on

Miller’s by identifying how these same three groups (musicians, folklorists, and phonograph

companies) contributed to the verbal and visual rhetorics used to sell these new discrete racial

categories of music to the public. The present study developed from a specific interest in how the

rhetoric of this advertising and promotional material functioned as an articulation and reinforcement

of the essentialist vision of Southern white and black music developed over this period.

While there are many histories of the record industry and of Race Records and Old Time, few have

delved deeply into the verbal and visual rhetorics used to sell these catalogues.14 There have been

several studies of Race Records advertising, which will be discussed in detail in Chapter Two, but

few that compare and contrast these with Old Time, or adequately account for the antecedents of

this material within an industry context.15 There is some very good work on the development of

12 Miller, Segregating Sound, 6. 13 Ibid. 14 Among the best treatments of the record industry during this era which do address Race Records and Old Time are: William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Suisman, Selling Sounds; Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years, Vol. 3: From 1900-1984 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Millard, America on Record; and Miller, Segregating Sound. 15 There have been more on Race Records, reflecting the level of advertising in the black press which was not mirrored at all for Old Time. These include: Mark K. Dolan, ‘Cathartic Uplift: A Cultural History of Blues and Jazz in the Chicago Defender, 1920-1929' (PhD, University of South Carolina, 1985); Mark K. Dolan, ‘Extra! Chicago Defender Race Records Ads Show South from Afar'. Southern Cultures (Fall 2007): 107 -124; Jeff Todd Titon, Early Downhome

Introduction 8

these new catalogues which does treat race, but for the most part these studies, when they do stretch

back to the 1920s, stick to the well-established narratives which centre around the major figures of

the entertainment industry – Ralph Peer, the head of recording at both OKeh then Victor, or radio

impresarios such as John Lair and George W. Hay who established the radio hillbilly – or else they

view this history through the work and lives of particular recording artists.16 These accounts offer

insightful commentary on the development of the segregated record catalogues and the relationship

these entrepreneurs had to the music and their recording stars, but they offer little analysis of the

marketing rhetoric of these new commercial categories.

When one’s goal is to delineate and analyse the production of cultural and commercial tropes used

in record industry advertising, the centrality of specific individuals recedes. There are no detailed

accounts of the process of drafting record industry advertising nor of the devising of marketing

strategies, we have merely snippets of information, anecdotal evidence and little else. We can make

educated guesses; for example it seems most likely that most of the Race Records advertisements

were drafted in-house and then sent to an advertising agency, which inserted the cartoons and

prepared them for the press, but beyond this very little is known. Regardless, the actions,

perceptions or prejudices of particular men cannot explain how or why an entire industry, in silent

consensus, utilised and adapted certain cultural tropes for the marketing and definition of these new

catalogues of recorded music.17 Rather, the way to unravel this process of cultural and commercial

production is with an analysis that weaves together several threads. First, there are the models for

advertising music by Southern whites and blacks already in use in the entertainment industry by the

1920s, such as those used for minstrelsy, vaudeville, sheet music and the Southern-themed music in

‘popular’ catalogues. All of these were important antecedents of the industry's marketing for Race

Records and Old Time and provided many of the images, stereotypes, and widely understood tropes

upon which it was based. Second, the corporate image concerns of record companies in the 1920s,

Blues (Urbana: University of North Carolina Press, 1977); and Ronald Clifford Foreman, Jnr., 'Jazz and Race Records, 1920-1932: Their Origins and their significance for the record industry and society' (PhD, University of Illinois, 1968). 16 These works include, Bill C. Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1993); Bill C. Malone and David Stricklin, Southern Music/American Music (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979); Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Russell, Blacks, Whites, and Blues; Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Wayne W. Daniel, Pickin’ on Peachtree: A History of Country Music in Atlanta, Georgia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Charles K. Wolfe, 'Nashville and Country Music, 1925-1930: Notes on Early Nashville Media and Its response to Old Time Music'. Journal of Country Music, 4 (Spring 1973): 2-16. 17 In his research into the practice in the 'Commercial Music Graphics' series in the John Edwards Memorial Foundation Quarterly Archie Green reveals the names of several men who were employed to write the ad copy for Old Time catalogues in the 1920s, but not much beyond this is known about them. More broadly, we know that for major campaigns Victor used Raymond Rubicam, one of the most successful ad-men of the era, but of course none of this yields insights into the decision making process behind the more prosaic practice of drafting ads and catalogues.

Introduction 9

and the cultural ideology that underpinned these concerns, played a crucial part in the construction

of these catalogues of music and their marketing. Third, the actions of both Southern whites and

blacks as artists play a significant role in this story. The self-promotional, or 'self commodification',

efforts of artists greatly influenced the images and language used by the industry to sell their

recordings and therefore this study, while not focusing on the lives and careers of musicians, does at

times examine the role of specific artists in the development of key tropes in this marketing

vernacular. Finally, the music fan and record-buying consumer also plays a role in this story, even in

this pre-market-research era. Suisman has argued that ‘the creation of modern musical culture was

not a consumer-driven phenomenon', that the industry was not responding to some expressed need

which only it could fulfil, and that it therefore had to create a market for its product.18 While this is

true of the modern music industry in its first years of development in the early twentieth century,

when its main job was to convince consumers of the benefits and convenience of mechanically-

reproduced phonograph recordings, the creation of both Race Records and Old Time in the 1920s

was, if not entirely consumer-driven, prompted by the local popularity of certain artists, and

significantly shaped by the enthusiastic response among record buyers to the initial recordings.

While OKeh's claim to be the pioneer in both the Race Records and Old Time markets, as presented

in the industry advertisements presented above, was correct, in neither case was it entirely OKeh’s

initiative to produce these records. Ralph Peer, OKeh's head of recording from 1920-1926, is widely

credited with being the man behind the creation of both Race Records and Old Time, and indeed he

was responsible for the recordings of both Mamie Smith and Fiddlin' John Carson, and yet in both

instances he was persuaded by an outsider that there was an untapped market for this music.19 In the

case of Race Records this outsider was Perry Bradford, a black songwriter and performer who had

considerable difficulty convincing any of the New York record labels to record one of his songs

with a black female singer.20 In the case of Old Time, the outsider was P.C. Brockman, a Southern

‘jobber’ and head of sales at OKeh’s largest Southern distributor, James A. Polk Inc., in Atlanta,

Georgia. He was, the story goes, in New York City’s Palace Theatre on Broadway watching a

newsreel that featured a fiddling competition when he made a note to record local Atlanta fiddler

John Carson.21 These stories, and the lives of these men, are undoubtedly fascinating, but what is

most remarkable about them is what they tapped into and what they showed the industry about the

18 Suisman, Selling Sounds, 15. 19 Peer initiated the first field recording in Atlanta in 1923, and it was here that Peer recorded Fiddlin’ John Carson at the behest of Brockman. Peer famously described the record as 'Plu perfect awful' and it is still debated whether he was he was referring to the recording or the music with this judgement. He also described Mamie Smith’s first record as 'The most awful record ever made' but quickly added, 'and it sold over a million copies'. Harkins, Hillbilly, 72. 20 Perry Bradford, Born with the Blues: Perry Bradford's Own Story (New York: Oak Publications, 1965), 29. 21 He then took this idea to Ralph Peer. Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 145.

Introduction 10

tastes of ordinary Americans. In both cases these initial recordings were runaway hits, with ‘Crazy

Blues' selling 75, 000 copies in a month and onto a million and a half, and ‘The Little Old Log

Cabin in the Lane’ selling several hundred thousand copies, creating a national market into which

nearly every major label moved within the next few years.22 The industry was completely taken by

surprise by the success of these two records – Ralph Peer claims they did not even assign the

Carson record a catalogue number – and OKeh's executives had to be convinced to pursue these

markets firstly by people whose involvement in the wider music community told them there was a

market for this music, and secondly, by consumers who responded enthusiastically to these

recordings and the many more that followed.23 The record industry knew very little about the music

– how to define, market, and sell it, even what to call it – and this colours the whole story of these

catalogues and the history of this music on record. Furthermore, this fact has an important impact

on the approach to the marketing of these records, because in effect the industry had somehow to

capture the popularity of this music and sell it back to consumers while at the same time using

imagery that adhered to its existing marketing strategies and corporate image. This dynamic, and

tension, informed the tenor and the vocabulary of Race Records and Old Time marketing.

This discussion of consumer involvement leads to the question of reception. While the focus in the

following pages is on the cultural and commercial context of the rhetoric used by the industry to sell

these new racialised categories of music to the public, such a project naturally leads one to

questions about the consumer response to these marketing strategies and images. The reception of

advertising by consumers is notoriously difficult to research, especially in this era that pre-dates

systematic market research. The success of the records and catalogues themselves, and the

consistency of record industry marketing imagery, may point to a degree of acceptance, perhaps

even a positive response, to the imagery used in record company advertising (there is at least no

evidence of public outcry against this advertising) or it may not. These facts may instead simply

indicate the prevailing popularity of the artists and musical genres contained in these catalogues,

rather than successful marketing. For the purposes of this study, while responses to the imagery of

Race Records and Old Time in the media, the industry, and in the case of Race Records, the black

leadership and among younger intellectuals of the 'New Negro' generation, are considered, the

questions of most interest to me are how the industry settled on these images, what informed both

the images themselves and the decision to use them, and what contributed to their final shape.

Without inside knowledge of this decision-making process, this study relies predominantly on a

rhetorical analysis and industry contextual study to suggest answers to these questions.

22 Miller, Segregating Sound, 192. 23 Huber, Linthead Stomp, 43.

Introduction 11

The research for this project involved the analysis of as much 1920s record industry promotional

material as I could find. This led me to the rich holdings of record industry material at both the

Library of Congress and the Wilson Library’s Southern Folklife Collection at the University of

North Carolina, Chapel Hill. At the Library of Congress I studied the Jim Walsh Collection,

bequeathed to the Library of Congress by one of the greatest collectors of acoustic and early electric

era recordings and related material. This collection, which includes 40, 000 discs, 500 cylinders,

and 23 phonographs, contains many boxes of record industry catalogues, supplements, promotional

material and ephemera from many labels including: Brunswick, Columbia, OKeh and Odeon. At the

Southern Folklife Collection this range was expanded with many boxes of material relating to

Victor, Vocalion, OKeh, Brunswick, Columbia, Paramount and Black Swan. Much of this material

came from the John Edwards Memorial Foundation (JEMF) holdings, an archive built around

Australian John Kenneth Fielder Edward’s remarkable collection of ‘Golden Age’ country music

78s and promotional material. In the 1950s this collection was widely considered the largest outside

of America and equal to any within it, and when in 1960 the Sydney Old Time enthusiast’s life was

tragically cut short by a car accident, Edward's collection was bequeathed to American record

collector Eugene Earle.24 Earle, with a distinguished group of American music scholars including

Archie Green, Fred Hoeptner, Ed Kahn, and D.K. Wilgus, established the JEMF to honour Edward's

legacy. This foundation went on to establish the JEMF Quarterly, a publication that included many

seminal studies of early country music, including Archie Green's pioneering 'Commercial Music

Graphics' series, one of the first efforts to offer a cultural analysis of Old Time and Race Record

catalogues and advertising.25

Beyond these two principal archives, another central source used in this study is the Talking

Machine World (TMW), the main trade journal of the record industry through the 1920s. This

journal serves as the primary source for two chapters here, as no previous study has attempted an in-

depth analysis of this forum for the record industry. Extensive research in newspapers was also

undertaken, especially the black press, in which nearly every major player in the Race Records

market advertised heavily during this era.26 Finally, due to the resurgence of interest in this music

24 Edwards spent many years mining the libraries of Australian radio stations, swapping new country records he had ordered from the US for old 78s of the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, and many others. He then established long lasting relationships with other collectors in the US and many artists themselves. Sara Carter was known to refer to her pen pal as 'Our John in Australia'. Jazzer Smith, ‘The Long Journey Home: The Hitherto Untold Story of a Remarkable Man Called John Edwards’. JEMF Quarterly v. 21 77/78 (1985): 85-88, 88. 25 I have since sourced many other articles from the JEMF Quarterly for this study. 26 Variety issues throughout the 1920s were also examined. To further explain my methodology, the two holdings which were my principle cites of research contained a vast range of record industry catalogues and promotional material and covered the great majority of record companies in operation during this time. I photographed all of this material,

Introduction 12

and the recording process of Race Records and Old Time among folklorists, musicologists and

enthusiasts in the 1960s and 70s, there are many interviews with key figures in the creation of the

first Old Time and Race Records which shed light on some aspects of the marketing process and

these have been drawn upon in various places throughout this study.27

This interpretation of record industry promotional material necessarily involves an engagement with

the problems surrounding, and limitations of using, advertising as a primary source. Historians of

advertising and consumer culture have lamented the paucity of work that explores advertising as a

source for cultural history.28 When advertisements are used there is often the feeling that, as Daniel

Pope has suggested, ‘Too often (cultural critics) divorce advertisements from the business

conditions and marketing strategies behind them.’29 Kimberly Ann Paul, in her study of context and

culture in print advertising of the 1920s, stresses ‘the importance of situating an advertisement in its

historical setting. Within this context, authorial intent and meaning can be studied, offering multi-

layered and robust interpretations.’30 My intention is to situate the marketing of Race Records and

Old Time in both an industry context, with particular attention paid to the commercial concerns of

the industry at the time of the inception of these catalogues, and within the historical context, and

rhetorical idiom, of the marketing imagery used to sell both Southern black and white music.

and used these photographs as the basis of a content assessment of the material, which involved cataloguing them by various themes, by company and by year. As for the newspaper articles and advertisements pertaining to either Old Time or Race Records, I examined every item that contained the search terms Race Records, Old Time, blues or hillbilly from 1919-1930. I did further searches with more specific search terms, and with wider time periods, to check my results and compare the content to different periods. I then catalogued these in the same way as the photographs of the catalogues and promotional material. In regards to The Talking Machine World (TMW) I studied every issue from 1920-1930 and again catalogued every article and advertisement that pertained to either Race Records and Old Time, and many other relevant topics, such as the activities of key industry figures etc., and again the findings here represent a content assessment, what journalism/media historian Carolyn Kitch, using Marion Marzolf's concept, defines as 'a selection of representative words and images analysed with particular attention to their cultural and historical context'. Carolyn Kitch, 'Family Pictures: Constructing the “Typical” American in 1920s Magazines'. American Journalism 16 (Fall 1999), 60. 27 These include: Arthur Edward Satherley, interview by Norm Cohen and G. Earle, with Ken Griffis and Bill Ward present (June 12, 1971) tapes FT-1647/1 and 2; FT-1648. Southern Folklife Collection, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; David Evans ‘Interview with H. C. Speir.’ JEMF Quarterly No. 27 (Autumn 1972): 117-121; Mike Seeger, 'Interview with Frank Walker,' in Josh Dunson and Ethel Raim, eds, Anthology of American Folk Music Handbook (New York: Oak Publications, 1973); Alfred Shultz, interview by Gayle Jean Wardlow, (August 2, 1969) Cassette TTA-01812/UU. Courtesy of The Centre for Popular Music, Murfreesboro, Texas; Harry Charles, interview by Gayle Jean Wardlow, (1960) reels #TTA-0182 J/UU and TTA-0182 K/UU. Courtesy of The Centre for Popular Music, Murfreesboro, Texas; Mayo Williams interview by Stephen Calt and Gayle Jean Wardlow. in Stephen Calt, ‘The Anatomy of a “Race” Label Part 11,' and Stephen Calt and Gayle Jean Wardlow, 'The Buying and Selling of Paramounts Part 3'. Gayle Jean Wardlow interview with H.C. Speir, in Chasin' That Devil Music: Searching for the Blues (San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books, 1998). 28 Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way For Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds, The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980 (New York, Pantheon Books, 1983); Kimberly Ann Paul, 'The More We Know, the More We See: Context and Culture in 1920s Print Advertising'. (PhD, University of Texas at Austin, 2001). 29 Daniel Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 10. 30 Paul, 3.

Introduction 13

One of the central issues with using advertisements as a primary source in cultural history is to what

degree one can understand the advertisement as a mirror of the times in which it was published. It is

important to recognise that advertisements are projections, and reflect more about those that devised

them than anything else. In so far as they are products of their time and projections used to attract

certain segments of the public through imagery and text designed to be appealing to them, there is

certainly a case to be made that advertisements reflect something of the times in which they were

devised. Advertising historian Roland Marchand’s solution is to suggest that, while one can only

ever read the advertisement as a 'distorted, selected refraction' of reality, 'determined not only by the

efforts of advertisers to respond to consumers desire for fantasy and wish-fulfilment but also by a

variety of other factors', it is 'in their efforts to promote the mystique of modernity in styles and

technology, while simultaneously assuaging the anxieties of consumers about losses of community

and individual control that they most closely mirrored historical reality – the reality of a cultural

dilemma’.31 It is one my central contentions that the record industry was one such national

advertiser engaged in this paradoxical strategy.32 In the odd position of needing to respond to, and

expand, a market about which they knew little, the predominantly Northern white middle-class men

who ran the record industry relied mostly on Southern talent scouts to suggest which artists to

record, and likewise these men turned to what they could find already in use for the marketing of

black music and Southern white music. Largely eschewing advertising agents, except in the case of

major campaigns – in the 1920s Victor used Raymond Rubicam, one of the most prized ad agents of

the era who also devised campaigns for Wanamaker, Montgomery Ward and Rolls Royce, for their

Red Seal and Victrola ads – the record industry’s marketing of Race Records and Old Time looked

to the advertising of minstrel shows and vaudeville theatres, the covers of sheet music and song

books, as well as the visual and verbal tropes representing Southern blacks and white Appalachian

mountaineer culture already in the popular consciousness, courtesy of popular fiction and the

press.33 This is not to say that perceptive copy did not appear about this music, for example Archie

Green has singled out Victor's James Edward Robertson for his particularly sensitive descriptions of

songs in early Old Time catalogues, and as we shall see, the rhetoric of these catalogues owed much

31 Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, xvii and xxi. 32 Other studies in connected fields, such as Carolyn Kitch, 'Family Pictures: Constructing the “Typical” American in 1920s Magazines', and Lisa Jacobson, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century, have explored this issue. Kitch uses the theory of hegemony to describe the way in which the Saturday Evening Post and Good Housekeeping magazine both reflected and produced a version of the family that would last throughout the century. Jacobson is careful to avoid a ‘top-down’ approach, which views 'the expansion of consumer markets largely as a result of corporate strategies to rationalize demand'. She concluded 'cultural change did not merely reflect the economic imperatives of corporate elites', and wished to restore agency to non-corporate elites. My study is closely aligned to this perspective, in that a central tenet of the argument here is that the record industry was responding to consumer demand and the musical taste of audiences, while simultaneously shaping and producing cultural meaning through economic imperative and the negotiation of segregation. Jacobson, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 3. 33 Suisman, Selling Sounds, 115.

Introduction 14

to the music and the artists themselves, however this marketing was from the outset couched in the

tropes of pre-existing models.34

This study aims to understand the record industry’s strategic employment of specific marketing

rhetoric to persuade the consumer to buy the records in Race Records and Old Time catalogues, and

therefore can be described as a rhetorical analysis. To elucidate how this rhetoric functioned, that is

how this marketing employed previous models for marketing the music of Southern whites and

blacks and yet created something new out of this available material, this study also draws on other

approaches to the analysis of 'texts' such as those used in post-structuralist semiotics and the

‘linguistic turn’ in historiography. While much attention was paid in post-structuralist semiotics to

how meaning is formed when reading a 'text', and although the focus in this study is less on

reception and more on the cultural and commercial production of marketing tropes, certain post-

structuralist theories are useful in explaining how this marketing rhetoric functioned within the

commercial and cultural discourse of the phonograph industry. One potentially useful way of

explaining how this marketing rhetoric worked is the through the concept of bricolage, a theory

devised by the father of French post-structuralism Jacques Derrida, building on the work of de

Saussure. This theory argues that all signs (a discrete unit of meaning that can be a word, image,

gesture, sound among many other things) are ‘constructed of fragments of prior significations,

being meaningful by virtue of the traces that each fragment carries of previous uses’.35 Bricolage,

literally meaning construction through whatever is in hand, is a way then to describe how signs

recombine previous meanings to create new meaning, and this is an important aspect of both Race

Records and Old Time marketing. Both drew heavily not only on contemporary representations of

the ‘hillbilly' or ‘blues' musician, but retained and reconfigured previous meanings as it recombined

elements to create new meanings. However, the conceptual tool that perhaps helps us best

understand the dynamics inherent in the marketing imagery of Race Records and Old Time, and is

drawn upon in the subsequent analysis, is the literary theory devised by Julia Kristeva of

intertextuality. Somewhat aligned to Derrida's bricolage, Kristeva's intertextuality is based in

literary theory but has been effectively applied to mass media by other scholars, such as Kimberly

Ann Paul and those included in Ulrike H. Meinhof and Jonathan Smith's collection Intertextuality

and the Media, and offers a useful way to describe how advertising works.36 Kristeva's theory

describes, as Paul neatly puts it, ‘the influence of text upon text upon text – that a text always refers

34 Archie Green, 'Commercial Music Graphics: Four'. JEMF Quarterly, Vol. 4, pt.1, No. 9 (March, 1968):9-12, 10. 35 Jacques Derrida, 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences' (1972), reprinted in Robert Davis, Robert Con and Ronald Schliefer, eds, Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies (New York: Longman, 1989), 229-248. 36 Paul, 'The More We Know, the More We See'; Ulrike H. Meinhof and Jonathan Smith, eds, Intertextuality and The Media: From Genre to Everyday Life (New York: Manchester University Press, 2000).

Introduction 15

back to a previous text', and underscores not only the point that to understand and legitimately

interpret any text, one must understand its antecedents, its context and its referents, but as well that

a text is essentially one articulation in an ongoing discourse, both historical and cultural.37 The three

components of this concept of intertextuality are the actual text, the pretext, and the quotation. The

actual text is what is being read or viewed. The pretext is made up of any and all possible 'texts' that

are woven into the actual text – deliberately or not – by both the creator and the reader. The

quotation is an actual recognisable reference to a pretext – for example, the use of minstrelsy

figures – bug-eyed, wide-mouthed, 'Zip Coon' and 'Jim Crow' caricatures – in the cartoons

associated with the marketing of Race Records. Julia Kristeva’s theory is a useful way to explain

how this rhetoric was situated within a long tradition, and ever-evolving vocabulary, of rhetoric

used to sell white and black Southern music. This rhetoric did not simply make allusions to

recognisable rhetorical devices, but re-configured them to create something new. Furthermore, the

cartoons, illustrations and printed images of this marketing were as deeply intertextual as the copy

that accompanied them and intertextuality is a useful theory here because it acknowledges the

language of visual imagery.

The central question of this study – how and why the record industry constructed the version of

Southern vernacular music that it did in the early 1920s – is as much concerned with ideas about the

South and its inhabitants as it is about the record industry and its motivations. To answer this

question then this study engages with existing literature in several inter-related fields: the

historiography on Southern cultural stereotypes such as 'poor whites', 'hillbilly', 'happy slave', 'urban

dandy', ‘mammy’ and 'blues shouter'; the work of cultural and music historians who have elucidated

the history of Southern vernacular music in American society preceding and following the 1920s;

the literature on consumer culture in the early twentieth century; work on the parallel yet distinct

process of commercialisation and cultural clash in radio; and the work of advertising historians who

have suggested approaches to the problematic interpretation of advertising as a mirror of society.38

37 Paul, 45. 38 For work on the construction and function of Southern cultural stereotypes see: Harkins, Hillbilly; Mark Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); J. Wayne Flynt, Dixie’s Forgotten People: The South’s Poor Whites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); and W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). For work on Southern musical culture see, Archie Green, 'Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol'. The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 78, No. 309 (July-September 1965): 204-228; Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Low Brow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); Charles Joyner, Shared Traditions: Southern history and folk culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers; Tony Russell, Blacks, Whites, and Blues; Le Roi Jones, Blues People (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1963); Marybeth Hamilton, In Search of the Blues (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007); and Geoff Mann, ‘Why does Country Music Sound White? Race and the Voice of Nostalgia’. Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 31 No. 1 (January, 2008): 73-100. For work on radio in the 1920s, see Susan Smulyan, Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting, 1920-1934 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994);

Introduction 16

As the reification of certain ideas surrounding black and white Southern musical culture, Race

Records and Old Time contributed substantially to the formation of Southern whiteness and

blackness in the blossoming consumer culture of the 1920s. Contrasting the development of each of

these contributes to our understanding of this formation and the record industry’s role in this

process. In the scholarship on whiteness, some attention has been paid to the confluence of

Southern segregation and consumer culture in the first decades of the twentieth century, but few

have noted the peculiar case of the record industry in this context.39 Grace Elizabeth Hale discusses

the ‘common whiteness’ and ‘mass racial meanings’ that white Southerners defined through

consumer culture, and which were made possible through new visual technologies and cultural and

commercial sites where these meanings could be acknowledged. Among these she lists

‘photography and motion pictures and changes in lithography, engraving, and printing as well as the

construction of museums, expositions, department stores, and amusement parks'.40 The phonograph

does not figure in her analysis, but not only does the phonograph represent another site in which

these new mass racial meanings were being constructed and defined, it was also an industry that

utilised all of the new technologies and entertainments she lists in their construction. The

phonograph industry was a Northern-based industry, which perhaps is why Hale excludes it from

her study of Southern segregation, but of course these new mass racial meanings were part of a

national project at this time, as segregation took place across the US whether by custom or by law.41

Furthermore, the negotiation of Southern segregation laws guided the national marketing strategy

for these two new phonograph industry products, Old Time and Race Records, because the greater

part of the market for these recordings was presumed to reside in the South.

The other reason perhaps why Hale overlooks the phonograph in her analysis is that her focus is on

Shawn Vancour, 'Popularizing the classics: radio’s role in the American music appreciation movement, 1992-34’, Media Culture & Society (2009): 289; Charles Wolfe, A Good Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999); and Tracey E.W. Laird, Louisiana Hayride: Radio and Roots Music Along the Red River (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). On consumer culture and advertising, see: Marchand, Advertising the American Dream; Paul, 'The More We Know, The More We See’; Pamela Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1998); Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989); Fox and Lears, eds, The Culture of Consumption; and Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976). 39 Works on whiteness that have discussed the period: Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation In The South, 1890-1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit From Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); Matthew Pratt Guterl, The Color of Race in America: 1900-1949 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Vron Ware and Les Black, Out of Whiteness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 40 Hale, Making Whiteness, 8. 41 On segregation and resistance to it in the North see Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2009).

Introduction 17

‘visual’ imagery and the phonograph has featured in the literature on race predominantly by virtue

of its contribution to new ‘aural’ definitions of whiteness and blackness. This tendency is

understandable. Scholars such as Lisa Gitelman and Mark M. Smith have explored the way in

which the record industry from its inception both destabilised prior racial signification, because one

could no longer see the race of the performer, and by inscribing new oral racial markers, racialised

sounds in new ways. Gitelman asks 'what happens to the love and theft of blackface when there is

no face?' and answers that new kinds of aural markers of race were developed in response to the

apparent colour-blindness of recorded sound.42 The 'coon song', one of the biggest crazes of the

acoustic era, became popular at a time, the turn of the century, when the minstrel show was no

longer a widespread popular entertainment, and this racialised performance was predicated on the

fact that listeners could hear race. Musical features such as syncopated rhythms and even the sound

of the piano in popular music became new markers of blackness in popular music. Mark M. Smith

similarly argues that 'record companies…helped accelerate a racial politics of sound, popularized

the idea of the disembodied voice, and separated race from the eye and thereby endorsed the notion

that racial identity could be heard, sold, and consumed'.43 Both the radio and the phonograph

industries had to find ways to signify race through voice, instrument, musical style, etc., and this

aural dimension was an important part of the industry’s promotion of an essentialist definition of

race. But the phonograph was not only an aural medium. The fact of its aural ambiguity only

heightened the need to visually encode and reinforce racial markers, and the phonograph industry

advertised heavily.44 The industry leader, Victor, was the single largest magazine advertiser in the

country in 1923 and the fourth-largest newspaper advertiser.45 Therefore, this study can be seen as

part of an effort to understand the visual representation of race devised by the record industry, but

this focus does not aim to suggest that the segregated catalogues of the 1920s were the only, or even

first, contribution the record industry made to the racialisation of popular music in the early

twentieth century.

In Geoff Mann’s work on country music and whiteness in the post-World War II period, he asks

'Why does country music sound white?' and suggests that 'it is perhaps worth considering the

possibility that something claiming the status of “white culture”, something like a purportedly

American whiteness, however historically baseless, is not reflected in country music, but is, rather,

42 Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 124. 43 Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 55 44 In fact its aural ambiguity was sometimes exploited for covert crossings of the colour-line, and certain acts, such as the Mississippi Sheiks, a black group led by the Chapman brothers from Jackson, Mississippi, were featured in both Race Records and Old Time catalogues. 45 Suisman, Selling Sounds, 115.

Introduction 18

partially produced by it'.46 This contention that the country music industry in fact produces

whiteness goes to the heart of the argument of this study, which looks at a period far earlier than

Mann’s. Country music was producing whiteness, and calling people to their whiteness, long before

it was even called country music, right from the beginning of the Old Familiar Tunes catalogues of

the mid-1920s. The industry’s concurrent definition of 'blackness' in Race Records likewise

produced a blackness, a commercial category of Southern blackness, that allowed the black

musician some involvement in the commodification of Southern black musical culture, but a role

defined and accompanied by images that conformed to forms of blackness acceptable in 1920s

society.47

The 1920s was a remarkable decade for the commodification of Southern vernacular black and

white music to take place in. In a decade that on the one hand was presaged by the 1919 race riots,

and was characterised by a general consternation over the ‘Great Migration’ of the Southern black

population, and on the other, included the Scopes Trial and the scandal of the economic and cultural

indigence of the Southern rural farmer, selling Southern black and white musical culture in any

form in the 1920s would appear to have been no easy task. The historical consensus on the 1920s is

that the era was defined by paradox and countervailing impulses: that in this era of rapid change and

incredible excitement about all things modern, there was an equally strong current of rejection of, or

revulsion from, modernity. Cultural historians have seen this ambivalent mood, and more

specifically the deep mistrust and resistance to modernity, reflected in disparate movements such as

prohibition, fundamentalism, nativism, the revitalised Ku Klux Klan, and in events such as the

backlash against urbanite Al Smith’s presidential campaign in 1928.48 The support for many of

46 Mann, 'Why does Country Music Sound White? Race and the Voice of Nostalgia'. 75. 47 Minstrelsy, a Northern and white creation has been characterised in terms of ‘love and theft’ by Eric Lott in his influential book of that name. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: blackface minstrelsy and the American working class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). By the 1920s however, minstrelsy had long ceased to be solely a white performance, with black minstrels dominating the dying form. For more on minstrelsy, see John Strausbaugh, Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult and Imitation in American Popular Culture (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin Group, 2006); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1999); William John Mahar, Behind the Black Cork: early blackface minstrelsy and Antebellum American black culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Robert Toll, Blacking Up: the minstrel show in nineteenth century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); W.T. Lhamon, Raising Cain: blackface performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Amy Schrager Lang, ‘Jim Crow and the Pale Maiden: Gender, Color and Class in Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times”', in Reading Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Honky-Tonk Bars, ed. Cecelia Tichi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); and Nick Tosches, Where Dead Voices Gather (London: Little, Brown and Co., 2001). 48 See Lawrence Levine, The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the transformation of American Culture: 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981); Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Marchand, Advertising the American Dream; Tracey E.W. Laird, Louisiana Hayride: Radio and Roots Music Along the Red River (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); George E. Mowry, The Urban Nation: 1920-1960 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965); Nathan Miller, New World Coming: the 1920s and the Making of Modern America (New York: Scribner, 2003); Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1966); Brundage, The

Introduction 19

these movements came from new city dwellers as well. Levine has argued that these causes

represented ‘a real or symbolic flight from the new America back to the familiar confines of the

old.’49 Indeed, the folksy, front-porch style of both of the winning presidential candidates of the

1920s, Harding and Coolidge, has been seen as further evidence that in this decade of rapid

modernisation, there was an ever-present pull in the opposite direction, a deep desire to hold on to

the values of the past.50 Levine suggests there was a ‘tension’ between the old and new, individual

and society, within every American in the 1920s.51 I would add the tension between rural and urban,

and perhaps North and South, to this list of major preoccupations of the era.

This ambivalence towards modernity involved a deepening of the nostalgia for, and of the

mythology surrounding, the ‘Old South' in the first decades of the twentieth century. Although not

new in 1920, indeed ever-present throughout Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era, the version of

the idealised American past that seemed to focus so intently on the antebellum ‘Old South’ became

institutionalised, and again ironically modernised at this time, through new commercial ventures,

government-sponsored commemoration, and the burgeoning consumer culture.52 I will argue in

subsequent chapters that while historians have tended to focus on radio or the nascent film industry

as embodiments of this ambivalence towards modern society in the 1920s, there is no more potent

expression of the nostalgic and contradictory nature of the era than the immense popularity of both

Race Records and of Old Time. Although products of the success of mass production and

consumerism, and of a technology still very much in its infancy – the transition from acoustic to

electrically-powered phonographs occurred in 1925, after the establishment of both of these

catalogues – these catalogues were marketed as a return to tradition, a preservation of traditional

culture, and as a conservative force, allowing the displaced Southerner and the urban Northerner to

re-establish some links to their pasts. This marketing served to dress up this modern music, and this

modern phenomenon of a commodified, segregated, electrically re-produced Southern music, in the

guise of tradition and nostalgia for a past that, it was strongly implied, at least in the case of Old

Time, no true American could do without.

Chapter One looks at the content of record label catalogues prior to the creation of Race Records

and Old Time and analyses the first attempts by the record industry to include Southern vernacular

Southern Past; Pete Daniel, Standing at the Crossroads: Southern Life Since 1900 (New York: Hill and Wang,1986); Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); and David E. Whisnant, All that is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1983). 49 Levine, The Unpredictable Past, 197. 50 Miller, 135. 51 Levine, The Unpredictable Past, 199. 52 For commemoration and Southern tourism see Brundage, The Southern Past.

Introduction 20

music in their ‘popular’ catalogues. It argues that the new folkloric sheen that Southern vernacular

music gained in the 1910s and 1920s provided the phonograph industry with the tools to market this

music as culturally important as well as novel, and furthermore, that this early marketing of

Southern vernacular music continued to influence the industry’s approach to Race Records and Old

Time in the 1920s. Chapter Two analyses the Race Records advertising placed in the black press by

the American record industry in the 1920s. The record companies advertised extensively in the

black press, with the knowledge that some of these newspapers, in particular the Chicago Defender,

had a wide circulation in the South. Indeed this amounted to the industry's sole avenue for reaching

the black market for Race Records. This chapter offers an interpretation of the verbal and visual

rhetoric used in these advertisements and argues that, contrary to previous studies that have read

this advertising as a product of the fear of the urban black male or a deliberate attempt to belittle

and denigrate the music of black Americans, this advertising was a product of a confluence of

commercial and cultural forces that produced advertising that was rooted in the models available for

the advertising of ‘race’ music but that resulted in a new presentation of black musical culture in the

1920s.

Chapter Three offers an interpretation of the imagery used to sell Old Time records in the 1920s.

Although much of the industry did not advertise Old Time records in newspapers in the way that it

did Race Records, the ‘Old Familiar Tunes', ‘Songs from the Hills and Plains', and 'Old Time Tunes'

catalogues and other promotional material similarly drew on pre-existing models to present a new,

concrete, visually-reinforced articulation and definition of this music as white, Anglo-Saxon

‘American’ music.

Chapter Four and Five focus on the key phonograph industry publication of the 1920s, the Talking

Machine World (TMW). This journal served dual purposes. It was both the primary organ of the

trade; providing industry news and translating company policy and marketing campaigns for the

dealer, distributor, jobber, and salesman, and also the principal forum for industry discourse

between record companies. It was the site where new products and marketing campaigns were

tested on the industry, and where the ongoing competition for new dealerships took place. It is

frequently cited and often serves as an important primary source for studies of the early record

industry, and yet no previous study of the formation of Race Records and Old Time has attempted a

sustained treatment of the TMW. I have dedicated two chapters to the journal and these chapters are

in part some initial efforts to redress this oversight, albeit through the perspective of a cultural

historical analysis of the cultural dissonance created by the appearance of Southern vernacular

music in its pages. Chapter Four examines the role of the trade organ in the 1920s and how it

Introduction 21

presented to its subscribers an industry philosophy that its editors believed the whole industry

should aspire to uphold. The argument of this chapter is that the prevalent cultural ideology of

cultural and moral uplift and refinement through ‘highbrow’ culture that underpinned much of the

editorial policy and authorial voice of the TMW created a crisis for the journal as it struggled to

reconcile this with the industry’s new, highly-successful catalogues of Southern vernacular music.

Chapter Five continues this treatment of the TMW and looks at what the journal did have to say

about these new catalogues when it could no longer ignore them. This chapter then turns to

discourse on these new catalogues within the TMW. Differing in important ways to publicity aimed

at the public, this material reveals how labels presented themselves to the rest of the industry.

Chapter Six analyses the black press's response to this new presentation of Southern black music.

As mentioned above, Old Time was not advertised in the white press, and therefore this chapter

analyses Race Records exclusively. The Race Records advertisements were placed in newspapers

that were otherwise under the sway of a racial uplift ideology with which Race Records did not sit

comfortably. This chapter analyses this clash of culture and argues that the music critics of these

papers were forced to accommodate this music and these artists due to their overwhelming success,

and yet they did so in a manner that paid neither much respect and did not engage with them on a

serious, critical level. Situating this response in the broader debate amongst black intellectuals about

jazz and blues in the 1920s, this chapter also considers the contrasting perspective on this music

presented by younger intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance and 'New Negro' generation.

The focus on historical and industry context in this study is in service of a central contention: that

the verbal and visual rhetoric of Race Record and Old Time was not purely a product of a particular

ideology or of a deliberate strategy, but the result of a convergence of diverse commercial, social,

and political forces and concerns that cannot be reduced to a single racial agenda or the deliberate

strategy of New York record industry men. These men, and occasionally women, produced a

construct that was a reflection of the state of race relations and the place of the South in the popular

imaginary in the 1920s, something far deeper than personal prejudice. This material can be easily

moulded to support various views of the record industry. On the one hand, the record industry in the

first decade of the twentieth century could be cast as a distinctly progressive force for not observing

the colour line and producing records by black Americans at a time when they were excluded from

most Northern industry.53 On the other hand, in the 1920s the record industry vividly redrew the

53 As Tim Brooks has commented, the early record industry men 'simply did not have the luxury of enforcing irrational social conventions like the “colour line”...the “talking machine men” recruited any performer who could induce people to buy their records and drop nickels into their automatic music machines. If that was a black man singing “Whistling

Introduction 22

colour line in the Southern musical tradition by constructing the fiction of a purely black musical

tradition and a purely white one. It is my contention that in both cases the industry was neither

progressive nor an enthusiastic supporter of segregation, but rather was simply attempting to exploit

new and expand existing markets. This motivation of course did not prevent it from conducting

business and producing imagery that was brimming with racial assumptions and cultural

stereotypes, but my research reveals an industry responding to consumer demand in the manner it

knew how, with the resources it had at its disposal, while negotiating the issues involved in the

commercialisation of Southern white and black vernacular music in the era of Jim Crow. Therefore

this material may amount to, as Marchand has suggested, a 'distorted, selected refraction' of reality

that illuminates several cultural dilemmas, and thus represents an excellent case study of the process

of cultural and commercial production at the dawn of the mass consumer culture of twentieth

century America.

Archie Green, who produced the seminal work on the visual and verbal rhetoric of these record

catalogues, asked in number twenty of his series 'Commercial Music Graphics':

Does a catalog reveal more than its exact contents – picture, titles, artists, numbers? Is such

an item just a discographical publication? My questions are rhetorical; however, I do believe

that record listings are very rich in resources for students of American folk and popular

culture. Accordingly, such graphics should be used to open new modes of investigation by

discographers, folklorists, and historians.54

This was the jumping off point for this study, which began with record catalogues and then widened

its scope to advertising and other record industry promotional material. These archives are indeed

rich resources, and have provided the contextual anchoring of this study. It was quickly apparent

that without adequate accounting for the cultural and commercial context, any attempt to extract

meaning from this material would be futile. This material shows us the crucial process of the

commodification and segregation of a Southern musical tradition that had traditionally been far less

racially fixed. Jim Crow laws, the traditions of minstrelsy and vaudeville, and the sheet music trade,

perhaps began the process of defining, segregating and commodifying this music as either distinctly

white or distinctly black, but in the 1920s the record industry and radio finished it. In this way, the

record industry contributed significantly to the construction of twentieth-century Southern white

and black musical identity and crystallised a Southern whiteness and blackness which had never

Coon” or a black quartet singing “Sweet Low, Sweet Chariot,” so be it'. Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and The Birth of Recording Industry, 1890-1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). 54 Archie Green, 'Commercial Music Graphics: Twenty'. JEMF Quarterly, Vol. 8, pt.1, No. 25 (Spring, 1972), 26.

Introduction 23

been so over-determined.

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream

Introduction

In the 1900s and 1910s, the burgeoning interest in ‘American’ folk music within the elite and the

classical music world prompted the major phonograph companies to introduce Southern vernacular

music into their popular catalogues as both a novelty and a subject worthy of study. It is the

argument of this chapter that the new folkloric sheen that certain Southern musics acquired as a

result of this interest allowed the industry to present this music in a manner in keeping with the

ideology of musical and cultural hierarchy that underpinned record industry marketing throughout

this period. Moreover, I contend that these early experiments with marketing Southern ‘folk’ music,

and the ideology of musical hierarchy, would go on to influence and inform industry marketing of

Race Records and Old Time in the 1920s. The new respectability bestowed on ‘folk’ forms during

this time, such as the spiritual, allowed the record industry to market this music as part of its

commitment to uplift, education and musical appreciation.

Encouraged by the success of the Fisk Jubilee Singers in north-eastern urban concert halls in the

1880s, the phonograph industry seized on the spiritual as a respectable black folk form that could be

marketed as part of its commitment to uplift, education, and musical appreciation. This resulted in

many recordings by the Fisks and other gospel groups such as the Hampton Singers and the

Tuskegee Institute Singers. The industry also moved tentatively into the field of the ‘white folk

music’ of Appalachia, and other ‘authentic’ folk musics of isolated regions of the US including

cowboy songs, which were similarly given the seal of approval as ‘folk’ music through the

publication of songbooks.1 These releases represented the first steps toward the creation of discrete

musical categories and catalogues of Southern vernacular music, and the exploration of this material

reveals the industry’s first attempts to reconcile this music with the cultural ideology that many

within the industry believed was so central to its success.

The genealogy of the marketing of Southern music has not been adequately accounted for in

1 John A. Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (New York: Sturgis and Walton, 1910).

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 25

previous studies of the visual and verbal rhetoric of Race Records and Old Time. While there have

been studies of the presence of black artists in the record industry prior to the creation of Race

Records, and likewise for Southern white artists, the work on Race Records and Old Time

marketing would have benefited from closer examination of the industry ideology as well as

marketing antecedents as important determinants in the development of advertising strategies.2

Many within the phonograph industry perceived it to be in a vulnerable position in the 1920s,

exposed particularly to the threat of radio, and there was a determination to hold on to the inroads

the phonograph had made into cultured, middle-class homes and polite society in the past two

decades. An oligopoly at this time, Victor was the industry leader, and had surpassed Edison, its

main rival of the early 1900s, largely through its innovative marketing strategy, which placed new

emphasis on the celebrity artist, first-and-foremost Enrico Caruso, and its expensive Red Seal

catalogue of European classical music, to sell phonographs.3 Facilitated by Victor’s European

affiliate, the UK Gramophone Company, which secured many classical musicians and opera singers

for Victor, this innovative approach was devised to convince the aspirational middle class that the

phonograph was an agent of democracy and of moral uplift.4 Red Seal marketing employed

democratic rhetoric by offering 'the music you want, when you want it' and by giving countless

Americans who could not attend the opera access to 'good music'. In reality however this catalogue

reinforced the link between highbrow music and class through its prohibitively priced records

which signified wealth and good taste, and cost several times more than 'popular records'.5 Victor

owner and founder Eldridge Johnson admitted privately that Red Seal was used 'almost entirely for

2 The scholarship on Race Records advertising includes: Mark K. Dolan, ‘Cathartic Uplift: A Cultural History of Blues and Jazz in the Chicago Defender, 1920-1929' (PhD, University of South Carolina, 1985); Mark K. Dolan, ‘Extra! Chicago Defender Race Records Ads Show South from Afar'. Southern Cultures (Fall 2007): 107 -124; Jeff Todd Titon, Early Downhome Blues (Urbana: University of North Carolina Press, 1977); and Ronald Clifford Foreman, Jnr., 'Jazz and Race Records, 1920-1932: Their Origins and their significance for the record industry and society' (PhD, University of Illinois, 1968). 3 David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 301. 4 An American, Frederick Gaisberg was employed by The Gramophone Company to secure highbrow talent for the English company's recording program and when Eldridge Johnson at Victor signed a deal with the company to share recordings, Victor gained access to Caruso and other Italian opera stars. Suisman, Selling Sounds, 106. For more on the early record industry see: Suisman, Selling Sounds; Russell Sanjek, American Popular music and its business: the first four hundred years, Vol. 2, 1790-1909 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Steve J. Wurtzler, Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the rise of the Mass Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Emily Thompson, ‘Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity: Marketing the Edison Phonograph in America, 1877-1925'. The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 1 (Spring, 1995): 131-171; Tim Brooks, ‘“Might Take One Disc of This Trash as a Novelty”: Early Recordings by the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Popularization of “Negro Folk Music”’. American Music, Vol. 18, No. 3. (Autumn, 2000): 278-316; Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and The Birth of Recording Industry, 1890-1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); and Geoffrey Jones, ‘The Gramophone Company: An Anglo-American Multi-National, 1898-1931’. The Business History Review, Vol. 59, No. 1. (Spring, 1985): 76-100. 5 In 1903, Victor records were priced at two-dollars whereas 'popular' records cost between thirty-five cents and a dollar. Suisman, Selling Sounds, 113.

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 26

advertising'.6 This incredibly successful strategy was aped by the rest of the industry, except Edison,

which refused to use celebrity artists and was therefore quickly reduced to an anachronism.7 Victor's

approach soon became the model for everything from product lines and marketing techniques, down

to the tone and authorial voice of its record catalogues.

Historians such as David Suisman and Marsha Siefert have explored the important cultural work the

Red Seal campaign achieved for the industry in the first decades of the twentieth century, but this

campaign is also important to this study because it underscores the priorities, the perspective and

the cultural ideology which underpinned the marketing of Race Records and Old Time in the 1920s,

an important dynamic overlooked in other treatments of this campaign and its influence.8 It is my

contention that as the Red Seal campaign became the creation myth of the industry, a story

constantly re-told in the industry trade journal The Talking Machine World, this orthodoxy

continued to inform the industry's view of itself and its success, and to guide its approach to new

forms of music and the creation of new catalogues into the 1920s.

Victor led the industry into a deep commitment to a public image based on moral and cultural uplift.

This ideology took its cues from what has been described as the ‘cultured generation’ of the late

nineteenth century that institutionalised and popularised the idea that European classical music

represented the apex of cultural achievement in the world of music.9 This generation of concert

directors, musical patrons, city orchestra directors, as Lawrence Levine and others have shown,

‘sacralized’ the canon of European classical composers and believed the appreciation of highbrow

musical forms would lead to cultural and moral improvement.10 This sparked the broader trend

among mass producers and advertisers in the first decades of the twentieth century of aligning

themselves with, and exploiting, ‘highbrow’ culture to establish their brand. The phonograph

industry was a leader in this trend. Shaken by criticism from proponents of the musical appreciation

6 Eldridge Johnson in a letter to The Gramophone Company in 1904. Suisman, Selling Sounds, 113. Sanjek estimates, 'the Red Seal line generally accounted for less than one fifth of all Victor production and about three percent of total disc sales'. Sanjek, American Popular music and its business: the first four hundred years, Vol. 2, 1790-1909, 391. 7 Edison’s marketing strategy, much to the dismay of some within the company, remained focused on the superior fidelity of its machines and throughout the 1920s Edison conducted public ‘tone tests’ to prove it. For more on Edison’s marketing strategies, see Emily Thompson, ‘Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity: Marketing the Edison Phonograph in America, 1877-1925', and Leonard DeGraaf, 'Confronting the Mass Market: Thomas Edison and the Entertainment Phonograph'. Business and Economic History 24 (1995): 88-96. 8 For more on Red Seal marketing, see Suisman, Selling Sounds; Marsha Siefert, 'The Audience at Home: The Early Recording Industry and the marketing of musical taste’, in Audiencemaking: How the Media Create the Audience, eds. James S Ettema and D. Charles Whitney (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1994); and Mark Katz, 'Making America More Musical through the Phonograph, 1900-1930'. American Music, Vol. 16, No.4, (Winter, 1998): 448-476. 9 Derek Vaillant, Sounds of Reform: Progressivism and Music in Chicago, 1873-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 2. 10 See Levine, Highbrow/Low Brow, and Ralph P. Locke, 'Music Lovers, Patrons, and the “Sacralization” of Culture in America’. 19-Century Music, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Autumn, 1993): 149-173.

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 27

movement and celebrated musical figures, such as Philip Sousa, who coined the derisive term

‘canned music’, the industry leaders, like those in radio, sought to portray themselves as agents of

refinement and education through highbrow culture rather than agents of its denigration.11

This ‘sacralization' led commentators to wonder about the possibility of America producing music

of the same quality and also led to fresh interest in native folk musics – the vernacular music of

native Americans, blacks, and the folk music of the isolated Appalachian mountains. This new

interest had an effect on the manner in which the record industry marketed these new catalogues of

vernacular music. The new ‘folkloric’ and anthropological interest in American folk musics was

inspired by many things: post-WW1 nativism and the challenging of the obsession with European

culture, complaints within the musical appreciation movement that American classical compositions

needed to be rooted in American themes and music; and publications such as Cecil Sharp’s English

Folksongs from the Southern Appalachians and Lomax’s Cowboy Songs and other Frontier

Ballads.12 For the industry however it was simply a way to market this music as more than merely

slightly unsavoury popular entertainment.

The first recordings by Mamie Smith in 1920 were marketed at white audiences who, it was

assumed, would be receptive to this music as either a worthy subject for arm-chair anthropology or

as a throw-back to minstrelsy, a form itself often depicted as a representation of authentic black

culture. With Old Time or 'hillbilly' music, these artists were likewise both legitimate examples of

authentic American folk music as well as entertaining, exotic novelties. While the influence of

'popular' music, and popular culture, are strong in the verbal and visual vocabulary of both Race

Records and Old Time and will be addressed in the following chapters, in particular the spectre of

minstrelsy in Race Records and the influence of the romantic Southern themed parlour songs in Old

Time, it is in fact the burgeoning interest in the 'folk' cultures of America which made it possible for

the record industry to market these musics as cultural artefacts worthy of middle-class arm-chair

anthropology and novel entertainment. This period saw the evolution of the cultural tropes

associated with this music: its Southern-ness, its authenticity, and its ‘folk’ status – each of which

11 For more on the music appreciation movement and the function of cultural uplift ideology in the record industry and radio, see Mark Katz, 'Making America More Musical through the Phonograph, 1900-1930'; Mark Katz, 'The Phonograph Effect: The Influence of Recording on Listener, Performer, Composer, 1900-1940' (PhD, University of Michigan, 1999); Jessica C. Gienow-Hecht, 'Whose Music Is It Anyway? The Limits of Transnational Culture in the Nineteenth Century'. European Contributions to American Studies (2004): 34-50; Marsha Siefert, 'The Audience at Home: The Early Recording Industry and the Marketing of Musical Taste'; and Shawn Vancour, 'Popularizing the Classics, Radio's Role in the American Music Appreciation Movement, 1922-1934'. Media, Culture and Society 31 (2009): 289-307. 12 For more on the influence of Sharp and Lomax, see Malone and Stricklin, Southern Music/American Music, and Hamilton, In Search of the Blues.

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 28

reinforced its segregation along racial lines – and this established Southern ‘folk’ music in popular

music catalogues, ready for middle-class consumption.13

The marketing and advertising of Old Time and Race Records in the 1920s required the

development of a new commercial iconography and a new vocabulary. These were the first discrete

catalogues of the vernacular music of Southern whites and blacks, yet they were not without

antecedents. While the record industry presented two newly-defined, racially-fixed constructs of

Southern ‘white’ and Southern ‘black’ vernacular music in Race Records and Old Time, these new

representations drew heavily on previously established styles of advertising and approaches to

Southern white and black music (both popular and ‘folk') within the record industry and beyond it.

Indeed, the record industry was not the first branch of the music industry to commercialise the

music of Southern whites and blacks: live audiences and middle-class parlours had been provided

with sheet music and player piano rolls derived from at least some version of Southern ‘folk’

whiteness and blackness for some time. There was also minstrelsy, the 'coon song’, the sentimental

parlour ballads of Stephen Foster and those that followed him, the first 'blues' craze following W.C.

Handy’s first published blues ‘The Memphis Blues’ in 1912, all of which established a niche in

popular music for Southern-themed music which purported to be in some way derived from real

Southern, mostly plantation, experience.14 The entrepreneurial efforts and 'self commodification' of

pioneering artists themselves played a large role in this. The minstrel, medicine, tent, and vaudeville

shows that toured throughout the country all presented some version of ‘authentic’ Southern

entertainment, and so-called mountain balladeers had been moving into urban centres looking for

13 Miller has argued that folklorists reinforced segregation through the concept of cultural isolation and their belief in separate but equal folk cultures. Miller, Segregating Sound, 31. 14 For more on Southern tropes in the early music industry see Bill Malone and David Stricklin, Southern Music/American Music (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979); Bill C. Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993); Archie Green, ‘Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol’. The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 78, No. 309 (July-September 1965): 204-228; Bill C Malone, Country Music U.S.A. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968); Tony Russell, Blacks, Whites, and Blues (London: Studio Vista Ltd., 1970); Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, ‘“They Cert'ly Sound good to Me”: Sheet Music, Southern Vaudeville, and the Commercial Ascendancy of the Blues’. American Music, Vol. 14, No. 14, New Perspectives on the Blues (Winter, 1996): 402-454; Stephanie Dunson, ‘The Minstrel in the Parlor: Nineteenth-Century Sheet Music and the Domestication of Blackface Minstrelsy’. ATQ Vol. 16 Issue 4 (Dec 2002): 241-257; James H. Dormon, ‘Shaping the Popular Image of Post-Reconstruction American Blacks: The “Coon Song” Phenomenon of the Gilded Age’. American Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 4. (Dec 1988): 450-471; Bruce Bastin, ‘From the Medicine Show to the Stage: Some Influences Upon the Development of a Blues Tradition in the Southeastern United States'. American Music, Vol. 2, No.1. (Spring, 1984): 29-42; J. Stanley Lemons, 'Black Stereotypes as Reflected in Popular Culture, 1880-1920'. American Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring, 1977): 102-116; J. M. Mancini, ‘“Messin’ with the Furniture Man”: Early Country Music, Regional Culture, and the Search for an Anthological Modernism'. American Literary History (June 1, 2004): 208-237; Lee Glazer and Susan Key, 'Carry Me Back: Nostalgia for the Old South in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture'. Journal of American Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1, The American Past and Popular Culture (April, 1996): 1-24; and the extensive literature on minstrelsy, some of which is cited in the following pages.

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 29

entrance into the market place for some time before the creation of Old Time.15 While much of the

visual and verbal rhetoric of these antecedents remained indistinct, disparate, and vague, these were

the examples of the marketing of Southern vernacular music the industry had to draw upon, and the

images which came to define this music owed much to extant models.

This chapter is divided into two halves that address these two crucial determinants in the industry’s

first presentations of Southern vernacular folk music. The first half explores the cultural elitism and

uplift ideology of the record industry in the first decades of the twentieth century as presented in its

advertising, instructional and promotional material. This ideology was carried into the 1920s,

creating a situation where the industry was pursuing the seemingly contradictory marketing aims of

cultural uplift through appreciation of European classical music, while rigorously exploiting new

markets for Race Records and Old Time. The second half addresses the first interest in including the

Southern vernacular ‘folk’ music of whites and blacks in the popular record catalogues of the 1910s,

and how the interest in this music by folklorists and those in the music appreciation movement

influenced the industry’s approach to this music, an influence which would be carried through to

their Race Records and Old Time marketing.

Ultimately this marketing material offers a unique insight into the changing cultural priorities in

America in the first decades of the twentieth century. In this period the cultural allegiances of the

late nineteenth-century begin to bump up against consumer culture and the changing cultural

priorities that came with the re-evaluation of America and its place in the world after WW1. In these

years when nationalism was high, a new nativism, which offered a revision of the American past,

and a new nostalgia for the antebellum era, was on the rise.16 This clashed with the Euro-centric

elitism and uplift ideology of many mass culture producers who wished to convey a corporate

image of exclusivity, refinement, quality, and cultural worth.17 Contained in this record industry

material is a profound reflection of the clash of these cultural forces with the new economic

imperatives of mass consumption.

Victor, Red Seal and cultural hierarchy in early record industry advertising

15 Karl Hagstrom Miller, 'Segregating Sound: Folklore, Phonographs, and the Transformation of Southern Music, 1888-1935'. (PhD, New York University, 2002), 78. 16 David E. Whisnant, All that is Native and Fine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1983), 238. 17 Advertising historians such as Roland Marchand, Stuart Ewen, and T.J. Jackson Lears have all written on this trend among mass producers and new media in this period. To see how this functioned within other industries, see Linda L. Tyler, ‘“Commerce and Poetry Hand in Hand”: Music in American Department Stores, 1880-1930’. Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Spring, 1992): 75-120; and Shawn Vancour, ‘Popularizing the Classics’.

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 30

The state of the phonograph industry in 1920 owed a lot to the success of the Victor Talking

Machine Company in selling the idea of the phonograph to white middle-class consumers as a

replacement for the parlour player piano. Much has been written about Victor’s Red Seal catalogue

as an important turning point for the phonograph industry as a whole and as a master-stroke of

marketing. Suisman and others have argued that the rise of Victor over its main competitor Edison

at the turn of the century, and its continued success against rivals such as Columbia throughout the

1920s stemmed from the company’s belief in the efficacy of advertising and its Red Seal Records

catalogue and advertising campaign. I will not go into great detail here about Red Seal and the

strategy behind it as this has been adequately covered by other scholars, and yet its ongoing

dominance of trade advertising strategies and the ongoing effect of its concentration on elite

European classical music on the presumptions, prejudices, and ideology of the industry in 1920,

necessitates some consideration here.

Aware that the phonograph was held in low esteem by the ‘cultured’ classes, who held concerns

about the effect of this ‘canned music’ on musical culture and the crassness of the commercial

music available to play on the machine, as well as reservations about the ugliness of the phonograph

machine itself, Victor devised the elegantly packaged and exclusively priced Red Seal grand opera

records in 1902 in an attempt to change these perceptions, and to sell the idea of the phonograph to

middle-class white Americans.18 This represented a major shift in marketing away from the

phonograph itself to the recording artist, the human face of mechanical reproduction. Reflecting the

broader shift in advertising from images of industrial prowess to images of people using products in

everyday life, Victor sought to humanise the product by featuring the artist in their own living room,

sitting around the phonograph, socialising around it.19 Pioneers in the utilisation of the celebrity

18 In 1906, John Phillip Sousa, who himself was so often attacked for diluting culture, warned the nation of a new menace: the proliferation of phonographs and player pianos, which were transforming musical expression into 'a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things'. By 1912 however, Sousa himself could not withstand the new technology and recorded 15 to 20 sides for Victor Records including music by Verdi, Berlioz, and Wagner, as well as a number of his own marches. John Phillip Sousa, 'The Menace of Mechanical Music'. Appleton's Journal 8, no. 3 (1906): 278-284. 19 For more on the shift in advertising and the role of ad agencies in the 1920s, see: Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way For Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); T.J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History Of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977); Pamela Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998); Richard S. Tedlow, New and Improved: The story of Mass Marketing in America (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996); Daniel Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Lisa Jacobson, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989); Ruth Mayer, ‘“Taste It!” American Advertising, Ethnicity, and the Rhetoric of Nationhood in the 1920s’. Amerikastudien-American Studies 43 (1998): 131-

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 31

artist, Victor pursued this marketing strategy so passionately that it made a huge star of one of these

Italian opera voices, Enrico Caruso, whose tenor voice was not the most celebrated in grand opera

but came through clearly on the still noisy acoustic phonograph horns.

Throughout the 1910s, Victor was one of the top five advertisers in the country.20 Not only did it

advertise abundantly, it pioneered certain aspects of advertising, both in terms of campaigns and in

the style of its ads, which have subsequently become fundamental elements in modern record

industry advertising. Victor was well aware of the fact that its Black Seal popular series, where one

would find the earliest releases of Southern vernacular music, out-sold Red Seal records by a great

margin, and that most people would choose to buy minstrel routines, parlour songs, and spirituals

over grand opera. In 1905, the first year of publication of the trade journal The Talking Machine

World, Victor took out an unprecedented series of four full-page ads, and in the last it proclaimed:

‘There are four Victor pages in this issue. Three show pictures of operatic artists; one shows

pictures of popular artists. Three to one – our business is just the other way, and more too; but there

is good advertising in Grand Opera. Are you getting your share?’21

Here Victor spelled out its marketing strategy to the industry and confessed that its strategy in

promoting grand opera was not in the hope of selling huge amounts of Red Seal records, but with

the intention of selling the idea of the phonograph to middle-class consumers. There is ‘good

advertising’ in grand opera because Red Seal advertising raises the prestige of the phonograph in

the mind of the middle-class consumer who might then be more inclined to replace the player piano

with a phonograph, regardless of their actual taste in music. According to music historian Ronald

Davis, opera had become more ‘a symbol of culture than a real cultural force’ by this time, and it

was in this sense, as a symbol, rather than a profit-making product, that Victor used grand opera

artists to dignify and then sell phonographs and records.22 This message, and the success of this

strategy, was felt throughout the industry, with other companies such as Brunswick, Columbia, and

Okeh's classical music arm Odeon producing similarly priced and packaged classical music

recordings. The link between the production of these catalogues of music and the image of the

industry is ever-present in the material promoting these recordings, with many companies making

the link explicit in their advertising to the trade, as Odeon did in 1925, when it claimed that its

release of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, ‘will do much to make and sustain the prestige of the

141; and Kimberly Ann Paul, 'The More We Know, The More We See: Context and Culture in 1920s Print'. (PhD, University of Texas at Austin, 2001). 20 Suisman, Selling Sounds, 115. 21 Talking Machine World, October, 1905, 36. 22 Levine, Highbrow, Low Brow, 104.

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 32

business'.23

Victor's fondness for print advertising led to the production of a great variety of other forms of

promotional material. It issued a dense, 300-page, hardcover, annual general catalogue, monthly

catalogue supplements and many other promotional booklets. Mostly printed at its own facilities,

these publications were aimed at the distributor as well as the customer, and were littered with

photographs of recording artists, and long, descriptive passages of ad-like copy. According to their

own slogan, these catalogues contained ‘all the music of the world'. They did contain a vast range of

styles, from popular Tin Pan Alley Dixie songs to minstrel tunes, Hawaiian lullabies, Mexican

marimba, foreign language recordings, Italian opera, European classical music and recorded

presidential addresses and speeches from other prominent personalities.24

Victor’s innovative approach to, and extensive use of, advertising meant the company cast a rather

large shadow over the industry. Its main competitors at the time, Columbia and Brunswick,

shamelessly followed Victor’s every move, and although Race Records and Old Time records

would require new and innovative marketing strategies, and gave smaller, bolder labels such as

OKeh, Paramount, and Black Swan a niche in the market, these smaller companies essentially used

Victor’s advertising and marketing strategies as a template for their own. Victor, by capitalising on

the changes to advertising at the turn of the century, and by becoming the industry leader in both

phonographs and lateral-cut discs, thanks largely to its understanding of the ability of advertising to

help shape the public’s perception of products and brands, showed the rest of the industry, or

anyone thinking of moving into the record industry, the way to success.

A good introduction to Victor’s acoustic era advertising is the New Victor Records June 1907

catalogue (see Fig 1.1).25

23 OKeh and Odeon General Catalogue, 1925. Southern Folklife Collection, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 24 Red Seal records were set apart in the listings, printed on special pink paper at the back, to underscore their special status. Victor advertising also appeared on the sides of street cars, in shop windows, and in conjunction with home visits by dealer representatives. Suisman, Selling Sounds, 117. 25 Victor records supplement, June 1907. Southern Folklife Collection, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 33

Figure 2.1 (Source: Southern Folklife Collection, Manuscripts Department, University of North

Carolina, Chapel Hill).

The design of this catalogue reflects many of the main concerns of the industry at this time. The

cover is light and decorative and speaks to the industry’s concerns about the perceived ugliness of

these slabs of vinyl. It features several records out of their sleeves, nestled in a branch of roses, just

waiting to be picked, as if the decorative design and domestic, feminine imagery will soften the

blow of the ugliness of the records themselves. This catalogue is clearly designed to flatter the

reader’s refined taste and artistic sensibility, every element suggesting an appreciation of the finer

things, far removed from the loud, crude, hard-sell of modern advertising and the popular music

industry. Indeed, these catalogues were aimed at middle-class women, who were seen at this time as

in charge of the purchase of household goods such as the phonograph.26 The cover also features an

outlet stamp, which reads ‘Fred W. Peabody, Pianos, Sewing Machines, Talking Machines,

Amesbury, Mass.', the kind of store patronised by middle-class white women at this time.

From the first published Red Seal catalogue in 1903, Victor pursued potential new middle-class

26 According to a 1919 symposium sponsored by The Talking Machine World, 'Whether they be “fair ladies” or “wild women,” the fact remains that the talking machine manufacturer in his general advertising, and the talking machine retailer in his personal contact, should not overlook the fact that a general average of 75 % of all talking machines and records are bought by the female members of the family'. Suisman, Selling Sounds, 208.

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 34

phonograph customers through an appeal to their appreciation of the superior charms of European

classical music and of the finer things in life in general. The sales pitch became ensconced in a

language of high-art appreciation, of the opera enthusiast. This copy for Australia’s Dame Nellie

Melba in 1907 is a fine example:

The new Melba records have created a genuine sensation among music-lovers everywhere.

Although they have been on sale but a few days, the demand is quite unprecedented, and

opinion is unanimous in pronouncing them the most amazingly beautiful voice

reproductions ever issued. Those who have not yet heard these delightful records should do

so at once.27

This copy illustrates the nexus of commercial and cultural concerns in record industry advertising at

this time. Careful to avoid crass commercial overtures, this copy features the urgency of

consumption (‘on sale but a few days, demand is quite unprecedented’) but this is submerged in a

rhetoric of music appreciation and high-art, as somehow above the thrills of a fleeting craze; a high

art product of cultural worth, ‘the most amazingly beautiful voice reproductions ever produced',

which emphasises the superiority of Victor's recording technology.

A survey of Victor advertisements placed in the New York Times throughout the 1910s reveals a

company deeply committed to associating itself with the appreciation of high art and cultural

hierarchy. This advertising links in the reader’s mind the appreciation of great art and true beauty

with the ownership of Victor records. Exceptional quality, perfection, and high art were constant

themes associated with the production of the Victrola and Red Seal records. The Victrola is ‘The

Supreme Musical Instrument’, which ‘places at your command the art of the greatest singers and

musicians'.28 The decoratively designed cabinets which encased this ‘musical instrument’ are

conceived as objects or furniture of great quality and beauty to rival the piano, ‘beautifully cased in

mahogany, Circassian or American Walnut’, and the releases of new Red Seal records are

announced as achievements of the highest order and as events in musical history. ‘A new Victor

Record by Melba is a new chapter in the musical history of the world', read one, ‘The capture of her

matchlessly pure notes in a fresh flow of beauty is an event of genuine importance to those who

27 Victor records supplement, June 1907. Southern Folklife Collection, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 28 New York Times, June 28, 1915, 5. Edison also depicted his phonographs as musical instruments rather than machines. Edison dealers were forbidden to refer to the Diamond Disc as a machine and were encouraged to offer 'recitals' rather than play records. Emily Thompson, ‘Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity: Marketing the Edison Phonograph in America, 1877-1925', 142.

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 35

cherish genius'.29 Another announcement, for an Alma Gluck and Efrem Zimbalist collaboration,

read, ‘only the Victrola is able to bring their art into your home with unerring truth, and so they

make records for the Victor exclusively. It is the absolutely fidelity that has established the

supremacy of the Victrola; that has attracted into the ranks of Victor exclusive talent the greatest

artists of all the world'.30 Similarly, a new Sextet from Lucia di Lammermoor and a new quartet

from Rigoletto inspired this:

The worthy presentation of these mighty lyric ensembles – the most famous in the whole

realm of opera – calls for an art which is nothing short of supreme. Intricate, dramatic,

surpassingly beautiful, intense in passion and color these two great climaxes of music

summon talents of the highest rank – demand an instrument supreme in the fidelity of its

tone.31

These advertisements reveal just how thoroughly committed the industry was to constructing a

public image tied to high-art and European classical musical culture in the first decades of the

twentieth century. Every aspect of the trade: the phonograph itself, the cabinets it came in,

improvements in fidelity and technology, record releases and song selection, were all seemingly

driven by the desire to recreate the experience, the elegance, opulence and beauty of the opera

experience. This was Victor’s strategy to raise the prestige of the phonograph from a toy or office

dictating machine to a musical instrument worthy of replacing the parlour piano, and this strategy,

with the musical hierarchy that came with it, was carried into the 1920s and continued to guide its

attitude and marketing and the creation of many new catalogues of popular and vernacular music,

which we shall explore in the following section.

This strategy put the industry in the awkward position in the 1920s of having to reconcile its

allegiance to cultural uplift and elite musical culture with its pursuit and exploitation of the markets

for new strands of popular music, such as jazz, and the vernacular music of Southern whites and

blacks. In most of its promotional material, Victor continued to pledge its allegiance to the cause of

spreading 'good music' throughout America. In 1927 the Victor Talking Machine Company

published ‘A Musical Galaxy’, a promotional booklet which, although appearing many years after

the launching of the Red Seal marketing campaign, reveals a company still preoccupied with the

issues Red Seal was designed to address over ten years earlier (see Fig 1.2). It suggests that Victor

29 New York Times, June 9, 1916, 7. 30 Ibid., November 11, 1916, 7. 31 Ibid., April 16, 1917, 6. The first recording of the Lucia Sextet in 1908 included Enrico Caruso and was priced at seven dollars, earning it the title, 'The Seven Dollar Sextet'.

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 36

believed it still had work to do to convince the middle class of the good cultural work of the

phonograph industry.32 Indeed, published the same year as Victor's big commitment to both Race

Records and Old Time recording with the hiring of Ralph Peer who travelled to Southern regional

centres such as Atlanta and Memphis with portable recording equipment, this booklet trumpets an

allegiance to an embattled cultural hierarchy challenged on both sides; from a growing interest in

American folk music on one side, and the overwhelming success of its catalogues of commercial

vernacular music on the other. In the foreword to the booklet, Leopold Stokowski, one of Victor’s

most popular conductors and the sometime face of Victor’s general catalogue, relates:

This vast land is full of magnificent and beautiful nature where no one now lives. But soon

all this will be easily accessible by aeroplane. Then – no more crowding in ugly and

unhealthy and overcrowded cities. We shall live closer to nature and consequently be

happier. How will this affect music? No matter how far we may live from so-called

civilization’ we can have good music – by Victrola.33

32 The record business reached its peak sales of the 1920s in 1921, with sales at retail of $106.5 million ($47.8 million wholesale), a figure that was not exceeded for twenty-six years. With the new threat of radio, the next few years were anxious ones for the industry leaders. Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years, Vol. 3 From 1900-1984, 62. 33 Victor records supplement, 1927. Southern Folklife Collection, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 37

Figure 2.2 'A Musical Galaxy' was a special Victor supplement published in 1927. (Source:

Southern Folklife Collection, Manuscripts Dept., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

One of the many ironies of the 1927 A Musical Galaxy supplement, and one which underscores a

major paradox of record company marketing throughout the 1920s, is that while conductor Leopold

Stokowski in his introduction envisions the Victrola transporting the ‘good music’ of civilisation to

the far reaches of the barely inhabited frontiers of America, quite the opposite concept is a major

feature of contemporaneous Old Time and Race Records marketing. In these catalogues, the

exciting role of the phonograph is to bring into the modern, urban home the music from the far

reaches of America; the cowboy songs of the western frontier, the old-time folk songs from the most

isolated mountain ranges. In one sense, this was the great new enterprise of modern America; that

through increased mobility and industrialization, mass consumerism and choice could be brought to

the farthest regions and music from the farthest regions could be brought to the cities. It meant that

anywhere one resided in modern America one could listen to opera from Italy or fiddle music from

the Appalachians. And yet in A Musical Galaxy, this democratic potential is overshadowed by a

cultural hierarchy. Stokowski continues:

Two decades ago – with the exception of a few of the largest cities – there was virtually no

good music to be heard anywhere in America. In thousands of small towns and villages, in

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 38

hundreds of thousands of farms, the world of good music simply did not exist. The

harmonium and the parlor organ with their hymns, the Silver Cornet Band with its bucolic

marches – these defined the circle of the musical horizon.

This is not an argument you would think a major record company would be making in 1927, when

in its ‘Old Familiar Tunes’ catalogues it was going to great lengths to market rural Southern music

as the musical heritage of all Americans. You might be forgiven for wondering if statements like, ‘in

thousands of small towns and villages, in hundreds of thousands of farms, the world of good music

did not exist’ might not only starkly contradict record company publicity for other catalogues

supposedly full of the quality music of villages and farms, but also alienate certain sections of the

public, not to mention their own recording artists. However, the reason these inherent contradictions

in the marketing of its various catalogues were not problematic for Victor was that the term ‘good

music’ at this time was a synonym for European classical music. In the elite circles of classical

musical appreciation, where high culture was synonymous with European culture, the native

vernacular music of America was still of scant interest. This stylish supplement, featuring

reproductions of six modernist paintings by Eduard Buk Ulreich, was tailored to these tastes and

panders to the pretence of highbrow aesthetics.

The musical traditions alive in the small towns of America were from this perspective irrelevant

compared to the crowning achievements of European high art. On the other hand, this rhetoric

appeals to the missionary impulses of those patrons of high culture who would like to see this music

spread across the cultural wasteland which is America.34 Viewed this way, Victor could market Old

Time tunes from ‘the hills and plains’ as the true musical heritage of all Americans and

simultaneously criticise the lack of ‘good music’ found throughout the country without any inherent

or perceived contradiction.

This musical elitism and the industry's commitment to marketing its products on a cultural uplift

platform resulted in the appearance of many advertisements, and articles in the trade organ The

Talking Machine World testifying to the health and rapid rise in popularity of classical music across

the country, which will be explored in detail in the following chapters. Now we turn to the first

experiments with marketing the ‘folk’ music of Southern vernacular musicians, both black and

34 For more on the musical appreciation movement in America in the first decades of the twentieth century, see Julia J. Chybowski, 'Developing American Taste: A Cultural History of the Early Twentieth-Century Music Appreciation Movement' (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2008); Marsha Siefert, 'The Audience at Home: The Early Recording Industry and the marketing of musical taste’: Mark Katz, 'Making America More Musical through the Phonograph, 1900-1930'; Shawn Vancour, ‘Popularizing the Classics’; and Jessica C. Gienow-Hecht, ‘Whose Music is it anyway? The limits of Transnational Culture in the Nineteenth Century'.

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 39

white, and explore the new respectability bestowed on this music by folklorists and classical

composers and how it enabled the industry to promote this music outside of the images of

minstrelsy.

The first experiments with the vernacular ‘folk’ music of Southern blacks

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the influence and presence of black musical culture was

everywhere, from the by-then black-dominated minstrel show and ‘coon song’ craze, the raft of

‘blues’ available on sheet music and records thanks to W.C. Handy’s first published ‘blues’

‘Memphis Blues’ in 1912, to ragtime and jazz, which on radio and phonograph was almost

exclusively performed by white musicians but was clearly a black innovation.35 While the blackface

minstrel performance was already to some degree inscribed with a sense of authenticity and was

seen as representing some form of real Southern black (predominantly plantation) culture, the

record industry’s marketing of the jubilee singers influenced Race Records advertising in a different

way. This was the first time Southern folk musicians were marketed to middle-class whites as

dignified 'folk' artists outside of the minstrel tradition. Minstrelsy, of course, loomed large over the

Race Records advertisements, which employed minstrel tropes in their cartoon illustrations, and this

will be explored in the following chapter. What I am suggesting here is that the marketing of black

folk music in the 1910s made possible the marketing of black blues recordings to middle-class

audiences as authentic 'folk' performance in the 1920s, which in turn led to the creation of Race

Records catalogues designed for the black market once the industry was made aware that such a

market existed by the immediate and huge response to OKeh's Mamie Smith records. The tone of

the Race Records catalogues of the 1920s represented an attempt to have it both ways. It used the

frankly commercial, showbiz idiom of minstrelsy in its illustrations and black dialect copy, while

alluding to the cultural, anthropological, and folkloric worth of the music of authentic blues

shouters through the more dignified photographs of these artists without blackface. It was the

emergence of jubilee groups that introduced a highbrow dimension to the interest in black folk

forms and that informed the industry’s approach to Race Record artists in the 1920s.

35 There were exceptions. James Reece Europe’s success in the 1910s, through his association with dance celebrities Irene and Vernon Castle was exceptional and an early example of a successful black artist performing his own music, not a style inscribed by minstrelsy. Other black artists such as Bert Williams had tremendous success in this era through minstrelsy. Otherwise, there were very few recordings made by black minstrels before Race Records. One of the first black artists to record was George W. Johnson, who recorded a version of his famous ‘Laughing Song’ in 1895, but mostly only white minstrel performers made recordings. For more on this pre-Race Records era see, Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds.

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 40

The interest in both white and black Southern vernacular music from folklorists and classical

composers and commentators who called for a truly American music derived from American ‘folk’

music had a profound effect on the Northern record industry’s attitude to the vernacular music of

the South, both black and white. There was debate among classical composers and scholars as to

which folk music culture to use as the basis for this American classical music. Some, such as Czech

composer Antonin Dvorak and his students, Henry Walley, Henry Rowe Shelley, and William

Marion Cook, saw the spiritual as ideal; others such as Howard Brockway and Lorraine Wyman

believed white Southern music was more suited.36 The first to be mined by the record industry was

the spiritual. Made popular in the 1880s by gospel choirs sponsored by black institutions such as the

Fisk University and Tuskegee Institute dedicated to the uplift of the race, these groups began with

assimilationist repertoires full of ‘white’ material such as hymns, but found that it was their

renditions of spirituals, the ‘semi-religious sorrow songs’, that caught the public’s interest.37

Antonin Dvorak played an important role in the development of popular and scholarly curiosity

about the spiritual as one of the principal candidates for inspiring a truly American classical music.

In 1893 Dvorak wrote on the spiritual: ‘These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the

soil. They are American. They are the folksongs of America, and your composers must turn to them.

In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of

music’.38

Dvorak’s language and his advocacy can be seen reflected in record company advertising. His

reverence for the music, and his characterisation of it as distinctly American, is echoed in the record

announcements which espoused the various fine attributes of this ‘American Folk Music’ to an

audience that presumably needed introduction and tutoring in this music. The tone of Victor’s

announcement of the first Fisk Jubilee Quartet recordings in 1910 was expansive and revealing:

The Jubilee Songs collected and introduced to the world by Fisk University, and which

might be called Negro Folk Songs, are without parallel among musical productions. They

36 Gienow-Hecht, 78. 37 The popular interest in the spirituals dated back to the 1880s when the Fisk University Singers began touring the country as a chorus to raise funds for the Nashville Fisk University, established in 1865 after the Civil War to educate recently emancipated Southern blacks. Initially composed of ‘white’ material, operatic arias, temperance songs, and parlour songs, the ensemble’s repertoire was an example of cultural ‘uplift’, designed to appeal to the white middle-class audiences of the East who would witness the ability of the Southern black to excel in traditionally white fields of endeavour. The response was lukewarm until the instructor, George L. White, noticed that the greatest response came from the spiritual, the ‘semi-religious sorrow songs’, that the students had sung in the chapel at Fisk, and he promptly changed the name of the chorus to the ‘jubilee singers’ and made the spiritual the centre piece of their repertoire. Brooks, ‘“Might Take One Disc of This Trash as a Novelty”’, 280. 38 New York Herald, May 25, 1893.

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 41

touch the heart with their pathos; and although intensely religious, they sometimes excite to

laughter by their quaint conceptions of religious ideas or Biblical facts. Kept fresh and living

by contact with the people, and sung by trained vocalists who are thoroughly in sympathy

with the emotional sympathy of its originators, they have a unique and powerful appeal to

all classes.39

Victor confidently identified this music as ‘Negro Folk Songs’ and this classification inspired a tone

at once both reverential and condescending. Although the music is by this point an official, capital-

lettered genre, the primitive notions of religiosity within this music, their ‘quaint conceptions’, quite

excusably induces laughter. Having no conception of the deep metaphoric power much of the lyrical

content of the spirituals held for Southern blacks during slavery and throughout the Jim Crow era as

well, this conviction must indeed have seemed baffling to white middle-class audiences, and Victor

here is striking a delicate balance in its promotional thrust between labelling this music a serious art

form and an amusing, quaint novelty.40

This copy also underscores the influence of another group with an interest in Southern black music

at this time, the growing folk music movement, which further fuelled the interest in Negro folk

music among classical composers and the cultural elite. Since the formation in 1888 of the

American Folklore Society, many collections of songs by folklorists had been published to much

acclaim and they would continue to be so throughout the 1920s.41 The American Folklore Society

had declared that its intention was to collect and study ‘the fast-vanishing remains of folklore in

America’, by which it meant ‘relics of old ballads’, myths and tales of Native Americans, and ‘lore

of Negroes in the Southern States’.42 Although urgent attention was initially paid to Native

Americans as a group whose ‘culture patterns' were being lost, by Franz Boas and those who

followed his lead in conducting field recordings of Native Americans in the 1890s and 1900s, in the

1910s the attention turned to other folk cultures in danger of losing their ‘culture patterns’ through

39 Victor records supplement, February, 1910, 7. Brooks, ‘“Might Take One Disc of This Trash as a Novelty”’, 286. 40 For more on the spiritual as a musical form see Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds, Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York: Norton, 1997); Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889-1895 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002); and Richard Newman, Go Down Moses: A Celebration of the African-American Spiritual (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1998). 41 For more on the renewed interest in folk music in the early twentieth century, see: Bill Malone and David Stricklin, Southern Music/American Music (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979); Marybeth Hamilton, In Search of the Blues (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007); David E. Whisnant, All That is Native and Fine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1983); Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); and Karl Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 42 Hamilton, In Search of the Blues, 50.

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 42

destruction of their ‘isolation', a crucial factor in their ‘folk’ culture status.43 The white Anglo-Saxon

culture of the western frontier and the Appalachian Mountains was one of these. John Lomax's and

Cecil Sharp’s collections will be discussed shortly, but others such as Howard Odum, Dorothy

Scarborough and Natalie Curtis Burlin went in search of authentic Southern black culture and

produced works such as Burlin’s Negro-Folk-Songs: Hampton Series, Scarborough’s On the Trail of

Negro Folk Songs, and Odum’s The Negro and his Songs.

This growing interest in the preservation of folk music received attention in the press as well. The

New York Times ‘New Music Publications’ column closely followed the work of leading folklorists

and folk song collectors. In one review of Natalie Curtis Burlin’s Songs and Tales from the Dark

Continent in 1921, this music is considered of value as an anthropological source, ‘for what they

reveal of the mind and heart of the black man and his life and customs'. They will ‘repay study from

a musical point of view, as well as the anthropological'. It was reported that Burlin herself suggested

what Dvorak had several decades earlier: that this music can ‘offer new suggestions to the erudite,

as the forceful, free, barbaric outlines of many of the African melodies offer to modern music a new

silhouette'.44

When Columbia lured the Fisks away from Victor, it made this announcement in its January 1916

supplement: ‘The old negro “spirituals” can quite logically be called American folk songs.

Naturally, every American will want some native folk songs in his musical collection. With this idea

in mind, the Columbia has made an exclusive contrast with the Fisk University Jubilee Singers to

sing a collection of their most famous numbers’.45 This copy, in feeling the need to justify its

definition of the spiritual as folk music, reveals that this is a relatively new concept, but more

importantly, this copy implies that the definition of this music as folk music is what justifies its

inclusion in the music library of the phonograph owner. This underscores how crucial the record

industry perceived an association with ‘folk music’ to be for record sales. Furthermore, the assertion

that by this time the ownership of recordings of some ‘native folk songs’ was a ‘natural’ want of all

Americans speaks to the success of folklorists in convincing the population of the legitimacy of the

idea of American folk music.

Other Victor copy emphasised the already nostalgic quality of the spirituals and the Jubilee singers,

43 Hamilton, 47. Karl Miller argues that the concentration among early folklorists on studying folk cultures/groups in ‘isolation’ involved folklorists in the preservation and explanation of Southern segregation because this concept, ‘imposed a structure onto the complicated cultures studied and obscured cultural and social experiences that did not accord with the ‘isolation’ paradigm'. Miller, ‘Segregating Sound’ (PhD), 127. 44 New York Times, Feb 6, 1921, X3. 45 Columbia records supplement, June 1916, 12. Brooks, ‘“Might Take One Disc of This Trash as a Novelty”’, 293.

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 43

as well as the authentic nature of the material:

Many of the songs which have been harmonized by the Fisk Singers were brought to the

University by students who learned them from their mothers; or at the ‘big meetings’ (camp

meetings) and the ‘basket meetings’ gatherings of negroes who brought food enough to last

them through an all-day service of song and prayer. Students are also sent out among the

plantations to collect these almost forgotten songs. One young negro was out six weeks

during the past summer and brought back more than seventy songs. Not all of these, of

course, could be used, but some of the finest songs now in the repertoire of the quartet were

taken from this collection.46

Here Victor touches on the practice of ‘field work’ that had become an important aspect of folk

studies. Initially ‘field trips’ were conducted by folklorists to probe deep into the isolated regions of

America in the hope of finding undiluted folk songs and culture, and this was how many of the

seminal folk song songbooks were compiled. Envisioned as an act of preservation, this practice was

later taken up by record companies and their artists, such as the Carter Family, who needed steady

streams of ‘new’ Old Time and Race Records material. This is another example of the industry co-

opting the methods and the language of folk preservation, which ironically were devised in direct

response to the commercialisation of folk culture by modern industries such as the record industry.

Indeed the popularity of recordings by gospel groups such as the Fisks only heightened the sense of

mission and urgency within the folk studies movement, as these recordings were seen as yet another

example of the encroachments of modernity, which, along with the effects of industrialization,

urbanization, increased mobility and migration, were perceived as a threat to the purity of folk

cultures and their precious isolation.

Deeply concerned that the mass dissemination of folk forms throughout the country would

contaminate and homogenise the music, folklorists felt the urgent need to preserve what could be

salvaged of this culture. Some could not abide the practice of recording folk songs even for archival

purposes, as mechanical reproduction itself was seen somehow to compromise the instinctive,

‘folkloric truth’ of this material. Burlin wrote, in 1919, in her Negro-Folk-Songs: Hampton Series, ‘I

lack entire faith in the making of wax records’.47 The record industry simply ignored the

oppositional stance of folk music enthusiasts and continued to position itself as an agent of

preservation rather than dissemination. This approach proved incredibly successful for Victor, as

46 Victor records supplement, June 11, 10. Brooks, ‘“Might Take One Disc of This Trash as a Novelty”’, 288. 47 Hamilton, 59.

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 44

well as Columbia, whose marketing of the Fisk Jubilee Singers to white middle-class audiences

resulted in estimated sales of over two million, which made them the second best-selling African

American vocal artist of the pre 1920 period after Broadway blackface star Bert Williams.48

These record companies approached the first releases of Southern white vernacular music with a

similar attitude. Although located in the novelty sections of their popular catalogue, Victor and

Columbia presented this baffling music as both an entertaining novelty and a folk music deserving

of study and preservation, a strategy that would be further developed with the advent of Old Time

and Race Records catalogues.

White southern folk music enters the record industry

Old Time, like Race Records, emerged from an industry that on the one hand was already marketing

music that evoked the Old South in its ‘popular’ catalogues, and on the other, was just awakening to

the renewed folkloric interest in Southern vernacular music. As already noted, the South, and

particularly the antebellum ‘Old South', had enormous cultural resonance as an exotic, romantic

fantasy in the imagination of popular song-smiths of the day. From the home-and-hearth minstrel

songs of Stephen Foster; the romantic ‘parlour songs’ of Will S. Hays, one of which ‘The Old Log

Cabin in the Lane’ would become Old Time’s first hit; the popular fiction of Joel Chandler Harris,

Thomas Nelson Page, and Thomas Dixon, Uncle Tom's Cabin (both as a novel and in adapted form

in the ‘Tom shows’); the nativist film The Birth of a Nation; through to the raft of Southern songs

by Tin Pan Alley song writers such Irving Berlin and George Gershwin: images of an idealised

Southern past were commonplace in 1920.49

With the rise of jazz, many new groups utilised Southern settings and tropes to distinguish

themselves: the Cotton Pickers from ‘way down South’ is just one example, and yet these were not

images designed to appeal to Southerners but to Northerners who might choose to indulge in a

Southern reverie or favour the Cotton Pickers over a Northern band because of their supposed

48 Brooks, Lost Sounds, 298. Bert Williams and the influence of minstrelsy in Race Records catalogues will be further examined in Chapter Two. 49 Stephen J. Whitfield has noted that both Irving Berlin's ‘Alexander's Ragtime Band’ (1911) and George Gershwin and Irving Caesar's ‘Swanee’ (1919) hark back to Stephen Foster's classic ‘Old Folks at Home’(1851) also known as ‘Swanee River’, in which a homesick black man sighs for the intimacy of the South. Stephen J. Whitfield, ‘Is It True What They Sing About Dixie?’ Southern Cultures (Summer 2002): 8-37, 10. Malone and Stricklin also point to the novels of Mary Noailles Murfree, who wrote under the pseudonym Charles Craddock and John F. Fox’s novels before WW1, as important works specifically contributing to the romantic myth of the mountains. Malone and Stricklin, Southern Music/American Music, 31.

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 45

Southern connection. The industry had not previously perceived the potential for marketing

Southern musicians performing their own music because it did not believe there was a sufficient

market for it.50 Although the phonograph was making inroads into Southern rural markets, the

record industry did not see farmers as a priority, and perhaps believed them catered for with the

Dixie themed songs of the popular catalogues anyway.51 Besides these, there were what Archie

Green describes as ‘the potpourri of rural dances, minstrel routines, laughing songs, country

fiddling, and concert offerings (which were) neither integrated nor specially categorized by the

industry or public', but which to varying degrees drew on Southern imagery. Finally, there was the

hayseed character played by vaudeville performers who made the occasional record in the early

1900s, such as Charles Ross Taggert’s ‘A Country Fiddler in a New York Restaurant', which

anticipated the later much used contrast between the country hayseed and the city sophisticate in

Old Time marketing.52

As it did with Southern black artists, the activities and publications of folklorists influenced the

portrayal of white Southern musicians’ music in record catalogues. The efforts of Northern

reformers in Southern schools during Reconstruction who seized on and promoted Southern

mountain music as a culture worth preserving, notwithstanding their own prejudices and ideological

agendas, encouraged the folkloric interest in the Southern mountain ranges such as the

Appalachians.53 In conjunction with the turn towards ‘native’ culture among folklorists and classical

50 In 1927 there were a much higher percentage of people in large cities who had phonographs. In cities with a population of 100,000 or more 60.3 percent of homes had phonographs, while in towns of 100,000 or less, only 29 percent of homes contained phonographs. Although the Talking Machine World believed farmers to be excellent candidates as phonograph consumers, it was not until the inauguration of parcel post in 1913 and improved roads in the 1920s that phonograph salesmen could really cover rural areas. In terms of the musical taste of farmers, the Talking Machine World claimed that 50 percent of farm families wanted music ‘associated with their own culture,' another 40 percent wanted popular dance records, and 10 percent wanted classical music’. Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 136. 51 Malone suggests that before Old Time catalogues country people, ‘listened to Harry Lauder, Gene Austin, Henry Burr, the Peerless Quartet, Al Jolson, Vernon Dalhart, and other ‘popular’ singers of the early twentieth century'. Bill C. Malone, Country Music USA: A Fifty-Year History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968) 30. 52 Another Southern-themed record, Alma Gluck's 'Carry Me Back to Old Virginny' was the first Victor Red Seal disc to sell over a million copies, and as Archie Green has commented, ‘many of the purchasers felt they were getting a real view of plantation mores’ .Archie Green, ‘Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol', 207. 53 Many teachers in mountain settlement schools, predominantly women, went into the mountains after the Civil War and had romantic notions of educating the children about their own culture. It was one of these settlement women, Olive Dame Campbell, who contacted English folklorist Cecil Sharp and encouraged him to come to the southern mountains to collect folk songs. Malone and Stricklin, Southern Music/American Music, 31. For more on the efforts of Northern reformers in the Appalachians, see Whisnant, All That is Native and Fine; Hamilton, In Search of the Blues; John Inscoe, ed, Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001); Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia On Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1986); Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life under Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Pete Daniel, Standing at the Crossroads: Southern Life Since 1900 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986); George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 1013-1945 (Texas: Louisiana State University, 1967); and J. Wayne Flynt, Dixie’s Forgotten People: The South’s Poor Whites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980).

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 46

composers alike, the publication of two seminal song-books, John Lomax’s 1910 Cowboy Songs

and Other Frontier Ballads, and Cecil Sharp’s 1917 English Folk Songs from the Southern

Appalachians, spurred a raft of such expeditions and collections and paved the way for the first

experiments with recording mountain ballads, now accepted as pure Anglo-Celtic folk music, and

the heritage of all Americans.54

The discourse among classical composers and music appreciation commentators on how to base a

true American music in the folk cultures of Southern blacks and whites contributed to the interest in

mountain ballads, and in the Appalachian region, and this new respectability, which had been also

recently been bestowed upon black spirituals, resulted in musical recitals in the concert halls of the

north-eastern cities.55 These recitals, which presented to urban Northerners a purportedly pure

Anglo-Saxon folk culture, functioned as the equivalent to the concert appearances of the jubilee

singers of black spirituals, and these songs became what historian Tracey Laird has described as

'pieces in an Anglo-Saxon museum of the mind'.56 The cultural currency, and uplift potential, of

genuine mountain ballads as opposed to commercial ‘popular’ music and jazz began here and

flowed into the visual and verbal rhetoric of 1920s Old Time marketing.

The popular romantic ‘Old Dixie’ tradition and the new aura of ‘folk’ culture that now surrounded

mountain music were crudely blended by the record industry in its first attempts to market the

music of Southern mountaineers. Again as with the industry's marketing of black jubilee groups, the

industry incorporated the language of folk song preservation into its marketing for these artists in an

attempt to cast itself as an ally of the folklore movement and an enlightened agent of folk song

preservation rather than a disruptive and corrupting force of mass consumerism. This can be seen in

one of the very first attempts to promote Southern vernacular musicians, Victor's 'New Victor

Records: November 30, 1923' release sheet which featured two recordings by Eck Robertson and

Henry Gilliland, Southern musicians from Texas and Georgia respectively. This duo recorded

several sides for Victor in New York in June 1922, a year before Fiddlin' John Carson's genre-

defining recordings. This sheet posits Robertson and Gilliland alongside several Red Seal records,

54 Lomax's Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads opened with a glowing letter by former president Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote that the ‘crude home-spun ballads’ from ‘the back country and the frontier’ provided something the ‘ill-smelling’ ‘music hall songs’ could not. Miller, 120. English Folksongs from the Southern Appalachians followed in 1916 and set the tone for folk music appreciation during this period by focusing on the Child ballads, a canon of 305 British ballads by a Harvard academician Francis James Child. 55 While, for example, Dvorak and others believed the spiritual could be used as the basis of a truly American form of music, not all agreed that the spiritual was worthy. George Pullen Jackson, for example, a leading scholar of southern religious folk music, believed the spiritual was derived from older white religious music and denied its significance. Malone and Stricklin, 29. 56 Tracey E.W. Laird, Louisiana Hayride: Radio and Roots Music Along the Red River (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 48.

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 47

including violinist Hugo Kreisler, playing 'Letter Song (From “Apple Blossoms”)’, a tune described

as, ‘in a style musicians will recognise as Viennese’. Directly below are the two fiddle recordings,

‘Turkey in the Straw’ and ‘Ragtime Annie’. To save having to define the music, Victor listed it

under ‘Instrumental Music'.57 The copy read:

Two old-fashioned numbers by genuine cowboy fiddlers. Theirs is genuine American, not

hybrid, music. You will find such musicians, today, only in out-of-the-way places. These

two play the old-style tunes, without accompaniment, with an occasional weird ‘second part’

in double-stops. The younger generation will enjoy their nimble-footed style; the elder,

perhaps, hear them with mixed feelings. Students of American music – whatever its sources

may be – will examine, study and prize these records as keenly as the professional dancer or

the boy who simply wants a lively record with a ‘tune to it’.

This awkward early attempt to describe Southern vernacular music and its appeal is noteworthy for

several reasons. Firstly, it is already trading in many of the clichés of future Old Time marketing;

this is music from ‘out-of-the-way-places’, played in 'the old style'. Secondly, this copy places this

music within the hallowed realm of American ‘folk’ music fit for anthropological and folkloric

study, and yet it assures the reader that it should appeal just as well to those looking for lively

entertainment as well as to serious ‘students of American music'. The fact that the copy is confident

in its definition of this music as ‘genuine American, not hybrid, music’ reflects the new status of

this music and the relatively new sentiment that a genuine American music is something to

celebrate. Thirdly, the description of the bridge, ‘the occasional weird second part', suggests an

industry happy at times to admit its bafflement with this music. This pose only strengthens the sense

of the other-worldliness of this music, its authenticity as a novel anachronism. Fourthly, the copy

makes suggestions about the reception of this recording by different generations. It suggests it will

appeal to the younger generation, presumably because this is essentially dance music, and follows

this with the strange observation that ‘the elder’ might hear this music with ‘mixed feelings’, a

vague sentiment perhaps attributable to the fact that the days of dancing to this ‘nimble-footed

music’ are over for members of this generation.

Finally, this ad described these artists as ‘genuine cowboy fiddlers', a marketing ploy inspired by

Eck Robertson and Henry Gilliland themselves, who according to Victor promotional material

57 Victor records supplement November 30, 1923. (Southern Folklife Collection, Manuscripts Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill).

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 48

arrived at their offices in full cowboy costume.58 The romance with cowboy culture and songs was

already firmly in place at this time. Alan Lomax’s Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads

published in 1910 came out shortly after the ‘Wild West’ show craze of the early twentieth century,

which itself was only a few years after the 'closing' of the frontier, therefore the cowboy image was

at this time a more potent and popular symbol of American individualism, isolation and its frontier

past than the mountaineer.59 However, the cowboy figure did not come to dominate country music

until the 1930s, when the mountaineer or hillbilly began to lose its lustre and romantic force

through increasingly demeaning caricature. That the industry was selling the cowboy image in

1922, ten years before it caught on as the central image of Old Time, speaks not only to the reliance

it had on artist’s attempts at ‘self commodification’ for its marketing approach to this pre-Old Time

music. It also underscores the difficulty the industry had in identifying the key images with which

to market white Southern rural music, and the lack, despite (or perhaps because of) the myriad of

antecedents and prototypes to draw on, of one defining image for this varied musical tradition.

Finding themselves with a huge selling record by an Atlanta fiddling champion a year later, the

industry realised this would have to change.60

Conclusion

The record industry’s first experiments with marketing the vernacular music of Southern whites and

blacks involved a presentation of this music as authentic American folk culture. Adopting the idiom

of the folklorist, the industry experimented in the 1900s and 1910s with inserting some,

appropriately chaste, examples of Southern folk culture into popular music catalogues while

maintaining its commitment to cultural hierarchy, democratic rhetoric and uplift ideology. Although

some of these sold remarkably well, the industry did not learn the two lessons from this experiment

– that there were sizable Southern and black markets for phonograph records, and indeed a national

market for the vernacular music of Southern whites and blacks – until the 1920s when the consumer

response to Mamie Smith and Fiddlin' John Carson made them impossible to ignore. The national

discovery of America’s own folk music and the growing awareness of the bank-ability of Southern

tropes led to an adoption of the language of folk preservation in the record industry, but not a full

58 Archie Green notes the pair travelled to New York after visiting the United Confederate Veterans' Reunion at Richmond, Virginia, and that this might account for their attire. Archie Green, 'Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol’, 217. 59 Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers, 74. 60 If Robertson’s Western cowboy image had taken off in 1922, instead of Carson’s mountaineer image a year later, Old Time may have looked quite different in the 1920s. Musically however, both recordings were essentially traditional fiddle music.

Chapter One – Southern Vernacular Music Enters the Mainstream 49

embrace of vernacular music, which remained marginalised due to the prevalence of cultural and

musical hierarchy. However, this Race Records and Old Time pre-history produces a vivid picture

of an industry’s first attempts to commercialise and commodify American musical culture through

what were considered appropriate representations of Southern whites and blacks in the early

twentieth century. A vivid example of a mass producer struggling to meet and create mass

consumerism in the age of Southern segregation, this tension between commercial goals and

cultural ideology only gets more intriguing as the demand for the vernacular music of Southern

whites and blacks explodes as we shall see.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask: Race

Records Advertisements in the Black Press in the 1920s

Introduction

As noted in the preceding chapter, the record industry’s marketing of black artists prior to the

establishment of Race Records catalogues was aimed at white audiences and drew on the

contemporary interest in ‘native’ folk music, within both the folklore and the musical appreciation

movements, to dignify the vernacular music of Southern blacks in the minds of white middle-class

audiences. This chapter explores what happened to the pictorial and textual representation of

blackness when the industry discovered the market amongst blacks for vaudeville blues, spirituals,

sermons, and later in the decade, ‘down home’ folk or country blues. It makes the central contention

that while the Race Records advertisements drew heavily on previous models for advertising black

music, and most heavily upon minstrel tropes, ultimately what was presented in the Race Records

ads was an intertextual minstrelsy, a set of images that were quotations in a new text that was as

influenced by the musical culture it sought to sell as pre-existing models for selling black musical

culture.

The Chicago Defender, which was founded in 1905 and was by 1920 was the most widely

circulated black newspaper in the country, enthusiastically promoted Mamie Smith’s first recordings

and was responsible for the huge sales of her second release, 'Crazy Blues', 75,000 copies of which

sold within a month of its release in 1920.1 Hoping to encourage the recording of more worthy race

talent by demonstrating the support for black artists among its readership, the Defender instead

became the unwitting accomplice in the industry's commercialisation of the 'blues queens' of the

early 1920s. Not only did it awaken the industry to the lucrative market for records among blacks, it

pointed to the best avenue to reach them through this nationally distributed arbiter of black life and

culture. In fact the Defender was also inadvertently responsible for the first Southern distribution of

Race Records, through the Pullman porters who would sell the Defender as well as records at the

railway stops en route in and out of the South.2 However, this is where the Defender's influence

1 'That Thing Called Love' was Smith's first release and featured a white orchestra. 'Crazy Blues’ was the first to feature a black jazz band. Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years, Vol. 3 From 1900-1984 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 31. 2 Ralph Peer's account of this suggests that the improved income of many Southern blacks after WW1 played a part in the initial success of Race Records: 'The porters on the Pullman trains would make a fortune just by carrying the records

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 51

ended. Instead, it was a confluence of other influences that suggested to the phonograph industry

the look and sound of Race Records, including: the models for marketing black artists already in

circulation in 1920, the artists themselves, and the readership of the black press who enthusiastically

responded to the Mamie Smith records. The industry accordingly rushed to record more vaudeville

blues talent. This led to a flood of advertising in the black press for ‘Race’ artists, first from OKeh,

then from Columbia, Vocalion and new labels Black Swan and Paramount, and later Victor.3 In May

1923, OKeh advertised ‘The World’s Greatest Race Artists on the World’s Greatest Race Records’

which gave these catalogues the name (based on the preferred term for African-American among

the black press at the time), which would continue to define this sole avenue for black recordings

until 1949 when it was replaced by 'Rhythm & Blues'.4

This advertising coincided with the industry’s new preference for cartoon-illustrated advertising for

out,' he recalled. ' They's pay a dollar a piece for them, sell them for two dollars, because the Negroes in the South had the money. Either they'd returned from Detroit with their pockets full or they were getting jobs because of the opening of the new cotton mills. At any rate, their standard of living was being raised. So that led to the Negro record business and eventually led it led to the hillbilly record business'. Lillian Borgeson interview with Ralph Peer, 1959. Southern Folklife Collection, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Arthur Satherley, Southern talent scout for Paramount, takes a lot of the credit for himself in his account. Explaining that it was difficult to shift Paramount records because record stores were mostly franchises for either Victor or Columbia, Satherley became a travelling salesman for Paramount, visiting Southern rural fairs, and he found that ‘country people’ bought vast amounts of their records. 'I had no trouble of disposing them. And they were eaten up, which gave me a great idea’, which was to advertise in the Defender. According to Alex van der Tuuk, 'he explained (to Paramount's Moeser and Supper) that they had a chance to get all this business from the country folk of America, black and white, as Paramount’s artist spoke the same language as these people'. Alex van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall (Denver: Mainspring Press, 2003), 81 and 84. 3 Victor did some recordings of black blues singers in 1923, but did not fully enter the market until 1926 due to declining record sales. Vocalion, Brunswick’s subsidiary also established a competitive Race catalogue. The Wisconsin label Paramount quickly distinguished itself as the leader in the field through its abundant advertising in the Black Press and its pioneering use of mail order services. It was also the first to secure major Southern wholesalers for their Race Records, and the only other label apart from Black Swan to employ black record executives, with Mayo Williams being head of Artist and Repertoire at Paramount’s Chicago office. As Otto Moeser, Paramount’s chief executive officer, explained, ‘We could not compete for high class talent with Edison, Columbia, and Victor, and we had inferior products: so we went to race records'. Stephen Calt, ‘The Anatomy of a “Race” Label – Part One'. 78 Quarterly Vol. 1 No. 3 (1988): 9-23, 22. For more on Paramount see: Stephen Calt, ‘The Anatomy of a “Race” Label Part 11'. 78 Quarterly Vol. 1 No. 4 (1989): 9-30; Stephen Calt and Gayle Jean Wardlow, 'The Buying and Selling of Paramounts Part 3'. 78 Quarterly No. 5 (1990): 7-24; Alex van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall; Michael S. Hatfield, 'The Paramount Story: Part One: The Sheboygan Genesis'. In the Groove Vol. XXV, No. 2. (February 2000): 4-21; and Paul Swinton, ‘A Twist of Lemon', available from http://www.paramountshome.org/articles/121.pdf. For more on Black Swan see: David Suisman, ‘Co-Workers in the Kingdom of Culture: Black Swan records and the Political Economy of African American Music’. The Journal of American History, Vol. 90, Issue 4. (March 2004): 1295-1324; Ted Vincent, ‘The Social Context of Black Swan Records’. Living Blues (May/June 1989): 34-40; R.M.W. Dixon and J. Godrich, Recording the Blues (London: Studio Vista, 1970); Helge Thygesen, Mark Berresford and Russ Shor, Black Swan – The Record Label of the Harlem Renaissance (Nottingham: Vintage Jazz Mart Publications, 1996). 4 In June 1949, Billboard journalist Jerry Wexler renamed the magazine's 'Race Records' chart 'Rhythm & Blues Records' and the name stuck. Alex van der Tuuk claims that the first use of the term ‘Race Records’ in print was in an advertisement by Jack Kapp, who ran a record business in Chicago. He advertised Columbia records of Irene Gibbons and the late Bert Williams as ‘the latest Race Records', in the Chicago Defender, April 21, 1923. Alex van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall, 86. OKeh had been releasing black blues in its own 8000 series since 1921, but if it was called anything it was the ‘Colored Catalog'. Even after 1923, OKeh did not use ‘Race Records’ in all contexts, in the Talking Machine World it called the catalogue ‘Negro Records'. Dixon and Godrich, 17.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 52

'popular' releases, as opposed to the photography used to advertise 'serious music'.5 In 1922 General

Phonograph explained to the trade in the Talking Machine World that this instigated a new form of

advertising, which was taken from the ‘funny papers’ and was ‘based on the idea that the thing

people like best is entertainment, and that folks love to laugh'. The company’s new window

displays, like its advertising, would now ‘depart entirely from “pretty pictures that don’t make

sales”’.6 Adopted enthusiastically by the industry to sell Race Records, this new style of advertising

established, through the employment of black dialect, blackface caricature and the visual

representation of blues lyrics, a new, deeply intertextual presentation of blackness that had a

significance far exceeding its representational aspirations.

The music of Race Records introduced a version of black working-class culture, both sacred and

secular, into the marketplace.7 The verbal and visual rhetoric used to sell this music presented to the

readership of the black press a new commercial construct based on this musical culture which

disrupted the version of modern black lives and black success the black elite sought to present in its

newspapers. While this created a new avenue, and new model, for black achievement in the music

world, this was not a full liberation or an entirely victorious assumption of cultural freedom. In his

study of Race Records advertisements, Mark Dolan has argued persuasively that despite the

traditional uplift ideology that held sway at the Defender, – defined by Booker T. Washington's

philosophy of racial advancement and characterised by a belief in upward mobility, acceptance of

segregation, and the pursuit of achievements in European culture –, the readership of the Defender

created its own form of racial uplift, a cathartic uplift. This uplift was based ‘on the emotional

responsiveness to real-life experiences', and through the fantasy of a return to the sunny South as

depicted in Race Records advertising.8 Dolan argues that the appearance of Race Records

advertisements ‘suggests the paper was being used by readers in ways its editorial staff may not

5 In Printers’ Ink Monthly in 1920, S.G. Marden explained that while record supplements used photographs of stars in their homes, socialising around the phonograph to enable the reader to ‘know the human side of the clever folks who are actually making the records', while listings of popular music records often had used ‘comic cartoons, depending upon the numbers featured'. He noted that when ‘popular jazz came to the front, it was embellished in its presentation by extravagant pictures, done in the spirit of the funny sheets'. Ronald Clifford Foreman, Jnr., ‘Jazz and Race Records, 1920-1932: Their origins and their significance for the record industry and society’ (PhD, University of Illinois, 1968), 214. 6 Ibid., 217. 7 Arthur Satherley explained the appeal of Race Records (and Old Time) this way: 'It was so new for the people of America, both black and white, to be able to buy what they understood and what they wanted...Hundreds of people sending in that they wanted to become agents, clergymen, black people (who) had little grocery stores, but they had already known about Paramount Records. You see somebody was talking their language in the way they wanted…I was simply going after a song loved by the country people, and that was the making and the acceptance over the protests of Broadway, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Los Angeles. This was around 1923. The acceptance was because of their own language'. Arthur Edward Satherley, taped interview by Norm Cohen and G. Earle, with Ken Griffis and Bill Ward present, Jun 12, 1971, (tapes FT-1647/1 and 2; FT-1648). University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 8 Mark K. Dolan, ‘Cathartic Uplift: A Cultural History of Blues and Jazz in the Chicago Defender, 1920-1929' (PhD, University of South Carolina, 2003), 1.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 53

have wished or understood', and that the ads ‘reflected the consciousness of a people'.9 This

formulation of competing uplifts captures well the clash between working class and elite cultures in

Chicago and in the black press at this time, but the Race Records ads were more complicated than

this. Dolan's focus is on reception and on the consumer/reader, and while the presence of Race

Records in the black press may have reflected a struggle within the black community over the

defining images of the modern black figure, there is another dimension to this advertising and that

is the white Northern record industry's role in creating these images. These ads represented the

industry's attempt to capture and transmit the working-class musical culture of blues vaudeville

artists as faithfully as possible but inevitably through imagery which had been previously used to

sell black musical culture. This resulted in neither a pure, undiluted transmission of this musical

culture, nor a purely demeaning caricature, but something different, and something new. Their

representation drew on the imagery of minstrelsy but was ultimately guided by the music itself and

became an intertextual form, illustrating the transitional position of black artists at this time: still

beholden to the constructs of the white industry yet emerging from behind the minstrel mask and

onto the mass market as modern figures performing their own music.

The mass consumer marketplace was, to use historian Davarian L. Baldwin's phrase, a 'hopeful and

harrowing' site for blacks in the 1920s.10 This is true for none more so than black musicians, who, if

they happened to play jazz and blues, might find their music welcome for the first time in a mass-

producing white-run industry that had previously only welcomed minstrel acts and jubilee singers,

but if they did not, might find themselves as marginalised as ever.11 As explored in the previous

chapter, white fascination with primitive black folk culture preceded and informed the industry's

first attempts to capture the market for this music. However, upon the discovery of a large black

market for this music, the industry was forced to abandon the primitive imagery of previous

representations of blacks in the music industry and to present something much closer to what this

music really was: part of a modernist impulse that drew on the traditions of minstrelsy, pop music,

and folk culture, but was ultimately a new form of black expression. This chapter investigates the

record industry's role in the transmission of this expression.

The present study of Race Records advertisements departs from previous readings by using a closer

examination of context of both of the genealogy of Race Records and the ideological poses of the

industry explored in the preceding chapter, and of the re-contextualisation of minstrel tropes in the

9 Ibid., 3. 10 Davarian L. Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 8. 11 In particular the story of Black Swan Records, the one Race Records company that attempted to broaden the scope for black recording artists in the 1920s is a product of this.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 54

industry’s national advertising in the age of Jim Crow.12 While previous readings have

acknowledged the minstrel presence in this advertising, the conclusions drawn from this

observation have been divergent. Jeff Todd Titon for example, has read Race Records

advertisements and the industry’s use of what he sees as demeaning minstrel imagery, as almost

entirely a product of the attitudes or prejudices of the Northern record industry, a product of a

‘nervousness', which exposed a fear of the urban black male. He argues that the industry’s

concentration on Southern 'country' blues in the mid-to-late 1920s was a deliberate strategy to avoid

the image of the urban black male and a conscious effort to ‘put the black back in its place; back in

time and far away in the country'.13 While I will address his contentions in more detail later in this

chapter, my research into the record industry during this period does not give me confidence in

either the industry's ability, or desire, to deliberately manipulate catalogues in the service of a racial

agenda, nor its knowledge and understanding of the nuances of country and urban blues. There is no

doubt that racism pervaded the record industry in the 1920s and there are countless stories of the

poor treatment of black musicians at the hands of racist record executives. But equally undoubtedly,

the industry's marketing of Race Records was guided by the pursuit of profits above all else. The

industry pursued whatever field they thought would sell best. The genealogy of this music and the

previous marketing of black musical culture, suggests that the use of minstrel imagery was not as

perhaps as inappropriate as Titon suggests, many of these artists themselves came from minstrel

troupes, or as deliberately demeaning as Titon maintains. A concentration on context suggests that if

this imagery was inappropriate and demeaning it was so due to the industry’s reliance on outmoded

tropes rather as a result of a deliberate strategy. Ultimately, Titon does the opposite of Dolan, and

endows the industry with a degree of forethought and design of which there is no evidence in the

many accounts by record industry employees and talent scouts.14 My contention is that the use of

12 The only other in depth treatments of Race Records advertising are Ronald Clifford Foreman Jnr., 'Jazz and Race Records’: Jeff Todd Titon, Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977); Mark K. Dolan, ‘Cathartic Uplift: A Cultural History of Blues and Jazz in the Chicago Defender, 1920-1929’; and Mark K. Dolan, ‘Extra! Chicago Defender Race Records Ads Show South from Afar'. Southern Cultures (Fall 2007): 107-124. Other studies of Race Records that touch on advertising are Dixon and Godrich, Recording the Blues; Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Alex van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall. Ronald Clifford Foreman Jnr’s pioneering analysis of Race Records charts the development of the catalogue and offers analysis of some elements of the advertising copy for Race Records, while not pursuing the implications or context of the minstrel cartoon illustrations and copy in Race Records advertising. Karl Hagstrom Miller touches on the minstrel dimension to Race Records ads and argues that this style appeased white dealers who could see Race Records as nostalgic renditions of minstrelsy, but does not take his analysis any further than this. 13 Titon, 221. 14 The interviews with talents scouts consulted here include: Arthur Edward Satherley, interview by Norm Cohen and G. Earle, with Ken Griffis and Bill Ward present (June 12, 1971) tapes FT-1647/1 and 2; FT-1648. Southern Folklife Collection, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, David Evans ‘Interview with H. C. Speir'. JEMF Quarterly No. 27 (Autumn 1972): 117-121; Mike Seeger, 'Interview with Frank Walker,' in Josh Dunson and Ethel Raim, eds, Anthology of American Folk Music Handbook (New York: Oak Publications, 1973); Alfred Shultz,

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 55

minstrel imagery in these ads was neither a deliberate attempt to demean blues artists, a strategy to

avoid threatening urban black males, nor a direct expression of the culture of black blues musicians,

but rather a reflection of the industry’s fumbling yet successful attempts to keep up with consumer

demand and to sell this music back to those who created it using the models for selling black music

it was familiar with. Using the advertisements placed in the black press, along with record

catalogues and other promotional material, this chapter argues for an interpretation of this

advertising grounded in the history of verbal and visual representations of blackness in the music

industry, and the concerns of the record industry in advertising these records in the 1920s.

Far from discouraging a cultural interpretation of this material, I contend this grounding prompts a

reading that illuminates more clearly the very real cultural work of this material. Race Records

advertising reveals the imperfect science of commodification, in which the cultural artefact was

distorted and transformed through its marketing, filtered as it was through the lens of the industry

and its attendant ideological and commercial concerns, priorities, assumptions, and

misunderstandings. Ultimately, the commercialisation of black musical culture by the record

industry resulted in a new representation of blackness in 1920s consumer culture. This

representation was shaped by several forces: the attempt by the phonograph industry to exploit new

markets in the South and amongst African Americans, the tools it had to use and its use of them, and

finally, the music and the artists themselves.

There were two distinct phases within the first decade of Race Records, a catalogue severely

curtailed in 1930 due to the stock market crash and the ensuing Depression.15 The first was

dominated by what is now called ‘classic blues’ or ‘vaudeville blues', a style that was performed

predominantly by professional female vaudeville singers from the South accompanied by jazz

bands. These included Mamie Smith, Ethel Waters, Clara Smith, Ida Cox, Victoria Spivey, and

Alberta Hunter, who were joined shortly by Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey, who some say pioneered the

genre, and her protégé Bessie Smith, both of whom performed a more rural-derived style of this

‘classic blues'.16 The second phase was dominated by ‘down home’ blues (known more commonly

interview by Gayle Jean Wardlow, (August 2, 1969) Cassette TTA-01812/UU. Courtesy of The Centre for Popular Music, Murfreesboro, Texas; Harry Charles, interview by Gayle Jean Wardlow, (1960) reels #TTA-0182 J/UU and TTA-0182 K/UU. Courtesy of The Centre for Popular Music, Murfreesboro, Texas; Mayo Williams interview by Stephen Calt and Gayle Jean Wardlow. Stephen Calt, ‘The Anatomy of a “Race” Label Part 11'; and Stephen Calt and Gayle Jean Wardlow, 'The Buying and Selling of Paramounts Part 3'. Gayle Jean Wardlow interview with H.C. Speir, in Chasin' That Devil Music: Searching For the Blues (San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books, 1998). 15 Race Records did continue throughout the 1930s and 40s, in a severely diminished form, often combined with Old Time or hillbilly records in joint catalogues. 16 For more on the classic blues singers, see: Daphne Duval Harrison, Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), Buzzy Jackson, A Bad Woman Feeling Good: Blues and the Women Who Sing Them (New York: W.M. Norton and Company, 2005); Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 56

now as either ‘country’ or ‘folk’ blues), an older style of blues that was performed by Southern male

singers, who more often than not accompanied themselves on guitar – artists such as Blind Lemon

Jefferson, Blind Blake, Charley Patton, Papa Charlie Jackson, among many others.17 These two

figures, the female vaudevillian and the solitary male ‘down home’ blues guitarist, were the two

central figures of Race Records in the 1920s. After these, there were the male quartets and

evangelical preachers who also sold incredibly well throughout the 1920s.18 These were each

attended with their own set of traits and symbols, pictorial and dialect devices, and these will be

addressed in turn.

As blacks were kept off the radio during the 1920s, Race Records were the only representation of

black musicians in national advertising at this time.19 Historians of advertising have often

commented on the restricted role of blacks in advertisements of the 1920s; that they only appeared

outside of the black press as maids, porters, janitors, and houseboys.20 Within the black press the

advertising for Race Records sat uneasily with editorial boards under sway of a prevailing uplift

ideology which held that the advancement of the race was tied to black achievement in highbrow

culture and high art.21 The reception of Race Records in the black press will be explored further in

Chapter Six, but it is important to recognise for the purposes of this chapter that Race Records

advertisements presented a new and unique representation of blackness in the national media of the

(New York: Pantheon Books, 1998); LeRoi Jones, Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music that Developed from It (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1963); Sandra R. Lieb, Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey (Cambridge, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983); and Chris Albertson, Bessie: Empress of the Blues (New York: Stein & Day Publishers, 1972). 17 For more on 'country' or 'down home' blues, see Samuel Charters, The Country Blues (Cambridge: De Capo Press, 1976); Paul Oliver, Yonder Come the Blues: The Evolution of a Genre (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Francis Davis, The History of the Blues (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2003); Gayle Wardlow and Edward M. Komara, Chasin’ That Devil Music: Searching For the Blues (San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books, 1998); and Jeff Todd Titon, Early downhome blues. 18 There were other artists featured in Race Records catalogues, jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong and minstrel performers, but as Norm Cohen suggests the market was dominated by a handful of artists before the Depression: Blind Jefferson, Blind Blake, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Clara Smith, and Ida Cox, all of which fall into one of two main categories described above. He estimates that each piled up more than 40 releases, with Bessie Smith the clear leader with nearly 80. Norm Cohen, ‘America’s Music: Written and Recorded'. JEMF Quarterly 16 (1980): 126. 19 De Ford Bailey on the Grand Ole Opry was a rare exception. For more on this see: William Barlow, ‘Black music on radio during the jazz age'. African American Review Vol. 29 Issue 2 (Summer 95): 325. 20 Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 193.

21 For more on the black press in the 1920s see: Hayward Farrar, ‘What the Afro Says: The Baltimore Afro-American, 1892-1950’ (PhD, The University of Chicago, 1983); James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Roi Ottley, The Lonely Warrior: The Life and Times of Robert S. Abbott (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1955); Juliet E.K. Walker, ‘The Promised Land: The Chicago Defender and the Black Press in Illinois, 1862-1970', in The Black Press in the Middle West, 1865-1985, ed. Henry Lewis Suggs (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996), 9-41; Bernell Tripp, Origins of the Black Press (Alabama: Vision Press, 1992); Frankie Hutton, The Early Black Press (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993); Davarian L. Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes; Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Lawrence Schenbeck, 'Music, Gender, and “Uplift” in the Chicago Defender, 1927-1937’. The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 81, No. 3. (Autumn, 1997): 344-370; and Armistead S. Pride and Clint C. Wilson II, A History of the Black Press (Washington D.C.: Howard University Press, 1997).

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 57

1920s. This study reveals the complex and negotiated relationship black audiences and musicians

had with the minstrel tradition, and the conditional, restricted, yet somewhat more independent

position of black musicians at the time – still very much at the mercy of the stereotypes chosen by

the record companies to represent them, and yet, for the first time, being presented as serious artists

performing their own music.22

Advertising the vaudeville blues queens: Dandies, minstrels, and flappers: The first phase of

Race Records from 1920-1926

As already noted, the first Race Records stars were predominantly successful female vaudeville jazz

singers. Mamie Smith, Alberta Hunter and Clara Smith, were all marquee names on what was called

the chitlin’ circuit, the black vaudeville circuit through the Theatre Owners’ Booking Association

(T.O.B.A.). By 1923, the genre had expanded to include other celebrated vaudeville figures from

the South who came out of minstrel and tent shows, such as the veteran Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey and

her protégé Bessie Smith, both of whom came from the Georgian minstrel troupe, The Rabbit Foot

Minstrels, and Ida Cox who toured with The White and Clark Minstrels before joining the T.O.B.A.

circuit.23 The first Race Records stars were female vaudeville singers due largely to the efforts of

black songwriter Perry Bradford. In his autobiography, Bradford commented simply, 'I felt strongly

it should be a girl and that was what I was trying to sell'.24 Most likely he was responding to the

popularity of black female singers on the vaudeville circuit and in Harlem clubs, as well as to the

success of white figures such as Sophie Tucker, a Russian-born singer known as ‘The Last of the

Red Hot Mamas’ (and later ‘The Queen of the Blues’ by OKeh), who had been performing ‘blues’

without blackface for some time in New York vaudeville theatres.25 Music historian and writer

22 The allusion here to Shane White’s description of the highly conditional position of blacks before the Civil War as ‘somewhat more independent’ is intentional.

23 For more on vaudeville, minstrelsy and tent shows in the early twentieth century see Bruce Bastin, ‘From the Medicine Show to the Stage: Some Influences upon the Development of a Blues tradition in the Southeastern United States'. American Music Vol. 2 No.1 (Spring 1984): 29-42, Berndt Ostendorf, ‘Minstrelsy and Early Jazz'. The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Autumn 1979): 574-602; Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Nadine George-Graves, The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, and Class in African American Theatre, 1900-

1940 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000); Nick Tosches, Where Dead Voices Gather (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 2001); Barbara L. Webb, 'The Black Dandyism of George Walker: A Case Study in Genealogical Method'. TDR, Vol. 45, No. 4. (Winter, 2001): 7-24; Tony Russel, Blacks, Whites and Blues (London: Studio Vista, 1970); and the many biographies of blues and jazz figures, such as Stephen Calt, I'd Rather be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues (New York: De Capo Press, 1994); Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll: The fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and Inventor of Jazz (Berkeley: University of North Carolina Press, 1973); and Sandra R. Lieb, Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981). 24 Perry Bradford, Born with the Blues, 13. 25 Sophie Tucker was the singer Fred Hager at OKeh wanted to use for Bradford’s songs, but she turned them down. Hager was then was finally persuaded by Bradford to use Mamie Smith. Dixon and Godrich, Recording the Blues, 9.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 58

Amiri Baraka (writing at the time under the name LeRoi Jones) wrote of the classic blues:

Classic blues is called ‘Classic’ because it was the music that seemed to contain all the

diverse and conflicting elements of Negro music, plus the smoother emotional appeal of the

‘performance’. It was the first Negro music that appeared in a formal context of

entertainment, though it still contained the harsh, uncompromising reality of the earlier

blues forms. It was, in effect, the perfect balance between the two worlds, and as such, it

represented a clearly definable step by the Negro back into the mainstream of American

society.26

This excellent description suggests not only some of the motivation behind Bradford's decision to

push black vaudeville singers, – that the music had a smooth quality and the appeal of performance

more closely resembling contemporary popular music than earlier, less refined forms of blues –, but

it also underscores a central point of this chapter: that Race Records advertising reflected to a

significant degree the music it was selling. It depicted, often literally, the blues singer stepping out

from behind the minstrel mask and toward acceptance as a musical artist performing their own

music.

OKeh Records was the first label with a Race Records catalogue. Prior to this, OKeh had released

Mamie Smith in its general catalogue as ‘Mamie Smith, Contralto’ and had not marketed her

specifically at black consumers. When the Defender celebrated the release however and imbued the

occasion with racial pride (‘Mamie made a recording!') the industry awoke to this new market

among black consumers.27 The black press had of course been covering these artists for some time

before the appearance of Race Records advertisements in their pages. Many of the early Race

Records stars were featured in the notices for the travelling tent and minstrel shows, and the

programs for the vaudeville theatres in Chicago, New York, and Baltimore. As early as 1918, two

years before her recording debut, Mamie Smith was advertised in the Baltimore Afro American as

the ‘The Queen of the Blues’ in her appearance in the revue, ‘Sergeant Ham', which was produced

26 LeRoi Jones, Blues People, 87. Lawrence Levine has agreed with Jones on this and has written of blues in general as the 'most typically American music African Americans had yet created and represented a major degree of acculturation to the individualized ethos of the larger society.' Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 221. 27 The Defender initially celebrated Smith’s opportunity to record, but became increasingly disenchanted with the industry’s choice of artist and music. For more on the establishment of Race Records as a catalogue, see William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life; Norm Cohen, ‘America’s Music'; Karl Miller, Segregating Sound; Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business; Dixon and Godrich, Recording the Blues; and Rick Kennedy and Randy McNutt, Little Labels, Big Sound: Small Record Companies and the Rise of American Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). For more on the Defender’s response see, Phillip McGuire ‘Black Music Critics and the Classic Blues Singers'. The Black Perspective in Music, Vol.14, No.2 (Spring 1986): 103-125; and Lawrence Schenbeck, ‘Music, gender, and “Uplift” in the “Chicago Defender”, 1927-1937’.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 59

by Perry Bradford, the man who would help Smith break through as a recording star.28 The

connection between vaudeville, minstrelsy and the blues was already well established when the

record industry began releasing records of the blues by vaudeville and minstrel show performers.

Since the 1830s when Thomas Dartmouth Rice developed his famous Jim Crow character, and

George Washington Dixon created his rival, Zip Coon, the image of the Southern ‘happy slave’ and

the Northern ‘urban dandy’ had been two of the most recognisable images of blacks in America, and

these stereotypes have formed the basis of black caricatures ever since.29 Minstrelsy had not been a

static form since the 1850s however. After the Civil War blacks began to dominate the form, and by

the turn of the century a new form of black caricature, the ‘coon song', again altered the blackface

minstrel character and the presentation of blackness in the entertainment industry. The ‘coon song’

has been read predominantly as a particularly offensive offshoot of minstrelsy in which the black

character added dishonesty, drunkenness, and lasciviousness to his already dishonourable list of

traits including foolishness, ignorance and laziness.30 Although many ‘coon songs’ were composed

by black songwriters, and two of the biggest figures in the field were black, Bert Williams and

George Walker (the ‘Two Real Coons'), these have been seen predominantly as tragic figures,

trapped by the racism of the times in a demeaning and offensive form.31 However, some historians

have looked for agency and subversion within this form, in the same way Eric Lott, and those who

have followed his lead, have explored agency and subversion within earlier blackface minstrelsy.32

28 Baltimore Afro American, April 26, 1918, 5. As late as 1922, a debate was carried out in the pages of the New York Herald as to whether blacks or whites were better at playing blacks. Nick Tosches, Where Dead Voices Gather (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 2001), 14. 29 Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 9. Among the vast literature on 19th century minstrelsy, see: John Strausbaugh, Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult and Imitation in American Popular Culture (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin Group, 2006); Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara, Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth Century Blackface Minstrelsy (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1996); William J. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrely and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); W. T. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). 30 James H. Dormon notes, ‘“Coons” were, in addition to all, of these things, razor-wielding savages, routinely attacking one another at the slightest provocation'. He argues that this change in the portrayal of blackness was in part a justification for repressive segregation laws, that the minstrel show black was a non-threatening figure and whites needed a threatening character to justify segregation. James H. Dormon, ‘Shaping the Popular Image of Post-Reconstruction American Blacks: The "Coon Song" Phenomenon of the Gilded Age'. American Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 4. (Dec., 1988): 450-471. In its 1915 catalogue, Victor defined ‘coon songs’ in this way: ‘By ‘coon songs’ are meant up-to-date comic songs in negro dialect. The humor of many of these songs cannot be called refined, and for that reason we have distinguished them from old-fashioned darky humor, these songs being listed under ‘Negro Songs', ‘Fisk Jubilee Quartet', and ‘Tuskegee’’. Foreman, 47. 31 Patricia R. Schroeder’s list of the, mostly pioneering, historians who have offered an ‘apologist’ account of the ‘coon song’ includes Robert Toll, Sam Dennison, Richard Martin and David Wondrich, Marshall Wyatt, and Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff. Patricia R. Schroeder, ‘Passing for Black: Coon Songs and the Performance of Race'. The Journal of American Culture Volume 33, Number 2, (June 2010), 139. 32 Other readings that have illuminated the agency, subversion, and multiplicity of signification present in the ‘coon song’ and its performance include, Patricia R. Schroeder, ‘Passing for Black: Coon Songs and the Performance of Race', W. T. Lhamon Jnr., ‘Whittling on Dynamite: The Difference Bert Williams Makes’, in Listen Again: A Momentary

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 60

For example, W.T. Lhamon has argued that Williams’ and Walker’s use of the billing ‘The Two Real

Coons’ was itself subversive and a challenge to the claims of authenticity of white minstrelsy and

the ‘coons’ of popular song. He argues that ‘The Two Real Coons’ effectively ‘held open season on

conceptual coons’ and ‘eviscerated whatever “coon” resided in the imagination of their diverse

audiences'.33 Another, Barbara L. Webb, has read the performance style of George Walker, the

dandy figure and straight man to Bert Williams’ fool, as shifting from the realm of parody to a more

nuanced portrayal of an actual black dandy, especially his role as the interlocutor who introduced

and narrated sections of the performance. Webb argues Walker’s off-stage persona merged with his

stage character, and that he was increasingly reviewed in the entertainment pages as an awe-

inspiring figure with dazzling, detailed tailoring and impeccable comportment, rather than as a

figure of ridicule.34 This subtle subversion, and shifting signification, of a highly circumscribed

form, and indeed the portrayal of the dandy as a real-life persona as opposed to mere parody, is

echoed in Race Record advertising. Although Race Records advertising contained blackface

caricatures, it also portrayed blacks in less crude ways, as modern urban sophisticates in fashionable

clothes. First of all however, we shall examine the minstrel tropes and their presence in Race

Records ads, before turning to an examination of how these are re-contextualised and reconfigured

to produce a highly intertextual and yet altogether new representation of blackness in Race Records

ads.

The minstrel show poster sampled in Fig 2.1 shows how cartoon-style illustration was used in

conjunction with photography in nineteenth-century minstrelsy. The illustration depicts a scene

from the show, punctuated by blackface caricatures with bulging eyes, bright teeth and big lips.

Either white or black, the performer was often also presented without make-up alongside the

caricature in the standard locket-sized photograph. On 'coon song' sheet music covers, cartoon

illustration was also commonly used, as with this Lew Dockstader song from 1901, ‘Coon, Coon,

History of Pop Music, ed. Eric Weisbard (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Karen Sotiropoulos, Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); and Janet Brown, ‘“The Coon Singer” and the “Coon-Song”: A Case Study of the Performer-Character Relationship’. Journal of American Culture 7 (Spring/Summer 1984): 1-8; and Louis Onurah Chude-Sokei, The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 33 Lhamon Jnr., ‘Whittling on Dynamite', 140. 34 Barbara L. Webb, ‘The Black Dandyism of George Walker: A Case Study in Genealogical Method'. TDR, Vol. 45, No. 4. (Winter 2001): 7-24. Throughout the history of black face minstrelsy, the character was often confused with the actor. In the riot of August 1900 in New York, white rioters called out Williams’ name and actually found and beat Walker and fellow comedian Ernest Hogan. Janet Brown, ‘The “Coon-Singer” and the “Coon-Song”’, 5. Despite this, and sharp criticism of the coon song by some black musicians and music critics, Williams and Walker and Hogan were nevertheless proud of their work, in particular that their musicals were entirely written and produced by blacks and that their success, and that the craze for ragtime music, had opened doors for other black entertainers and musicians. James Dormon estimates that over six hundred coon songs were published in the 1890s, many by African-American composers, with some selling thousands of copies. James H. Dormon, ‘Shaping the Popular Image of Post-Reconstruction American Blacks', 453.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 61

Coon' (see Fig 3.1):35

Figure 3.1 (Source: Library of Congress)

35 Sheet music for minstrel-show hits sold as many as 100,000 copies. John Strausbaugh, Black Like You, 126.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 62

Advertisements for Race Records clearly continued this tradition. The codified black often

remained a minstrel character, a blackface caricature. Karl Miller has hypothesised that the use of

minstrel imagery was a strategy to appease white dealers who could view Race Records as nostalgic

renditions of minstrelsy.36 Certainly, not only was minstrelsy the most familiar imagery for the

industry to draw upon when marketing the music of blacks, beside the more pious image of the

jubilee singer, white dealers would have found this imagery familiar and inoffensive. The industry

did in fact explicitly market early recordings of the Norfolk Jazz Quartet as a return to minstrelsy, as

discussed in Chapter Five. Besides being a strategy that would appeal to dealers throughout the

country, I would suggest the reliance on minstrelsy underscores the limited images of black

musicians record companies could draw upon in the 1920s. Furthermore, as already noted, there

was a real connection to minstrelsy in the careers of many Race Records artists; therefore it is

unlikely this imagery would have been surprising to either the audience or the artist at this time.

Most importantly however, the vaudeville blues performance was not a minstrel routine and this

fact, through Race Records advertising’s often very literal visual portrayal of lyrical content, began

to influence this advertising and its intertextual use of minstrelsy as we shall see.

At first glance, the Race Record advertisements do not appear to differ substantially from minstrel

show advertising. In fact, some actual blackface routines made it into Victor and Columbia

catalogues in the 1920s. For example the 1927 Columbia ad in The Defender for Slim Henderson

and John Mason’s 'Argufying', featured a cartoon of the two comedians in blackface, with the copy,

‘There’s more comedy and more laughs packed into this coupling, ‘Argufying’ than there are seeds

in a watermelon'.37 Other ads appear actually to posit the artist in an imagined minstrel show and

depict a scene from the performance of the song. This can be seen in this 1924 ad for ‘Oh Boy’ by

Fletcher Henderson and George Williams (see Fig 3.2).38

36 Miller, Segregating Sound, 196. 37 Chicago Defender, 19 Nov 1927, 7. 38 A few other black blackface minstrel acts, such as Butterbeans and Suzie, had successful recording careers throughout the 1920s on various labels.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 63

Figure 3.2 (Source: Chicago Defender, September 21, 1927 and March 21, 1928,

ProQuest Historical Newspapers)

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 64

Many recordings by the blues queens are advertised in a very similar manner to minstrel acts. In an

OKeh supplement from 1924, descriptions for a George McClennon blackface routine and a

Butterbeans and Suzie record sit alongside a description of a Virginia Liston record and the copy

used the same idiom in all three. George McClennon is portrayed in an illustration as a blackface

caricature, with large exaggerated white lips and massive feet, his ‘flop feet’ as the copy below

describes them. ‘Nuthin’–We don’t care what it is – can get this boy excited. Nuthin’! Talk about

havin’ a way with his feet, there’s no one can show this floppin’ bird nuthin’. Under a photograph of

Virginia Liston it reads, ‘Looks like this gal has got the Blues, don’t it? That’s not so prezactly. We

wants to tell you she’s got the same mood she was caught in when singing her way through a mean

OKeh Blues. Dat’s wat!’39

The minstrel urban dandy is found throughout these ads, misbehaving in various ways. A male jazz

quartet group called ‘The Five Little Chocolate Dandies’ was depicted in the OKeh ad for ‘Four or

Five Times’ as five identically dressed dandy figures, lining up at a woman’s door.40 An ad for one

of the several 'coon songs' that made it into Race Records catalogues, ‘The Mysterious Coon',

depicted an overweight, presumably over-indulging urban dandy type, his pockets overflowing with

money, walking down the street, puffing on a cigar, with wide-eyed girls following his every

move.41 The ad for ‘Mr Freddie Blues’ presented a familiar minstrel ‘urban dandy’ scenario (see

Fig. 3.3). Mr Freddie is, ‘a cake-eater and cake-walker’ who ‘just won’t behave', and the illustration

shows the fancily dressed Mr Freddie leaving a train of women behind him. In the ad for Bessie

Smith’s Columbia record 'Jazzbo Brown from Memphis Town’ in 1926, ‘Jazzbo Brown’ was

unmistakably a dandy type, walking down the board-walk with his trumpet, fresh off the boat from

Memphis and already impressing the ladies with his fancy clothes and style (see Fig 3.4). Another

Columbia ad, for Clara Smith’s ‘Mean papa turn in your key’ in 1924 featured a blackface

caricature of a woman leaning through the hole of the record, telling a scared little dandy caricature

39 OKeh records supplement, 1924. Southern Folklife Collection, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 40 Chicago Defender, 17 Nov 1928, 2. 41 Ibid., 29 Dec 1928, 6. Patricia R. Schroeder offers an interpretation of this coon song, alongside the only other coon song to make it into 1920s Race Records catalogues, ‘Travelling Coon’ by Luke Jordan, released in 1927. Schroeder reads these late examples of the form as deeply encoded critiques of blackface minstrelsy and the stereotypes of the ‘coon’ character. Seeing these ‘rural African-American coon song performers as directly challenging the prejudices of the dominant culture', Schroeder argues, ‘At the very least, a knowledgeable audience could certainly recognize them as negotiating with that dominant ideology, acknowledging its power yet adapting a response to individual circumstances and to mixed audiences, absorbing the projected ideologies of different audience constituencies'. She concludes, ‘Alec Johnson, Luke Jordan, and their contemporaries were ‘‘passing’’ for black with white audience members, while parodying white definitions of blackness for those who understood the joke'. Schroeder, ‘Passing for Black: Coon Songs and the Performance of Race', 152-3.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 65

to ‘turn in his key' (see Fig 3.4). The accompanying text reads like a script of a minstrel

performance. One line described the ‘slickest guitar accompaniment you ever heard anywhere’ with

this analogy, ‘Some of the plunks sound just like a bullfrog singing bass. No fooling'.42

Figure 3.3 (Source: Chicago Defender, October 11, 1924, ProQuest Historical Newspapers)

42 Chicago Defender, June 21, 1924, 5.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 66

Figure 3.4 (Source: Chicago Defender, July 10, 1926, and June 21, 1924, ProQuest Historical

Newspapers)

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 67

However, there are crucial differences between the minstrel show poster and these Race Records

ads. While Mr Freddie is a recognisable ‘urban dandy’, ‘Zip Coon’ style character, he is not drawn

as a minstrel character. He is rendered as an actual urban dandy rather than a parody of one.

Similarly, the minstrel roots of the Jazzbo Brown character are easy to identify and yet the

exaggeration of the blackface cartoon is absent. He has racial markers, such as big lips, but this is a

scene from real life, rather than a minstrel routine. Indeed the real black dandy was a presence in

Northern cities in the 1920s and received some comment in black newspapers. Shane White and

Graham White in their study of African American expressive culture have pointed to the Defender’s

account of 'vain dandies' in an article form 1921 that recounts events from a night at the Vendome

Theatre, a venue for silent films. According to this account, the night was spoiled by a group of

young men, 'who come in and peacock up and down the aisles, cigars in their mouths and hats on

their heads'. The columnist later complained about the ‘“strollers” who strut up the aisles, manikin-

like, with their hats on'.43

In fact there were frequent comments in the black press about the conduct and fashion of those

involved in the weekly Sunday 'stroll', a practice every Northern city had some version of, and the

Defender ran a column through the 1920s and 1930s called 'folks we can get along without', that

was critical of flashy regalia and the noisy, disruptive behaviour of young men in the various

parades down State Street, the centre of black community in Chicago. The Defender was generally

disapproving of the parades, citing their disruptive effect on black business and the late night parties

that left workers no good for work the following day. In contrast the Defender ran a regular men's

fashion column 'Men's Corner', which produced an annual feature on Chicago's ten 'Best Dressed

Men', the majority of whom were professionals of one sort or another and closely resembled their

white counterparts.44 The cultural cringe and the influence of traditional racial uplift, that favoured

white conceptions of style and deportment, clearly informs this coverage. Within this context, the

flashy 'dandy' characters presented in these cartoon illustrations would have no doubt been yet

another element of the Race Records phenomenon that galled figures such as Defender editor

Robert Abbott and his uplift writers. And yet, while these ads did not present the kind of role

models the black elite may have preferred, the blues queens were often portrayed as powerful

figures that chastised and punished misbehaving, unfaithful men. This sort of home-spun justice, or

working-class morality, may have been lost on the generally appalled writers of the black press but

43 Shane White and Graham White, Stylin': African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (New York: Cornel University Press, 1998), 233-234. 44 Ibid., 237.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 68

surely it would have appealed to the greatly engorged population of working-class Chicagoans,

many of whom had only recently arrived from the South. Moreover, this presence of black working

class musical culture in their newspapers was something the black elite was forced to accept as it

represented the converging interests of some of its major advertisers as well as its readership.

The ad for Clara Smith’s ‘Mean Papa turn in your Key’ features a photograph of the artist looking

out at the reader with an air of dignity and flapper glamour in her finery.45 Although the depiction of

the minstrel with, and without, make-up was a common feature of minstrel advertising, this is not

what is presented here, for this is not a minstrel performance. Regardless of how heavily black

vaudeville ‘blues queens’ relied on stereotypical black traits in these songs, vaudeville blues

performance itself was a significant step away from minstrelsy, and not only because burnt-cork

was no longer being worn. The Race Records ads captured this moment. The juxtaposition of the

artist photograph with the highly farcical minstrel-type cartoon and text strikes a delicate balance;

the photograph lends the artist a degree of dignity and a touch of show-biz glamour, while the

illustration plays on the comical nature of the song and provides the reader with amusing and

familiar imagery. While these ads employed minstrel tropes in illustration, alongside these

illustrations were pictures of the blues singers in high-fashion: the black flapper performing music

outside of the minstrel tradition. To use the language of intertextuality, minstrelsy is thus used here

as a quotation, – a deliberate and instantly recognisable reference to a previous text, but one that in

the current context is only a reference, a quotation, situated in a new text. Although elements of

these ads may have been familiar, and were deeply tied to minstrel conventions, this was an

intertexual minstrelsy, transfigured and subverted by the music it advertised. In this way, the Race

Records advertisement literally, if not consciously, depicted the black performer stepping out from

behind the minstrel mask, an image that was an accurate depiction of the position of the black blues

artist at this moment in US history.

45 Chicago Defender, 21 June, 1924, 5.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 69

There are other important distinctions. Although the central characters of many of these songs were

men and the central theme their bad behaviour, the female flapper character was far more

commonly depicted than in advertising for minstrelsy, which was predominantly a male domain.

Some Race Records advertising made the connection between Race Records and minstrelsy

explicit. In 1924 Columbia called Ethel Waters ‘The female Bert Williams!', in the Chicago

Defender.46 This ad, announcing Waters' new exclusive contract with Columbia, showed a black

janitor looking up in adoration at the photograph of Waters (see Fig 3.5). While this conflation was

probably more to do with Waters' success as a popular entertainer, on par with the hugely successful

Bert Williams, it does highlight one of the most obvious differences between the stars of minstrelsy

and Race Records: that the Race Records star could be a woman.

Figure 3.5 (Source: Chicago Defender, July 4, 1925, ProQuest Historical Newspapers)

An ad which illustrates the centrality of women in Race Records ads is the 1924 Paramount ad, 46 Ibid., 4 July, 1924, 5.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 70

‘Here they are!: The World’s Most Famous Blues Singers – Singing the Latest Hits Exclusively for

Paramount'.47 Five out of six of these acts were female vaudeville blues artists: Ma Rainey, Ida Cox,

Alberta Hunter, Edna Hicks, and Edmonia Henderson, with the one male group being the Norfolk

Jazz Quartet. All of these portraits are of glamorous, bejewelled, modern women, smiling out at the

reader. Against the backdrop of the fashion pages, which were dominated by middle-class

definitions of black beauty and style, this presentation of black women was an alternative vision of

the modern black woman, who was successful and appealing without meeting the accepted

standards of black, middle-class, beauty.48 The women of vaudeville and Southern minstrelsy were

generally not the picture of refined beauty portrayed in the fashion pages of the black press but they

had an earthy 'down home' appeal which spoke of hard living and woe, but also of character and

grace. Although several stars, such as Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith, would be praised for their

brown skin, the preferable tone for black women, in 'puff' pieces in the black press, many were not

considered great beauties.49 Some were not considered physically attractive at all, such as Gertrude

‘Ma’ Rainey, the 'Mother of The Blues', who was even described as ugly by fellow musicians. Little

Brother Montgomery commented, 'She looked too ugly for me'. Clyde Bernhardt recalled, 'Yes she

was ugly’, but also added significantly, 'but I'll tell you one thing about it: she had such a lovely

disposition, you know, and personality, you forget all about it. She commence to lookin' good to

you'. Something of Rainey's charm and attractive personality comes through in the Paramount

advertising for her records, which often featured large pictures of the singer regaled in her finery.

The copy for one read, 'Stylish, neat, good-looking, lots of pep, 'n everything!' and ended with 'real

pig-meat!', a term for an attractive person of either sex. 50 This presentation of working-class women

of character, charm and power was undeniably a new portrayal of blackness by the record industry

in the 1920s: professional, successful black women, performing without the minstrel mask.51

47 Ibid., 8 March, 1924, 4. 48 Shane and Graham White argue that the establishment of fashion parades, beauty contests and society pages with women pictured in fashionable clothes which were a response to the absence of black women in white newspapers, became a site through which the 'African American middle class defined itself'. They argue that in the 1920s and 30s the black middle-class more firmly established itself in Northern cities, as the population steadily increased, and assumed control of black fashion. They became the arbiters of what blacks could and couldn’t wear, and this became a means by which to differentiate themselves from the working-class. They also argue, 'that those who organised or took part in these displays may have been acceding, in part, to prevailing white standards of beauty was less significant than the fact that for the first time blacks were being presented, through the contests and fashion shows themselves and the widespread publicity given to these events by the African Americans press, in what was, by contemporary standards, an unambiguously positive way'. It is my contention that the figure of the 'classic blues' singer in Race Records ads represented an intervention of working-class values into an otherwise middle-class controlled sphere. Shane White and Graeme White, Stylin', 211-212, and 218. 49 These puff pieces are discussed at more length in Chapter Six. 50 Buzzy Jackson, Bad Women Feeling Good, 15. 51 One of the most heavily advertised products in the black press of the 1920s was skin whitener. The cultural power of the 'classic blues' singers is in evidence in one such ad for Wavine skin whitener ointment which featured Margaret Johnson, 'the famous OKeh and Victor Records star' as the face of the product. It describes her complexion 'light, clear and lovely'. Chicago Defender, June 9, 1928, 10.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 71

Many ads, while concentrating on the humorous side to the tales of heart-break and misbehaving

partners that were the content of many of these songs, portray both male and female characters in a

much more serious and sympathetic light than their close ties to minstrelsy would suggest. While

the cartoon illustration featuring black-face features, thick lips and comical expressions remain,

there is a shift from crude cartoon characters in comic poses to vignettes portraying something

looking much more like lived relations in contemporary life. The 1924 Columbia Bessie Smith ad

shown in Fig 3.6 similarly has taken elements from minstrelsy and yet presents something new.52

Figure 3.6 (Source: Chicago Defender, May 24, 1924, ProQuest Historical Newspapers)

The line of minstrel caricatures in the background are crying their eyes out, but the focus of this ad

is the large photograph of the laughing Bessie Smith, not playing a character, but 'steppin' out' in an

evening gown. Likewise, OKeh’s ‘Blue Book of Blues’ featured a jazz-age dandy couple, a flapper

52 Ibid., May 1924, 5.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 72

and a dandy in top hat and suit holding a cane, dancing.53 This portrayal of the modern jazz couple

is not overtly comic or satiric, merely highly stylised, echoing the new highly stylised Art Deco

vogue in modern design, much in same way Webb has argued George Walker’s interlocutor

functioned. Images such as these are no longer parody, but something new, a stylised portrayal of a

real-life phenomenon, the ‘real’ urban black. Many others showed modern, mostly urban, black

women coping with real-life situations. Some, such as ‘Aint Cookin What You’re Smelling', and

‘Organ Grinder Man', employed an ironic literalism, negotiating the sexually suggestive lyrics by

simply depicting the metaphor untranslated (See Fig 3.7).

Figure 3.7 (Source: Chicago Defender, November 17, 1928, and October 23, 1926, ProQuest Historical

Newspapers)

53 OKeh Blue Book of the Blues. Southern Folklife Collection, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 73

While many of the characters depicted in these ads relied on minstrel-derived stereotypes, and drew

on the three prevalent stereotypes of black femininity – the Mammy, the Jezebel and the Sapphire –,

they were not simply articulations of these stereotypes. The terrifying Sapphire, with her vengeful

wrath, is the closest match to the urban black flapper we see in ‘Papa Turn In Your Key’ for

example, but the heroine of the vaudeville blues is more a sympathetic figure, justifiably enraged,

righteously exacting punishment (see Fig 3.4).54

Inside an undated OKeh Race Records catalogue, the introduction is overflowing with dialect

appeals:

This page has sure got the Blues: Loud, bright hot Blues! Every note drips a honeyed tune.

All the folks are merry making for this is the time of Blues. Blues of the Race smothered in

woe! Blues of the Race moanin’ sorrow! Blues forever….Pick your blues, Folks. Teasin’ hot

Blues! Buy your Blues and hurry home for a happy spell.

Yes, Sir! That’s our Lonnie – He’s hittin’ the high spots in Blues and there’s nothin’ going to

bring that pleasin’ boy down but six bits and quick step home.

Here is Sammy Lewis getting’ in a song on S285. He’s just naturally a hot-dawg entertainer

and he’s sure got luck with the folks across the foot lights. He rolls a mean vocal that tickles

the spot. He’s your brother for a low down Blues.

The graceful, swayin’, shoutin’, Sippie is with us. Hey! Hey! There’s no one can beat that

girl for rainin’ down Blues – Hold her, brother, she’s Number S288.

Oh! Kiss your papa! We’ve got the Bluey Blues – and it sounds like Bertha Henderson.

She’s they baby on No. S265.55

This industry copy combined minstrel clichés with what it could glean from lyrics and song titles.

In December 1924, OKeh boasted of the authenticity of its black-dialect advertising copy in a piece

in the Talking Machine World on their white black-dialect writer Joseph Sullivan, who was leaving

the company for a new job at an advertising firm. It told readers that Sullivan had ‘lived in the

54 For more on stereotypes of black women in the media, see J. Simms-Wood, ‘The Black Female: Mammy, Jemima, Sapphire, and other images', in Images of Blacks in American Culture: A Reference Guide to Information Sources, ed. J.C. Smith (Westport: Greenwood, 1988); Shannon B. Campbell, Steven S. Giannino, Chrystal R. China, and Christopher S. Harris, ‘I Love New York: Does New York Love Me?' Journal of International Women’s Studies, Vol. 10 No. 2 (November 2008): 20-28; Marilyn Yarbrough and Crystal Bennett, ‘Cassandra and the "Sistahs": the Peculiar Treatment of African American Women in the Myth of Women as Liars'. Journal of Gender, Race and Justice (Spring 2000): 626-657; Karen Michelle Bowdre, ‘African American Female Images and representation from Minstrelsy to the Studio Era’ (PhD, University of Southern California, 2006); and K.W. Goings, Mammy and Uncle Moses: Black Collectibles and American Stereotyping (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 55 OKeh Race Records catalogue. Southern Folklife Collection, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 74

Southern States for many years', and was ‘thorough familiar with the peculiarities of Southern negro

dialect', and therefore, ‘OKeh advertising has reflected his knowledge in this direction'.56 Paramount

occasionally ran its advertising copy by its head of A&R, Mayo Williams, the only black record

company executive of the 1920s (outside of Black Swan), although he was less than impressed with

their efforts to mimic black slang.57 Regardless of the actual knowledge these men had of black

vernacular or jazz culture, this concern for authenticity indicates that the industry was not solely

reliant on the idiom of minstrelsy, and did make some effort to capture contemporary jazz parlance.

Indeed, for all of their crude approximations of hip lingo, the copy of these Race Records ads

certainly captured to some degree the central paradox at the heart of the blues and its therapeutic

function in the lives of black fans. The seemingly contradictory emotional appeals of this copy,

where a tune ‘smothered in woe’ will inspire a ‘happy spell', does speak to what has been noted by

scholars and artists alike as the power of the blues: the cathartic joy in the full expression and

transcendence of sorrow.58

Others have read black dialect in Race Records advertising quite differently. Jeff Todd Titon argues

that the use of slang in advertising in the 1920s was generally frowned upon and was only

considered appropriate when the language suited the level of intelligence of the intended reader. He

thus concludes that 'the cartoons in the race record ads were meant to appeal to those in a stage of

arrested development', which does not account for the industry's attempt, however condescending

and clunky, to capture the jazz parlance of this music and its fans.59 Historians have long discussed

the cultural significance of the blues as a musical form and the importance of blues lyrics. Le Roi

Jones has argued that the blues represented a new statement by blacks about their position in

American society. He argues:

The emergence of classic blues indicated that many changes had taken place in the Negro.

56 Foreman, ‘Jazz and Race Records', 217. 57 Black Swan was subsumed by Paramount in 1924 which made Williams the only black man with any power in the record industry. In an interview with Gayle Jean Wardlow, Mayo Williams recalled that while Laibly and the executives at Paramount would send ads for his approval 'once in a great while,' he believed that 'They could have used a lot more Negro slang than they did. They wrote those ads definitely from a white man's point of view'. Stephen Calt and Gayle Jean Wardlow, 'The Buying and Selling of Paramounts Part 3'. 23 and 10. 58 Langston Hughes captured something of this dimension to the blues when he contrasted it to the spiritual and described the sadness of the blues as a 'sadness...not softened but tears, but hardened with laughter, the absurd incongruous laughter of a sadness without even a god to appeal to'. Langston Hughes, letter to Carl Van Vechten (May 17, 1925), in Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964, Emily Bernard, ed. (New York: Knopf, 2001), 12. For more on the meaning of the blues and blues lyrics, see (among many others): Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), Paul Oliver, Blues Fell this Morning: Meaning in the Blues, Le Roi Jones, Blues People, James H Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1991), and Daphne Duval Harrison, Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s. 59 Titon, 245.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 75

His sense of place, or status, within the superstructure of American society had changed

radically since the days of the field holler. Perhaps what is so apparent in classic blues is the

sense for the first time that the Negro felt he was a part of that superstructure at all. The

lyrics of classic blues become concerned with situations and ideas that are recognizable as

having issued from one area of a much larger human concern…Classic blues attempts a

universality that earlier blues forms could not even envision. But with the attainment of such

broad human meaning, the meanings which existed in blues only for Negroes grew less

pointed. The professionalism of classic blues moved it to a certain extent out of the lives of

Negroes. It became a stylized response, even though a great many of the social and

emotional preoccupations of primitive blues remained.60

Lawrence Levine, putting it differently but perceiving the same shift, writes, ‘The blues was the

most highly personalized, indeed, the first almost completely personalized music that Afro-

Americans developed…blues was the most typically American music African Americans had yet

created and represented a major degree of acculturation to the individualized ethos of the larger

society'.61 I contend that the Race Records advertisements for the ‘classic’ blues singers reflect this

dimension in black American music in a very literal way. Through the literal, representational, un-

metaphoric, rendering of blues lyrics through cartoons and black dialect, these ads embodied and

conveyed this new sense of universality, individualism and acculturation to the reader of the black

press. While distinctly African American in style and culture, the characters in these ads were living

in a world that looked far more like the modern contemporary world rather than a ‘darky-town’ or

plantation. Jones suggests that Bessie Smith’s music ‘remained outside the mainstream of American

thought, but it was much closer than any Negro music before it', and the advertisements for the

‘classic blues’ artists, while not being identical to the music, encapsulate this in their own way.62

While marketed exclusively to a black audience, and through the guise of minstrel tropes familiar to

the phonograph industry, what is ultimately presented in these advertisements is an altogether new

version of blackness in American society, a portrayal of African-Americans as individualised

beings, living in a modern urban environment, dealing with real-life issues, and even being highly

successful modern women in a national consumer market.

60 Jones, Blues People, 87. 61 Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 221. 62 Jones, Blues People, 94.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 76

Down Home Blues

Figure 3.8 (Source: Baltimore Afro-American, January 4, 1924, ProQuest Historical

Newspapers)

In January 1924, OKeh advertised Sara Martin's ‘The Roamin’ Blues' as: ‘The first blue guitar

record'. The record featured Sylvester Weaver’s ‘talking guitar'.63 Hinting at the movement away

from the ‘classic blues’ style and towards the solo guitar or banjo-picking ‘down home’ blues

singer, this record sees the two styles combine, with a classic blues singer, Sara Martin, lending her

star power to a solo guitarist. The ad encapsulates this transitional moment and the contrasting

images that would define the two phases of Race Records in the 1920s (See Fig 2.8). There is a

photograph of Martin looking glamorous and jubilant and very much of the jazz age, juxtaposed

with an illustration of the solitary rural Southern man sitting alongside a log cabin, playing his

guitar. The illustration combines the signifiers of what would repeatedly be called ‘real’ blues by

record industry publicity, with the glamour of the Race Records star. By August that year the male

guitar-playing blues singer was being marketed alone, by Paramount with Papa Charlie Jackson,

63 Baltimore Afro-American, Jan 4, 1924.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 77

'the only man living who sings, self-accompanied, for Blues records'.64

This shift was spurred by both the saturation of blues queens in the Race Records market, which

called for the expansion of the catalogue, as well as the emergence in 1923 of Old Time, a new field

which led many record companies to establish satellite offices in Southern regional centres such as

Atlanta and Memphis to discover and record Old Time talent – cities that not coincidently happened

to be hubs of blues talent also. Again, others have explained this shift differently. Jeff Todd Titon, as

noted above, argues that the focus on the country blues singer in the second half of the 1920s was at

least in part the product of a fear of the urban black male who was seen as a threat in Northern cities

at this time. His argument rests on the fact that sales figures for the 'classic blues' and instrumental

jazz records (that dominated by urban black male artists) remained strong in 1926, and yet in that

year Race Records ads took a sudden shift in direction, towards the 'downhome' country blues and

‘sermons with singing’. He argues, 'there is a psychological explanation: the record companies felt

more comfortable with illustrations of black people down home’.65 While it certainly is likely that

the urban black male was a less appealing character to racist Northern whites than the nostalgic

image of 'Old Time' Southern blues singers, who were easily tied to the nostalgia for the plantation

‘darky', and certainly, many industry figures revealed racist views when interviewed later in life,

nothing in these mostly very candid interviews suggests that the shift towards the country blues

singers was a result of a deliberate avoidance of the black urban male. Rather, interviews with

industry figures and talent scouts suggest that the shift to the country blues was a logical expansion

of the market for Race Records following the industry's realisation that there was a sizable rural

market for black recordings and its subsequent move into the South. Paramount talent scout H. C.

Speir put it this way to Gayle Dean Wardlow: ‘Generally, record officials did not know the

difference between country and city blues. Sales figures were the only thing that interested them.

Laibly was only trying to stay in business, hoping something was going to happen. That’s why he

kept on recording new talent. He didn’t care what kind of blues music was sent up to record'.66

These interviews suggest the ultimate motivation of these men and these companies was the

expansion of existing markets and the exploitation of new ones, and while the blues queens

continued to sell well, the exploration of more rural forms of black music seems a logical expansion

of a field with a sizable rural audience and a Northern audience greatly increased by Southern

64 Chicago Defender, August 23, 1924. 65 Titon, Early Downhome Blues, 204. 66 Alex Van Der Tuuk, Paramount's Rise and Fall, 137. Wardlow tracked Speir down in 1964. He suggests Speir had believed for years they should be recording southern black blues, and from around 1926 he began to try to get companies interested in the talent he could find. He would scout with Art Laibley in Birmingham, Mobile, Memphis, and New Orleans. The artists needed four songs. Speir sent many artists to Paramount who took whoever he sent, whereas Victor etc demanded a test pressing first. Speir was responsible for Charley Patton, Skip James, Ishmon Bracey, Tommy Johnson. Gayle Jean Wardlow, Chasin' That Devil Music.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 78

migration. The shift to Southern rural blues was also presaged by the popularity of figures such as

‘Ma’ Rainey and Bessie Smith, whose raspier, less-refined style was perceived as more 'old

fashioned' and 'down home' than other vaudeville singers.67 Moreover, as we have seen, the urban

black male was a common feature of the advertising for the ‘classic blues’ Race Records, which

does not suggest an industry desperately trying to avoid this figure.

Over the next seven years the industry relied on Southern talent scouts such as H.C. Speir, Arthur

Satherley, Polk Brockman, and Harry Charles, to either send up talent to Chicago and New York, or

to organise talent for their field units to record during visits to Southern cities such as Atlanta,

Bristol, Charlotte, Memphis, and Savannah.68 As with ‘classic blues’ OKeh led the way and

Paramount quickly joined it, and these two recorded many of the biggest names in ‘down home

blues', including Papa Charlie Jackson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Lonnie Johnson,

Charlie Patton, Skip James, The Mississippi Sheiks and many others. Columbia followed with Peg

Leg Howell and Robert Hicks (recording under the pseudonym Barbecue Bob), and so did Victor

with the Memphis Jug Band, Blind Willie McTell, and Cannon's Jug Stompers.69 Although several

of the blues queens remained popular throughout the 1920s, most notably Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey,

Clara Smith and Ida Cox, the ‘down home’ or ‘country’ blues dominated the Race Records market

from 1926 to the Depression.70

The visual and verbal rhetoric of the advertising for ‘down home’ blues artists differed substantially

from that of vaudeville blues ads. The main appeals for the vaudeville blues records, that they were

‘full of pep’ and ‘up to the minute’, were replaced in the country blues ads by copy about ‘real’ or

‘down home’ blues with an ‘old time’ feel. Besides being an unconscious linguistic marker of this

music’s shared heritage with, and close kinship to, Old Time, this rhetoric linked this music to the

general nostalgia for the Old South which permeated popular and consumer culture during the

1920s.71 Barbecue Bob hails from the ‘Sunny South’, Blind Lemon Jefferson is ‘that sterling old

time guitar strumming blues singer'.72 ‘Hear the words and the tune and you’ll wonder why he

67 To be fair to Titon, he does acknowledge these other determinants. In an otherwise excellent study of the musical and cultural analysis of down home blues there are only a few conclusions with which I would differ. 68 Unlike OKeh, Columbia, and Victor, Paramount relied solely on Southern talent scouts, usually Southern dealers, to send up talent to Chicago or New York. Tuuk, 110. 69 Cohen categorises some of these recording artists, such as Papa Charlie Jackson, Furry Lewis, Cannon and his Jug Stompers, and Mississippi John Hurt as ‘pre-blues-styled folksingers sometimes called songsters’ who sang some blues but whose repertoires were full of older ballads and minstrels songs, many of which would be found in hillbilly catalogues sung by white artists also. Norm Cohen, ‘America’s Music: Written and Recorded’,126. 70 Ibid., 126. 71 At this time, the Southern past and the Old South, or ‘Dixie’, were also becoming major features of Southern tourism. See W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). 72 Chicago Defender, May 1, 1926, 7.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 79

didn’t sing this long ago for you', suggests copy for a Blind Lemon Jefferson recording.73 Another

Paramount Jefferson record was marketed as 'a real, old-fashioned Blues by a real, old-fashioned

Blues singer'.74 As with Old Time, as we shall see, this language walked a linguistic tightrope by

trying to sell the excitement of something new through its nostalgic quality. This is captured well in

the copy for the recording ‘Adam and Eve' by ‘Talking’ Billy Anderson, which describes this new

Columbia record as 'clever and just different enough to give you a real old time thrill'.75

The visual lexicon of 'down home' blues was also a departure from vaudeville blues. Illustrations no

longer featured urban dandies dressed for a ball, but instead, rural Southern figures. Some of these

were bare-foot figures in overalls, standing in fields or sitting alongside a log cabin, strumming a

guitar; characters who bore a strong resemblance to the ‘happy slave’ caricatures of blackface

minstrelsy. This stereotype had been the central character of minstrelsy since Rice’s ‘Jump Jim

Crow’ in 1828, and the most enduring image or trope of antebellum Southern blackness which

survived into the 1920s through struggling minstrel troupes, Southern romantic literature, and

popular culture.76 Undeniably this stereotype is employed in cartoon illustrated ‘down home’ blues

ads of the mid to late 1920s. This 1927 advertisement for Barbecue Bob’s ‘Barbecue Blues’ is a

stereotypical Southern rural vignette which plays on the plantation stereotype: Barbecue Bob, in his

plaid shirt and overalls, exaggerated thick lips, banjo in hand, is singing with joy under a full moon,

waiting for his barbecue.77 However, other types of Southern rural blacks appeared in these ads as

well. Alongside black dandy characters displaced in the countryside, such as in ‘Poor Boy a Long

Ways From Home', where we see an obviously comic character, with exaggerated blackface

features, lost in the countryside, his toes poking out of his shiny shoes, in many others we see

figures that resemble neither the black dandy nor the 'plantation darky' type.78 Paramount’s ad for

Blind Blake’s ‘Brownskin Mama Blues’ depicts a fashionably dressed rural couple, with an inset

illustration of Blind Blake similarly well-dressed, leaning back in a rocking chair (see Fig 3.9). In

‘Hard Road Blues', we see another well-dressed black man sweating along a country path ‘looking

for his sweetie' (see Fig 3.10).79 These figures are not overtly comic characters. They are presented,

like the city characters in the vaudeville blues ads, as far more realistic figures, devoid of the crude

caricatures and ham-fisted exaggerations of minstrelsy.

73 Baltimore Afro-American, February 23, 1929, 5. 74 Chicago Defender, April 3, 1926, 7. 75 Ibid., July 23, 1927, 6. 76 John Strausbaugh, Black Like You, 61. 77 Chicago Defender, May 21, 1927, 6 78 Ibid., Oct 29, 1927, 8. 79 Ibid., April 21, 1928, 7, and Feb 4, 1928, 6.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 80

Figure 3.9 (Source: Chicago Defender, April 21, 1928, ProQuest Historical Newspapers)

Figure 3.10 (Source: Chicago Defender, February 4, 1928, ProQuest Historical Newspapers)

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 81

Mark K. Dolan, in his reading of ‘down home’ blues ads, has argued that the Race Records

advertisements in the Defender depicted the fantasy of a return to the South for recent Northern

immigrants, in stark contrast to the editorial policy of the Defender which actively encouraged and

positively portrayed the Great Migration from the rural South to Northern cities.80 This is certainly a

lyrical theme which is graphically and textually reinforced in these ads. For example, the copy for

the Papa Charlie Jackson tune ‘Where the Chilly Winds Blow’ asks, ‘Have you ever shivered up

North – when its way down below zero – and wished you were way down below the old Mason-

Dixon line?’81 Yet there were also advertisements that depicted the start of this journey, the

departure from the South, such as ‘You’re leaving the old home Jim’, which showed a country man

with a swag, waving goodbye to his mother. Many ‘down home’ Race Records ads depicted the

real, if dramatised, difficulties of contemporary Southern rural life.82 ‘Hard To Rule Woman’

portrayed a country family-man, with a child in his arms, watching as his wife leans in to talk to a

man in a car, with the copy, ‘He finds its pretty hard to rule a woman these days without having a

automobile’.83 ‘Long Lonesome Blues’, by Blind Lemon Jefferson, depicted a well-dressed man

standing by a country river, contemplating suicide.84 The Paramount ad for Charley Patton’s 1929

‘Down the Dirt Road Blues’ presented a downtrodden man in threadbare clothes, riding a mule

along a country road.85 In several ads, Southern black musicians are shown entertaining whites in

the street. There was also a raft of advertisements for songs about relationships (some of which

have been discussed already) that are rendered in Southern settings that were not the plantation but

instead, respectable, contemporary, even affluent, 1920s homes (see Fig 2.11).

Finally, there was a rich vein of songs about getting in trouble with the law, such as ‘Ma’ Rainey’s

‘Chain Gang Blues’, Blind Lemon Jefferson’s ‘Booster Blues’ and ‘Lectric Chair Blues', and Blind

Blake’s ‘He’s in the Jailhouse now’. These songs may not have been overt protest songs, but they

did evoke the harsh realities of life under Jim Crow (see Fig 2.12). Jeff Todd Titon has suggested

that the Race Records advertisements for jail house songs shared a laugh with Northern urban

blacks at the expense of country clowns, but if this is so, these ads also captured Southern black

musician’s sharing heartache and woe with a national audience through a genuine form of black

80 Mark K. Dolan, ‘Extra! Chicago Defender Race Records Ads Show South from Afar'. 81 Chicago Defender, 6 Feb, 1926, 7. 82 Ibid., 16 Feb, 1929, 7. 83 New York Amsterdam News, 26 September, 1928, 6. 84 Chicago Defender, 1 May, 1926, 7. 85 Ibid., 23 Nov, 1929, 7.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 82

musical expression.86 These ads were certainly steeped in the cultural tropes and traditions of

minstrelsy, and while the cartoon illustrations may have appeared at times to marry comic or light-

hearted images to sorrowful subject matter, at other times, and sometimes even simultaneously, they

also rendered a far more naturalistic picture of Southern life than any previous depiction of

Southern black music. As nationally circulated images, these ads established a new representation

of blackness in 1920s consumer culture.

Figure 3.11 (Source: Chicago Defender, September 1, 1928, ProQuest Historical Newspapers)

86 Titon, 257.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 83

Figure 3.12 (Source: Chicago Defender, December 31, 1927, ProQuest Historical Newspapers)

Religious Records: Spirituals and ‘Sermons with Singing’

Advertising for the records of the singing evangelists depicted a working-class religiosity that, like

blues and jazz, did not meet traditional uplift conventions nor fit white fantasies of rural innocence

and plantation faith. This advertising also utilised cartoon minstrel characters and yet went beyond

these tropes to depict blacks as powerful preachers and as various biblical figures. Again, this

stemmed from, and reflected, the music and the artists themselves, who had built upon the traditions

of black religious expression reaching back to slavery to create a modern form of worship in the

urban North.

From the beginning, Race Records catalogues by OKeh, Columbia, and Paramount, contained

records by male quartets singing spirituals. Often the same quartets would record popular or jazz

numbers under a slightly altered name, such as Paramount’s Norfolk Jubilee Quartet who also

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 84

recorded under the name Norfolk Jazz Quartet. Then, in Atlanta in 1923, Columbia recorded a

‘sermon with singing' by local preacher Reverend J. M. Gates and two female members of his

congregation. The second release from this session had an advance order of 34,025 copies and this

launched the boom in gospel records, which at its peak in 1926-1927, saw the release of sixty

records of sermons over a nine-month period, forty of which were by Rev J. M. Gates.87

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has argued that through this boom in gospel records, the record

industry unwittingly waded into an ideological struggle that was taking place in black churches in

the 1920s. The ‘emotional folk orality’ of gospel music, which Southern migrants had been

installing in new store-front churches, or introducing into 'old-line' Baptist and Methodist churches,

argues Higginbotham, represented a challenge or subversion by the black working class of the

‘hegemonic values and aesthetic standards of the traditional Protestantism of the black middle

class'.88 This made the Defender an ideologically contested ground on another front, where the

conventional uplift ideology of the black elite, which saw racial uplift only in the assumption of

white religious and musical practice, clashed with the culture of the working class, which bought

these records, and through their patronage, made these styles of music and their practitioners

visible, popular and successful.

The ads for spirituals were for the most part understated, employing illustration much more

sparingly than the blues advertisements. The ads for the singing evangelists were different in tone

again, with striking, lurid, and deliberately menacing content, reflecting the wrath of God and the

fervour of the gospel preacher. Reverend F. W McGee’s recording of ‘Jonah in the Belly of the

Whale’ was advertised with an illustration of the preacher at the pulpit, fist raised in passion, his

congregation below him, and copy that reinforced the intensity of his performance: ‘two sermons

that ring with genuine religious fervor…You hear it all as it actually happens. The preacher’s

burning words…spontaneous shouts from the congregation…and the low-pitched hum of musical

instruments as the message is turned into wonderful harmonies' (see Fig. 3.13).89

87 In November 1926, the Downfall of Nebuchadnezzar, a ‘sermon with singing’ by another evangelical preacher, Reverend Burnett, sold eighty thousand records within months of its release, which was four times the average sales of Bessie Smith. Baldwin, 174. 88 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, ‘Rethinking Vernacular Culture: Black Religion and Race Records in the 1920s and 1930s', in American Studies: An Anthology, eds. Janice A. Radway, Kevin K. Gaines, Barry Shank and Penny Von Eschen (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 226. 89 Chicago Defender, 1 Oct, 1927, 8.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 85

Figure 3.13 (Source: Chicago Defender, October 1, 1927, ProQuest Historical Newspapers)

These ads attempted to capture all of the dread of eternal damnation that was a common theme of

these sermons. Gates’ ‘Death’s Black Train is Coming’ menaces the reader with the ominous image

of a long black train winding down the mountain, with copy that read, ‘Sure as you’re born, that

little black train is comin’ down out of the clouds for everyone of us'.90 Gates himself was depicted

as an imposing figure with a raised clenched fist in ‘Pay Your Furniture Man’, with the headline,

‘Rev J. M. Gates startles his congregation with brave accusations'. Below this it read, ‘members get

into heated argument. There is back-talking and much laughing' (see Fig 3.14).91 The most

commonly used publicity shot of Gates, which was used in many catalogues by the various labels

he recorded for, was a menacing image of the minister casting an accusatory glare out at the reader.

90 Ibid., Aug 21, 1926, 8. 91 Ibid., Oct 20, 1928, 2.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 86

Figure 3.14 (Source: Chicago Defender, Oct 20, 1928, ProQuest Historical Newspapers)

Although some advertisements depicted the jazz-age as full of sin, and jazz music as the devil's

music (for example a Columbia ad for the Birmingham Jubilee Singers’ ‘Do you call that religion’

which showed a sinful jazz band playing on a Sunday), many of the blues queens actually recorded

gospel songs and spirituals themselves. Columbia advertised a Clara Smith spiritual in this way:

‘Clara Smith, who knows just the sort of treatment for every type of blues, from the palest peacock

to the deepest indigo, now displays her versatility by a coupling of spirituals'.92 Ethel Waters was

given a similar pitch when she recorded ‘He Brought Joy to My Soul', with the lines: ‘When you

say “Ethel Waters”, folks know you’re thinking about blues and downtrodden, mournful blues at

that. “He Brought Joy to My Soul” is her latest offering'. It depicts Waters in a cotton field with rays

of holy light beaming down from heaven upon her.

The depiction of Bible stories saw many biblical figures portrayed as African Americans. While

some ads did present biblical figures as white, such as a white Noah in his ark, there were others

that made the metaphorical power of these stories literal by envisioning a black 'little David', and a

92 Ibid., Feb 12, 1927, 6.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 87

black ‘Prodigal Son’, who was shown leaving home in a setting evoking the rural South in the

Columbia ad for Rev C. F. Thornton's sermon on the parable (see Fig 3.15). In this ad, the Prodigal

Son, who in the Bible story leaves his home and returns destitute after spending all of his father’s

money on carnal pleasures, is just leaving home, pictured with a swag on his back. The image

underscores the metaphorical power of this tale and its parallel in the lives of contemporary

Southern rural workers lured to the North during the Great Migration, and the dangers and sins that

may ensnare them there. This is another example of the accuracy and insight of record company

advertising that may have used minstrel imagery as a starting point, but also did, if unwittingly,

publish in the pages of the black press images and representations of the lives of blacks which had

never been so vividly portrayed.

Figure 3.15 (Source: Chicago Defender, September 10, 1927, ProQuest Historical Newspapers)

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 88

The advertisements for the singing evangelists represented a commodification of an emergent,

modern, urban form of worship that broke away from the images of black worship, prevalent in the

music industry in 1920, such as the image of the pious jubilee singers faithfully reciting the

plantation spirituals of slavery. That the phonograph industry knew nothing about the struggle

within the religious communities of Northern cities over the form of black worship, or the

disapproval of the black press of these emotive worship practices, did not stop it from enabling this

culture to invade the black press and subvert the hegemonic values of the black elite who controlled

it. This serves as another example of how the commercial concerns of the record industry and the

cultural concerns of working-class consumers converged to produce a commodification and mass

consumption of an emergent form of musical expression. The record industry’s advertising captures

this process.

Conclusion

The advertising for Race Records reveals how the corporate and commercial concerns of the

phonograph industry presented black musical culture as well as how this culture affected this

presentation. By approaching this material from an industry perspective, by interrogating both the

lineage and development of the verbal and visual rhetoric adopted for selling Race Records, we are

able to see the process for what it was: an industry grappling with what imagery it could use to sell

black music back to the black population. Neither a product of the fear of the urban black male, nor

a pure undiluted expression of a musical culture, Race Records advertisements reflect, first-and-

foremost, the industry’s attempt to capture and transmit this black working-class musical culture

about which it knew very little, by using the imagery it knew quite well. Reflecting the highly

circumscribed set of images with which to market blacks in the US in the 1920s, the industry began

with minstrelsy. However, while musically indebted to this tradition, neither the classic blues,

country blues, nor the sermons with singing were minstrel routines. The stories these recordings

told were not tales of the plantation, the mammy, or the comical figure of ridicule, but stories of

hardship and woe for ordinary folk in an unsympathetic world. Both the sheer volume of these

records (there were up to 500 releases a year by 1927), and the form of this advertising, that

attempted to capture and sell to the reader the narrative or mood of the recording in a single,

emotive image, meant that these ads shifted away from minstrel scenarios and towards simple

scenes of something much closer to real life.93

93 Dixon and Godrich, 57.

Chapter Two – Out From Behind the Minstrel Mask 89

Regardless of the original representational aspirations of this advertising, the record industry had

put in the pages of the black press a version of a modern working-class blackness not seen before. It

was one that perfectly captured the position of the black musician in the 1920s: still tied to a

blackness of white conception and yet emerging from behind the minstrel mask, as successful and

meaningful ‘Race’ artists. Undoubtedly, this was not an image pleasing to the black elite, and the

musical choices for black musicians in the 1920s remained highly circumscribed. But equally

undoubtedly, this was a new image of commodified blackness in the 1920s national consumer

market, one based on black success and black culture transmuted by a Northern white industry

intent on exploiting it for all its worth.

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time

Artist as Presented by the Record Industry

Introduction

In June 1923, two and a half years after the release of Mamie Smith's 'Crazy Blues', OKeh released

'The Little Old Log Cabin in The Lane' by a white fiddler from Atlanta known as Fiddlin' John

Carson. As with the black vaudeville blues that became the Race Records craze of the early 1920s,

Ralph Peer had to be convinced by an outsider to record this Southern vernacular music, but when

Atlanta dealer P.C. Brockman got his way, this experiment went on sell tens of thousands of copies

beyond the 500 Peer first ordered for regional distribution.1 The record was made during a 'field

recording trip' in Atlanta in 1923, a practice that many companies would continue for the rest of the

decade to tap the well of both country blues and Old Time talent in Southern cities. The two

catalogues were therefore inextricably linked in the minds of those in the phonograph industry, and

everything from recording, talent scouting, and distribution for regional popularity, was approached

in a similar manner for both. Likewise, the industry’s approach to marketing this music had much in

common to its approach to Race Records, and it is the argument of this chapter that, like the

marketing imagery used to sell Race Records, the verbal and visual rhetoric of what the record

industry variously titled ‘Old Time Tunes', 'Old Familiar Tunes', 'Songs From the Hills and Plains',

or ‘Hillbilly', drew on previously existing models for marketing Southern white music, but

ultimately created something new in 1920s consumer culture. This rhetoric, which embodied the

paradoxical nature of the decade by containing both the modernist and anti-modern impulse,

presented a picture of Southern mountaineers and a new version of Southern whiteness that

successfully circumvented the negative image of Southern whites prevalent in the media in the

1920s.

Whilst many histories of country music have traced the development of various musical genres

featured in Old Time catalogues, and various works on the record industry have discussed the

development of the commercial category of Old Time or hillbilly, there are very few that have

offered a close reading of the visual and verbal rhetoric developed for the new marketing category

1 Bill C. Malone and Judith McCulloch, Stars of Country Music: Uncle Dave Macon to Johnny Rodriguez (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 18.

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 91

by the record industry.2 Historians of early country music (including Bill C. Malone, Richard A.

Peterson, Anthony Harkins, and William Howland Kenney), who have addressed the formation of

the hillbilly stereotype, have tended to prioritise the marketing of the radio hillbilly over the record

industry’s marketing of the Old Time musician.3 While the role and influence of key phonograph

industry figures such as Ralph Peer, head of recording at both OKeh and then Victor, Columbia's

Frank Walker, and Southern jobber Polk Brockman, are often emphasised, when it comes to

marketing imagery, these studies concentrate on the more colourful fabrications of radio

impresarios, such as George Hay of Nashville’s WSM ‘Grand Ole Opry’ and John Lair at Chicago’s

WLS ‘National Barn Dance'.4 These are certainly intriguing figures, whose influence on the

development of the clichés of radio hillbillies was significant, and whose struggle with the imagery

of early country music underscores the fraught process of commercialisation. For example, both of

these men rejected the term ‘hillbilly’ as a demeaning characterisation of the Southern musician and

culture they presented in their shows, and yet both were also vigorous in their exploitation of the

comic traits associated with the term. They regularly fashioned outlandish names for their musical

groups, such as Gully Jumpers, Possum Hunters, Fruit Jar Drinkers etc., names hardly redolent of

dignified mountain folk culture, and they dressed their artists up in overalls and gingham dresses for

promotional photographs and concert appearances.5

By concentrating on radio however, previous scholarship on hillbilly as a commercial entity has

under-estimated the record industry’s contribution to the image of the Southern white musician in

the first decade of his commercial career. Richard A. Peterson, for example, makes the distinction

2 Archie Green’s seminal and perceptive series ‘Commercial Music Graphics’ in John Edwards Memorial Foundation (JEMF) Quarterly was the first serious study of the visual imagery of early country music. 3 Bill C. Malone’s excellent study of the competing images of early country music artists, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers, discusses in detail the various artists who aligned themselves with the more serious and pristine mountain image rather than the comic hillbilly character. He does not however offer an analysis of the industry’s transmission of these tropes or attempt an analysis of record industry marketing rhetoric. Bill C. Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music (London: University of Georgia Press, 1993). 4 Bill C. Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers; Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); William Howland Kenny, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago and London: University Of Chicago Press, 1997); and Diane Pecknold, ‘The Selling Sound: Country Music, Commercialism, and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1920-1974’ (PhD, Indiana University, 2002). Other good works on the development of Old Time/hillbilly include: Archie Green, ‘Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol'. Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 78, No. 309, Hillbilly Issue (Jul-Sep, 1965):204-228; Bill C. Malone, Country Music U.S.A. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968); Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Patrick J. Huber, Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Wayne W. Daniel, Pickin’ on Peachtree: A History of Country Music in Atlanta, Georgia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Charles Wolf, ‘Columbia and Old Time Music'. John Edwards Memorial Foundation Quarterly, No. 14 (1978):118-121. 5 Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers, 72. These radio shows were broadcast in front of studio audiences and this added visual dimension no doubt figured crucially in the tendency of these shows to exploit the more visually crude, comic clichés of the ignorant rube.

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 92

between the ‘Old Timer’ and the ‘hillbilly', who superseded him (the early Old Time artists were

mostly men, but women did become a significant presence by the late 1920s). He writes, ‘By the

1920s, the hearty Eastern mountain man was seen as little more than a relic, an old geezer, whose

wisdom was filtered through generations of inbreeding and corn liquor'.6 Furthermore, he argues

that despite the best efforts of wealthy enthusiasts such as Henry Ford, the fiddling contest and Old

Time dancing craze was over by 1927. He notes that none of the fiddle champions who recorded

exclusively Old Time dance and fiddle contest tunes enjoyed substantial record sales, concluding:

‘people weren’t responding to what was literally old fashioned'.7 This is certainly true, but by

jumping from the ‘old geezer’ to the ‘hillbilly’ he skips over the distinct and significant alternative

model to these ciphers: the Old Time musician as presented by the record industry. I contend that

the Old Time artists on record – including Fiddlin’ John Carson, Gid Tanner and Riley Puckett, The

Stoneman Family, The Powers Family, The Carter Family, Vernon Dalhart, and many more – were

never simply ‘old geezers’ or crude hillbilly caricatures. These figures, mostly portrayed in their

Sunday best or in a barn-dance vignette, were presented by the record industry as one of two types

of mountain musician: the scholarly folk-singer who had preserved the songs of the hallowed

Appalachian region (the last stronghold of America’s largely lost rural past), and the mountain

entertainer, who was on hand to enliven any occasion with novel and exotic entertainment, that

might not be strictly traditional but was at least 'old timey' in feel.8 While these were not strict

categories and at times certain artists seemed a combination of the two or to cross freely between

them, these figures were never simply 'old geezers' or hillblly fools. When the industry finally

adopted the term hillbilly in its catalogues in the early 1930s, times had changed and the sharply

diminished output of Old Time records was relegated to subsidiary labels which carried their budget

catalogues. By this time, as Malone and others have shown, the appeal of the mountaineer as a

romantic figure was in decline and had been largely superseded by the image of the cowboy of the

western plains.9 The image of the dignified, noble mountain balladeer, the preserver of Elizabethan

culture, was eroded by various developments, not the least, I contend, the comic, mostly negative

6 Peterson, 56. 7 Ibid., 62. 8 For more on the radio hillbilly and the ‘barn dance shows’ see: Charles K. Wolfe, The Grand Ole Opry: The Early Years, 1925-1935 (London: Old Time Music, 1975); Louis M. Kyriakoudes, ‘The Grand Ole Opry and the Urban South'. Southern Cultures (Spring, 2004): 67-84; Tracey E.W. Laird, Louisiana Hayride: Radio and Roots Music Along the Red River (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Pamela Grundy, ‘“We Always Tried to Be Good People”: Respectability, Crazy Water Crystals, and hillbilly Music on the Air, 1933-1935’. The Journal of American History, Vol, 81, No. 4 (Mar., 1995):1591-1620; Charles K. Wolfe, ‘Nashville and Country Music, 1925-1930: Notes on Early Nashville Media and Its Response to Old Time Music'. Journal of Country Music, No. 4 (Spring, 1973): 2-16; Steven J. Smethers and Lee B. Jolliffe, ‘Singing and Selling Seeds: The Live Music Era on Rural Midwestern Stations’. Journalism History 26 (2000): 61–70; and Craig Havighurst, Air Castles of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007). 9 Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers, 90.

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 93

image of the hillbilly as presented on the radio.10

Of course, even in the early 1920s the portrayal of Southern whites as preservers of precious Anglo-

Celtic folk ways was hindered by the pervasive image of Southern rural folk as degenerate, lazy,

slothful, superstitious hayseeds who suffered from pellagra and extreme poverty, and were prone to

clay-eating.11 While the cultural cache of simple country folk was in some respects at an all-time

high, and everyone from presidents Harding and Coolidge, to the Grand Wizard and Emperor of the

Klan, Hiram Wesley Evans, claimed to be simple, rustic folk representing the beliefs and dreams of

true Jeffersonian Americans, the Scopes Trial and the findings of social scientists researching the

conditions in the South drew a contrastingly dire picture, culminating in H.L. Mencken’s famous

characterisation of the South in the Baltimore Sun, as a ‘bunghole of the United States, a cesspool

of Baptists, a miasma of Methodists, snake-charmers, phoney real-estate operators, and syphilitic

evangelists'.12 Southern mountaineers were still on the margins of society, an ‘other’ which could be

alternately romanticised or vilified.

The industry circumvented this negative image by aligning this music with the burgeoning folk

studies movement that had begun to view Southern vernacular music as culturally significant and

worthy of preservation. Since the late nineteenth century the mythology around the Southern

Appalachian Mountains as the last surviving enclave of a pure Anglo-Saxon settler culture had been

steadily growing, encouraged by romantic evocations of popular writers, such as Mary Noailles

Murfree, writing under the pseudonym Charles Craddock, and after WW1, the novels of John F.

Fox, as well as the folklore movement.13 The enthusiasm for Southern culture shown by Northern

10 The negative depiction of hillbillies as lazy, drunken rubes became so pronounced that there was some backlash against this on the radio, with shows such as the ‘Crazy Water Crystal Barn Dance’ where the image of the hillbilly was cleaned up and recast as god-fearing, sober, responsible member of society. See Pamela Grundy, ‘“We Always Tried to be good people”’. 11 Matthew Wray has explored how in the Progressive Era the eugenics movement, social scientists, and hookworm crusaders made poor Southern whites a national concern. Eugenicists traced white poverty to hereditary causes and believed ‘the weakened racial stock of whites in the rural South’ to be responsible, whereas hookworm crusaders ‘traced white poverty to the debilitating effects of the hookworm disease'. These experts also linked the disease to the clay eaters of the South, all of which put these afflictions of poor Southern whites in the national lime-light and only encouraged exaggerated portrayal of Southern whites. As Wray concludes, this contributed to their status as a ‘stigmatized, dishonored, and despised group'. Matthew Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 63-64. For more on the condition of Southern people and perceptions about Southern rural farmers in the 1920s see, Pete Daniel, Standing at the Crossroads: Southern Life Since 1900 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986); J. Wayne Flynt, Dixie’s Forgotten People: The South’s Poor Whites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); and James H. Shideler, ‘“Flappers and Philosophers”, and Farmers: Rural-Urban Tensions of the Twenties'. Agricultural History, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Oct., 1973): 283-299. 12 Laird, 47. 13 Bill C. Malone and David Stricklin, Southern Music/American Music (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979), 31. Nathan Miller also points to writers such as Gene Stratton-Porter, Harold Bell Wright, and Zane Grey, among the most popular fiction writers of the day, whose books appealed to, ‘the kind of American whose eyes glazed and even dampened when they thought of the good old days when life was simple and generally lived in close

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 94

reformers in settlement schools in the last decades of the nineteenth century also encouraged the

perception of the cultural and musical heritage contained in the mountains. For example, the

president of Berea college in Kentucky, William Goodell Frost, wrote an article in 1899 entitled,

‘Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains', in which he envisioned the Appalachian

folk as ‘our contemporary ancestors', and as our ‘eighteenth century neighbours’ who had just been

awakened from a long ‘Rip Van Winkle sleep'; pure Anglo-Saxons ‘beleaguered by nature’ in

‘Appalachian America', one of ‘God’s grand divisions'.14 The songbooks of folklorists and song-

collectors, such as Cecil Sharp’s 1917 Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, further

encouraged the hallowed status of the mountains and helped to make music the focus of the interest

in the region.15 The industry’s marketing of Old Time catalogues linked to this tradition of folk

music preservation and enabled them to present this music as cultural artefacts worthy of study, a

link that also dignified this rough-hewn music and made it appropriate for the modern middle-class

living room.

In actuality of course, not all of this music was mountain music, and some of it was not even old. As

many historians and musicologists have noted, the music contained in Old Time represented a wide

variety of musical forms, from British ballads and fiddle reels hundreds of years old to Tin Pan

Alley songs of the previous generation stripped back and adorned with ‘old timey’ accompaniment,

to newly penned ‘event songs’ written in a faux-traditional style. Ralph Peer is an important figure

here because his understanding of copyright law and his savvy business dealings significantly

proximity to nature'. Nathan Miller, New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America (New York: Scribner, 2003), 223. 14 Old Time artist Bradley Kincaid gained his education in Old Time music at Berea College in the 1910s. Ronald Lewis, ‘Beyond Isolation and Homogeneity: Diversity and the History of Appalachia', in Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes: Back Talk From an American Region, eds, Dwight B. Billings, Gurney Norman, and Katherine Ledford (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 21. 15 Between 1911 and 1915, state folklore societies sprang up in North Carolina and Kentucky (1912), Virginia (1913), and West Virginia (1915). Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia On Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 250-1. Much of the song collecting during this period was dedicated to the unearthing of Child Ballads, the common name for the 305 ballads collected by Harvard academician Francis James Child in his English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898). This collection established the British folk song cannon, or in Malone’s words, as ‘the aristocrats of ballad literature'. Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers, 44. Many music historians have argued that the rural lowland Southerners were as steeped in the folk tradition as people from the Southern Appalachian. Malone argues that along with mountaineers, ‘rural lowland Southerners, in a society where illiteracy was widespread and where social contact with outsiders was limited, were also characterized by cultural isolation. The socially ingrown rural South, from the tidewater of Virginia to the pine barrens of East Texas, produced a population that, in its commitment to and preservation of traditional cultural values, should be considered as a distinct family unit. The music of these people, lying outside the mainstream of American cultural development, provided the origin and nucleus of what we know call country music'. He notes furthermore that folk researches found as many Child ballads in New England as in the South. Bill C. Malone, Country Music U.S.A., 5. Alan Lomax similarly argued that, ‘the lowland poor whites shared the song preferences of their mountaineer cousins', and Arthur Palmer Hudson suggests, ‘not only was the singing habit a widely and perhaps equally diffused one in the South as a whole; the songs sung over the South are much the same, irrespective of locality'. Alan Lomax, The Folk Songs of North America in the English Language (London: Cassell, 1960), 153. A.P. Hudson, ‘Folk Songs of the Southern Whites', in Culture in the South, ed. W.T. Couch (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1935), 520.

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 95

influenced the sound of Old Time. Under a national law first suggested by President Theodore

Roosevelt and passed in 1909, the author of a musical composition, or crucially whoever possessed

the rights to its mechanical reproduction, received 2 cents per reproduction.16 Realising the amounts

of money that could be made through these royalties, Peer made a now famous deal with Victor

Talking Machine Company when they poached him from OKeh Records in 1927. He would work

for free if they allowed him to own the mechanical rights on all the music he recorded. As Old Time

records sold anywhere from 5,000 to 100,000 copies of a 'hit', Peer made huge sums of money (his

royalties for the second quarter of 1927 alone ran to $250 000).17 This had a great impact on the

nature of Old Time in the mid-to-late 1920s, because the goal became the copyrighting of either

undiscovered traditional material or 'new' compositions which were just different enough from

existing material to avoid infringement of copyright.18 This made the music of Old Time catalogues

even more eclectic, as 'new' songs joined the 'traditional’ material. In this way Old Time became a

truly modern phenomenon, one created as often in the new urban and industrial centres of the South

as the isolated mountain ranges.19

Yet the industry constructed a version of this complex variety of musical forms that was guided by

its own ideological preoccupations, commercial concerns, the existing models for selling Southern

vernacular music, and the self-commodification efforts of Southern musicians, rather than the true

and complex nature of the vernacular music of the South. Like the marketing of Race Records,

which was based on the models extant for selling the music of black Americans – minstrelsy, coon

songs, vaudeville etc., and the new interest in black folk music – the marketing of Old Time records

drew significantly on already existing models for selling Southern white music.20 Firstly, there were

the ‘home and hearth’ parlour songs and minstrel routines in the ‘popular’ music catalogues that had

already introduced into the mainstream many of the sentiments of Old Time and in particular the

nostalgia for ‘Old Dixie’. Many so-called Old Time tunes were in fact parlour ballads that had been

16 Because ASCAP refused Old Time and Race Records artists membership on the grounds that these songs were not compositions in the formal sense, no-one collected mechanical royalties on behalf of the artist. Peer deigned to offer Old Time artists 'royalty' of 25% of what they were owed, but did not extend this generosity to black artists. Kenney, 150-2. For more on Peer, see: Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life; Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers; Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music; and Charles K. Wolfe, 'Ralph Peer at Work: The Victor 1927 Bristol Sessions'. Old Time Music, No. 5. (1972): 10-15. 17 Kenney, 154. 18 Charles Wolfe has estimated that, ‘Copyrighted material from 1927-1930 hovered between 15% and 20%. In 1931 the figure rose to 30% and by 1932 to 76%'. Charles Wolfe, 'Columbia and Old Time Music’, 121. 19 Patrick Huber has argued that, ‘early country is, in fact, as thoroughly modern in its origins and evolution as its quintessentially modern counterpart, jazz'. He points to the textile villages of the Southern Piedmont region as the wellspring of the 1920s commercial hillbilly music. Huber, Linthead Stomp, XIV. 20 There were a few examples of Southern rural artists who were already making records by the 1920s, such as Cal Stewart and Charles Ross Taggart, and these artists would have certainly informed the industry’s approach to the Old Time acts. These are discussed in more detail in Chapter One.

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 96

adapted and re-arranged by rural musicians.21 Secondly, the popular fiddling contests which had

thrived in the South in the first decades of the century provided another example of rural vernacular

music as commercialised entertainment. These contests gave Old Time some of its first recording

artists and provided an arena for many early Old Time artists to hone their stage personae and

performance shtick before taking it to Northern record labels. They also contained a strong element

of comedy in their proceedings from which hillbilly artists would draw. 22 Indeed, in concerted

efforts at ‘self-commodification', many early Old Time artists – Fiddlin’ John Carson misleading

the press about the details of his life, Eck Robertson and Henry Gilliland arriving at Victor’s New

York offices in full ‘cowboy’ regalia for example – were ‘discovered’ by the Northern record

industry with a good deal of what would become the hillbilly persona already intact.23 Finally, as

already noted, the new sheen of respectability the folk music of white Appalachian mountaineers

had gained through the enthusiasm of settlement school missionaries and folklorists throughout the

late nineteenth and early twentieth century, further encouraged in the 1920s by post-war nativism,

informed the image of the Old Time musician as presented by the record industry.24 Beyond this, the

industry’s commercial concerns, such as the negotiation of segregation in a rapidly expanding

national market, also influenced the industry’s conception, definition and marketing of Old Time

records and artists, encouraging the definition of this music as categorically separate from the folk

music of Southern blacks. All of these elements came to bear on the formation of the verbal and

visual rhetoric of Old Time records and helped to create a version of Southern whiteness that was

based in a newly-defined Southern musical culture.

As noted in the introduction, music historian Geoff Mann has pointed to the potential of country

21 Bill Malone and David Stricklin point to the sentimental parlour songs of William Shakespeare Hays as important forebears of country music. Hays in fact wrote ‘The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane’ which provided both OKeh and Fiddlin’ John Carson with their breakthrough Old Time hit. Many Old Time artists had strong links to minstrelsy also, musically, in minstrel skits, and in stage patter, including: Uncle Dave Macon, Skillet Lickers, Al Hopkins, Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers. Malone and Stricklin, Southern Music/American Music, 23. 22 There was a strong farcical tradition in much early country music. Groups that performed at the Georgia ‘Old Time Fiddlers’ Conventions in Atlanta in the 1910s and 1920s, for example, used names such as the ‘Moo Cow Band', the ‘Simp Phony Orchestry', and the ‘Lick Skillet Orchestra'. These shows were emceed by ‘Professor Aleck Smart’ who dressed in the standard vaudevillian costume of the rube comedian – undersized striped pants, top hat, and frock coat. Harkins suggests, ‘In addition to ensuring audiences of a foot-stomping good time, these names were also designed to mock the “high art” pretensions of the newly wealthy, who attended both the fiddler conventions and the operatic festivals'. Harkins, Hillbilly, 76. The Southern fiddling contest was also adapted by radio in the barn dance shows and continued to be part of the promotional circuit, and an important source of income, for Old Time musicians. 23 Fiddlin’ John Carson was a successful entertainer prior to his radio and record career, performing at political rallies for Georgian politicians Tom Watson and Eugene Tallmadge and employing a stage persona Tallmadge's biographer describes as ‘a corny, redneck character, a little down and out but happy'. William Anderson, The Wild Man from Sugar Creek: The Political Career of Eugene Tallmadge (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, Press, 1975), 76-77, as quoted in Daniel, Pickin' on Peachtree, 96. 24 For more on the folklore movement of the early twentieth century and its preoccupation with Southern musical forms and the Appalachian region see: Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia On Our Mind; David Whisnant, All That is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1983); Malone and Stricklin, Southern Music/American Music; Marybeth Hamilton, In Search of the Blues (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007); and Billings, Norman, and Ledford, eds. Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes.

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 97

music to partially produce the white culture it purports to represent.25 Mann uses John Mowitt’s

concept of ‘musical interpellation’ – which describes the way music might produce a subject – and

by investigating this, focuses on nostalgia as one of country music’s dominant cultural tropes

through which ‘the songs of a mythic “used to” sound a present in which whiteness makes sense

retroactively, calling people to their whiteness'.26 This sense of country music partially producing an

American whiteness is at the heart of the argument of this chapter. The dominant cultural trope of

nostalgia was evident in country music much earlier than the era Mann discusses; in fact it was

there before country music was even named as such. Old Time and hillbilly called people to their

whiteness right from the beginning, and not just through the music, but also through the verbal and

visual rhetoric of their marketing.

The verbal and visual rhetoric of Old Time marketing was presented in carefully drafted and

illustrated record catalogues as well as in other industry publications and advertising in phonograph

industry trade publications, such as the Talking Machine World. Unlike the marketing campaign for

Race Records, which was the only kind of music catalogue aimed at black consumers, the industry

did little advertising for Old Time in the press. Throughout the 1920s, the industry maintained its

policy, dating back to the early 1900s, of relying on its more prestigious catalogues of classical

music to sell the idea of the phonograph to middle-class customers, a strategy also designed to

maintain their public image as purveyors of high culture.27 However their densely illustrated and

verbose catalogues and supplements, which were distributed to stores and jobbers and then to

customers, were full of artist photographs, introductions, and song descriptions, and it is through

these that the industry presented its version of the Southern white rural artist which we shall

explore.

Many historical studies of the 1920s have commented on the countervailing impulses which

25 Geoff Mann, ‘Why does country music sound white? Race and the voice of nostalgia' Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 31 No. 1 (January 2008): 73-100, 73 26 Ibid., 73. 27 A search of historical newspapers during the 1920s through ProQuest historical newspapers, such as the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlanta Constitution, and Chicago Daily Tribune yielded no Old Time/hillbilly advertisements. Old Time music only featured in the press by way of radio listings, the coverage of fiddling competitions and Old Time dances, which through the advocacy of figures such as Henry Ford, enjoyed somewhat of a revival in the mid-1920s. For a deeper discussion of the industry’s use of classical music in advertising, see: David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2009); Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Emily Thompson, ‘Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity: Marketing the Edison Phonograph in America, 1877-1925'. The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 1 (Spring, 1995): 131-171; Marsha Siefert, ‘The Audience at Home: The Early Recording Industry and the Marketing of Musical Taste', in James S Ettema and D. Charles Whitney, eds. Audiencemaking: How the Media Create the Audience (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1994); Jessica C. Gienow-Hecht, ‘Whose music is it anyway? The Limits of Transnational Culture in the Nineteenth Century'. European Contributions to American Studies (2004): 34-50: and Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010).

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 98

characterise the decade.28 On the one hand, the 1920s was a decade full of new inventions and the

excitement of all things new, from radio, movies, jazz, the modern city, mass consumerism and

national advertising in multitudes of new publications, the extension of new roads and cars which

made the country more connected and people more mobile than ever, and the mass migration of

Southern blacks and whites into urban industrial areas, both in the South and North, and the cultural

changes this fostered. However, running counter to the excitement of modernity was an anti-

modernist impulse, an anxiety about the effects of modern mass-culture and a consumerist life and a

nostalgic yearning for the imagined simplicity of life sometime in the past. This found articulation

in many fields, not least, in consumer culture.29 It is one of the central contentions of this chapter

that the popularity of Old Time artists was a product of these conflicting impulses, and that the

record industry marketing for this music vividly and uniquely reflected this paradox.

The shift from jazz age to by-gone era

The ‘popular’ catalogues of the major record companies of the early 1920s, Victor’s Black Seal

Records alongside its classical Red Seal catalogue, were dominated by white jazz orchestras and

groups. Blackface minstrel routines, foreign language records, the odd movie tie-in, novelty songs

with Hawaiian pretensions, and political speeches filled out the rest of the catalogue, but the

waltzes, foxtrots, rags, and sentimental parlour songs of New York’s Tin Pan Alley songsmiths and

Broadway shows were the most popular tunes of the day. These tunes, and consequently the verbal

and visual rhetoric of the popular record catalogues, were steeped in the images of modernity and

the lexicon of jazz. They depicted fast-paced city life-styles, jazz-loving flappers and sophisticated

gentlemen, balls and dances, which now could take place at home, thanks to the modern, sharp-

looking phonograph. The cover of a Columbia general catalogue in 1924 features men in tuxedos

and women in modern dresses and short cropped, flapper hair styles, dancing in their living room,

asked: ’What do we care for the weather? With a New Columbia We Dance at home, when we

28 Including: Lawrence Levine, The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears, eds, The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983); T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture: 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981); Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way For Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Laird, Louisiana Hayride; George E. Mowry, The Urban Nation: 1920-1960 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965): Miller, New World Coming; Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1966); W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005); Daniel, Standing at the Crossroads; Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003); and Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine. 29 For more on antimodernism at the turn of the century, see Lears, No Place of Grace.

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 99

please'.30 This prepared the reader for the preponderance of dance orchestras and jazz artists

featured in the general catalogue.

The most common adjectives were ‘pep’ and ‘up-to the minute', with copy-writers evidently

struggling to come up with new ways to describe the seemingly never-ending stream of foxtrots and

new jazz combos. An analogy for receiving chilling news, ‘he gets as cold as a commuter waiting

for the 7.10 on a zero morning in January', invokes the busy working life of a city office worker.31

In another blurb, electricity is the central metaphor: ‘If pep, punch and persuasion are electricity,

this brace of trots by our Georgians is a powerhouse'. These groups had names such as ‘The

California Ramblers', 'Memphis Five', 'The Georgians', and 'The Romancers'. There is a self-

consciousness and degree of self-parody about the idiom, ‘the parlance of jazz’ as it is put in one

blurb. In one example, a particular foxtrot ‘fills you with that dance enthusiasm that has made “pep”

a word destined to find its place in the dictionaries of the future'. In another, ‘We step heartlessly

over the dead carcass of the English language to say that the California Ramblers, in Roamin’ to

Wyomin’, “will get you quick and keep you got”’.32

Some important elements in the marketing images of Old Time records are evident in the popular

catalogues of the early 1920s. The record industry had been marketing nostalgia, and in particular

nostalgia for the Old South, for some time, and romantic evocations of the South and ‘Old Dixie’

were common preoccupations of the popular tunes of the 1910s and 1920s.33 As evidenced in the

names listed above, the regional origin of these groups was an important part of their marketing

image and Southern appellations dominated the field.34 Beyond this, there is a shared emphasis on

dance music, and in the copy for both dance orchestras and Southern fiddle bands there are

colourful appeals based on the physical effects particular tunes will have on the listener. Old Time

dance music induced a similar response from the listener as the popular foxtrots. While the

California Ramblers ‘will get you quick and keep you got', as quoted above, the North Carolina

Ramblers (note that it is only their supposed regional origin which signifies the different styles of

music) induce uncontrollable urges: ‘You should tie your feet to the floor before playing the latest

contribution of the North Carolina Ramblers…Yes, sir, this is movin’ music'.35 The element of

parody, of poking fun at the form, is also a common characteristic of the copy for both styles of

30 Columbia General Catalogue 1924. Jim Walsh Collection, Recorded Sound Reference Centre, Library of Congress. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 For more on the pre-history of Old Time themes see Chapter One. 34 These names were often as fictitious as those of Old Time groups. Indeed, the California Ramblers were in fact from Ohio. They chose that name presumably because they believed people would be less interested in a jazz group from the Midwest. 35 Columbia ‘Familiar Tunes Old and New'. Jim Walsh Collection, Recorded Sound Reference Centre, Library of Congress.

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 100

music. That Old Time, like jazz, was distinct from ‘serious’ music and could not be taken too

seriously was something this marketing shared, reflecting the esteem in which the industry held

both of these novelties.36

Yet this is where the similarities of the marketing for popular jazz and Old Time end. The industry

had to draw upon a whole new set of visual and verbal signifiers, clichés, puns and wisecracks to

make its new Old Time records stand out. Gone are the evocations of the modern world, the fantasy

of the fashionable, inner-city flapper life, and in its place is the lure of the country, a simpler life

closer to nature, and of days gone by. ‘Pep’ and ‘up-to the minute’ are replaced by ‘quaint’ and ‘old

fashioned'. Scenes of the bustling city life are replaced with scenes of nature. For example, Fiddlin’

John Carson’s ‘Liberty’ (coupled with ‘The Old Frying Pan and the Old Camp Kettle'): 'seems to

sing of the glories of Spring when all the world is taking on a richer brighter color'.37 Indeed, the

jazz craze was invoked in Old Time marketing as an opposing force, something finally passing with

the advent of the Old Time ‘revival'. Henry Ford’s Old-Fashioned Dance Orchestra, ‘which has

caused so much to be written in newspapers of the country about the revival of old-time dances',

was described by Columbia Records as, ‘beautifully reminiscent of the days of hop-skirts and long

hair, before jazz and the night clubs moved the bed time hour ahead'.38 Henry Ford had become by

the mid-1920s one of the highest profile advocates for ‘Old Time music’, and he sponsored many

fiddling competitions and supported fiddlers in their careers. The kind of ‘Old Time’ that Henry

Ford preferred, such as square dancing with strict rules – only the forefinger and thumb of the male

could touch the female whilst performing the dance – contrasts with the suggestive and flirtatious

tone to jazz, its accompanying dances, and the language used to sell it.39 However tame by today’s

standards and not approaching by a long distance the suggestiveness of Race Records, the authorial

tone of advertisements for jazz foxtrots often centred on flirtation and sexual innuendo. A typical

‘gag’ in a jazz ad reads, ‘You play this newest fox trot by the California Ramblers. Then ask her

what she thinks is the best of the new fox trots. When she tells you, the magic words are said. It’s

36 For more on the distinction between ‘serious’ or ‘good music’ at this time, see Chapter One, also: Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Low Brow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Mark Katz, 'Making America More Musical through the Phonograph, 1900-1930'. American Music, Vol. 16, No.4, (Winter, 1998): 448-476; Mark Katz, 'The Phonograph Effect: The Influence of Recording on Listener, Performer, Composer, 1900-1940' (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1999); Jessica C. Gienow-Hecht, 'Whose Music Is It Anyway?’; Marsha Siefert, 'The Audience at Home: The Early Recording Industry and the Marketing of Musical Taste'; and Shawn Vancour, 'Popularizing the Classics: Radio's Role in the American Music Appreciation Movement, 1922-1934'. Media, Culture and Society 31 (2009): 289-307. 37 OKeh 'Old Time Tunes' catalogue 1926. Jim Walsh Collection, Recorded Sound Reference Centre, Library of Congress. 38 Columbia 'Familiar Tunes Old and New'. Jim Walsh Collection, Recorded Sound Reference Centre, Library of Congress. 39 Roderick Nash, The Nervous Generation: American Thought, 1917-1930 (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1970), 162.

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 101

like betting a girl a kiss that she won’t let you kiss her. You can’t lose'.40 The nascent Old Time

catalogues focused on an altogether different preoccupation: the re-discovery and preservation of

America’s pure Anglo-Saxon past, still a-flicker in the log cabins of the people modernity forgot:

the simple, dignified folk of the Appalachian Mountains.

Fond memories of music we’ve never heard before

Hear, folks, the music of the hillbillies! These rollicking melodies will quicken the memory

of the tunes of yesterday. The heart beats time to them while the feet move with the desire to

cut a lively shine. These here mountaineers sure have a way of fetching music out of the

banjo, fiddle, and guitar that surprises listeners, old and young, into feeling skittish. Their’s

is a spirited entertainment and one you will warm to.41

The overriding message of the introductory publicity for Old Time by OKeh, then Columbia,

Brunswick-Vocalion, and Victor, was the rather vague claim that this music was evocative of a by-

gone era and should be remembered fondly by all Americans as an integral part of their history. The

above introduction of ‘The Hillbillies’ hits several of the key notes in Old Time marketing and

touches on its central paradox. Firstly, it implicitly links the music of the mountains to the past of all

Americans. This past is typically and intentionally vague, a ‘yesterday’ to which everyone can

relate, which of course it needed to be to encompass folk songs relics from the British Isles, turn-of-

the-century Tin Pan Alley hits and old sounding new compositions such as ‘the event songs'. The

contradiction inherent here, that artists who were supposedly the embodiment of a culture untainted

by modernity routinely sang popular Tin Pan Alley hits of the twentieth century and new

compositions based on contemporary events, is generally avoided in the marketing material for Old

Time artists, but of course this contradiction encourages the rhetoric to be vague to avoid being

entirely misleading. Secondly, this copy invokes a lively music that will please ‘listeners, old and

young', thus widening the consumer base for these records while assuring the reader that while this

music may be of a by-gone era, it is still exciting and novel. Finally, this music surprises the listener

who will then warm to this spirited entertainment, highlighting the semantic tight-rope this copy

walked, selling music as simultaneously nostalgic and novel, authentic but all-new.

40 Columbia General Catalogue 1924. Jim Walsh Collection, Recorded Sound Reference Centre, Library of Congress. 41 OKeh '“Old Time” Tunes’ catalogue, April 1925. Jim Walsh Collection, Recorded Sound Reference Centre, Library of Congress.

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 102

The rhetoric of Old Time marketing put the industry in the odd position of having to introduce and

define forms of music and styles of playing that they were simultaneously claiming to be the

familiar old tunes of all Americans. Victor struggles with this balancing act throughout its

catalogues. Here it is a familiar sound, evoking a memory all Americans hold dear: ‘To listen to

them will be, for many of us, to bring up the memories of many a happy gathering in some little

out-of-the-way place where the lights of the city never penetrate'.42 Yet in Victor's first

announcement to the trade of its incipient Old Time catalogue in November 1924, which it labelled

‘Olde Time Fiddlin’ Tunes', it cast the new interest in this music as a revival: ‘The old time fiddler

has come into his own again with the music loving public…The Victor Talking Machine Company

has taken cognizance of public interest to issue an attractive four-page folder'.43

Elsewhere, in Victor’s ‘Olde Time Fiddlin’ Tunes’ supplement, the tone is apologetic when

describing the appeal of Southern fiddlers such as Eck Robertson:

The work of the American ‘country fiddler’ must not be judged by the same standards as

apply to the concert interpreter of classical and romantic music. Nevertheless, he is a master

of his craft – that of furnishing music for the jig and reel, or for the derived ‘old time’

dances…Here are two more examples of his art, in tunes every American will recognize, or

should.44

This ‘should', with its distinct ring of admonishment, implies one’s very status as a true American

hangs in the balance of their awareness of this cultural heritage. Channelling the nativist spirit of the

times and the cultural cache of this music as ‘folk’ music, ultimately it is the American nature of

this music that is the core/fundamental message of Old Time marketing by the record industry. It

both excuses its presence in the Victor catalogues as well as explains its appeal to the listener. The

crude nature of this material can be overlooked because it is folk music fit for scholarly study and

thus serves a pedagogic function, but also because it is truly American and thus no more

explanation is required; this is a quaint native creation that all true Americans should enjoy. As

Victor stresses of Fiddlin’ John Powers and Family after a long passage reiterating their folkloric

status, ‘No one interested in American music will ignore them’, and again on the same page, ‘they

are as truly American, in style, as anything in the land'.45

42 Victor ‘Olde Time Fiddlin’ Tunes’ catalogue, October 1924. Reproduced in Archie Green, ‘Commercial Music Graphics: Four'. JEMF Newsletter, Vol. 4, Pt. 1, No. 9 (March, 1968). 43 Talking Machine World, Nov 1924, 178. 44 Victor ‘Olde Time Fiddlin’ Tunes’ October, 1924. 45 Ibid.

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 103

Columbia, which entered the field shortly after OKeh in 1924, and also followed OKeh to Atlanta to

find Old Time artists, perceptively called its catalogue ‘Familiar Tunes Old and New', which

perhaps more accurately described the contents of the catalogue than any of the efforts of its

competitors. The celebrated 15000-D series featured many of the biggest names in the field,

including the Skillet Lickers, Charlie Poole, Riley Puckett, and Vernon Dalhart. Columbia released

782 Old Time records, accounting for about 20% of all the Old Time material issued prior to 1932.46

The company also announced the new series in a paradoxical manner, as something that introduced

the novel and new and old and familiar at the same time:

In this booklet, the Columbia Phonograph Company has collected a series of well-known

songs, jigs, reels, and square dances. Most of these selections are probably known to you.

You sang the words, and danced to the music in days that have passed.

Now these songs are brought back to you! They are all new records, recently made by

singers and musicians, who are as well-known as some of the selections they sing and play.

These tunes are played on fiddle, guitar, banjo, accordion, and harmonica by folks who play

these instruments the way you like to hear them.

In this copy, the reader is excused from having forgotten these tunes:

Many of the songs you heard when you were younger, and which have passed from your

active memory, have been recorded again by singers and musicians who present them just as

you would have them.

Songs that you may have heard once or twice in your wanderings; tunes that are familiar in

your section of the country; selections that you heard of by title, these and many others of a

similar nature are listed in the Columbia Familiar Tunes Catalog.47

Other early ads for this new market drove home to salesmen the message that this music, while an

authentic regional folk music, had appeal beyond its Southern mountain enclave. An early

Columbia ad in the Talking Machine World excitedly proclaimed: ‘The Hill Country Music craze is

sweeping Northward!', which by using the commercial designation ‘craze’ imbues this supposedly

ancient folk form with all the excitement of a new musical style, while underscoring its Southern

origin.48 Further into the same issue, OKeh’s ad assures the dealer that this ‘quaint’ music has

46 Charles Wolfe, ‘Columbia and Old Time Music', 119. 47 Columbia ‘Familiar Tunes: Old and New'. Jim Walsh Collection, Recorded Sound Reference Centre, Library of Congress. 48 Talking Machine World, June 1924, 17.

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 104

‘spread to thousands of communities north, east and west as well as in the south'.49

Although the very first artists who recorded for Old Time catalogues were identified as

mountaineers, sometimes this vague description became more specific and identified ‘Southern’

musicians as specifically Appalachian mountaineers:

These old tunes rarely get into the cities, but mountain folk have sung and danced to them

for generations. The fiddle leads the music, the banjo, ukulele, mandolin and guitar keeping

up the swing of the dance. Once in a while the voice is heard, in a style anybody will know

who has ever been through the Southern Appalachian ranges. The tunes are mostly simple,

and they are repeated over and over until they get into your blood and you will want to

dance to them all night. Writers of books and plays, of late years, have gone into the

mountains and studied the life of the people there, but this is almost the first of their music

that has come into public notice. “Ida Reid” and “Old Joe Clark” have quaint and humorous

voice-lines, they are as truly American, in style, as anything in the land.50

The Appalachian ranges had long held a special place in popular imagination as a stronghold of

pioneer culture, the last bastion of pre-industrial, authentic, American culture. In popular fiction,

Appalachian mountain folk had often been evoked as embodying freedom and independence and

the very essence of Americanism, while simultaneously being an exotic novelty, and the subject of

parody and broad comedy.51 However, the Appalachian mountains as an untainted and hallowed

enclave, which retained Anglo-Saxon settler culture and customs, was exempt from the worst

characterisations of poor whites, known increasingly as ‘poor white trash', during this period.52 The

special status of the Appalachian region and its inhabitants lent this music a dignified air that the

common lowland Southern white did not possess, and the industry’s use of this association in the

presentation of Old Time music is what we now turn to.

49 Ibid. 50 Victor ‘Olde Time Fiddlin’ Tunes’ October, 1924. Reproduced in Green, ‘Hillbilly: Source and Symbol’. 51 See the works of John F. Fox, Mary Noailles Murfree, Gene Stratton-Porter, Harold Bell Wright, and Zane Grey. 52 According to Matthew Wray the term ‘poor white trash’ emerged in the 19th century. Abolitionists argued that the immoral slave system degraded non-slaveholding whites by pushing them to the margins of society and impairing their ability to find work at liveable wages, while pro-slavery secessionists countered that white poverty was hereditary, a product of ‘bad blood'. Matthew Wray, Not Quite White, 18.

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 105

Old Time from the Old Country?

The record industry had to combat significant and vocal opposition to the ‘hillbilly craze’ of the

1920s. The ridicule of the music and its practitioners was summed up most famously in this front-

page editorial in Variety in December 1926 by music editor Abel Green:

‘Hill-billy’ Music:

This particular brand of pop-song music is worthy of treatment on its own, being

peculiar unto itself. The ‘hillbilly’ is a North Carolina or Tennessee and adjacent

mountaineer type of illiterate white whose creed and allegiance are to the Bible, the

Chautauqua, and the phonograph…The mountaineer is of ‘poor white trash’ genera. The

great majority, probably 90 percent, can neither read nor write English. Theirs is a

community all unto themselves. Illiterate and ignorant, with the intelligence of morons, the

sing-song, nasal-twanging vocalizing of a Vernon Dalhart or Carson Robison on the disks,

reciting the banal lyrics of a ‘prisoners song’ or ‘The Death of Floyd Collins’ (biggest

hillbilly song-hit to date), intrigues their interest.53

One strategy pursued by the record industry to combat this kind of negative portrayal of its artists

and Old Time music in general was to cast Old Time as intimately linked to the ‘old country’ of the

British Isles, rather than simply ‘Old Dixie'. Certainly, the American-ness of this music was an

important part of record industry marketing for Old Time from the beginning, yet some Old Time

marketing employed a visual rhetoric that implied British heritage. This reflected the mythology of

the Southern Appalachian region as a surviving stronghold of Scotch-Irish and British peasantry,

who had settled there in the 18th century and had remained ever since, undisturbed.54 Exploiting the

folklorist interest in British balladry that led many enthusiasts into the Appalachians to search for

authentic balladeers who could play the hallowed repertory of Child Ballads, these images projected

a fantasy of the mountaineer as a remnant of British culture as well as the embodiment of

53 Variety, December 29, 1926. 54 For more on the popular mythology and the Scotch-Irish influence on the Appalachian mountain culture see: Billings, Norman, and Ledford, eds. Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes; Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind; James C. Klotter, ‘The Black South and White Appalachia'. The Journal of American History, Vol. 66, No. 4 (Mar., 1980): 832-849; Katie Algeo, ‘Locals on Local Color: Imagining Identity in Appalachia'. Southern Cultures (Winter 2003): 27-109; Audrey J. Horning, ‘Myth, Migration, and Material Culture: Archaeology and the Ulster Influence on Appalachia', Historical Archaeology Vol. 36 Issue 4 (2002): 129-140, and; H. Tyler Blethen and Curtis W. Wood, Jnr., eds. Ulster and North America: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Scotch-Irish (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997).

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 106

America.55 As Malone and Stricklin, among others, has shown, many of the ballad hunters,

folklorists, and Northern cultural missionaries who set up schools in the Appalachians and

professed to be fascinated by true American folk culture valued the ballads and tunes that mostly

closely resembled pure Elizabethan ballads over all others. Any sign of American adaptation or

embellishment was frowned upon. This was viewed as contamination and a distressing sign of

commercialisation and the encroachment of modernity into a previously culturally pure, unspoiled

and static community.56 One OKeh 'Old Time Tunes' catalogue cover features an image of a fiddler

sitting on a tree trunk with his dog looking up at him while he plays (see Fig 4.1). A distinctly

different character to the later ‘hillbilly’ stereotype in overalls and straw hat, he is of short stature,

has pointed ears and nose and wears a mischievous smirk. The fiddler is depicted with more than a

passing resemblance to the Celtic mythological pixie character that is featured in many 19th century

British and Scotch-Irish folksongs, and whose defining characteristics are his small stature, ragged

clothing, pointed features, and mischievous character. This catalogue cover illustration directly ties

Old Time to Anglo-Celtic folktales, and to the notion of the mountain folk singer as a purveyor of

pure Elizabethan folkways. Beyond reflecting the presence of actual British ballads in the Old Time

catalogues of the 1920s, this imagery presented an image of mountaineer musicians as embodying

old world folk culture, as pure ‘old-stock’ Anglo-Saxons, utterly removed from the image of

degraded modern rural Southerners with their pellagra, hookworm, indigence and ignorance.

Indeed, the language used in the copy in these catalogues often drew on anachronistic English

terms, including Victor’s use of ‘olde’ in its catalogue title, 'Olde Time Fiddlin' Tunes', and these

catalogues were littered with old-fashioned dialect that evoked the early settler. These include

archaic expressions such as ‘hearken to the shame of the drunkard!', and songs such as ‘I Love

Somebody’ coupled with ‘Charming Betsey', as sung by Land Norris, which bore the description:

‘His two songs are reminders of the olden days and as you listen you seem to start dreaming of

happy girls and their courting swains making musical ballads in the moonlight'.57 The Old Time

catalogue thus served as a connection to lost British folkways, and therefore could be viewed as an

agent of cultural preservation, dissemination, and education, in keeping with the industry’s oft

declared mission as an agent of cultural uplift. In reality, this imagery can be seen as an extension of

the same cultural hierarchy and bias displayed by settlement school folk enthusiasts and song

55 Francis James Child was a Harvard academician who dedicated himself from the 1880s to the collection of 305 British ballads. These became known as the ‘Child Ballads', which were established as the cannon, or in Malone’s words, as ‘the aristocrats of ballad literature'. Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers, 44. 56 Malone and Stricklin, Southern Music/American Music, 20-29. David Whisnant quotes Annabel Morris Buchanan, one of the organizers of the Whitetop Folk Festival in Virginia, who explained, ‘Being folk, or of folk origin does not necessarily mean that a tune…is good. I am often offered crude versions perhaps of some modern ballad, based on a popular or revival tune. We must learn to discriminate between the cheap ‘hillbilly’ type and that which has true musical or literary merit'. Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine, 228. 57 OKeh 'Old Time Tunes' catalogue, 1926. Jim Walsh Collection, Recorded Sound Reference Centre, Library of Congress.

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 107

collectors over the previous decade, who, in their search for true American culture, valued only that

which preserved British folk traditions.

Figure 4.1 OKeh ‘Old Times Tunes' catalogue, 1926. (Source: Jim Walsh Collection, Recorded Sound

Reference Centre, Library of Congress)

Old Time artists as folksong conduits and humble mountain entertainers

By 1927-8 the sources of traditional material began to dry up, and new songs based on traditional

melodies, such as the ‘event songs', and tailored Tin Pan Alley ‘pop’ songs, began to dominate the

Old Time catalogues.58 However, artists in Old Time catalogues continued to be presented by the

industry as either serious purveyors of traditional folk ballads or as mountaineer entertainers.59

Malone has listed as among these artists who ‘appropriated positive images of mountain life',

Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Buell Kazee, the Carter Family, and Bradley Kincaid. His list indicates

58 Music historian Norm Cohen has calculated that, ‘of the first 100 records in the 15000-D series 70 sides, or 35 %, consisted of traditional material. Of the last records of the series, only 10% were traditional material'. Cohen defines ‘traditional’ as ‘material that has appeared in one or more of the standard regional collections of folksongs'. Norm Cohen, ‘The Skillet Lickers: A Study of a Hillbilly String Band and Its Repertoire'. The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 78, No. 309, Hillbilly Issue (July-Sep., 1965): 229-244, 232. 59 Malone and Stricklin, Southern Music/American Music. 71.

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 108

those who deliberately linked themselves to the serious preservation of Elizabethan folk ballads.

Yet, I contend, the industry maintained its portrayal of Old Time artists as dignified mountaineers

throughout the 1920s, and thus many other artists also presented positive images of mountain life.60

The main problem with using the mountaineer as the central image for Old Time is that not

everyone viewed the mountaineer in quite the same way, including the artists themselves. The use

of the mountaineer as the central image of Old Time marketing initially appeared to help the

industry avoid the negative image of rural Southerners in the popular consciousness. Yet, the strong

vein within this music of comedy and self-parody, stemming from minstrelsy, fiddle contests and

medicine shows, in which entertainers would knowingly play with negative stereotypes of

backward rubes, made it difficult to cast all ‘Old Time’ artists as pure specimens of a rarefied folk

culture.61 To accommodate this, the industry marketed another stream of Old Time artist, alongside

the more serious style of the Elizabethan song preserver, whose material was obviously not pure

Anglo-Saxon folk ballads, and who mined the vein of comedy and parody which had long been an

important element of Southern vernacular music. Often these were string bands or jug bands, or

fiddlers such as Carson. Avoiding the image of the comic hayseed, the industry instead portrayed

these artists as reliable country entertainers who could enliven any event.

These artists, including Fiddlin’ John Carson, Henry Whitter, Gid Tanner and Riley Puckett from

the Skillet Lickers, Doc Walsh, The Powers Family, among many others, were often pictured in

their Sunday best, cast as respectable and dignified entertainers, plying their trade at dances and

fiddle contests across the South. The first publicity shots of Henry Whitter and Fiddlin’ John Carson

OKeh placed in the Talking Machine World in 1924 introduced a ‘brand new field of record sales',

and featured them sitting with their instruments, dressed in suits and ties, and in the presentable

pose of a simple musician or country entertainer (see Fig 4.2).62 Here, they are both described as

mountaineers who play ‘Hill Country Music'. It notes that Fiddlin’ John Carson had won seven

fiddling contests in the South, and that Henry Whitter, another ‘mountain star', is ‘acclaimed the

60 There are others not on his list who are cast as folksong preservers, such as Luther B. Clarke, who is introduced in this way, ‘If there is any man who knows the songs popular in the South, it’s Luther B. Clarke…Mr Clarke’s renditions breathe the very spirit of the Southern hills. Since boyhood, he has devoted his life to collecting, studying, and interpreting the music, native to this great section of music-loving, music-creating America'. Columbia ‘Familiar Tunes Old and New'. Jim Walsh Collection, Recorded Sound Reference Centre, Library of Congress. Another is Frank Hutchison, who was always presented in a suit and tie. 61 Groups that performed at the Georgia Old Time Fiddlers’ Conventions in Atlanta in the 1910s and 1920s, for example, used names such as the ‘Moo Cow Band', the ‘Simp Phony Orchestry', and the ‘Lick Skillet Orchestra'. Harkins, Hillbilly, 73. 62 Talking Machine World, June 15, 1924. Green comments on this ad that Whitter and Carson are, ‘sketched as country men dressed up for visits to OKeh’s New York recording studio'. He then concludes ‘The hayseed and the sequinned westerner were not appropriate visual symbols for country music during 1924'. Archie Green, ‘Hillbilly Source and Symbol’, 10.

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 109

most novel entertainer throughout his native hills’ where he ‘sings those quaint, “Old Time

Pieces”’.63

Figure 4.2 OKeh's ad for Fiddlin' John Carson and Henry Whitter in the Talking Machine World,

June 15, 1924. (Source: Southern Folklife Collection, Manuscripts Dept., University of North Carolina,

Chapel Hill)

John Carson was continually portrayed as an old-fashioned Southern entertainer. A fiddling

champion and seasoned performer, the emphasis of the copy in his ads was firmly on his irresistible

dance tunes and his masterful fiddling: ‘Yes, listed below are all the OKeh songs by the famous

champion fiddler of the South – Fiddlin’ John Carson. John has fiddled and sung his way into most

of the homes of the South and thousands welcome his playing so you had better pick early if you

want to have someone to depend on for your social gatherings and musical affairs'. An OKeh ‘Old

Times Tunes’ catalogue reads:

There is a lot going to break loose when this record takes the needle. It’s sure to start the

dancers going in a dance of joyousness, girls will step as light as any fairy, and the boys will

63 Talking Machine World, June 15, 1924.

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 110

have a thrill of happiness as they swing them. Of course this is all because Fiddlin’ John and

His Virginia Reelers are masters of their audience.64

This copy also underscores the role the phonograph is intended to play in the lives of music lovers

as envisioned by the record industry. While casting Carson as the veteran entertainer, performing at

fiddling contests and musical gatherings throughout the South, this copy implies that now you too

can have him as ‘someone to depend on for your social gatherings and musical affairs', through the

magic of the phonograph, which takes the place of live musicians: ‘It’s sure to start the dancers

going in a dance of joyousness, girls will step as light as any fairy, and the boys will have a thrill of

happiness as they swing them’.65 Many other artists were similarly depicted. OKeh’s introduction of

Doc Walsh reads: ‘So great is the demand for him at country dances and entertainments in the

South, that it’s mighty difficult to tell where he’ll be next'. Later it explains, '“Dock’s” banjo work is

as good as his singing. Consequently, he is able to play his own accompaniment. This is a big factor

in making “Dock” Walsh one of the very greatest of Southern minstrels'. ‘Tie Your Feet to the

Floor', an appeal already quoted above, is the heading that introduced a record by North Carolina

Ramblers: ‘before playing the latest contribution of the North Carolina Ramblers, or take the

consequences. Anybody with a couple of feet free when this outfit jumps into “Flyin’ Clouds” or

“Forks of Sandy” is apt to be run away with. Yes, sir, this is movin’ music'.66 This copy does not

mention authenticity or focus on the lives of the musicians, but instead makes an appeal based

entirely on entertainment. You will have a good time listening to this record rather than gain some

sort of cultural edification. Authenticity is implied in this publicity through the local popularity of

these artists. If they entertain their own in the hill country, then they are playing the real thing.

Victor’s introduction of Fiddlin' Powers and His Family evokes a similar tradition:

Fiddlin’ Powers and His Family come from the mountains of Tennessee, with some records

of old American music – songs and dances. These old tunes rarely make it into the cities, but

mountain folk have sung and danced to them for generations. The fiddle leads the music, the

banjo, ukulele, mandolin and guitar keeping up the swing of the dance. Once in a while the

voice is heard, in a style anybody will know who has been through the Southern

Appalachian ranges.

64 OKeh ‘Old Times Tunes', 1927. Jim Walsh Collection, Recorded Sound Reference Centre, Library of Congress. 65 Ibid. 66 Columbia ‘Familiar Tunes Old and New'. Jim Walsh Collection, Recorded Sound Reference Centre, Library of Congress.

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 111

Columbia’s introduction of both Riley Puckett and Gid Tanner to the record buyer similarly

presented, first-and-foremost, two supreme entertainers. The Skillet Lickers, featuring both Tanner

and Puckett, were described as a ‘dance orchestra', and the catalogue promoted them as professional

musicians, of a type.67 Puckett is described as ‘The Sensation of the South', and Tanner, ‘No country

dance down in Gid’s part of the country is considered complete unless Gid and his pals furnish the

music'. Another Columbia blurb for Tanner and Puckett reads: ‘A combination such as this means

dance urge and plenty of it. There are enough vocal and instrumental fireworks in this Southern

Team’s latest two records to startle a seven years’ sleeper into instant and unremitting dance action'.

Yet another reads: ‘Gid Tanner is one of the famed fiddlers of the South. He has played for many of

the country dances in that section, and is very much in demand. He is one of the present day

Southern Minstrels'. The use of the word minstrel in this context denotes the travelling entertainer;

the itinerant musician who moves from one engagement to another, entertaining in rural towns

throughout the South. It does not necessarily denote blackface minstrelsy, although of course that is

one part of the minstrel’s performative arsenal. The itinerant travelling musician is a common figure

in these catalogues. ’Doc Walsh is a great traveller', read Columbia’s introduction of Doc Walsh:

‘He’s so popular that it’s hard to tell where he’ll jump to next. However, we caught up with him and

brought him on to Atlanta where he recorded to of the tunes that make him a favorite at country

dances'.68

Opposite the erect, studious image of the bespectacled Luther B. Clarke, who ‘since boyhood…has

devoted his life to collecting, studying, and interpreting the music, native to this great section of

music loving, music creating America', Columbia introduced in its 'Familiar Tunes Old and New'

catalogue the ‘Blue Ridge Highballers’: ‘Here they are – the Blues Ridge Highballers from the

highlands of the South! When it comes to playing the mountain dance music and the tunes,

melodies and marches famous in the Southern hill country, the Highballers take nobody’s dust'.

They are described as playing ‘in mountain style in a snappy, clean-cut tempo that will appeal to the

people in the hill country'.69 This juxtaposition encapsulates the two types of Old Time musician

contained in these catalogues, the folk song preserver and the Old Time entertainer. While the latter

67 The Skillet Lickers are an interesting example of the duality of Old Time artists. They were both an embodiment of dignified mountaineer entertainers as well as musically progressive rural musicians. Norm Cohen comments, ‘The Skillet Lickers are important not only because of their unusually rich traditional repertoire, but also because of their many attempts at recording ‘popular’ music and jazz. Although not very successful in the latter genres, the group did produce some of the earliest recordings that combined hillbilly with popular music, and made a significant step in the development of a jazz-country music hybrid that is an important part of modern country-western music scene’. Norm Cohen, ‘The Skillet Lickers', 229. While promotional material avoided the crude stereotypes of southern hillbillies Patrick Huber makes the point that some of these songs did trade in these pejorative images, such as the Skillet Lickers’ 14-part rural drama series ‘A Corn Licker Still in Georgia'. Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp, 82. 68 Columbia ‘Familiar Tunes Old and New'. Jim Walsh Collection, Recorded Sound Reference Centre, Library of Congress. 69 Ibid.

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 112

indulged in comical names and employed touches of Southern dialect, ‘take nobody’s dust', these

‘boys’ were portrayed as entertainers not ignorant hayseeds. They were novel, exotic, colourful and

fun, but not a parody. Rather than being comically backward yokels, the Blue Ridge High Ballers

were dressed in suits and ties in photographs and were portrayed by Columbia as simply the best of

the Southern mountain dance bands (see Fig 4.3).

Figure 4.3 Columbia 'Familiar Tunes Old and New' catalogue. (Source: Jim Walsh Collection,

Recorded Sound Reference Centre, Library of Congress)

One of the Old Time artists who slipped most easily between popular and Old Time catalogues, and

whose image could encompass both, was Vernon Dalhart. Beginning his career on Edison in 1916

as a singer of light opera and ‘popular tunes', this ‘Southern tenor’ from Texas did not record

anything resembling Old Time music until 1924, when his career as a popular singer was on the

wane and the ‘hillbilly’ song was on the rise. According to Malone, Dalhart was working almost as

a free-lance artist during these years, recording on nearly every US label of the early 1920s.70 It was

his idea to try a ‘hillbilly’ tune and although the directors of Victor were hesitant, they relented and

his 1924 version of ‘The Wreck of the Old 97’ (which Henry Whitter had recorded the previous

year), coupled with ‘The Prisoner’s Song', became what Green has described as ‘the record destined

70 Dalhart took his name from two Texas towns, ‘Vernon’ and ‘Dalhart'. Malone, Country Music U.S.A., 56

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 113

to nationalize hillbilly music'.71

Victor’s description of these selections in its 'Olde Time Tunes' catalogue is thoughtful and

respectful, if inaccurate. It reads:

These are not fiddle songs but tenor songs – genuine songs of the Southern mountaineers,

given with all their original lyric vigor and their quaint melody. ‘The Wreck of Old 97’ is not

a steamboat, but a railroad song, like ‘Casey Jones’, but apparently much older. ‘The

Prisoner’s Song’ is from the hair-brooch and weeping-willow period, and it would take a

Mark Twain, perhaps, to describe it.72

Archie Green has disputed the contention here that ‘Wreck of the old 97’ is older than ‘Casey

Jones'. He notes that ‘Casey Jones’ was a ‘coast-to-coast hit’ in 1909, and the events took place in

1900, whereas the crash of the Fast Mail of the Southern Railway en route from Monroe to Spencer,

Virginia, occurred in 1903 and became popular when Henry Whitter recorded it in 1923 for OKeh.73

Nevertheless, the Victor copywriter has gone to some trouble to describe these songs, and evidently,

in describing them as ‘genuine songs of the Southern mountaineers’ and suggesting only a Mark

Twain could explain the literary merit of ‘The Prisoner’s Song', wished to associate them with a

hallowed mountain folk tradition which only an American literary genius could capture in words.

This record was the biggest selling record in Victor’s pre-electric recording history, it approached

six-million copies sold, and confirmed Dalhart’s new status as a Old Time artist.

Columbia portrayed Dalhart’s the frankly commercial career to dealers and record buyers in this

way: ‘Here’s a Southern tenor who is claimed by the South and the North, alike. Vernon Dalhart

was born in Texas. Early in his career, he came to New York to perfect his singing art. The measure

of Dalhart’s success is recorded in Columbia Records which sell by the thousands'. It then notes,

‘Dalhart has organized a musical group called “Dalhart’s Texas Panhandlers”. The popularity of this

organization promises to be second only to that of its leader'.74 In a Columbia 'Old Familiar

Melodies' catalogue, opposite a photograph of Dalhart looking much more the image of a classical

tenor than a hillbilly, the copy reads: ‘He came to New York as a young man and after a hard

71 Archie Green, 'Commercial Music Graphics: One'. JEMF newsletter, Vol. 2, Pt. 3, No. 6 (June, 1967): 50-53, 51. For more on Dalhart’s career, see Miller, Segregating Sounds, and Malone, Country Music U.S.A. 72 Victor ‘Olde Time Fiddlin’ Tunes’, October 1924. Southern Folklife Collection, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 73 Archie Green 'Commercial Music Graphics: Two'. JEMF Newsletter, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, No. 7 (September, 1967): 15-16, 16. 74 Columbia ‘Familiar Tune Old and New'. Jim Walsh Collection, Recorded Sound Reference Centre, Library of Congress.

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 114

struggle to perfect his singing style, he finally proved his worth, and he is now recognized as one of

the foremost singers of Southern ballads'.75

The cover of Columbia’s 'Familiar Tunes Old and New' featured insert photographs of Riley

Puckett, Tanner’s Skillet Lickers, and Vernon Dalhart, laid over an illustrated pastoral scene of a

home on the edge of the woods among rolling hills with a big moon on the horizon.76 These three

artists represent well the key figures of Old Time: the blind balladeer, the refined tenor, and the

dance band. In fact, the blindness of artists is regularly noted, both as a colourful biographical detail

and as a signifier of authenticity. Puckett’s blindness is equated with his talent and style: ‘The

charm of every song that the blind musician sings is enhanced by his imaginative interpretation'. In

the case of Ernest Thompson, Columbia equated the loss of his eyesight with the birth of his talent:

‘The explosion, which years ago robbed Ernest Thompson of his eyesight, gave to the South one of

its great minstrels'. Blindness in this context lends both an element of tragedy to the life of the Old

Time singer that is a convenient handle to hang claims of authenticity on. Not only does it indicate

hardship but also increased musical ability through the concentration on hearing over sight. It

continues, ‘he accompanies himself with these instruments while singing the popular songs of by-

gone days'.77 As his release-list featured songs such as ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band', a hugely

popular Irving Berlin hit from 1911 (and a song people would continue to have hits with into the

1950s), ‘At a Georgia Camp Meeting’ and ‘The Mississippi Dippy Dip', the description was

accurate, these were ‘popular’ songs from fairly recent by-gone days, not Elizabethan folk ballads.

This copy does not shy away from admitting that some of this music is merely popular music of

several decades prior: '“The Pride of the South”, Riley Puckett, blind Southern minstrel and one of

the most popular of old-time artists, has recorded two selections that were popular several

generations ago'.78

75 Elsewhere in Columbia's 'Familiar Tunes' Catalogues, Vernon Dalhart was featured performing a rendition of a Jean Acker composition, ‘We will meet at the End of the Trail', who was married to the singer who made the song famous, Rudolph Valentino. Dalhart’s penchant for popular tunes of the day had not been diminished by his new standing as an Old Time artist. 76 Columbia ‘Familiar Tunes Old and New'. Jim Walsh Collection, Recorded Sound Reference Centre, Library of Congress. 77 Ibid. 78 The songs were two sentimental parlour songs, ‘Hello Central Give Me Heaven’ and ‘To wed you in the golden summertime'.

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 115

Conclusion

In 1936, the radio trade journal Radio Guide published an article by Harry Steele entitled, ‘The

Inside Story of the Hillbilly Business’ that featured images of mountaineer musicians of quite a

different type, fully clad in the regalia of the hillbilly as rustic fool or vaudeville caricature (see

figure 4.4). The copy reads:

Ezra K. Hillbilly’s number is legion. He’s been comin’ round the mountain in droves for

eleven years now…(T)he number of hillbillies employed in radio in 1934 is so large that if

all of them were laid end-to-end they would be in the position they were most accustomed to

before the lure of easy money brought them out of their cow pastures'. 79

. Figure 4.4 (Source: JEMF Quarterly, 10 (Summer, 1974), 20)

In contrast to this is the lingering image of the Carter Family and one of the most popular ‘pop’

stars to emerge from the Old Time era, Jimmie Rodgers (who admittedly was portrayed as ‘the

singing brakeman’ or as a western cowboy rather than a mountaineer). In a 1929 ‘New Victor

Records’ supplement Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family are featured alongside the Victor

Orchestra, under their own heading, ‘Fascinating Southern Melodies'. The copy reads:

79 Harry Steele, ‘The Inside Story of the Hillbilly Business'. Radio Guide (Jan 25, 1936) Reprinted in JEMF Quarterly, 10 (Summer, 1974), 20.

Chapter Three – The Curious Character of the Old Time Artist 116

It’s always highly entertaining to hear this style of music well performed.

Jimmie Rodgers with his guitar and his yodel has by now made himself a national

character. He is inimitable and always refreshing. The Carter Family are specialists in just

such revival hymns as you will hear on this record…All three members of this family

contribute their voices, while two of them render the accompaniment. Here’s a good

opportunity to add to your repertoire of home entertainment…the quaint amusement of

Jimmie Rodgers and the sincere harmonies of the Carters.

The portrayal of the Old Time musician as a supreme entertainer allowed the industry to embrace

the lighter, comic side of the construct without turning these acts into pure caricature. Due to the

realities of the business, where, as Ralph Peer understood so well, more money could be made

through royalties and therefore song ownership than record sales, the preference of record

executives for ‘old-timey’ sounding yet new material that could be copyrighted greatly influenced

both the music and its marketing. Old Time artists, and record company copywriters, had to present

new compositions as somehow part of a mountain folk tradition. This was to some degree what so-

called Old Time artists had been doing all along. The ‘common stock’ of Southern musicians was a

broad church, encompassing music from all eras and all sources, interpreted and adapted to suit

their styles and taste. The record industry in the 1920s depicted a character very close to this truth, a

musician who played ‘Familiar Tunes Old and New' and this construct revealed another side to the

musical mountaineer character; a modernist impulse that resulted in the presentation of a positive

image of Southern whiteness by the record industry. Casting these artists as exclusively

mountaineers was pure fabrication, but one that allowed the industry to negotiate the negative

image of rural Southerners and one more aligned with the ideological concern of the industry that

music must serve a pedagogic and moral uplift purpose. This rhetoric certainly did not convince

folklorists of the day; most folk song collectors despised the record industry and believed it a

destructive force threatening the existence of fragile, isolated folk cultures vulnerable to the forces

of industrial and consumer culture. However, some of the biggest and most revered folk music

artists of the twentieth century, such as the Carter Family, came out of this tradition. Moreover, the

sense that these artists were steeped in a folk tradition whilst being adept interpreters of popular

tunes that they then subsumed into their tradition, became a crucial aspect of their ongoing appeal,

from the folk revival of the 1960s, to today.

Chapter Four – Cultural Uplift and the Talking Machine World

Introduction

This chapter explores the role of the Talking Machine World (TMW) as the self-appointed, but

widely endorsed, mouth-piece of the phonograph industry in the first decades of the twentieth

century.1 Analysing the journal principally from 1920-1920, the central contention is that the TMW's

struggle to maintain an orthodoxy focused on musical and cultural hierarchy throughout the 1920s

created a confusion of rhetoric in its pages as the industry attempted to exploit Southern vernacular

musics. The TMW's response to these new fields of recording is telling of the industry as a whole

and informs our understanding of the industry's approach to the niche markets of Race Records and

Old Time.

The TMW declared itself the premier phonograph trade organ in its own pages in its second issue,

February 1905:

The Talking Machine World, the first issue of which made its appearance Jan 15, 1905. It has

won the approbation of dealers and manufacturers who are a unit in proclaiming it “Just

What We Needed”. It contains talking machine news from all parts of the world, interviews

with leading men, technical improvements of value, and many pages of chat of interest to

talking machine men.2

1 For a biographical sketch of the journal, see Tim Grayck, ‘Introduction to the Talking Machine World', available at: www.gracyk.com/tmw.shtml. There is also a profile of the periodical in Frank Hoffman, ed. Encyclopaedia of Recorded Sound (New York: Routledge, 2005). Among the many works on the phonograph industry that draw on the TMW as a primary source are: William Howland Kenny, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); Roland Gelatt, The Faabulous Phonograph: From Tin Foil to High Fidelity (Cassell: London, 1956); Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); William Roy, ‘“Race records” and “hillbilly music”: institutional origins of racial categories in the American commercial recording industry’. Poetics, Vol. 32, Issues 3-4, June-August 2004: 265-279; Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Steve J. Wurtzler, Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of the Mass Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); and Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years, Vol. 3 From 1900-1984 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 2 Talking Machine World (TMW), February 15, 1905.

Chapter Four – Cultural Uplift and the Talking Machine World 118

Having virtually no competition as an industry-wide trade journal for most of this period, – besides

in-house publications such as The Voice Of Victor, the only other phonograph trade journal in the

early 1900s, Phonograph, did not last into the 1920s – The Talking Machine World comfortably

remained the primary organ of the trade until its demise in 1929.3

Although a subscriber-based periodical, the TMW’s main source of revenue was advertising.4 Most

of the major record companies and manufacturers of phonograph products advertised regularly in its

pages: Victor, Aeolian-Vocalion, Brunswick, Columbia, OKeh, Pathe, Edison, Emerson, Sonora,

and many others, took out one to four full-page advertisements in each issue. Individual dealerships

took out advertisements too. Up to 1925, Victor had a contract for a full-page ad on the front page,

which featured its trademarks “Nipper’ the dog and the Victrola, as well as the two first pages

available for advertising after the editorial, but it gave up the space due to financial difficulties and

from 1925 Brunswick held these prestigious positions. Unquestionably, the coverage given to

individual companies and their products reflected their level of advertising in the publication.

Spoon-fed ‘news’ from Victor, Brunswick, Vocalion, and Columbia was common and prominently

placed in the journal, with OKeh trailing behind these larger companies. Paramount became

virtually absent from the journal in the late 1910s when it ceased placing advertising.5 As a result,

the TMW was really the mouth-piece of the industry leaders rather than the industry as a whole, and

this is an important point as we shall see.6

As a trade journal, the TMW did offer the services it claimed to in its own ad, with regular regional

trade columns from Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Toledo, Florida,

Atlanta, as well as Canada and Europe. Other features of the journal included columns of music

publishing news, ‘Gleanings from the World of Music', sales advice ‘Musical Possibilities', many

special features on advertising and marketing, and in its back pages ‘advance record lists’ that listed

3 The only other forums for discourse on the phonograph industry during this time were music education magazines such as Etude, Musician and Music Supervisor’s Journal, and periodicals that catered to collectors, such as Disque and Phonograph Monthly Review, none of which dedicated much time or space to Race Records or Old Time. Besides these, there were newspaper music columns, other music industry publications such as the vaudeville monthly Variety, and less obvious sources such as the housekeeping magazines Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Women’s Home Companion. 4 A years’ subscription was a dollar before World War One and $1.50 after and yet the TMW commonly ran to over a hundred pages thanks mostly to advertising. This model was a new trend for periodicals in general in the 1910s-1920s, when national advertisers became the main source of income and subscriptions shrunk in price to negligible amounts. Tim Gracyk, ‘Introduction to Talking Machine World'. 5 Ibid, 1. 6 Another example of the incredible influence Victor had on the industry as a whole in the early twentieth century, and on the TMW specifically, is the fact that it was Eldridge Johnson who was the first company director, when legally forbidden to use the words phonograph or gramophone, to institutionalise the term ‘talking machine', which by 1905 was so pervasive that the premier trade journal of the era chose it for its name. William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 48.

Chapter Four – Cultural Uplift and the Talking Machine World 119

the following month’s releases by most of the major companies. After 1921 these lists gradually but

sporadically included black blues recordings, and after 1923, Race Records and Old Time. Yet TMW

did more than merely provide these services. As the primary trade organ, it presented to its

subscribers a philosophy that it believed the whole industry should aspire to uphold.7 One of the

central arguments of this chapter is that the prevalent cultural ideology of moral uplift and

refinement through ‘highbrow’ culture, which Levine and others have shown was a powerful force

in America during this period, underpinned much of the editorial policy and authorial voice of the

TMW.8 Historians working in various fields have explored the ways in which the cultural cache of

‘highbrow’ European culture was exploited by the new mass producers of consumer goods in the

first decades of the twentieth century in their efforts to cultivate a corporate image that promoted

personal health, education, democracy, and cultural refinement.9 However, those who have explored

how this cultural hierarchy functioned within the phonograph industry have not given the TMW the

attention it deserves. This was a complex transitional period for the industry, characterised by a

rapid expansion of national markets, increased competition from radio, the proliferation of

‘lowbrow’ genres and, in advertising, a major shift away from the machine and towards the artist

7 Available biographical information for the journal and its founder is skeletal and sheds almost no light on the predilections or prejudices of its editorial board. The TMW’s founder and editor, Edward Lyman Bill, was known as Colonel E.L. Bill due to his rank as colonel in the Dakota territorial Militia. He had previously owned and edited The Music Trade Review, served as treasurer of the New York State Commission to the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, and the TMW’s President and Treasurer, C.L. Bill, was a relative. It was renamed Talking Machine World And Radio-Music Merchant briefly in 1929 before its demise after the stock market crash. Tim Gracyk, ‘Introduction to the Talking Machine World'. 8 Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), and Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music (New York: Knopf, 1987). 9 Cultural historians such as Susan Smulyan, Michele Hilmes, Susan J. Douglas, and Shawn Vancour, have argued that discourses of cultural uplift proved central to radio’s growth during this period. Susan Smulyan, Selling Radio: The \Commercialization of American Broadcasting, 1920-1934 (Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1994); Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922-1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Susan J. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987); and Shawn Vancour, ‘Popularizing the classics: radio's role in the American music appreciation'. Media, Culture, and Society 31 (2009): 289-307. Historians of advertising and consumer culture have explored cultural hierarchy and uplift in various consumer industries, while mostly neglecting the phonograph industry, including: Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way For Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears, eds, The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983); Pamela Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1998); Daniel Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977); Richard S. Tedlow, New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996); Daniel Boorstin, The Americans, The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973). Among those that have explored the effect of this ideology on the phonograph industry are Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow; Suisman, Selling Sounds; Emily Thompson, ‘Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity: Marketing the Edison Phonograph in America, 1877-1925'. The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 1 (Spring, 1995): 131-171; Mark Katz, ‘Making America More Musical through the Phonograph, 1900-1930'. American Music, Vol. 16, No. 4. (Winter, 1998): 448-476; Marsha Siefert, ‘The Audience at Home: The Early Recording Industry and the Marketing of Musical Taste', in Audiencemaking: How the Media Create the Audience, eds, James S. Ettema and D. Charles Whitney (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1994); and Jessica H. Foy, ‘The Home Set To Music', in The Arts and the American Home, 1890-1930, eds, Jessica H. Foy and Karal Ann Marling (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 69-93.

Chapter Four – Cultural Uplift and the Talking Machine World 120

and the song. As a result, the role of the trade organ was particularly crucial in tutoring the dealer in

proper conduct and the appropriate priorities for the phonograph salesman.

During the first decades of the twentieth century, the record industry appeared defensive in the face

of attacks from prominent musical figures and the proponents of the musical appreciation

movement. Many of these critics, including one of the major musical figures of the early twentieth

century, celebrated military band leader John Phillip Sousa, saw the phonograph, and other

emerging consumer technologies such as radio, as potentially destructive forces, not only with their

perceived focus on ‘lowbrow’ entertainments, but in their debasement of ‘good’ music through

mechanical re-production and the proper ritual of appreciating and experiencing musical

performance.10 Although by the 1920s Sousa had relented and had made many recordings, his dire

forecast for the future of music in American life earlier in the century, and his phrase ‘canned

music', still resonated with many cultural critics and no doubt record industry executives, who must

have viewed this kind of high-profile attack by such a celebrated musical figure as deeply damaging

to their corporate image.11 The verdict was still out on Sousa’s prediction that mechanical

reproduction would result in ‘a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste'. 12

Although he himself had softened his stance, the debate over the effects of these new technologies

raged on, particularly heatedly in the field of radio, where ‘musical mavens' as historian Shawn

Vancour terms them, ‘registered a profound ambivalence about the popularization of classical

music, positioning the nation’s new medium of mass entertainment as at once the greatest boon and

greatest threat to music appreciation that the country had ever known'.13

The phonograph industry’s main strategy for combating charges such as these was the

establishment, and extensive advertising, of expensive and exclusive catalogues of the works of the

10 In 1906 John Phillip Sousa made a famous attack on recorded music in an article entitled 'The Menace of Mechanical Music'. He believed the proliferation of phonographs and player pianos were transforming musical expression into ‘a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things'. He argued that music, ‘teaches all that is beautiful in this world. Let us not hamper it with machine that tells the same story day to day, without variation, without soul, barren of the joy, the passion, the ardor that it the inheritance of man alone'. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 164. For more on the music appreciation’s disapproval of the recording industry, see: Mark Katz, ‘Making America More Musical through the Phonograph, 1900-1930'; and Julia J. Chybowski, ‘Developing American Taste: A Cultural History of the Early Twentieth-Century Music Appreciation’ (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2008). 11 Emily Thompson, 139. 12 Ibid, 139. 13 Despite the music appreciation programs on radio, such as New York Symphony conductor Walter Damrosch’s Music Appreciation Hour, the negative appraisal of the effects of radio and the phonograph continued into the 1930s. One example is Walter Benjamin’s famous 1936 essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ where he argues, ‘Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be'. Theodor Adorno also criticised the efficacy of radio music appreciation shows in 1934 in, ‘The Form of the Phonograph Record', trans. Thomas Y. Levin. October, Vol. 55 (Winter 1990): 56-61. Mark Katz, ‘The Phonograph Effect: The Influence of Recording on Listener, Performer, Composer, 1900-1940' (PhD, University of Michigan, 1999), 28.

Chapter Four – Cultural Uplift and the Talking Machine World 121

great masters of European classical music. As already discussed in Chapter One, Victor established

its pioneering flag-ship catalogue ‘Red Seal’ in 1902, positioning itself as the premiere label for

operatic and orchestral material, above its competitors at the time, Edison and Columbia. Victor

embarked on an unprecedented print advertising campaign for these specially priced and packaged

records, buying space in a wide range of publications from the Saturday Evening Post to The

Farmer’s Wife.14

These catalogues and their comprehensive advertising served several marketing purposes beyond

the ostensible goal of selling records of classical music.15 First, they sold the ‘idea’ of the

phonograph to middle-class Americans, who remained the principal market for phonograph records

in the 1920s and were still seen to be somewhat sceptical about these ugly contraptions; second,

they promoted these new technologies as forces of cultural progress, continuing the great

Progressive Era impulse to educate and uplift; third, they promoted the idea that the industry was

furthering the democratic ideals held dear by all Americans, by making ‘good music’ or ‘high art’

available to all; and last, by espousing and promoting the values of a cultural hierarchy which

placed ‘sacralized’ European classical music and in particular Italian opera at its apex, these

catalogues were designed to position the industry as an agent of its preservation rather than

destruction.16

However, in the 1920s, the ascendancy of jazz in the ‘popular’ catalogues, and the creation of the

Old Time and Race Records catalogues (which were a response to declining record sales across the

industry), put the industry in the odd position of pursuing conflicting marketing strategies.17

Exploiting the markets for ‘hot jazz', ‘blues of the deepest indigo', ‘the latest foxtrots', and ‘hillbilly

songs', clashed with its oft declared commitment to cultural uplift through what it variously

described as ‘good music', ‘the better sort of music', ‘serious music’ or ‘tone art'. While their

14 In a 1917 advertisement in the Independent (November 10, 1917, 92) Victor promised ‘to cheer, refine, educate and uplift'. Furthermore, it claimed, ‘Listening to the Victor fifteen minutes a day will alter and brighten your whole life'. Steve J. Wurtzler, Electric Sounds, 130. For more on the Red Seal campaign and Victor’s advertising strategies, see Chapter One; David Suisman, ‘The Sound of Money: Music, Machines, and Markets, 1890-1925' (PhD, Columbia University, 2002); Suisman, Selling Sounds; Mark Katz, ‘Making American More Musical through the Phonograph, 1900-1930'; and Marsha Siefert, 'The Audience at Home'. 15 Black Seal records outsold Red Seal records almost five to one in 1925, although Red Seal sales were not insignificant. Victor sold almost 80 million Red Seal records from 1903 through 1925. Suisman has suggested that recent European working-class immigrants made up a portion of this audience, for whom European classical music and Italian opera was a reminder of home. Suisman, ‘Sound of Money', 192. 16 Of the three new labels introduced in 1917 when the original patents held by Victor expired, Paramount, Vocalion, and OKeh, only Vocalion attempted to compete for Victor’s Red Seal market. The other two established ‘low brow’ catalogues of Race Records and Old Time. Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 64. 17 Pekka Gronow notes that despite the downturn in record sales in 1922, and the rise of radio which in the mid-1920s saw a further decline in sales, in the US at least the decline was only ‘relative', with annual sales staying above 100 million copies throughout the 1920s. Pekka Gronow, ‘The Record Industry: The Growth of a Mass Medium'. Popular Music, Vol. 3, Producers and Markets (1983): 53-75, 62.

Chapter Four – Cultural Uplift and the Talking Machine World 122

solution was to justify the production of huge amounts of ‘lowbrow’ entertainment as part of a

democratic endeavour to provide consumer choice (‘The Music You Want When You Want It' as

Victor proclaimed), the overwhelming popularity of the jazz craze, and later the blues and Old Time

craze, certainly complicated and even called into question the industry's commitment to the cultural

uplift program.

As the mouthpiece of the industry, this is the central paradox the TMW had to justify and translate

as sound policy to its subscribers, the dealers and salesmen. And while this involved a certain

sleight-of-hand of authorial tone and rhetoric to embrace seemingly contradictory policies and

marketing goals, the TMW essentially responded to this accommodation of an expanded catalogue

of vernacular and popular music with the constant, and slightly panicky, reassertion of the industry’s

commitment to cultural uplift ideology. Expounded consistently and proudly at every opportunity,

the TMW threw itself wholeheartedly behind this message. Cast as essential to the ongoing success

and prestige of the individual dealer, as well as the industry as a whole, the TMW insisted on the

centrality of European classical music to the industry and conveyed a strident belief in the public’s

gradual conversion to its superior pleasures. This doctrine guided the coverage, and the level of

coverage, of every facet of the industry in the journal, from company news to the many columns of

advertising and sales advice. Beyond this, it was woven into the ‘grand narrative’ of the industry

and its history that the TMW presented to its subscribers and pervaded its tutoring of the dealer in

the world of aesthetics as well as business, each of which we will explore in turn.

Discourse on the educational, pedagogic, and democratic function of ‘good music’ was not unique

to the phonograph industry, nor was it the only site in the 1920s where the clash between highbrow

and lowbrow culture was taking place. Traces of this clash could be found everywhere during this

decade, where the shift from a producer to a consumer culture continued to produce profound

anxiety about the effects of mass production and mass consumerism.18 In the internal discourse of

other industries, in the radio trade journal Radio Broadcast and in the department store trade journal

Dry Goods Economist, the insistence on the refining and civilising effects of highbrow culture and

‘good music’ was common, as these industries also struggled to establish mass-production and

consumerism as democratising forces and as opportunities for the uplift of all Americans.19 As

18 See Marchand, Advertising the American Dream; T.J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History Of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Fox and Lears, eds, The Culture of Consumption; Ewen, Captains of Consciousness; Laird, Advertising Progress. 19 In an era where B.T. Babbitt’s slogan was ‘Soap is the scale of Civilization', Victor’s claims that the phonograph was central to progress and civilisation does not seem so hyperbolic. Elsewhere, department stores made a particularly strong commitment to the promotion of ‘good music'. For example, John Wanamaker built the extravagant Egyptian Hall in I908 in his new Philadelphia store, which held 1,400 people and featured massive carved columns, sphinx statues, stone reliefs, frescoes, and a large pipe organ. He also built ‘The New York Wanamaker Auditorium', and

Chapter Four – Cultural Uplift and the Talking Machine World 123

Ralph P. Locke put it, ‘sacralization has repeatedly been transformed in the twentieth century into a

distinctly commercial, mass-marketing phenomenon'.20

The argument of this chapter however is that this cultural clash was played out in a particular and

revealing fashion in the phonograph industry and in the pages of the TMW because it put the

industry in a particularly and peculiarly compromised position. The perceived ongoing usefulness

of a public image based on musical hierarchy and uplift, just as popular and commercial catalogues

of music expanded and transformed, inevitably created profound contradictions, hypocrisy, and

problems for the industry. The reassertion of the industry's allegiance to cultural hierarchy led to a

confusion of rhetoric as it attempted to exploit ideologically incompatible markets. As Levine has

pointed out, the sacralization of European ‘highbrow’ culture which occurred in the late nineteenth-

century was re-invigorated in opposition to the emergence of jazz culture in the 1920s.21 Cultural

hierarchy was defined in its opposition to this new product of the modern world, and yet most of the

industry was vying for the jazz market. The record industry’s alignment with musical appreciation

and cultural hierarchy put it at odds with its own marketing strategies for vernacular and popular

music and left its allegiance to cultural hierarchy hopelessly compromised. Unlike more serious

music critics and social commentators in the 1920s, the TMW could not fully embrace this hierarchy

because it had too much invested in popular forms of music. The industry’s pursuit of these markets

required it to give some space to these critical commercial catalogues. Yet the fear of the effect this

‘lowbrow’ entertainment might have on the respectability of the phonograph in the eyes of its target

market, the middle-class consumer, led the journal to maintain an editorial agenda that urged

merchandisers to sell ‘good music’ over popular records. As a result, the TMW is a unique example

of a trade publication attempting to make sense of an increasingly complicated consumer culture

still in its infancy.

Finally, any study of the industry’s marketing of Race Records and Old Time in the 1920s would be

incomplete without analysis of the sole forum for contemporary discourse on these new catalogues.

An understanding of the cultural ideology that underpins the editorial tone of the TMW, and through

its refracted image, the authorial voice of the industry as a whole, is crucial to this attempt to decode

others such as Lord & Taylor, Simpson- Crawford, Gimbel Brothers, Siegel-Cooper, The 14th Street Store, Jordan Marsh, also built lavish music auditoriums. Wanamakers also invested a lot of time and money in the opera, founding a weekly eight-page magazine, Opera News in 1911, which featured a full-page advertisement for the Victrola on its back cover. The magazine invited shoppers to attend lectures on operas that were given by prominent music critics in the store auditoriums, and Victrola’s were used to aid this education. Linda L. Tyler, ‘“Commerce and Poetry Hand in Hand”: Music in American Department Stores, 1880-1930’. Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Spring, 1992): 75- 120, 83-88. 20 Ralph P. Locke, ‘Music Lovers, Patrons, and the “Sacralization” of Culture in America'. 19-Century Music, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Autumn, 1993): 149-173, 156. 21 Levine, Highbrow/Low Brow, 174.

Chapter Four – Cultural Uplift and the Talking Machine World 124

the industry’s approach to these new commercial categories of music. Previous attempts to analyse

and interpret the industry’s creation of these catalogues have failed adequately to account for this

cultural ideology which indeed influenced every aspect of these new commercial categories,

including their musical scope, the rhetoric used to sell them, and their very definition by the record

industry. Previous explanations for the tenor of these new catalogues, those for example that have

seen the direction and development of the Race Records catalogue as a product of a societal fear of

the urban black male, or Old Time as determined by a Northern debasement of Southern culture,

would have been enriched by a closer examination of the cultural ideology that underpinned and

informed their creation. These catalogues emerged during a time of deep anxiety about the effects of

the emerging consumer culture on American society. The response to this anxiety by mass

producers was primarily to cast themselves as forces for cultural and moral uplift that furthered

American democratic principles rather than as forces of profit-driven commercialisation. This had a

great influence on all aspects of the record industry, a fact that the study of the mouth-piece of the

industry fully illuminates. Ultimately, it represents a unique opportunity to witness the internal

struggle of an industry grappling with how to simultaneously maintain its prestige, exploit new

markets, and respond to its customers', to use Roland Marchand’s phrase, ‘imperfect acceptance of

modernity'.22

The World’s world-view

As part of the TMW’s service to its subscribers it offered advice on many aspects of the day-to-day

business of a phonograph dealer. Features on advertising, store furnishings, window displays, and

sales techniques, appeared in every issue. This discourse is highly repetitive in nature and is

essentially concerned with the reiteration of a few key lessons that it urged dealers to learn well.

These lessons illustrate both the business-model endorsed by the TMW, and the cultural ideology

underpinning this model.

The first lesson of the discourse on advertising was that persistent and consistent advertising was

crucial to the success of the phonograph dealer. These articles, written either by staff or ‘experts in

the trade' such as company executives or dealers, covered topics such as innovative and novel

campaigns, general trends in trade print advertising, direct advertising, window displays, and artist

tie-ins. All of this coverage was designed to highlight the crucial role of advertising to the modern

phonograph dealer. In a full page article in Jan 1924 on how to get ahead of the competition in the

22 Marchand, 13.

Chapter Four – Cultural Uplift and the Talking Machine World 125

year ahead, the message was clear, ‘publicity and advertising of all kinds is too important a matter

to overlook. No business campaign is complete if this important medium for creating sales is

slighted'.23 A long article on direct advertising in the June issue of that same year, reiterated this

advice: ‘In these two words, “persistence” and “continuity,” you have the secret of all successful

retail direct advertising'.24 In competing with mail order companies from the big cities, the journal

placed its trust in persistent direct advertising, via the mail: ‘Dealers are prone to make faces at the

mail order houses of Chicago and elsewhere. The secret is their persistency and continuity…a

whole host of large and small retailers in cities, towns and villages have turned the laugh on the

mammoth mail order houses – by direct advertising – planned for persistency and continuity of

appeal'.25

This discourse was of course self-serving. The TMW itself relied on advertising; its low subscription

rate was only made possible by advertising revenue, and its relevance as the organ of the industry

was supported by the breadth of advertising in its pages and its endorsement by companies through

their advertising. Beyond this however, this discourse reflects just how deeply committed mass-

producers had become to advertising by the 1920s. Advertising was a burgeoning industry in the

1920s, and the importance of advertising, national and local, and the advertising agency to

American industries now equipped to over-supply existing markets had an enormous impact on

manufacturers in general, who also found themselves in greater competition than ever in the

expanding world of consumer culture. Victor was the great proof of the efficacy of advertising to

the rest of the industry. The company had been the undisputed industry leader for close to two

decades and was among the largest advertisers in the country; by the mid-1910s it was one of the

top five magazine advertisers in the United States, while in terms of assets it ranked only the 174th

largest company in America in 1917.26 By 1924, with radio eclipsing the phonograph as the

preferred living room entertainment provider, the peak year of 1921 must have felt a long time ago,

and thus advertising, on a local and national level, had become all the more crucial.

This 1924 advertisement, taken out by The Eclipse Musical Co., Victor wholesalers based in

Cleveland, Ohio, highlights the power of the new commercial and cultural force of advertising and

its pervasive influence on the TMW, not to mention the celebrity status of its leading practitioners:

23 TMW, January 1924, 12. 24 Ibid., June 1924, 22. 25 Victor’s internal trade periodical, The Voice of Victor, similarly insisted on persistent local advertising, in articles such as: ‘Expert advice on Advertising’, ‘Advertising-The Foundation of Success’, ‘How to get more from your advertising', and ‘Repetition in Advertising. Why it pays to keep everlastingly at it'. Suisman, ‘The Sound of Money', 215. 26 Victor spent $52.7 million on advertising from 1901 to 1929, averaging 8.24 percent of the company's annual expenditures. Suisman, Selling Sounds, 114-115.

Chapter Four – Cultural Uplift and the Talking Machine World 126

A Story for Victor Dealers:

Bruce Barton relates a story about a friend who approached the proprietor of a retail music

store to sell him an advertising contract. ‘Why should I advertise?’ asked the dealer. ‘I’ve

been here for twenty years. There isn’t a man, woman or child here who doesn’t know who I

am and what I sell’.

The advertising man promptly asked, ‘What is that building over there?’

The proprietor answered, ‘That’s the oldest church in this town’.

‘How long has it been there?’ the advertising man asked.

‘Oh, I don’t know, seventy-five years probably’.

‘And yet’, explained the advertising man, ‘they ring the church bell every Sunday

morning’.27

Beyond the general message that advertising is vital to success in the phonograph trade, there is a

deeper message that runs through these columns about the style and content of effective advertising.

A good illustration of this is a piece entitled ‘The Talking Machine Business Is All Right’ by P.A.

Ware of the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Co., who was ‘a believer in merchandising methods and in

intelligent comprehension in the dealer of the requirements and problems of the business'.28 In this

article, Ware sums up his view of the state of the industry. On the threat of radio and the moving

picture he opines: ‘now the moving picture has its accorded place as has the radio, and neither of

them functions as a substitute or successor of the phonograph'. He then reaches the rather vague

conclusion that: ‘the only thing wrong with the phonograph business is the men who are in it, and

yet not for it'. Further along, under the subheading ‘Lack of Effective Advertising', Ware

admonishes modern phonograph advertising and in doing so reveals the way in which phonograph

men could be more ‘for’ the industry through their advertising:

I have not seen in several months what I would call ‘desire-creating copy’…None of them

[recent ads] pointed out that the phonograph offered the kind of music you want when you

want it. None of them talked of the refining influence of music in the home; none of them

27 TMW, January 1924, 76. Bruce Barton was the most famous advertising agent of the 1920s, not only because he helped found the fourth largest advertising agency in the United States, Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborne, but because he wrote several best-selling novels, one of which The Man Nobody Knows (1925), presented Jesus as ‘the founder of modern business'. T.J. Jackson Lears, 'From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930,’ in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980, eds. T.J. Jackson Lears and Richard Wightman Fox (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 31. 28 TMW, January 1924, 51.

Chapter Four – Cultural Uplift and the Talking Machine World 127

talked of the advantage to parents of selecting the kind of music their children should hear.

In the early days of the industry this was done, and it is clear enough that it should be done

again and always.

Ware was a Brunswick man, and although his rhetoric echoed the Victor slogan, ‘The music you

want to hear when you want to hear it', Brunswick was even more reluctant to enter into new

markets than its main rival and it never did issue a Race Records catalogue. Ware was a disgruntled

witness to a general shift in advertising strategy. The traditional approach of selling the idea of the

phonograph through the use of celebrity and cosy living-room scenes of people huddled around the

machine was giving way to more focused advertising which sold the novelty of new musical styles

and artists. Ware was also witness to the changing shape of the industry in the early 1920s and this

diatribe is in some measure a response to the new, apparently somewhat alarming, proliferation of

smaller record labels, as well as to the expanding popular catalogues of the more established labels.

The smaller labels, such as OKeh and Paramount, tended to sell records rather than phonographs,

and relied on new niche markets, such as Race Records and Old Time, which created a new

contested market as well as new styles of advertising with which to wage it. These phonograph men

who were, in Ware’s opinion, ‘in it’ but not ‘for it’, were less invested, both ideologically and

financially, in the brand of ‘cultural uplift’ pedalled by the major companies, and by extension, the

TMW. To mainstream, old-guard, industry figures such as Ware, these newer companies were not

operating with the best interests of the industry in mind, interests which were, in Ware’s view,

irrevocably tied to ‘desire-creating copy’ that stressed the refining and educational potential of the

phonograph.

Although its approach to these issues would differ from the futile condemnation displayed by Ware,

as we shall see, the TMW, reflecting its allegiance to the companies featured on its front cover,

shared Ware’s concerns about the direction of the industry. Its faith in musical hierarchy and uplift

ideology permeated its coverage of every aspect of the business of selling phonographs and records.

That the industry was expanding and perhaps with it the tastes and cultural priorities of Americans

living through a period of resurgent nativism, only served to heighten the TMW’s sense of mission.29

This mission was most emphatically expressed in the pages of sales advice that made up a good

portion of the TMW’s content. The next four sections address different facets of this content.

29 The resurgent nativism of the post-WW1 period fed into the exploration of American 'folk' cultures and Appalachian 'otherness' by folklorists, Northern missionaries, and members of the musical appreciation movement, and served to undermine the hegemonic power of the ideology of cultural hierarchy that held that European culture was inherently superior to American culture.

Chapter Four – Cultural Uplift and the Talking Machine World 128

The grand narrative of the phonograph industry

One of the recurring themes of the TMW’s sales advice was that familiarity with the history of the

trade was essential to the education of the phonograph salesman. Most sales advice pieces opened

with some sort of introduction to the history of the phonograph industry in America and the ways in

which it had sold the idea of recorded music to the public. These pedagogic passages offered an

official version of this history, tailored to support the sales advice that followed, but more than this,

they presented a creation mythology of the industry to its dealer readership. This creation

mythology was necessarily ideological and selective and served to reveal to the dealer the secrets of

the industry’s past success as well as the keys to its success in the future.

The first lesson focused on the early history of the industry and amounted to a celebration of the

genius of the marketing strategy, devised principally by Eldridge Johnson at Victor, of using Italian

opera singers, whose celebrity and status as internationally acclaimed artists brought prestige and

legitimacy to the phonograph and to recorded music in general, as the face of the industry.30

Unabashedly described in terms of a marketing strategy, as a conscious effort to exploit the status of

the ‘very best names in the musical world’ to enhance the image of the industry, this discourse was

rapturous in its praise of those who devised the plan, casting them as brave and fearless pioneers.

This ‘sublimely simple but extremely courageous idea', this ‘courageous and successful attempt [of]

enlisting the aid of well-known (by name) singers and players, especially operatic artists, and

selling machines and records through them', was frankly depicted as a marketing coup.31 ‘Since

operatic stars, under the accepted system of giving opera', explained one article, ‘have always

obtained an immense and undue amount of praise and puffery, and consequently have always been

known by name by thousands who have never heard, and probably never will hear them sing in the

flesh, their voices furnished the obvious foundation'.32 Another agreed that both the ignorance of the

American public, and the lack of access of most to good music, contributed to the sagacity and

genius of the approach: ‘In those days the American people were so generally ignorant of music that

the names of a few opera stars constituted the average man’s stock of knowledge, so that

undoubtedly the plan of selling music through these names was perfectly sound. Certainly it won'.33

Elsewhere, this already simple story of the marketing master-stroke was further reduced to the

30 Victor’s UK affiliate The Gramophone Company made possible this relationship, by having an exclusive contract with many Italian opera singers, including Caruso. 31 TMW, November 1925, 98. 32 Ibid., September 1925, 65. 33 Ibid., November 1925, 98.

Chapter Four – Cultural Uplift and the Talking Machine World 129

appeal of a singular musical figure. Victor’s most valued trademark besides ‘Nipper’ the dog and

the Victrola was Enrico Caruso. ‘It was Caruso who made the gramophone', Compton MacKensie,

Editor-in-Chief of the UK's premier record collector journal, The Gramophone, declared in a speech

at an industry conference in London in September 1925. Caruso's records were so successful,

MacKensie went on to explain, not only because he was willing to learn the technique of recording

in the uncomfortable recording environment of the acoustic era, but because he ‘put himself into the

operation as a matter of business as well as of art, and not at all as a matter of condescension'.

Compton concluded, 'the use of great, or at least greatly advertised, musical names, carried the

business through that critical period'.34 Revealing a certain amount of cynicism about Victor’s

hyperbolic rhetoric concerning so-called great artists, – that they may be merely greatly advertised

artists rather than great artists per se – Compton’s point was that the industry must acknowledge the

important role this association with ‘highbrow’ European culture played in the establishment of the

industry as a nationally advertising, mass-producing consumer industry.

It is important to note, of course, that to some degree these commentators were right.35 Enrico

Caruso and Red Seal did a lot to establish the phonograph as a middle-class entertainment fit to

replace the parlour piano. Victor had hit upon one of the fundamentals of modern advertising: the

repetition of a single powerful image, in this case, the image of Caruso: the maestro who sang

exclusively for Victor. As Suisman has argued, ‘Victor made Caruso symbolize sound recording

technology itself – both its artistic potential as a medium and its value as an industry', and Caruso’s

name and his face were both far more recognisable than his voice.36 Yet, the incredible contribution

made to the industry by what made up the great majority of record releases up to 1920, – the jazz

dance tunes, marches, parlour songs, minstrel routines, foreign language recordings etc. – do not

play a part in this story.

The level of mythologising in this industry – which was still in its infancy and involved in the

34 Ibid., September 1925, 65. 35 The proof of the success of Victor’s Red Seal and Caruso marketing was presumably in the success of the industry over this period. The value of the industry’s products more than doubled between 1909 and 1914, and then increased almost six-fold by 1919. In 1921 Victor achieved the highest record sales of its history, selling more than 54 million records world-wide. Suisman, ‘Sound of Money', 144. The New York Times announced in 1922, ‘Phonograph Rivals Motor Car’s Vogue’ with ‘6,000,000 Talking Machines Now in Use in This Country, It is Estimated'. It also noted ‘Caruso’s records have increased approximately 200 per cent since his death'. New York Times, March 12, 1922, 42. 36 Caruso was not the first celebrity musical figure on record in the United States, but his fame differed from that of earlier figures, such as Sousa and Jenny Lind, in the way his fame was designed to symbolise a specific commercial product. And yet, although Caruso symbolised the phonograph and helped sell the idea of musical reproduction to middle-class Americans, by, as Suisman put it, ‘humanizing an industrial process that might otherwise seem abstract and impersonal’, Victor's use of Caruso in this way initiated the move away from the phonograph and towards the celebrity recording star and his latest recording which would come to dominate industry advertising and was firmly established by the time Old Time and Race Records marketing strategies were devised. Suisman, ‘Sound of Money', 302 and 305.

Chapter Four – Cultural Uplift and the Talking Machine World 130

embryonic project of mass-consumerism with its many complicated, interlocking components such

as co-ordinated national marketing, advertising, and corporate branding – was striking, and yet, not

exceptional. This was an era in which every aspect of life and work was being re-assessed through

the clinical gaze of science, and new therapeutic sciences such as psychology. According to T. J.

Jackson Lears, an essential part of the ‘therapeutic ethos’ which pervaded the managerial elite and

advertisers in the early twentieth century was self-evaluation, improvement and rigorous self-

analysis, and for the phonograph industry this entailed a consensus about the causes of the success

of the industry, its current and continued health and vigour, and the exaltation of this fact to a higher

principle: a sacred dictum that the industry's success had always been due to its promotion of

highbrow musical culture.37 Nonetheless, what is most important here is that this reiteration of the

key factor in America’s embrace of the phonograph (the appeal of Caruso), served a purpose for the

TMW, which was to educate the salesman and instil in him a proper reverence for the music that had

established the industry. This then paved the way for the more difficult but most important task: to

convince the dealer not only that classical music was central to the history of the phonograph, but

that it was essential to its future as well. This message pervaded the coverage of many aspects of the

trade as we shall see.

The Phonograph versus the Record

Scholarship on the incipient consumer culture in America in the early twentieth century often

identified the creation of new markets, or as Ewen puts it, ‘the creation of a buying public', as one

of the major challenges for these new mass-producing, mass-marketing manufacturers.38 As

production outstripped demand and new consumer goods based on new technology emerged, many

industries had to create markets for products no-one yet knew they needed. The rise of advertising

as a powerful cultural force in America was largely attributable to this one development in modern

manufacturing. In the first few decades of its existence, the phonograph industry was preoccupied

with this task, of creating a buying public and selling the ‘idea’ of the phonograph, predominantly to

affluent, white, middle-class Americans, who to a large degree were still considered the only

consumers that mattered. For the most part this marketing focused on the machine itself, as a

replacement for the parlour piano and as an elegant piece of modern furniture, or in Edison’s case,

as an instrument in its own right.39

37 See Lears, ‘From Salvation to Self-realization'. 38 Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness, 26. 39 Thompson, ‘Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity’, 142.

Chapter Four – Cultural Uplift and the Talking Machine World 131

The phonograph remained a primary focus in the TMW throughout the 1920s, as many of the

TMW’s advertisers were companies that produced component and perishable parts and appendages,

such as tone arms, needles, cabinets, and speakers. The beauty of the talking machine remained

prominent in the advertising of manufacturers, who promoted it both as an elegant piece of furniture

and as an agent of cultural refinement, education and entertainment, worthy of sitting in pride-of-

place in the living rooms of all modern American homes. The TMW, in its sales and advertising

advice columns, frequently urged dealers to make the connection between this sort of marketing of

the phonograph and the way it was presented in their stores. One such article, whose sub-heading

read, ‘Improvements in Talking Machine Stores Show Realisation by Retailers of the Necessity and

Effectiveness of Dignified Surroundings', stated: ‘The modern talking machine is a thing of beauty,

both from the standpoint of appearance and design and as a musical instrument. It is an instrument

worthy of an artistic background, and those dealers who have realized and acted upon this thought

are now reaping the profits on their investment'.40 Another, entitled, ‘Selling the Phonograph as an

art product’ contained tips on how to sell to ‘society’, with ‘artistic literature’ and the creation

within the store of an ‘atmosphere of luxury’ within which to showcase the elegance of the

phonograph.41

Nonetheless, a shift away from the phonograph and towards the record, both to the artist and the

music, was an observable trend in company advertising in the mid-1920s. This shift can be

attributed to many developments, including: the need to sell new products to phonograph owners;

the vast improvement in fidelity of electrical reproduction which came onto the market in 1925,

resulting in a vastly broadened spectrum of music available on record; the proliferation of ‘popular’

and vernacular styles of music which prompted the creation of the Race Records and Old Time

catalogues; the many new companies that found a niche in those markets and often only produced

records not phonograph machines; and finally, a general perception within the industry that the

public’s familiarity with the phonograph by the mid-1920s, especially in the face of the newer and

cheaper radio, necessitated a new approach. Regardless of its cause, the shift in marketing was so

significant that in 1925 the TMW confidently asserted, ‘the sale of machines is only an accessory to

the sale of records'.42

The TMW’s response to this shift is revealing. Rather than offer a feeble reproach in the manner

adopted by Brunswick executive P.A. Ware in the article discussed earlier, the TMW viewed this

development as an opportunity to reassert the central principles of the industry. Taking on a

40 TMW, January 1924. 41 Ibid., September 1925, 42. 42 Ibid., October 1925, 54.

Chapter Four – Cultural Uplift and the Talking Machine World 132

reassuring tone, TMW explained the wisdom of the industry’s marketing strategies, and presented

this development as an opportunity waiting to be seized by the enterprising and cultured salesman.

In many articles on the subject the TMW explained the current trend in marketing away from the

phonograph, defended it, and subsumed it into a story of the grand design of the industry leaders

whose wisdom need not be questioned. In one representative article from February 1924, it was

reasoned that while the modern salesman now has to sell ‘musical reproduction', the major record

companies were not only producing ‘popular dance music, blues songs and popular ballads’ but also

‘a steadily increasing quantity of artistic music in every form'. The decision to issue these popular

forms of music was defended: ‘In this respect they are pursuing a well-thought-out policy of

attempting to meet a well-defined public demand'. As if in response to some outcry of protest

against these new catalogues, of which there was no evidence, it declared, ‘Those who guide the

policies of great manufacturing houses do not work by chance or blindly. They do what they do

after, and only after, they have thought out what they ought to do, from the data which they have

accumulated and studied'.43

The main thrust of these features was that this new focus on music in general represented an

opportunity to enlighten the community to the ‘good music’ available on disc: ‘To-day not a month

goes by without seeing additions to the already quite respectable list of records of fine orchestral

music. Does anyone suppose that this is done for fun, or persisted in merely as an experiment?

Hardly! When, then, we find fine orchestral music being produced steadily, month after month, we

may be sure that the producers know that they will find a sale for it'.44 This article made perfectly

clear to the dealer that now was not the time to be distracted by the large volume of ‘popular’

recordings pouring into the store, but to stay firm in one’s policy: ‘It is evident, in other words, that

those who know most about the game, who have the greatest material interest in keeping their

course correct, are convinced that the future of the talking machine must run in the high-grade

direction. That is the big lesson their policies teach'. To sell these records, the TMW suggested

several strategies, including the co-ordination of in-store promotion with seasons of opera and

concert recitals and the study of literature from manufacturers: ‘Continue thus and the sales of high-

class records will steadily grow. The growth in the sale of these will measure and determine the

future growth of your talking machine business'. Ultimately, the new trend of the record over the

phonograph presented another opportunity for the TMW to expand upon its favourite themes: the

importance of pushing the ‘better sort of music’ and its continuing centrality to the phonograph

industry. The following section explores some other facets of this orthodoxy.

43 Ibid., February 1924, 156. 44 Ibid.

Chapter Four – Cultural Uplift and the Talking Machine World 133

‘Records are Musical Missionaries’: The bright future of a classical music loving nation

The declaration in the TMW that the wave of interest in ‘good music’ was threatening to topple the

supremacy of ‘popular’ music was emphatic in its repetition. Throughout the 1920s, everything

from concert attendance, instrument sales, radio broadcasts, compositional trends in jazz, to the rise

of phonograph societies, was used as evidence of this ascendance and the growing popularity of the

more exclusive record catalogues such as Victor’s Red Seal and Columbia’s Masterworks series.

As Mark Katz and others have shown, the music appreciation movement was strengthened by the

perceived threat of the jazz craze to the popularity and cultural supremacy of ‘good music'.45 The

efforts of this movement helped establish musical appreciation programmes on radio networks such

as NBC’s Music Appreciation Hour in 1927, and as a result conservative music magazine The

Etude, a long-time radio advocate, claimed in 1931 that appreciation of classical music had grown

dramatically since the formation of NBC and CBS in 1926 and 1927 respectively: ‘the public in five

years has come to know one thousand times as much about music as in the previous millennium'.46

In June 1927, the TMW reproduced material from a feature in Victor’s own trade journal, The Voice

of Victor: ‘There is scarcely a music critic or writer in the country who has not publicly commented

on the remarkably increased interest in music of the better type, that has swept like a wave over

America'.47 Regardless of the efficacy of the musical appreciation movement’s attempts to convert

significant numbers of the public to the superior rewards of ‘highbrow’ entertainment, it is more

important for the purposes of this study to acknowledge that the efforts of the proponents of musical

appreciation were used in the TMW throughout the 1920s as material for exaggerated claims about

the resurgence of interest in classical music recordings and the imminent passing of the jazz and

blues craze.

Frequently the dichotomy of classical versus jazz was evoked, and jazz and popular music were

often cast as in direct competition with classical music for the attention of music lovers: ‘Despite

the vogue of the lighter, jazzier musical numbers which the terpsichorean advocates admire so

45 Katz, ‘The Phonograph Effect'; Vancour, ‘Popularizing the Classics’; and Chybowski, ‘Developing American Taste’. 46 Proponents of music appreciation in broadcasting made similar claims on behalf of the refining qualities of the radio as phonograph manufacturers. An article in Radio Merchandising in 1922 claimed, ‘The advent of radio has come as a boon to the human race…Avenues of culture and knowledge are now available to everyone'. C.E. Le Messena, ‘What the radio dealer should know about music', Radio Merchandising 1 (6): 208-11, reprinted in Vancour, ‘Popularizing the classics', 293. 47 TMW, June 1927, 26.

Chapter Four – Cultural Uplift and the Talking Machine World 134

much, there is unquestionably a growing appreciation of the best in music throughout the Nation'.48

While it was often admitted that the fight was not yet won, there was little hesitation in depicting

the ‘popular’ music lover as culturally bereft and ‘popular’ music as a shallow, transient thrill that

was a negative influence holding Americans back culturally and intellectually. The titles of these

pieces are revealing. ‘Trend is Towards the Better type', declared one, another homily is entitled,

‘Records are Musical Missionaries', invoking the cultural mission of the industry which was to

proselytise and ‘save’ the American public from cultural indigence. In ‘Profiting by the Desire for

Better Music', W. Braid White observed: ‘I have frequently in the past directed the attention of the

readers of The Talking Machine World to the undoubted fact that the general taste of the American

people in music is rapidly improving, and have adduced, in support of this statement, the growing

willingness of the great manufacturers to bring out records of the very highest class'. He continues:

The manufacturers see that public taste is changing. They do not pretend that there is

going to be any let-up in the sale of dance and song records; but they do see that along with

the dance craze and the movie craze and all other crazes there is growing up a deep and sure

public feeling for better ideas and tastes in art. We in this country have been far too prone to

believe that art and things artistic are necessarily in some way unmasculine, and unworthy

of the attention of busy men. But a change is coming upon us…and there is not the slightest

reason for believing that it will cease flowing until the whole country has soaked itself in

musical culture and thus has placed itself definitely upon the side of civilization and

against barbarism.49

In another article the dichotomy and battle between lowbrow and highbrow was made explicit: ‘You

haven’t sold as many Red Seal records as you can and will – because people have only recently

discovered the delight of great music. They are finding out the difference between the temporary

pleasure that popular music, soon worn threadbare, gives – and the lasting delight that is given by

the music that cannot grow old'.50

This optimism, this forecast of the improvement in the musical and cultural health of the nation,

was attributed to many things. Prominent among them was the important role the phonograph

industry had played itself by issuing many fine recordings of classical and symphonic music: ‘The

splendid recordings of great musical organizations such as the symphony orchestras and famous

string quartets have undoubtedly been a contributory factor in sharpening the appetite for better

48 Ibid., February 1924, 11. 49 Ibid., June 1924, 14. 50 Ibid., June 1927, 26.

Chapter Four – Cultural Uplift and the Talking Machine World 135

music'.51 The massive improvement of fidelity in the electric era made possible the recording of

larger orchestras and different voices which had previously been lost in static in the acoustic era.52 A

piece reproduced from the Voice of Victor pointed to Victor’s own contribution through its

educational recordings, ‘Victor’s long campaign of musical education in the schools has contributed

to this condition'.53 The formation of new phonograph societies around the country was cited as

another reason to celebrate the improving tastes of Americans. Here the link between phonograph

societies, improved symphonic recordings, and the pursuit of classical music sales was spelled out

with reference to Columbia’s Masterworks series:

There can be no doubt but that the phonograph society formed of music lovers will have a

tremendous effect in stimulating the sale of the better type of records and, with the new

types of instruments and the improved recordings and the great number of sets of

Masterworks recordings which are being placed on the market, it should not be a difficult

matter for distributors to form a society in every city or town in the United States.54

Likewise, the proliferation of symphony orchestras was frequently used in TMW as proof that the

wise salesman should be pushing classical selections: ‘It is said that there are now nearly sixty

symphony orchestras of from fifty to one hundred players apiece functioning regularly in the United

States today, whereas twenty years ago there were about six. Today a score and more of American

cities have annual seasons of grand opera. The schools teach music. Music literally is in the air'.55

The Voice of Victor piece added motion picture soundtracks and radio broadcasts to the list of

evidence of the improving tastes of the American public, ‘Attendance at countless concerts, the

success of so many musicians, the elevation of the standards of musical programs in motion picture

51 Ibid., February 1924, 11. 52 C.A. Schicke, Revolution in Sound: A Biography of the Recording Industry (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1974): 85-6. 53 Victor took the claim records were of educational benefit to its logical conclusion by producing catalogues of music for use in schools and encouraging dealers to target local schools. As Suisman has shown, they encouraged the dealer by two arguments (much like the arguments made to dealers in the TMW about the benefits of selling classical music in their stores). It had both a moral uplift outcome and also established a new, potentially lucrative, income stream. One Voice of Victor article told dealers, ‘You are the great army of musical educators and owe it to yourself to foster the love of music', while another asked, ‘Do you know the advertising value of a child?’ Victor established an Educational Department, run by Mrs. Francis Elliot Clark, who devised a wide range of school and children publications; special books such as What We Hear in Music and Music Appreciation for Little Children. Photographs in Victor advertisements showed phonographs in use in physical exercise classes, roller-skating, penmanship instruction, dance, typewriting, and others. There was also The Victor in Rural Schools which included a programme of folk music, including Alma Gluck and Male Quartet doing ‘Carry Me back to Old Virginny’ and Stephen Foster songs. The copy explained, ‘The folk-song is a natural expression of the deep feelings, daily experiences or national traditions of a people. It is simple in melody and form, each stanza being the same. The name of the author is often forgotten'. These efforts were often praised and critiqued in publications such as The Music Supervisor’s Journal. Suisman, Selling Sounds, 193. The Victor in Rural Schools, 23. Reproduced in Archie Green, ‘Commercial Music Graphics Twenty-Two'. JEMF Quarterly, Vol. 8, pt. 3, No. 27 (Autumn 1972):141-143. 54 TMW, May 1927, 18. 55 Ibid., Sept 1925, 42.

Chapter Four – Cultural Uplift and the Talking Machine World 136

houses and on radio broadcasts all point to it'.

In a regular column dedicated to music publishing news, ‘Gleanings From the World of Music', the

message was woven into the coverage of new compositional trends. In April 1927, a piece entitled

‘Changing Public Taste in Popular Music Shown in the Latest Publications: Trend is steadily

towards Better Type of Composition with Greater Emphasis on Melodious Content', described the

dance orchestra phenomenon: ‘Present day dance orchestras are the development of the last ten

years. Originally starting as jazz combinations this younger generation of musicians have reached a

great height'. 56 It then pointed to the fact that music publishers had begun to publish sheet music of

'“symphonic” arrangements of popular pieces’ as a sign that tastes were becoming more refined.

Elsewhere, music critics were not so sure. Highbrow critics at the radio trade journal Radio

Broadcast, Jennie Irene Mix and John Wallace, had serious reservations about what they considered

crudely adapted versions of great works. Mix believed that the ‘the jazzing of the classics’ was ‘the

greatest outrage perpetrated by jazz orchestras', who should not compromise the classics to

accommodate the tastes of the masses who instead should be taught to appreciate the classics in

their pure form.57 To some degree a justification of the industry’s democratic rhetoric, this merging

of ‘popular’ and ‘highbrow’ musical styles was what agents of ‘sacralization’ sought to stamp out in

the 1880s. Therefore while Mix’s protestations echoed those of musical appreciation advocates fifty

years earlier who wished to restore the classics to their pure and original form, and create a setting

fitting for its appreciation, the industry unwittingly, in its desire to pursue and create new markets of

record buyers, was bringing about a similar level of mixing of musical styles as that heard in

concert halls in the 19th century.58

The creation of the ideal Salesman: ‘It is good business to do so. That is the whole thing'.

Accompanying the sacralization of European classical music in the late nineteenth century were

programs of education, designed to tutor the masses in the superior pleasures of pure renditions of

the classics. Locke has criticised Levine’s neglect of this aspect of the process of sacralization in his

account of the phenomenon, and has explored the ‘out-reach’ programs of city orchestras which

included pre-concert lectures and tutorials on record that guided the listener through a piece of

56 TMW, April, 1927, 138. 57 Vancour, ‘Popularizing the Classics', 299. 58 In mid-nineteenth century American theatres, Levine has noted, it was common for opera companies to insert popular airs of the day as a supplement to, or as a replacement for, certain arias. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 90.

Chapter Four – Cultural Uplift and the Talking Machine World 137

classical music and explained its various musical strains and motifs.59 This educational impulse was

evident in the training of dealers and salesman by phonograph companies and the tutoring they

offered through in-house publications and the TMW.60

In the 1920s, with the challenge to the hegemony of classical music that the proliferation of popular

genres represented, this tutoring took on a new urgency and a heightened sense of mission. The

optimism that ran through the 1920s issues of TMW about the improving musical taste of the

general public was tempered by a general perception that salesmen were not doing all they could to

assist this progress, or more pointedly, all they could to capitalise on it. There were two strands to

this discourse, one of which urged the salesman to educate and foster within each customer an

appreciation for the classics, and another of which directly addressed the education of salesmen

themselves in the idiom and technical aspects of classical music. In many of these instructional

pieces, the tone was both pedagogic and moralising. Often the link between taking part in the

refinement of the nation and selling more records was explicitly made: ‘Talking machine dealers

and salesmen would do well to make it their duty to instil a greater liking for, and appreciation of,

the records of the better class. If this is done…they will not only contribute very materially to the

advancement of music nationally, but they will be able to move a greater number of recordings of

the better sort'.61 In a column on Davidson's, a Chicago's dealership, an employee argued that the

goal of the salesman was: ‘to do our best to sell the idea of high-class records to as many of our

customers…and we find that it is good business to do so. That is the whole thing'.62

Beyond urging salesmen to educate the customer on the breadth and quality of classical music now

available on record, the TMW admonished them for not knowing the catalogues of ‘good music’

well enough, and for being ignorant of the nature and nuances of ‘good music’ themselves. Articles

appeared with titles like ‘Music Taste Varies: How Well Do You Know Your Record Catalog?’ In

yet another article on the resurgence of interest in classical music in July 1927, it was declared that

‘the public taste for music is deepening and broadening and public curiosity is becoming greater all

the time in all that pertains to the tone-art'.63 Yet both the dealer and the public were considered

generally ignorant on the subject of highbrow music, ‘They do not even know that the phonograph

does to-day reproduce perfectly the more subtle forms of musical performance'.64 Many articles

59 Locke, ‘Music Lovers, Patrons, and the “Sacralization” of Culture in America', 149-173. 60 The Voice of Victor had a similar system of dealer education and direction, where Victor ‘brought managed sales techniques to bear on individual consumer experiences'. Suisman, ‘The Sound of Money', 198. 61 TMW, February 1924, 11. 62 Ibid., March 1925, 30. 63 Ibid., March 1927, 12. 64 Ibid., July 1927, 17.

Chapter Four – Cultural Uplift and the Talking Machine World 138

offered to tutor salesmen in the subject. ‘The labels on “classic” records often appear to mean

nothing to salesmen', one piece entitled ‘The Language of Music’ was shocked to report, ‘and in

consequence they very often display an entire lack of enthusiasm for selling them'. 65 This tutorial

goes on to provide a glossary of musical terms that the salesman should memorise, such as 'sonata,'

‘quartet,' ‘quintet'.

Conclusion

The TMW’s approach to the marketing challenges of the 1920s was stimulated by a set of

circumstances, both commercial and cultural. The perceived threats to the industry in the 1920s

were multifarious (with perhaps radio looming the largest), but the proliferation of low-brow

musical styles and the new focus on selling the record over the phonograph machine posed new

challenges to what had become a traditional phonograph marketing orthodoxy. Advertising was

changing, products were changing, and so was the commercial and cultural climate. TMW’s

tenacious adherence to a fading paradigm, and its panicky reassertion of the industry orthodoxy,

exposed the messy business of consumer culture, where the political economy of culture is rarely

determined solely by any one group, either consumer or managerial elite. The TMW folded in 1930

after a brief period as Talking Machine World And Radio-Music Merchant, a name change that

illuminates the changing priorities of the business as phonograph companies were subsumed by

radio networks (most significantly perhaps RCA’s purchase of Victor in 1929). Its cultural mission

of uplift, of both the consumer and the trade, was not entirely lost however. This work was carried

on in broadcasting trade journals such as The Radio Guide in the 1930s, and has informed discourse

on commercial musical culture ever since.

65 Ibid., July 1927, 28.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality:

Race Records and Old Time in the Talking Machine World

Introduction

This chapter continues my analysis of the Talking Machine World (TMW) by exploring the two

distinct, yet interrelated, ways in which Race Records and Old Time featured in the industry’s

primary trade organ. I have argued in the preceding chapter that the TMW’s main response to these

new commercial categories of music was to ignore them and to reassert an industry orthodoxy

focused on the prestige-enhancing and positive public image-creating ‘highbrow’ catalogues of

classic music. However, Race Records and Old Time did feature in the TMW. First, they featured in

the advertising placed in its pages by record companies, and second, in columns of industry news

and news from retailers from around the country. While the presence of these catalogues is slight

when compared to the space awarded to developments in musical appreciation or concert recitals

etc., and the coverage of these catalogues in the TMW never represented their true value to the

industry, I contend that this material reveals first how the record companies, and then reluctantly the

TMW, attempted to reconcile the realities of expanding, consumer-driven markets with an embattled

industry orthodoxy. Not only does this material offer insight into the way the industry viewed these

new commercial genres of music but also the way it wished to present them to the dealer.

Race Records and Old Time were a welcome, although unexpected, boon to the industry during the

sluggish years of the mid-1920s.1 Although the record business reached peak retail sales in 1921 of

$106.5 million ($47.8 million wholesale), a figure that was not exceeded for twenty-six years, the

Depression of 1921-22, and America's embrace of the radio, resulted in several years of declining

record sales which added a new urgency to the industry's search for new markets.2 Changes were

taking place in the corporate structure of the industry as well. A series of reconfigurations, take-

overs, collapses, and new competitors had changed the face of the industry. In 1923, the New York

1 Although it is difficult to obtain exact record sales, Russell Sanjek has estimated that black Americans bought as many as 10 million blues and black gospel records in a single year throughout the 1920s, and Charles K. Wolfe has estimated that an Old Time hit often sold over 100, 000 copies. Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years, Vol. 3 From 1900-1984 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 31. Charles K. Wolfe, 'The Birth of an Industry', in Patrick Carr, ed., Illustrated History of Country Music (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1979), 57. 2 Sanjek, 62.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 141

Recording Company took over collapsed black-owned and run label Black Swan's catalogue and

through the label Paramount carved out a large share of the Race Records market alongside the

General Phonograph Corporation's pioneering label OKeh Records.3 In 1925, Brunswick-Balke-

Collendar bought Aeolion-Vocalion and began producing both Old Time and Race Records

catalogues under the Vocalion label in 1925 and 1926 respectively. The two biggest companies,

Victor and Columbia struggled after the peak of 1921. Columbia had fallen into receivership in

1923 and was bought by the Columbia Graphophone Company of Great Britain in 1925, and Victor

was looking down the barrel of several years of declining sales.4

A significant contributing factor to these changes was the increasing awareness within the industry

of the emergent figure of the black consumer. The sheer volume of immigrants alone – the urban

black population in Northern cities like Chicago and New York swelled by half a million between

1916-1919 and would grow by over a million more in the 1920s – must have made them more than

dimly aware of the potential for developing new markets among black consumers (although prior to

the Depression of 1921-22 and the Race Records boom, there had been scant mention of the

phenomenon in the TMW).5 Yet it was by the enthusiastic response to the first Mamie Smith

records, brought to the attention of blacks throughout the country via the widely-circulated Chicago

Defender, and distributed throughout the South by the Pullman porters on George Pullman's railway

sleeping cars that the black consumer of both the South and the North was born in the eyes of the

industry.6 The Race Records boom was therefore, in essence, a black consumerist intervention into

an arena of white consumption; an assertion of its existence and purchasing power that forced the

industry to grapple with the fact that there was an untapped, potentially national, market for this

music, and this is what led to the creation of the Race Records catalogues. Some in the industry

3 The General Phonograph Company could not secure rights to electrical recording and in 1926 sold its OKeh-Odeon record division to Columbia. The two produced Race Records and Old Time catalogues concurrently but independently, being careful to not compete for the same artists. R.M.W. Dixon and J. Godrich, Recording the Blues (London: Studio Vista, 1970), 41. 4 David Suisman, Selling Sounds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 269. Victor's sales fell from $51 million in 1921 to $44 million in 1923, and continued to drop to $20 million in 1925. Dixon and Godrich, 44. Of these labels, this chapter will focus mostly on OKeh, Columbia and Victor, with the occasional mention of other labels, as the three that advertised in the TMW the most extensively and played the biggest roles in the Race Records and Old Time markets. As noted earlier, Paramount ceased advertising in the TMW in the late 1910s, although Black Swan did advertise in the TMW for just over a year between August 192 and October 1922. Vocalion had a substantial Race Records catalogue but did not distinguish itself in its marketing approach from the leaders in the field. The Edison Phonograph Corporation stuck to the classics and never wavered in its insistence that the superior quality of its phonographs, and the celebrated name of Edison himself, should be the primary focus of company advertising. 5 Lawrence Schenbeck, ‘Music, Gender, and “Uplift” in the “Chicago Defender”, 1927-1937'. The Musical Quarterly Vol. 81. No. 3. (Autumn, 1997):344-370, 345 and 346. See Chapter Two for a more detailed discussion of the awakening of the black market for blues recordings. 6 Ralph Peer later in life attributed the success of Race Records to the sales and distribution system set up by Pullman porters and the economic prosperity of blacks after WW1: 'One thing leads to another, and it was because of that that this accidental Negro recording by Mamie Smith got its tremendous start. We didn't know it. We don't know where these records were going'. Lillian Borgeson interview with Ralph Peer, 1959. (Southern Folklife Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 142

responded quickly, with OKeh and Black Swan initiating Race Records catalogues in 1921

(although the term Race Records was not affixed to a catalogue until 1923), but by 1926 Paramount,

OKeh, Columbia, and Brunswick/Vocalion had each established offices and recording studios in

Chicago, the preferred destination for Southern blacks throughout the 1920s, to produce Race

Records and cater to this trade.7

In an effort to turn its declining sales around, Victor entered both the Race Records and Old Time

fields aggressively in 1926-7, after a few half-hearted dalliances with these markets earlier in the

decade, and this again increased competition within the industry for these potentially lucrative

fields. The battle was waged in the pages of the TMW and, as a result, tutoring the dealer in ways to

attract this new consumer, and ways to cultivate customers for these vernacular forms of music,

became a new topic of discussion in the TMW. There was a strong pedagogic dimension to both the

company advertising and the coverage within the TMW, which involved describing and defining

this music for the dealer, and providing him with its main attributes and selling points, a primer of

sorts and this material functions for us as an insightful list of the key notes of the industry’s

commercial constructs.

Analysing Race Records and Old Time together puts us in a unique position to see the issues these

new catalogues of Southern music created for the industry. Ironically, many of the negative

presumptions about these Southern musics that company advertising in the TMW aimed to refute

was only encouraged by the marketing images the companies were themselves using. First, despite

selling exceptionally well, both Race Records and Old Time were predominantly regarded as minor,

marginal, markets akin to ‘foreign’ records and educational records in terms of their priorities, well

below the top-line 'popular' and classical music catalogues. The perception that this music was

culturally and commercially inferior and at the lowest rung of a cultural hierarchy, was encouraged

by, amongst other things, the key industry doctrine, enthusiastically espoused within the TMW, that

the ‘classics’ must be the top priority for the successful dealership. Second, the musics of Race

Records and Old Time were predominantly viewed as backwards even primitive styles of Southern

music performed by people thought to be outside of modern, civilised society. Indeed, much of the

industry's advertising in the TMW was designed to address the unease within the industry about the

slightly distasteful enterprise of selling music by blacks and Southern ‘hillbillies', and yet of course

this exotic otherness was also a primary selling point for both cataolgues. Third, the industry felt it

needed to tackle the presumption that this music had small, limited markets restricted to either a

7 Alex Van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall: A History of the Wisconsin Chair Company and Its Recording Activities (Denver: Mainspring Press, 2004), 98. Unlike the others, Victor would rely solely on recording expeditions which it sent into the South to uncover and record new race talent.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 143

specific region or race. Unlike the 'foreign' record catalogues, which were marketed as the

collective memories of specific groups of immigrants mostly found in Northern cities, the industry

sought to develop a national market for Race Records and Old Time.

In advertisements and press releases throughout the 1920s, companies such as OKeh, Columbia,

Victor, and Vocalion insisted that this music had national appeal, often employing humour and

invoking the North/South divide to make the point. Of course, the music of neither Old Time nor

Race Records was purely Southern. White fiddlers were found throughout the country, and the

vaudeville blues artists were just as popular in the theatres and clubs of Northern cities as the South.

However, the industry had settled on marketing images for both as exotic musics from Dixie, and

therefore was now in the position of having to convince the dealer that while this music did in fact

originate from isolated enclaves of the Appalachian mountains, or from the Southern plantation, it

appealed to Northerners as an exotic entertainment or as a connection to a lost pastoral.

The two streams of commentary on these new commercial categories of phonograph records will be

addressed in turn. First, I will examine the presence of Race Records and Old Time in record

company advertising placed in the TMW. These catalogues featured in two types of advertising

throughout this period, general 'brand' advertising (ads that showcase the range, superiority, and

quality of the label as a whole) and catalogue-specific ads. Although in the early 1920s the major

companies did not list Race Records and Old Time in their general 'brand' advertising, by the

second half of the decade these catalogues of music were increasingly included in brand ads that

emphasised consumer choice and personal preference rather than exclusivity and cultural hierarchy.

I shall examine first this brand advertising before moving into an analysis of the catalogue and

record-specific advertising for Race Records and Old Time. This latter form of advertising

addressed the principal concerns dealers might have about selling these new catalogues, and

illuminates clearly the anxieties which underpinned the industry’s construct of Race Records and

Old Time.

Second, I shall explore how, when, and why Race Records and Old Time were included in the news

columns of the TMW. Due to the commercial success of these records, and the record company

advertising within its pages that served to educate the dealers about these new catalogues in the

absence of real coverage from the TMW, the journal set about tackling what it believed to be the

main issues surrounding the sale of Southern black and white 'hillbilly' records, and offered some

dealer instruction about this music and its audience. This material reveals the uneasiness with which

the journal regarded these new catalogues and their perceived audience and thus offers us the

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 144

opportunity to examine the internal struggle within the phonograph industry in the 1920s to

reconcile the popularity of styles of music earlier previously considered ‘marginal,' ‘lowbrow', or

‘popular', with the core beliefs and guiding marketing strategies of the previous decades. But first, I

turn to record company advertising within the TMW and how the labels themselves conducted

discourse about these new catalogues.

Part 1: How the labels presented and represented themselves in The World

The industry-directed advertising in the TMW was one of the phonograph company’s main avenues

for appealing directly to prospective dealers as well as engaging in discourse about their catalogues,

marketing strategies, new artists, and the new recordings. Some advertisements designed for the

general public in newspapers and in magazines such as Saturday Evening Post were reproduced in

the TMW, but for the most part labels tailored these ads specifically for an industry readership.

Much of this advertising was brand advertising designed to present to the prospective dealer a

picture of the whole company and its various claims to superiority: sales figures, distribution,

advertising, catalogues, and recording stars. This representation of themselves, as they boasted and

bragged and chased new dealerships, reveals much about the way the industry viewed itself as a

whole, as well as the individual character and priorities of specific companies as they spoke directly

to their colleagues and competitors.

Impressing the prospective dealer with the advertising might of the company was one of the

priorities of this advertising, and this is a field Victor, as the first to fully embrace advertising and

reap its rewards, excelled in. A full page ad placed by Victor in June 1924 featured a messy,

overflowing stack of full page Victor advertisements, all examples of their persistent advertising in

national circulated magazines and newspapers (see fig. 5.1). The caption read:

Pick up any standard magazine of national circulation and you will find – Victor advertising.

Every month right through the entire year it sends forth its sales messages, its

announcements of Victor achievements, and features Victor Records and Victrola

Instruments in a way that brings business to every dealer in Victor products.8

Here Victor demonstrated the company's pre-eminence in the industry through its extensive and

aggressive advertising schedule. As a striking and compelling advertisement for the company using

8 TMW, June, 1924, 18.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 145

its advertisements alone this ad cleverly illustrated both the company’s faith in the efficacy of the

new religion of American business, as well as its command of the form. Victor invested a

considerable portion of its promotional budget to print advertising and as this advertisement shows,

this strategy worked for the company in a myriad of ways beyond simply advertising its product to

the consumer.9 That the ads in the pile are all for the one product, the Victrola, tells us other things

as well. It reveals Victor’s confidence in a narrow, persistent marketing campaign of one high-end

product over a more varied approach. Although of course Victor did advertise more broadly, in this

ad it is proud to present the extent of its advertising for the one product (its most valued and most

celebrated product) and moreover, proud to parade the extent to which a company with its resources

was able to advertise for just one product.

Figure 5.1 (Source: Talking Machine World, June 1924, 18)

9 Suisman, Selling Sounds, 115.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 146

Furthermore, this ad shows Victor’s advertising to be aimed squarely at cultivated, middle-class

Americans with an appreciation of phonograph craftsmanship and design as well as music. The

phonograph was losing its position of supremacy in record company advertising, and as explored in

the previous chapter, commentators in the TMW bemoaned the movement away from advertising

that focused on promoting the phonograph as the ideal living room entertainment. This ad however

is precisely the kind of advertising these critics would have approved of. It indicates the company’s

steadfast promotion of the phonograph as the flagship product of the company. The slogans and

headlines visible in the magazine advertisements fanned across the page, ‘Victrola production larger

than ever', 'Each Victrola is made as though we made but one', and ‘A product of the Victor art

shop', complement the primary message of the ubiquity of the brand and the scale of Victrola

production. Mass production was a common theme in advertising in the first decades of the

twentieth century. Many ads featured imposing images of industrial works and factories indicating

market dominance, efficiency, and vast economies of scale, and yet this standardisation, and images

of this volume of output, also invited questions about the quality of the factory-made product and

undermined notions of craftsmanship and exclusivity. Victor assuaged these concerns in this ad by

reassuring the reader of the singular elegance and craftsmanship of this wooden, cabinet-encased

phonograph, which was suitable for the most cultivated homes. The copy reassured that while

Victor factories were ‘the largest in the world devoted to musical products', and that 'millions of

Victrola instruments and hundreds of millions of Victor Records' have been made: ‘This enormous

demand is the result of superior Victor quality. We realize that it will continue only so long as

superiority of Victor quality is unquestioned, so we treat each instrument and record as the only

thing by which we will be judged. Thus quantity production guarantees higher quality in all Victor

products'.

In other Victor advertisements of the early 1920s, a new focus on the record and the artist, and away

from the machine, was evident. ‘Look at this group of famous faces!’ read the headline of a double-

page spread featuring dozens of passport-sized photographs of Victor artists in the June issue of

1924.10 The copy explained: ‘Nowhere in the world can you find such an array of talent as is

presented on Victor Records. Practically every great artist of today, every famous artist of this

generation. Coupled with a line of Victrola Instruments, comprising twenty-one different models

that meet every requirement of size, design and price'. This ad captures record company advertising

in a moment of transition. Record company advertising in this era began to reflect the broader trend

in advertising away from intimidating images of mass production and towards ‘emotive,'

10 TMW, June 1924, 16.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 147

‘participatory,' ‘anecdotal’ styles of advertising, a transition advertising historian Richard Pollay has

described as from a 'production or selling orientation' to a 'marketing orientation'.11 In this ad the

celebrity artist is foregrounded and yet the artists featured in this ad indicate that Victor had not yet

broadened its definition of an artist beyond that of composers and performers of classical music.

Columbia to some degree followed a similar strategy, and yet Columbia’s slogan ‘All the Music of

The World’ did at times extend to spirituals, blues, and Old Time music. A 1924 Columbia ad read,

‘In every field of music, Columbia artists enjoy an enviable prestige’ and artists are listed under

these headings: ‘the classical, the lighter-music, stars of the concert stage, the dance orchestras,

song-hit artists, old-time novelty, educational records for children, foreign language, race records'.12

There is a description of Old Time: ‘Columbia has an imposing array of talent in the old-time

novelty record field. The fiddle, banjo, guitar and harmonica experts of the hill country have made

and are making records for Columbia for which there is eager demand'. There is also one on

Columbia’s Race Records catalogue: ‘Columbia Race Records stars need no introduction. Bessie

Smith, Clara Smith, Williams and Brown, with others, are unexcelled in the art of singing “blues”’.

This advertisement is an example of a new style of advertising which sold the idea of consumer

choice and within this form of advertising Race Records and Old Time had a place in Columbia's

conception of ‘all the music of the world'. While record companies continued to run advertisements

that appealed to one's sense of cultural hierarchy, and in which Race Records and Old Time

remained non-existent, these newer ads played to personal preference rather than exclusivity and

superior aesthetics. Another Columbia advertisement from July 1927, boasted:

Columbia means many things to many people –

Masterworks (Album sets) of the music of the great composers for the ever growing

music loving public.

Popular dance and vocal hits for home entertainment

Records in other languages

Race Records

Southern Series Records.13

Responding to the success of smaller companies in these 'marginal' fields of recording and the

success of their own catalogues, Victor and Columbia did not abandon their marketing of highbrow

music; they merely supplemented it with a separate stream of advertising that trafficked in vast

11 Marchand, 12. 12 TMW, September 1924. 13 TMW, July 1927.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 148

consumer choice and personal preference. In these, Race Records and Old Time figured as yet

another market these mass-producers catered for. Most importantly, it told dealers that they did not

need to stock different labels for different products. Columbia had 'all the music of the world' for

the dealer in one place, while still being the provider of cultural uplift through the dissemination of

good music throughout the land.

A smaller label, General Phonograph Company’s OKeh Records had a significant presence in the

TMW, due mostly to the success of its two trail-blazing catalogues of Race Records and Old Time.

OKeh’s corporate image, its representation of itself and its pitch to the dealer in the TMW, was

different to that of Columbia and Victor and reflected the niche the company had carved for itself.

Because OKeh relied on the niche markets of Race Records and Old Time, the label was

comfortable promoting itself primarily as the leader in these fields. Although it did at times claim to

be competitive in the field of classical music, its slogan ‘the most saleable records are OKeh

records’ indicated that the General Phonograph Company saw OKeh’s lack of highbrow pretensions

as the key to its appeal to the prospective dealer. Its pitch was simple: OKeh’s records were the

most saleable because it produced the most ‘popular’ records. A full-page OKeh ad in 1925,

presented the company’s pitch to the dealer: 'OKeh Records because of their superb brilliance of

tone and the fact that they satisfy the musical desire of ALL classes of people find a ready market

for the dealer'. It then listed the different styles OKeh excelled in:

1. OKeh Dance records have the volume and perfected syncopation difficult to equal

elsewhere.

2. OKeh Vocal records are the most popular songs characterized by popular artists.

3. OKeh Old Time Tunes are revelations to the unacquainted. OKeh has singled out the

greatest among the mountaineers to record them.

4. OKeh has the finest jazz orchestras and Blues singers the Race has produced.

Your mistake is NOT selling OKeh Records.14

A similar OKeh advertisement included its classical music recordings in this list, which were

presented through Odeon Records, OKeh's German parent company:

OKeh Records Make Maximum Sales Facts. Rare, exquisitely played classical selections are

heard on OKeh-Odeon Records. Orchestras of national popularity play OKeh Dance Music.

Country wide search has secured for OKeh the best of singers. Nowhere can be found Old

14 TMW, July 1925, 167.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 149

Time Tunes as truly characterized as they are on OKeh Records. The greatest Race Artists

are exclusively OKeh. This ad features photos of Vincent Lopez, Butterbeans and Suzie,

Fiddlin' John Carson, Henry Whitter, and Cogert and Motto (The Human Jazz Band).15

These ads implied that the distinction between OKeh and the major companies Victor, Brunswick,

and Columbia was the lack of musical hierarchy in the catalogues of OKeh Records. By claiming to

‘satisfy the musical desire of ALL classes of people’ OKeh suggested to the dealer that, despite the

rhetoric of their advertising, other companies were not truly inclusive in their conceptions of the

world of music. Unlike these pretenders, OKeh did cater to the diversity of musical tastes of

Americans, including blacks and Southerners, and did not let ideology or cultural snobbery get in

the way of selling records.

Race Records advertising

A unique problem of selling Race Records to dealerships was tackling the perception that this music

was homologous, that is, that black music would only attract a black customer.16 This, as we shall

see, involved a down-playing of race in general and, at least initially, the promotion of the idea that

there was a significant white audience for black blues.17 This served several purposes: it dignified

the music of black Americans in the eyes of the white dealer, it assuaged concerns dealers may have

had about selling black music, especially to black customers, and finally, it increased the potential

market for these records greatly by crossing the colour line.

Between 1920-22, OKeh placed many advertisements in the TMW which bragged of its status as the

company that released the first black blues record, and many of these ads made specific claims

about the success of these records among white record buyers. Although the market for these

recordings among the African-American population was occasionally acknowledged, as if taken for

granted, this market was not at first considered a topic worthy of discussion. In fact, OKeh initially

attempted to sell Mamie Smith without making a comment of any kind. In December 1920, an

OKeh ad featured a large photograph of Smith with no copy and simply the headline, ‘Biggest

Vocal Seller, You All Know It'.18 Another simply told merchandisers, ‘To Hear is to Buy'.19

15 TMW, June 1925, 119. 16 For more on homology and Race Records and Old Time, see William Roy, ‘“Race Records” and “Hillbilly Music”: Institutional Origins of Racial Categories in the American Commercial Recording Industry'. Poetics 32 (2004): 265-279. 17 In fact, between 1920-1922, and prior to the establishment of the racially segregated Race Records catalogues, companies marketed black blues records exclusively at a white audience. 18 TMW, December 1920.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 150

By 1921, OKeh advertising was tying Mamie Smith's success to a white market for black blues. In

the March issue of the TMW, an OKeh ad featured an illustration of Smith and her African-

American band performing for formally attired white dancers.20 In an OKeh advertisement for the

Norfolk Jazz Quartet also in 1921, the white audience for this vocal group was the central message:

‘The initial release of “Jelly Roll Blues” totalled a sale of FOUR times greater than any popular hit

in that bulletin…You may be interested to know that it isn’t the colored race that is responsible for

this jump in record sales, the big demand comes from white people'.21 Another 1921 ad emphasised

the white audience for the Norfolk Jazz Quartet by distinguishing their music from jazz and

claiming it was part of black minstrel revival:

This negro quartette doesn’t represent ordinary negro jazz music. It is greater than that. It is

an appeal to the white people to revive negro minstrelsy, It is the old-fashioned folk music

of this country. And they are responding. They are buying eight to one of an average popular

hit.22

In August 1923, OKeh placed a full page, text-heavy ad in the TMW entitled ‘Negro Records: A

Booming field discovered, developed and led by OKeh'. In this ad the emphasis was on region

rather than race. It read:

A large demand always existed for records by negro artists – particularly in the South. But it

remained for OKeh alone to first recognize and appreciate the possibilities that this field had

to offer, and, as pioneer in the field, to release the first Negro Record. Since then, each

succeeding year has shown a remarkably rapid increase in the popularity of OKeh Negro

Records until today they are nationally famous. We are proud of this fruitful field which we

discovered and developed. ‘The Original Race Records’ are the best and most popular

records of their kind today…These hits are recorded only by Negro artists whose fame and

popularity are unquestionably established.23

While this ad did go on to claim that there was a substantial white market for these records, it also

19 Reproduced in Ronald Clifford Foreman, Jr., 'Jazz and Race Records, 1920-1932: Their Origins and Their Significance for the Record Industry and Society' (PhD, University of Illinois, 1968), 64. 20 TMW, March 1921. 21 Reproduced in Stephen Calt and Gayle Jean Wardlow, ‘The Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3)'. 78 Quarterly 5 (1990): 7-24, 11. 22 TMW, August 1921, 35. 23 TMW, August 1923.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 151

mentioned on an ancillary note, that blacks bought these records: ‘the growing tendency on the part

of white people to hear their favourite “blues” sung or played by famous colored “blues” artists,

added to the already immense demand by the colored race for such records, has made the Negro

Record field more fertile than ever before'. This copy was designed to reassure the dealer about the

prospect of selling black recordings. While the white market for black recordings was an important

selling point from the very start, – and we recall that in Perry Bradford's account it was the idea of a

sizable white market for black blues that convinced OKeh's Fred Hager to record Mamie Smith in

the first place –, once the magnitude of the market for these records among the black population

became apparent, and Race Records catalogues were produced to exploit it, the existence of this

significant white audience for black blues became a moot point.

In a rare Race Records-dedicated ad placed by Columbia in 1925 in the TMW, ‘The finest negro

talent ever assembled!', the race of the rapturous audience flocking to see Bessie Smith is not

identified but the implication was clear that Smith commanded a sizable black fan base:

Columbia rightly claims leadership in the negro record field. For, where is there a more

popular – yes, worshipped celebrity than Bessie Smith, who records exclusively for

Columbia? It’s a fact that the police have to be mobilized to handle the crowds waiting

outside the theatre where she is to appear. And when she sings – well, her audience is in a

trance of ecstasy. The fact is that the finest talent among colored artists records exclusively

for Columbia. You are always sure to have just the music you want, when you want it, for

your customers.24

In January 1925, a Race Records ad for Ajax Records, a Canadian-owned company run in the USA

by disc record pioneer Emile Berliner's son H. S. Berliner, tackled the issue head-on: ‘Wide-awake

phonograph dealers, all over the country, are becoming more and more alive to the potential

possibilities in the fast-growing Negro population and the musical demands of this special group.

Wherever there are Negroes, Phonograph dealers can “tap” an amazingly rich market with very

little effort'.25 This was fast becoming a major new market for Northern record companies and many

of them were advertising heavily in the black press in an attempt to corner the market. As a result,

the TMW could no longer ignore it. The journal therefore began to address in its columns the kind

of claims made by Ajax in this ad about the potential of this field for phonograph dealers, and this

we shall explore shortly.

24 TMW, April 1925, 93. 25 Ibid., January 1925, 143. Ajax picked up Mamie Smith when she was dropped by OKeh at the end of 1923 after being superseded by the bluesier Sara Martin.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 152

Old Time advertising: ‘these records have got that “something” that everybody wants'

The advertising placed by record companies in the TMW for Old Time artists and their new

catalogues of ‘Old Familiar Tunes', ‘The Song of the Hills and Plains', ‘Old Time Tunes’ etc.,

served to sell the new catalogue to dealerships in much the same way they had sold Race Records.

They aimed to introduce the music, the market, and the selling points of these records to the dealer,

while insisting on the superiority of their own catalogues over the others on the grounds of

authenticity, talent, and range of artists. While the race of the potential consumer of Old Time

records was not a central issue as it was for Race Records (the black audience for Southern

‘hillbilly’ music was never discussed) the companies had to convince the dealer that the appeal of

this music, like Race Records, was not confined to a particular region or section of the country, i.e.

the South, or to a particular stratum of the population or ‘class’ of person. To do this, and to

challenge the assumption that only Southerners would buy recordings of Old Time fiddlers and

mountain balladeers, the companies employed the cultural trope of the North/South divide and the

oppositional figures of the Yankee and the hillbilly, to insist on the national market for this music.

In May 1924, Columbia advertised releases by Gid Tanner and Riley Puckett. It first explained that

Tanner and Puckett came, ‘fresh from the mountains of Georgia, to make these records for

Columbia', and then assured the reader, ‘No Southerner can hear them and go away without them.

And it will take a pretty hard-shelled Yankee to leave them. The fact is that these records have got

that “something” that everybody wants'.26 In June Columbia they went further by suggesting that

not only would Yankees struggle to leave them, they were in fact already buying them in substantial

numbers: ‘The fiddle and guitar craze is sweeping northward!’ This claim, which is also cited in

Chapter One, underscored just how thoroughly associated with the South this music had already

become, regardless of the existence of fiddlers and guitar players throughout the country. This copy

implied that it was the Northern market that needed to be created for this Southern music, as the

Southern one was already naturally there.27 Again, as with Mamie Smith, all the dealer needed to

do, it was said, was to hear this music and they would be convinced of its success: ‘The records of

these quaint musicians which are listed here need only to be heard to convince you that they will

“go over big”'.

26 TMW, May 1924, 183. 27 Ibid., June 1924, 17.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 153

OKeh made similar claims about its discovery of Old Time as it did about Race Records, and like

Columbia it stressed the national market for this music beyond its apparent homeland in the

Southern mountains. It introduced the first recordings by Fiddlin' John Carson and Henry Whitter in

this way:

These two mountaineers were discovered by OKeh! Seeing the recording possibilities in

their quaint style and their 'Old Time Pieces' OKeh recorded some of their selections and at

the same time uncovered a brand new field for record sales…Another mountain star is

Henry Whitter. Throughout his native hills he is acclaimed the most novel entertainer for he

plays a harmonica and a guitar at the same time and never misses a note and in between

accompanies himself when he sings those quaint, 'Old Time Pieces'…The craze for this 'Hill

Country Music' has spread to thousands of communities north, east and west as well as in

the south and the fame of these artists is ever increasing. And this again gives OKeh Dealers

another new field discovered, originated and made possible by the manufacturers of OKeh

Records.28

In Nov 1924, Victor announced its entry into the Old Time market to the trade and freely conceded

that this was a consumer driven phenomenon that the company was merely responding to:

The old time fiddler has come into his own again with the music loving public and this fact

is reflected in the demand for records of the music and the old time fiddlers. The Victor

Talking Machine Company has taken cognizance of public interest to issue an attractive

four-page folder for dealer distribution with a cover design showing the fiddler presiding

over the old time barn dance, and a caption of 'Olde Time Fiddlin’ Tunes'.

In other ads the record companies took it upon themselves to introduce the song forms of Old Time

music to the TMW’s readership, and in particular the high-selling 'event song' was given special

attention. Discussed in more depth in Chapter Three, the event song was a topical 'old timey'

sounding tune with often contemporary, or at least turn-of-the-century, subject matter, relating

tragedies of the worker in the industrial age. Some of these songs had been in circulation for some

time and had become staples of the Southern 'common stock' of material songsters and entertainers

drew upon. Others, due to the demand from record executives for 'new' un-copyrighted material,

were written in response to new industrial accidents and events seized upon by the press.

Recordings of events songs sold incredibly well in the mid-1920s. Vernon Dalhart’s ‘The Prisoner’s

28 TMW, June 1924.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 154

Song,' which was by recorded by various labels, remained at the top of the best seller lists for over

two years from 1924 and was then became one of the best-selling vocal records and songs of all

time.29 Vernon Dalhart's version of the 'The Death of Floyd Collins' also sold over a million copies.

This event song was written by Andrew Jenkins and his daughter Irene and was first given to

Carson to record for OKeh within 26 days of Collins' demise in a sand cave in Kentucky.30 In a

November 1924 supplement Victor described the event song in this way:

Popular songs of recent American tragedies. They belong with the old fashioned penny-

ballad, hobo-song, or 'come-all ye' of hymnodists. They are not productions of, or for, the

cabaret or the vaudeville stage, but for the roundhouse, the watertank, the caboose, or the

village fire-station. Both have splendid simple tunes, in which the guitar accompanies the

voice, the violin occasionally adding pathos. These songs are more than things for passing

amusement; they are chronicles of the times, by unlettered and never self-conscious

chroniclers.31

Unable to describe these obviously contemporary compositions as relics of a by-gone era, this copy

goes to some lengths to explain that these songs are not professional compositions but authentic

artefacts of the lives of working-class Americans, which had merit due to their simplicity and

directness of expression. Described in this way, these songs were attributed a significance, appeal

and resonance deeper than the insubstantial popular tunes of the day. While this ad did not mention

the word 'folk', it was certainly gesturing towards a definition of this music as a contemporary,

almost spontaneous 'folk' form, and one, due to its occasionally extremely high record sales, that

should be respected as such by the dealer.

Part Two: The TMW speaks up: The coverage of Race Records and Old Time

Selling Black Blues: To Whites or Blacks?

Although the Talking Machine World’s coverage of these new catalogues was scant and begrudging,

29 Sanjek, 100. 30 Archie Green, 'Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol'. Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 78, No. 309, Hillbilly Issue (Jul-Sep, 1965): 204-228, 218. 31 Ibid., 219. Green notes in his footnotes that Jim Walsh believed that James Edward Richardson, the Victor supplement writer between 1917-28, was the best in the business.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 155

it echoed faithfully the goals of record company advertising by attempting to convince dealers of

the worthiness and financially-rewarding nature of the market for Race Records and Old Time. In

fact, a significant portion of this coverage is comprised of company press releases embellished with

cursory comment from TMW staff writers. The principal aim of these pieces was to introduce, and

sell, the main characteristics of this exotic music to dealers and to offer advice on ways to develop

the market for it. This involved either an emphasis on the link to authentic American folk culture, or

professionalism and success in vaudeville, and the insistence that there was a national market for it

beyond its regional birthplace. Because for the first two years the industry marketed black female

vaudeville blues singers at Northern white consumers, the TMW’s coverage over 1920-21 was

aimed at this market, and yet this coverage established much of the tone of the TMW’s approach to

Race Records for the rest of decade. For example, as we shall see, the noticeable absence of racial

signifiers in the first coverage of Mamie Smith recordings in 1920-1 is carried throughout the 1920s

in the TMW which, like the companies themselves, chose to concentrate on her popularity and

professionalism instead of race, in a bid to assuage the concerns white dealers had about pedalling

black products. However, as Race Records established itself as a profitable, even key catalogue for

the major companies, there was an increasing acknowledgement of the black consumer and the

TMW began to publish the occasional article pertaining to the new proposition of selling to black

customers.

It cannot be forgotten that this was not a relished proposition, but one largely forced upon the

industry by black consumerism. Not only were urban black communities of Northern cities

continuing to swell throughout the 1920s, but these communities were instilled with a race

consciousness and a support of black business which made itself felt in the marketplace. The belief

that 'Black capitalism' and successful black commercial enterprise could counter white racism,

achieve the 'separate but equal' ideal in the 'black metropolis', can be directly linked to this black

intervention in the pages of a white-run industry trade journal.32 This idea had been in circulation

for some time, coalescing around the accommodationist philosophy extolled by Booker T.

Washington at the turn of the century, and prevailing as a shared principle into the 1920s in

disparate black movements, from the Garveyites to the socialist-leaning writers of the Messenger

and the 'New Negro' generation. Robert Abbott's promotional campaign in the Defender for the first

Mamie Smith records had directly influenced the formation of Race Records catalogues by showing

the industry that blacks wanted records of, and by, their own. As we shall see in Chapter Six, Abbott

did not get his own way with the shape and sound of these catalogues, but working-class blacks

32 Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 148.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 156

responded anyway to the vaudeville singers the industry recorded, and the black press begrudgingly

supported these examples of black success in a white industry. As already noted, it was the Pullman

porters selling records on their routes through the South, and record dealerships from around the

country reporting greatly increased business with black customers in the TMW, that showed the

industry there was an untapped market for these records. The TMW could no longer entirely ignore

the black consumer who, while by no means enjoying their fair share 1920's prosperity, were

finding work in mass production industries in urban centres, in both the North and the South, and

were determined to enjoy the new technologies and mass-produced goods of the modern era.33

There was some discussion of the market amongst blacks for records in the TMW long before the

Race Records explosion, in fact as far back as 1913 a black salesman argued, ‘the black man is

greatly misunderstood. He is not nearly so ignorant and unappreciative as the world in general

would have us believe'. He went on to suggest that there was ‘a really good trade among these

people', particularly among urban Blacks in the North, and there was a photograph of a baby

holding an Edison Blue Amberola Cylinder package over the caption, ‘the Black and the Blue –

Baby wants it'.34 In 1920, B. F. Bibighaus, a distributor for Victor in Atlanta, Georgia, argued in an

article entitled ‘Negroes as Red Seal Buyers’:

I believe that if a dealer catered to the natural cravings of the negro for ‘close harmony’ and

aimed his Red Seal drive by selecting music distinguished by striking harmonic treatment he

would go far toward supplementing the present craze for blues by a more tractable demand

for Red Seal and other records. But, as I have said before, I have never found anyone who

has made a determined and intelligent effort in this direction.35

While this piece is concerned with cultivating an interest in classical music amongst black

consumers, it also contains a clear admission that blacks were buying blues records in significant

numbers and there was a sizable market to be captured if one was to use a 'determined and

intelligent' method of capturing it. Bibighaus concluded that the phonograph dealer could do better

with black customers with the right approach, for ‘the negro is naturally musical and will often buy

music before he will buy bread'.

33 Cohen argues that 'Mass culture – chain stores, brand goods, popular music – offered blacks the ingredients from which to construct a new, urban black culture'. Blacks therefore willingly participated in the mass market, attracted to the standardised goods at chain stores which greatly reduced the possibility of being a victim of discrimination by merchants, but also adapted it and responded to it in a manner that reflected their own agenda and race consciousness. Cohen, 147. 34 TMW, September 1913, 26. 35 Ibid., October 1920, 77.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 157

By 1923, the acknowledgement of the new market for records by ‘colored singers’ had become

commonplace in the TMW, with the race of these artists even occasionally being a subject worthy of

comment – a marker of authenticity in a field previously dominated by white singers. Much of this

coverage had, up to this point, followed record company marketing by focusing on the white

audience for this music. ‘It is interesting to note', read one article, 'that although Bessie Smith sings

selections written especially for the colored trade and generally written by colored composers, her

Columbia records enjoy a considerable demand among white people. This has been especially true

among professional white entertainers, who seem to recognize and appreciate her unique artistry'.36

As noted in relation to record company advertising, these reports served the dual purposes of

dignifying this field in the eyes of the dealer as well as increasing its attractiveness as a product,

with the prospect of selling to whites rather than blacks. However, with the launch of the first Race

Records catalogue by OKeh that year, the TMW began to comment more pointedly about record

buyers amongst the ‘colored’ population, leaning heavily, as this coverage did, on the press releases

provided from companies: ‘Columbia dealers report large sales among the colored population of the

records made by Bessie Smith, colored artist', the TMW announced in August in an article entitled

‘Records by Colored Artists Popular'. This article continued, ‘Not only are they popular in the city,

but also throughout the State'.37 Following the appearance of several banner ads placed by

Columbia for Bessie Smith throughout 1923, there is a piece on the success of the Bessie Smith

Columbia records which stresses the now 'country-wide' appeal of black blues records:

the sales department of the Columbia Graphophone Co., New York, reports an exceptional

increase in the sale of records by Miss Bessie Smith, exclusive Columbia artist and one of

the most popular singers of “blues” selections now making records. Columbia dealers

everywhere are featuring records by Bessie Smith to excellent advantage, particularly in

view of the country-wide demand for records of this type.38

In Sept 1923, Victor’s move into the market was announced with a vague headline which speaks

volumes: ‘Victor Records By Race Artists: Special Release of Three Records by Colored Artists Is

Particularly Timely'. Timely indeed, upon the realisation that blacks were routinely sending the sale

of these records into six figures.39 The TMW reported, ‘in view of the particularly growing interest

36 TMW, January 1923. In the vaudeville theatres of New York, figures such as Irving Berlin had been publicly praising black performers and attending, and poaching from, black musical comedy for some time. 37 Ibid., August 1923. 38 Ibid. 39 According to Dixon and Godrich the average blues or gospel record sold around 10,000 copies, but 'hits' often sold over a million. Dixon and Godrich, 60.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 158

in records by colored artists, termed by some manufacturers “race” records, a special release of

three records of that type by the Victor Co., is most timely'.40 In Jan 1924, the TMW announced

‘Popular Colored Singer Renews Columbia Exclusive Contract – Records Enjoying Wide and

Steadily Increasing Popularity'.41 This article, announcing Bessie Smith’s renewed contract with

Columbia reported: ‘This popular singer of blues and other selections appealing to the colored

population is one of the highest priced entertainers in the colored vaudeville field'. Her status as the

highest priced entertainers in the coloured vaudeville field does not however compromise her

authentic Southern-ness, as the article goes on to describe her style in these terms, ‘Miss Smith is

the possessor of a voice of that peculiarly desirable quality for which the old-fashioned colored

folks of the South were noted'.

While some acknowledgement of race and of black support for these artists crept in to the coverage

of Race Records in the TMW in the mid-1920s, the emphasis in the occasional TMW piece on Race

Records stars still tended to downplay race and focus on talent, professionalism and vaudeville

success. From the first notice that announced Mamie Smith’s contract with General Phonograph in

October 1920, which read: ‘Mamie Smith, Whose “Blues” Songs Are So Popular, Joins General

Phonograph Corp. Roster Of Artists – Many Jobbers Make Calls', the practice of omitting race was

established.42 An article on Ethel Waters in June 1925 did not mention that she was black or that she

sang the blues, rather she is described as a vaudeville star. She is praised for the ‘clearness of her

enunciation and inimitable style of delivery'.43 A long article about Clara Smith's sold out

performances at the Douglas Theatre in Macon, Georgia, did not once mention that Smith was

‘colored', and while it did identify her as a ’blues’ artist, this term did not necessarily signify

blackness in the 1920s.44 Sophie Tucker, a Russian-born singer, was regularly billed as 'Queen of

the blues' by OKeh in advertisements throughout the 1920s. The signifier ‘blues artist’ or

‘vaudeville artist’ was evidently considered preferable to racial categories such as ‘colored artist', as

if, unless pertinent to the story, it was more palatable to define these artists by their music, or by the

interest amongst whites in this music, than by their race.

How to sell to black customers

40 The three records were by Ethel Ridley with Bradford’s 'Jazz Phools', James T. Johnson, and Rosa Henderson and Lizzie Miles. 70. 41 TMW, January 1924. 42 Ibid., October 1920. 43 Ibid., June 1925, 133. 44 Ibid., February 1924, 70.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 159

The sales advice for the Race Records market centred on practical suggestions about window

displays, in-store promotion, and local advertising. While most advertising advice bemoaned the

lack of attention paid to good taste and the refining qualities of the phonograph, and coverage of

innovative advertising for popular music was often tempered with advice on how to apply similar

methods to ‘good music', novel window displays featuring the latest Bessie Smith record received

coverage and praise for their ingenuity.45

The discussion of novel Race Records window displays reveals the willingness of white dealerships

to promote this form of music, and even give it pride-of-place, representing the whole store, in their

window. In 1924 the Kahn Furniture Company of Memphis was praised for its ‘Clever Columbia

Record Window’ when it installed a mini-graveyard in its window to promote the new Bessie Smith

record, ‘Cemetery Blues'.46 In New York, the Kaplan Furniture Co. recreated the scene of Bessie

Smith’s ‘Jail House Blues’ complete with a black boy dressed in prison stripes sitting in the

window.47 The TMW reported on this tableau vivant that, ‘although the window cost less than

twenty dollars, including the services of the impersonator, the publicity was worth at least $1000. It

cleaned out the store’s stock of these two records' (the second record displayed being ‘Waiting for

the Evening Mail’ by Al Jolson). It further noted that, ‘The boy selected for the living subject tried

to back down at the last minute, but finally consented to go ahead with his part in the display in

consideration of several Columbias to be presented to his sweetheart'.48

The rare report on selling to black customers centred on the novel story rather than on serious sales

advice. An article titled, ‘Enterprising Chicago dealer uses unique selling idea which results in the

sale of 2,500 Records of one selection in one month', reported that the Rialto Music shop of

Chicago used a megaphone to increase the volume of its phonograph so that people on the street

could hear the records, and that when it played a record of the ‘Mariechen Waltz': ‘the peculiar

melody of this waltz, played in typical peasant style, attracted the attention of several members of

the colored race'. Because of this response from black consumers, the owner of the store decided to

rename the song the ‘Mariechen Blues’ when answering their queries and henceforth sold more than

2,500 copies it. The article concludes, ‘The sale of the record was invariably made after a

45 The same was the case with Old Time window displays. In an article on the innovative display of Carson’s ‘Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane’ for example, the columnist uses the creative design, complete with cabin and lane, as an example to suggest how the same could be done for ‘the classics'. TMW, July 1924, 35. Leonard S. Marcus has noted that in the display trade journals of the 1920s such as Display World and the longer running The Merchants Records, window dressing became a scientific discipline in the 1920s, with lighting expert’s being employed to determine the lighting intensity of certain window displays etc. Leonard S. Marcus, The American Store Window (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1978), 21. 46 TMW, January 1924. 47 Ibid. 48 TMW, February 1924, 48.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 160

demonstration, although it is quite possible that the use of the word “blues” was a factor in

interesting the purchaser'.49 The Mariechen Waltz was a polka of Swedish origin, made popular by

‘Whoopee John’ Wilfarht from Minnesota who recorded it several times in the 1920s, and it was

probably one of these that the Rialto had been playing. This story, while undoubtedly intended to

raise a laugh at the expense of gullible blacks who would buy anything labelled ‘blues', unwittingly

proves for us not only the relationship between European folk styles and black American vernacular

music and recognition of this musical connection by black record buyers in the 1920s, but also the

black audience for diverse types of recorded music, a fact never expanded upon in the TMW.50

The Race Record market was also mentioned in relation to Artist ‘tie-ins’ or store appearances,

recommended by the TMW as excellent opportunities to advertise one’s store as well as sell records,

and in the coverage of record industry publications. Many Race Records artists made store

appearances while touring the vaudeville circuit and often regional stores would report on the

phenomenal boon this was to their business. In June 1927 the TMW ran a piece on Perry Bradford's

appearance at the Morris Music Shop in New York, entitled, 'A Sure-Fire Method of Increasing

Record Sales'. Without once mentioning that Perry Bradford was a black man or a Race Records

artist, the article commented that 'pushing the records of an artist through his appearance at a store

has always been a “sure-fire method” of increasing record sales'. It went on to explain that: 'For

some days previous placards had announced the event and a novel window display...had attracted

attention', and this was what led to the sale of over 2,000 copies of Bradford's latest OKeh release,

'Lucy Long'.51 When Clara Smith performed in Macon, Georgia, in January 1924 it was reported

that 'The reaction to this success was felt immediately by Columbia dealers, many of whom were

obliged to wire special orders for Clara Smith's records to replenish their stocks'.52

This material suggests an industry and an industry organ prepared to discuss and offer advice on the

selling of records to blacks in only the most oblique manner. While it is clear that by the mid-1920s

the success of these artists required that the TMW offer some pedagogy on selling strategies for

black consumers, this material is so slight that in most of it, the black consumer is not identified as

such and remains virtually absent. With Old Time, the expanded market for records throughout the

rural South might have be an expected topic of discourse, and yet similarly to the coverage of the

Race Records boom, the majority of coverage was aimed at selling the catalogue to the dealer rather

49 Ibid., September 1923, 110. 50 Another rare story on black consumers was a 1923 report of an increase in sales of Vocalion records in stores ‘adjacent to or conducted where there is a large colored population’ after the introduction of Vocalion Race Records. TMW, September 1923, 80. 51 TMW, June 1927. 52 Ibid., February 1924, 70.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 161

than advice on how to sell it to country consumers.

Old Time hits the big smoke: Regional markets versus national appeal

The coverage of Old Time catalogues and artists in the TMW is more comprehensive and more

engaged generally than that of Race Records, reflecting both the more respectable activity of selling

records to whites, and also the perception that the market for records among white Southerners was

larger than among blacks. Yet there are many similarities between the coverage of the respective

catalogues, stemming from their Southern-ness, their otherness, and their status as new fads for

‘old’ music, or music reminiscent of an antebellum halcyon time. The central message was that

these were authentic Southern mountaineer artists but they were also professional and entertaining.

There is significant regional coverage of Old Time artists in the columns of news from various

sections of the country, which reported back to New York the state of the trade in their local area.

This coverage reflects the fact that, unlike the first Race Records artists, many of the first Old Time

artists were not already popular entertainers on the vaudeville circuit, but were well-known only in

their particular part of the country. Record companies sought to exploit this local celebrity as well

as nurture a national audience for this old fashioned, nostalgic music. Therefore, while some

records were produced with a specific regional audience in mind, and one must remember the field

was established with a recording that had a pressing of only 500 for Carson’s local Atlanta fans, the

industry and the TMW were keen to demonstrate its reach beyond the isolated hill country.

In 1924, at the news of Columbia’s recent recordings of several Old Time players from Georgia,

including Gid Tanner and Riley Puckett, the TMW noted that ‘this news should be particularly

gratifying to Columbia dealers down Georgia way where people flock by the thousands to hear

these men play'.53 In ‘Record sales gain 100 percent’, the regional popularity of Old Time fiddlers is

remarked upon quite specifically: ‘OKeh records have been gaining quite a hold on Cincinnatians

and are becoming increasingly popular from day to day. The sale of OKeh records, such as fiddling

numbers, in the mountain districts of Tennessee and Kentucky has been particularly encouraging'.54

The event song, as a topical ballad relating some tragic tale, was presumed to have particularly

strong sales in the region where the tragedy took place. When Vernon Dalhart recorded ‘The John T.

53 TMW, May 1924, 26. 54 Ibid., June 1924, 132.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 162

Scopes Trial (The Old Religion’s Better After All)’ for Columbia in 1925, based on the State of

Tennessee State vs. Scopes trial in which a teacher from Dayton was accused of breaking the Butler

Act, which prevented the teaching of evolution in public schools, the TMW reported: ‘Columbia

dealers throughout the country but particularly in Tennessee and adjoining states are reporting a

large sale'.55 It goes on to provide these details: ‘This record was released when public interest in

the evolution trial was at its height and naturally dealers displaying the window streamers and other

publicity matter sent out by the Columbia Phonograph Co., Inc., cashed in on it'.56 In another short

piece on event songs the TMW commented, ‘Such songs as “Little Rosewood Casket', ‘The John T.

Scopes Trial’ and ‘The Death of Floyd Collins’ may not make a strong appeal to jazz hounds on

Broadway but the sales indicate that they are distinctly popular in the so-called “sticks”'.57

Yet reports of the broader appeal of the music ran alongside this regionally-specific news. In April

1925, the TMW reported that the market for Carson’s records had expanded far beyond the South:

One of the most popular artists in the OKeh catalog is Fiddlin’ John Carson, mountaineer

violinist, whose records have met with phenomenal success throughout the country. When

Mr. Carson’s first OKeh records were released it was expected that they would be active

sellers throughout Southern territory, where this artist is a prime favourite with all music

lovers. However, to the keen surprise and gratification of the General Phonograph Corp., the

records by FJ Carson not only attained exceptional popularity in the South but were received

cordially by the public everywhere.58

In August 1925 the TMW reported again that, ‘The OKeh Records by Fiddlin’ John Carson, Georgia

mountaineer and minstrel, are steadily growing in popularity': ‘The quaint and little known

melodies recorded by this artist have met with the approval of the public, as steadily mounting sales

figures show'.59 In December 1924 another blurb on the exotic Carson reported that upon his visit to

Atlanta he found ‘too much city and not enough country to suit his taste and he was glad to return to

the sunny South'.60 These novel stories about the mountaineer relic in the big smoke are entertaining

for the reader but they also reinforce two key points for the dealer: first, that these artists are

55 Ibid., August 1925, 38. 56 In October 1927 the TMW published a piece on the speed with which OKeh produced an event song on the rescue of the hydroplane ‘PN-9’: ‘The news regarding the rescue of this naval airship was broadcast across the continent on September 11. Three days later OKeh’s ‘ballad’ was being announced, and by five days it was being shipped to OKeh jobbers'. TMW, October 1927, 200. 57 TMW, January 1925, 233. 58 Ibid., April 1925, 56. 59 TMW, August 1925. 60 Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 163

authentic rural Southerners from an isolated, pre-modern world, a novel and exotic other to sell to

modern Americans, and second, that they have infiltrated the city both literally and figuratively, as

the appeal of this music and these artists has extended far beyond their mountain alcoves.

Old Time versus Jazz: ‘It is an improvement’

As a musical field, Old Time was given greater serious contemplation than the music of Race

Records in the columns dedicated to musical commentary in the TMW. These columns were

dominated by derisive comments about the jazz craze and generally optimistic editorials on the state

of music appreciation throughout the country, and the Old Time ‘craze’ was reported in service of

these primary concerns.61

In December 1925, the regular column ‘Gleanings from the World of Music’ which reported and

editorialised on issues pertinent to songwriters and music publishers, featured a long article on

‘What the Popularity of Hill-Billy Songs Means in Retail Profit Possibilities', the kind of in-depth

analysis the blues never inspired.62 The subtitle read, ‘The widespread vogue of the Funereal type of

songs is attested by publishers and record manufacturers – is it of significance as indication of

public taste?’ This article heralds the hillbilly song as the death knell of jazz, ‘The advent or revival

or whatever you choose to call it of what are described as the “hill-billy” songs signifies more than

the mere vogue of such publications…(they) may mark the initial move in the passing of jazz'. It

then suggests approvingly, ‘music lovers will accept the situation as an improvement'.

The first line of this – ‘The advent or revival or whatever you choose to call it’ – captures

something of the confusion over, and indeed the confusing nature of, the ‘new’ field of Old Time

music. An umbrella term for many genres of music, from string-band dance music to ballads to

cowboy songs, each themselves representing a complex mix of genuine folk origins and modern

influences and innovations, the development of this new field was to some extent both an advent

and a revival. While the industry sought to simplify the catalogue by severely circumscribing its

contents, and reducing the music to a more easily understood construct based on existing cultural

tropes, the industry paradoxically defined and marketed Old Time as exciting and new while

traditional and authentic, and here we see the mouth-piece of the industry in its expert column on

61 For a deeper discussion of the use of Old Time music as further evidence of the waning of the Jazz Era, see Chapter Three. 62 For analysis and critique of black blues recordings in the 1920s one has to look in vaudeville news sources such as Variety.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 164

the music trade baulk at having to define it. This article however is more concerned with heralding

the passing of jazz than with examining the nuances of Old Time. Taking the popularity of Old

Time ballads as a sign that ‘the public is returning to songs', the article argued: ‘the fact that the

public or a fair portion of it has decided on a funeral dirge type of offering should not be taken as an

atavistic tendency. It is rather a desire for something different…The first love, of course, is songs of

the ballad order because they are the most impressive, have the widest appeal and sale. We expect

other types of songs to follow closely'. Praising the Old Time ballad really only as an improvement

on jazz, and as a move in the right direction towards ‘good music', it actually defined the ‘event

song’ in a rather unflattering manner, ‘the sob songs of several generations ago, brought up to date

and made into a pathetic song on some current topical event or catastrophe'.63

The occasional acknowledgement in the TMW of Old Time’s growing popularity suggested a

promising new catalogue for the phonograph dealer, but it did not, by a long way, suggest the level

of success certain industry figures and Southern dealerships were enjoying due to the popularity of

these records. Their success and prominence in the industry however meant that the TMW was

obliged to cover their careers, and we now turn to this ‘industry news’ coverage in the TMW to see

how the journal covered the careers of these figures without divulging the cause of their success.

‘Ralph Peer finds South satisfactory’: The TMW covers the industry careers built on the new

catalogues of Southern vernacular music

Through the industry news featured in the TMW it is possible to follow the careers of some of the

major players in the development of the Race Records and Old Time catalogues. Although these

figures, or the grounds for their success, are rarely openly celebrated in these pages, their careers

and activities prove significant enough that they feature frequently and there is some recognition of

their influence and success.

The activities of Ralph Peer, the manager of the recording division of OKeh and then Victor, and the

man who oversaw the recording of many significant Race Records and Old Time artists, are

followed with some interest if little elaboration in the TMW. In December 1925, Peer made the front

page with the announcement of his promotion from director of record production to ‘general sales

manager’ of the record division at OKeh. The article suggests, ‘A considerable measure of the

63 TMW, Dec 1925, 177. Not four months earlier in August 1925, ‘Gleanings from the World of Music’ ran an article entitled, ‘Songs based on topics of the day are rarely landed in the popular hit class', that argued, ‘No topical song based upon the news of the day, catastrophes or similar events ever amount to much'. TMW, August 1925, 63.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 165

success he has attained as an OKeh sales executive may be attributed to his thorough knowledge of

record merchandising and the fact that he is working in close co-operation with OKeh and Odeon

jobbers and dealers'. However, the fact he was in charge of the breakthrough recordings for both

Race Records and Old Time, two of the most successful and entirely new fields of recorded music

of the decade (and the man responsible for ‘discovering’ million record-selling artists such as

Fiddlin' John Carson, The Carter Family, and Jimmie Rodgers) escapes comment.

Likewise, an important associate of Peers', P. C. Brockman, who had built his father’s Atlanta

furniture business, James K. Polk, into the biggest distributor of OKeh records in the South,

featured quite frequently in the TMW as his business expanded and new offices were established,

but there was no mention of the foundation of his success. In September 1925, when the company

reached its fourth anniversary, there were several full-pages taken out in the TMW by companies

who wished to congratulate the distributor (an honour I did not find bestowed on other distributors).

These companies obviously saw these congratulations as a good opportunity for self-promotion and

were gratified to be associated with such a successful company. They come from OKeh, Caswell

Manufacturing Co., Honest Quaker Main Springs, The Wolf Manufacturing Industries, Sonora and

Wall-Kane Needle Manufacturing Co. The OKeh page read:

Four years ago the firm of James K. Polk, Atlanta, Ga., received its first shipment of 2,500

OKeh records. These records were given no display; they were placed in a corner of a

furniture store on temporary racks. From this first, small group of OKeh records has grown

the largest Record Distributor for OKeh records in the Southeastern section of the United

States. They are one of the most successful distributors of records and phonographs in the

whole United States. You will find the name of James K. Polk decorating their own three-

storey building. This is a magnificent showing, considering that four years ago they started

with a force consisting of P.C. Brockman and one assistant.

The backbone of this SUCCESS is the quick turnover of OKeh Records – or the speedy

disposition of a large order of OKeh Records through the dealer.64

Brockman received special praise at other times as well. In May 1924, James K. Polk, Inc., made

the front page as the new Sonora Phonograph’s dealer for Atlanta, and this was written about him:

‘P. C. Brockman, general manager of the company, numbers among his friends dealers throughout

the South, and his efforts to co-operate with the trade have been an important factor in the

64 TMW, September 1925, 98.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 166

company’s success'.65 Another article on the firm, with a photo of the entire staff at a company

banquet, states: ‘This division (phonograph) of the company started two years ago in a very small

way, but today it is one of the largest phonograph distributing organizations in the South. One of the

most important factors in the success of the company’s phonograph activities has been the untiring

efforts and activities of P.C. Brockman…(who has) devoted his entire time to the development of

the company’s phonograph activities and under his direction sales totals have steadily increased'.66

Again, in June 1925, Brockman’s role is described in the vaguest of terms: ‘The OKeh and Odeon

record business developed by James K. Polk, Inc., has been one of the outstanding features of

record activities in the South, and Mr Brockman is primarily responsible for this splendid showing.

A keen student of merchandising and well posted on business conditions throughout his territory,

Mr Brockman has sponsored sales methods that have enabled his company to attain an outstanding

success as a record jobber'.67 As previously discussed in Chapter Three, Brockman was the man

who first scribbled down the idea to record local Atlanta celebrity fiddler Fiddlin’ John Carson and

was perhaps the man, more than any other figure, who was responsible for the new catalogue. Polk,

Inc., served hundreds of retail outlets throughout the South and opened branches in Richmond,

Cincinnati, New Orleans, Memphis, and Dallas, and a large portion of this success was due to

Brockman’s understanding of the markets for Old Time in the South, however these details are not

reported in the TMW’s coverage of his career.68

.

There is very little mention of regional recording activities. All of the major Race Records and Old

Time companies, with the exception of Paramount, regularly sent recording expeditions to Southern

cities throughout the second half of the decade, most commonly Atlanta, Memphis and Dallas, and

yet this potentially intriguing practice gets scant mention in the TMW.69 In April 1927, there were

two short pieces on a recording expedition by OKeh, one of which was entitled, 'OKeh Recording

Engineers Back From Southern Trip'.70 This reported a successful trip and noted: ‘Among these

artists are many artists of rare talent whose records will be released at an early date to supplement

the hill country and race record catalog'. For an entirely new system of recording, one that

employed the newest portable phonograph recording equipment, and involved uncovering new

talent across the country, the lack of space awarded in the TMW is telling. One can only imagine the

exhaustive coverage this practice would have received had it been in service of uncovering of

65 Ibid., May 1924, 1. 66 Ibid., January 1924, 157. 67 Ibid., June 1925, 62. 68 Kenney, 144. 69 From 1927-1930 Atlanta was visited seventeen times by recording field units, Memphis eleven times, Dallas eight times and New Orleans seven times. Dixon and Godrich, 41. 70 TMW, April 1927, 132.

Chapter Five – The Accommodation of a Commercial Reality 167

classical musicians in rural areas.

Conclusion

By the end of the decade both Race Records and Old Time were more deeply embedded in industry

discourse and industry advertising than ever before. Both catalogues had performed incredibly well

right up until 1930; Old Time records accounted for around a quarter of all popular sales by 1930,

and Race Records went through its best years from 1927-1930, but at what was perhaps the peak of

its acceptance and assimilation, the ensuing Depression severely curtailed production of both

catalogues and the industry as a whole.71 The TMW itself ceased publication in 1929.72

Without the advent of the Depression one can only guess that with the strong sales of these

catalogues right up to 1930, the intervention of the black consumer and the Old Time character into

the pages of the TMW would have continued and grown stronger. As it is, we are left with an

industry trade journal steadfastly under-reporting two of the true success stories for the industry in

the 1920s, and an industry still selling this music to dealerships using the contradictory rhetoric of

otherness and national appeal. In the next chapter we examine how the black press with its own

ideological predisposition responded to the same phenomenon: black working-class music's

intervention into the national marketplace.

71 Sanjek, 64. 72 Coverage of the record industry moves to Variety and later in the 1930s Billboard.

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records

in the Black Press

Introduction

This chapter analyses the reception of the Race Records artists of the 1920s in the black press.

While a comparison between the reception of Old Time recordings in the white press and Race

Records in the black would have been a neat formulation for this final chapter, and a potentially

insightful comparison, this is not possible for the simple reason that Old Time recordings or artists

were not featured in the white press to anything like the same degree that Race Records artist were

in the black press, and even this coverage was cursory at best. Besides radio schedules, coverage of

fiddling-contests in regional newspapers, and the occasional piece on celebrity advocates for old

time dancing and fiddling such as Henry Ford, the recording stars and music of Old Time records

received very little coverage in the national newspapers. This was due to the general lack of interest

in the subject among the music critics of the white newspapers, whose cultural ideology and sense

of musical hierarchy led them to entirely ignore what would have seemed a generally unsavoury

subject for comment (an issue explored in greater detail in Chapter Three), and the simple fact that

Old Time records were not widely advertised in the press. The second point is key. The black press

also found the music and artists of Race Records unseemly and unpleasant and most of the music

critics of the 1920s did their best to ignored them, hoping they would eventually be replaced by

black orchestral music that would encourage respect and promote assimilation with whites.

However, selling Race Records was a different proposition to selling Old Time in the important

respect that it was through the endorsement and advocacy of the first Mamie Smith records by the

Chicago Defender that the industry had been made aware of a huge new market for records among

a sector of the population they had previously ignored. Old Time simply did not have this

dimension, and therefore the industry left it to the efforts of local dealerships, the regional

popularity of certain artists and their presence on radio to sell their records. With Race Records, the

New York based record industry responded to both the huge sales of the first Mamie Smith records,

and the Defender’s role in advertising these records for them, by waging a battle for this market in

the pages of the Defender and other black newspapers. This made it hard for the black press to

ignore Race Records. Beyond this however, this phenomenally successful new commercial category

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 169

of recorded music transformed the vaudeville blues artists the black press had been under-reporting

for some time into highly successful recording artists in a national, white-run industry and this made

them even harder to ignore as models of racial uplift, especially as there they were in every ad,

smiling out at the reader, draped in finery and glittering jewels.1

This chapter is therefore a study of the way in which the writers of the black press in the news

items, entertainment coverage, and vaudeville music review columns, addressed, explained,

excused, and covered the rise of the black recording star of the 1920s. It argues that under sway of

racial uplift ideology the black press begrudgingly covered Race Records artists and catalogues and

through selected coverage attempted to fit this music and these artists into acceptable and suitable

categories of success. First, I analyse the initial involvement of the black press with the phonograph

industry. Second, look at the successful black businesses that did get extensive coverage in the

pages of the black press, including the Pace and Handy Publishing Company and the Black Swan

record label (the only black owned and run label of the 1920s). Third, I will turn to the coverage of

the 'classic blues' singer of the early 1920s – artists such as Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith,

Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters, Victoria Spivey, Clara Smith and Ida Cox – who were the first stars of

the Race Records catalogues.2 In short press releases, tour announcements, theatre engagements,

and occasionally live reviews, these Race Records artists were covered in the black press during the

1920s, but it was predominantly by virtue of their stage performances, stories of their wealth and

success, and through their association with successful black businesses, rather than their status as

nationally famous recording 'blues' artists, that they received coverage. Fourth, I examine in more

detail one particular music critic's column and his attitudes toward music, uplift and the blues:

Dave Peyton’s 'The Musical Bunch' in the Chicago Defender. A musician himself with a long

history in the Chicago music scene, Peyton was a solid racial uplift man whose exhortative column

celebrated black achievement in respectable arenas of musical endeavour. While he acknowledged

jazz and blues as ways to get paid work, neither form fitted his vision of the modern black musician

who would gain the respect of whites through hard work and highbrow musical composition.

Finally, I will briefly consider those artists who were favoured by the black press, the few musical

figures who, unlike the classic blues singers, were considered worthy figures of extensive coverage

1 For examples of these ads, see Chapter Two. For more on Race Records advertisements, see Ronald Clifford Foreman Jnr., 'Jazz and Race Records 1920-1932: Their Origins and their significance for the record industry and society’ (PhD, University of Illinois, 1968), Jeff Todd Titon, Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977); Mark K. Dolan, ‘Cathartic Uplift: A Cultural History of Blues and Jazz in the Chicago Defender, 1920-1929' (PhD, University of South Carolina, 2003); and Mark K. Dolan, ‘Extra! Chicago Defender Race Records Ads Show South from Afar'. Southern Cultures (Fall 2007): 107-124. 2 For more on the 'classic blues' singers, see Daphne Duval Harrison, Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s (New Brunswick: Rutgers University, 1988); Buzzy Jackson, A Bad Woman Feeling Good: Blues and the Women Who Sing Them (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005); R.M.W. Dixon and J. Godrich, Recording the Blues (London: Studio Vista, 1970); and Angela Y Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998).

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 170

and veneration. These include W.C. Handy, the so-called 'father of the blues', and jazz figures such

as James Reece Europe, Clarence Williams and classical tenor Roland Hayes. Suffice to say, the

black ‘down home’, or country, bluesmen who came to dominate the catalogues of Race Records in

the late 1920s – figures such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Barbecue Bob, Charley

Patton, and the record preachers Reverend Gates et al – are almost entirely absent from the black

press in the 1920s, despite some of these artists selling huge numbers of records throughout the

period.3 For example, Blind Lemon Jefferson, who was one of the biggest selling Race Records

artists of the 1927-1930 period, died penniless on the street in Chicago in 1929 and the Defender

did not deign to publish an obituary.4 These artists were just too far outside the realms of traditional

uplift to be accommodated.

While the reception of Race Records artists in the black press in the 1920s has been discussed

briefly in many histories of early blues and jazz, there are only a few sustained treatments of the

attitudes in the black newspapers towards the early Race Records industry. Notable studies are those

by Mark Dolan and Phillip McGuire, yet these studies have different aims and concerns to the

present one.5 Dolan, in his study of the cultural clash between the traditional uplift ideology pursued

by Chicago Defender editor Robert Abbott and what he terms a ‘cathartic uplift’ of Race Records

advertising, dedicates a chapter to Defender music critic Dave Peyton’s 'The Musical Bunch'

column but limits his study to the coverage of instrumental jazz performances, such as those by

Louis Armstrong, citing Peyton's preference for 'ideas of instrumentation and small group

orchestra’, over the vocal-driven sound of the vaudeville jazz/blues bands.6 The focus of the present

study however stems from a broader analysis of the verbal and visual rhetoric of Race Records,

which was dominated by two figures in the 1920s: the female 'classic blues' singer of the early

1920s and the country or ‘down home’ bluesmen of the late 1920s. Although the latter hardly

appeared at all in the black press in the 1920s, the classic blues singer or 'blues Queens' did appear

in 'The Musical Bunch'. Dolan also does not address the role of the phonograph industry in the

transmission of this uplift, or how the Northern companies may have figured in the black press’s

3 From Blind Lemon Jefferson's first recording in 1926 until the Depression, the 'country blues' dominated the Race Records market and those were the peak years for Race Records. Around 500 blues and gospel records were released in 1927, an increase of 50% from the previous year. R.M.W. Dixon and J. Godrich, Recording the Blues (London: Studio Vista, 1970), 41, and Norm Cohen, ‘America’s Music: Written and Recorded,’ JEMF Quarterly 16, 59 (1980): 121-131, 126.

4 Mark K. Dolan, ‘Extra! Chicago Defender Race Records Ads Show South from Afar'. Southern Cultures (Fall, 2007):107-124, 115. 5 Mark K. Dolan, 'Cathartic Uplift: A Cultural History of Blues and Jazz in the Chicago Defender, 1920-1929,' and Phillip McGuire, 'Black Music Critics and the Classic Blues Singers'. The Black Perspective in Music, Vol.14, No.2 (Spring 1986): 103-125. Another good study of the music coverage in the black press is Lawrence Schenbeck, 'Music, Gender, and “Uplift” in the Chicago Defender”, 1927-1937'. The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 81, No. 3. (Autumn, 1997): 344-370. 6 Dolan, 'Cathartic Uplift', 113.

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 171

response to the industry’s new constructs, which is a central concern here. McGuire, on the other

hand, looks at what the music critics of the black press had to say about the classic-blues singers in

an effort to provide the missing link between biographical accounts of these artists, and histories of

the Race Records industry. While commenting briefly on the relationship between the black press

and the phonograph industry, McGuire focuses mostly on live reviews, and while he offers many

insights, he concludes, without evaluation or exploration of racial uplift ideology, that ‘just why

these critics failed to discuss the blues and/or blues singers in their reviews is not clear'.7 It is my

contention, that it was the subscription to a racial uplift ideology which held that certain cultural

achievements furthered the advancement of 'the race' while others did not, that lies behind this lack

of engagement. An analysis of the selective coverage of this music and these artists bears this out,

and yet also reveals how music critics attempted to mould the commercial success of blues artists

into conventional stories of racial uplift.

The newspapers and the social and political context of the entertainment pages

This study looks at the coverage of the Race Records artist in some of the most influential black

newspapers of the 1920s, including: the Chicago Defender, Baltimore Afro-American, Norfolk

Journal and Guide, New York Amsterdam News, Pittsburgh Courier, and Philadelphia Tribune. The

Chicago Defender was the most influential paper of its day and the most widely circulated – the

Pullman porters who sold the paper through the South established a profitable trade selling the

number one advocate of the Great Migration Northward to curious Southerners. While certainly a

range of opinions and preoccupations can be found within these papers, the editors and founders

had, for the most part, similar backgrounds and their papers similar stories and agendas.8 Many of

them began as church pamphlets and were created by well educated, middle-class Southern men

who moved to the North to begin their business. Typified by Robert S. Abbott at the Defender, and

John H. Murphy Sr. at the Afro-American, these men established themselves and their papers on the

basis of rigorous opposition to the injustices of Jim Crow laws; advocacy of the upward mobility of

African Americans; adherence to the racial uplift ideology influenced by Booker T. Washington,

among others, who encouraged black achievement in cultural and business pursuits that were in

keeping with white middle-class mores, and; the adoption of sensationalist or ‘yellow’ journalistic

7 McGuire, 109. 8 Hayward Farrar in his study of the Afro-American suggests that ‘after the departure of George Bragg in 1915, the Afro was less strident in encouraging blacks to pull themselves up towards middle class respectability. The shrill tone was now directed toward condemning the white community for not changing its attitudes and policies towards blacks. Yet only the tone of the Afro’s racial uplift editorials changed, their emphasis remained unchanged'. Hayward Farrar, ‘What the Afro Says: The Baltimore Afro-American, 1892-1950’ (PhD, University of Chicago, 1983), 182.

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 172

techniques, in the style made famous by the Hearst newspapers, in an apparent bid to broaden the

appeal of their papers.9

The coverage of vaudeville artists and Race Records in the black press was set against a backdrop

of great change for black Americans in the 1920s. Perhaps the biggest cause of change was the

Great Migration to the North by millions of Southern blacks during the 1910s and the 1920s.10

Many black newspapers, in particular the Defender, had actively encouraged, even sponsored, the

Great Migration. However, in the wake of the race riots across the country in 1919, which were

particularly violent in Chicago, these papers were grappling with the moral and social guidance of a

vastly increased Northern population which had just discovered that the North could be as violent

and hate-filled as the South.11

In some ways little changed with the advent of Race Records in the entertainment pages of the

major black newspapers. The music staff of the northern black newspapers had displayed an

ambivalent attitude toward vaudeville and minstrel performers for many years before the advent of

Race Records. From its inception in 1905, the Defender had listed in its entertainment pages the

small medicine shows, the tent show troupes, and the large travelling vaudeville circuses that toured

around the country, yet there was rarely any mention of the black blackface performers who were a

major draw card at these shows. The music critics of the black press were faithful adherents to the

prevalent ideology of their editors, a racial uplift ideology which held that achievement in the white

approved realms of commerce and culture was the path to better relations between the races, and

perhaps even to eventual assimilation.12 In fact, as Dolan has insightfully observed, while

9 Uplift ideology was expressed explicitly in these papers. The Afro-American defined its mission in an editorial published January 28, 1905: ‘At present, the mission of the Afro-American is twofold. First to present to the world that side of the Afro-American (people) that can be had in no other way, and in the second place to as far as possible assist in the great uplift of the people it represents'. Hayward Farrar, The Baltimore Afro-American, 1892-1950 (Westport, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998), xii. 10 Nearly half a million black Southerners left for the North between 1916 and 1919, and in the 1920s another million followed them. Schenbeck, 345. 11 In February 1917, Robert S. Abbott famously editorialised in the Defender, in response to those who were attempting to discourage blacks from moving north due to the freezing weather of the Northern cities: 'IF YOU CAN FREEZE TO DEATH in the north and be free, why FREEZE to death in the south and be a slave, where your mother, sister and daughter are raped...where your father, brother and son are...hung to a pole (and) riddled with bullets?' Chicago Defender, February 27, 1917. For more on the Chicago Defender and the Great Migration, see James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Roi Ottley, The Lonely Warrior: the Life and Times of Robert S. Abbott (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1955); Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Davarian L. Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Juliet E.K. Walker, ‘The Promised Land: The Chicago Defender and the Black Press in Illinois, 1862-1970', in Henry Lewis Suggs, ed. The Black Press in the Middle West, 1865-1985 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996), 9-41; and Armistead S. Pride and Clint C. Wilson II, A History of the Black Press (Howard University Press, 1997). 12 For more on racial uplift ideology see, Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Kevin K. Gaines, 'Assimilationist

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 173

Washington may have emphasised separate-but-equal progress, 'uplift in the black press was more

to do with being simply equal'.13

A central tenet of racial uplift ideology was the belief that certain achievements could accelerate the

acceptance by whites and that certain arts were agents of racial uplift and others were not. In the

realm of music, the uplift-conscious black elite drew a line between ‘good music' and ‘popular

music’, and the racial uplift message that was sent by black concert musicians and classical

composers as opposed to the poor image of blacks ‘popular music’, such as jazz and blues,

presented to white society. Implicit in this argument was an acknowledgement of class distinctions

within the black community. Influenced by W.E.B. Du Bois's concept of the 'Talented Tenth', which

held that white stereotypes about black inferiority would be dissolved through the achievements of

the most gifted leaders and artists of 'the Race', the fostering of a 'better class' of blacks who

appreciated 'highbrow' European cultural forms, and the veneration of those who excelled in these

forms, pervaded these columns.14

When the stars of the minstrel show and vaudeville became recording stars, the black press

continued to ignore them, and yet this had become more difficult because these artists were now

nationally-advertised stars of a new nationally-distributed commercial category of recorded music.

Not only were these black artists successful, even wealthy, recording artists in a national white-run

industry, the sort of success the black press had been dreaming of for many years, they were also

beaming out at the reader in the pages of the Defender, the Afro-American, the Amsterdam News

etc., in the hundreds of ads placed by the record industry throughout the 1920s. While these artists

were certainly not models of black success that fitted the black elite’s racial uplift agenda, their

overwhelming popularity, and no doubt a certain amount of pressure from such important

advertising clients as the major record companies, meant that a certain amount of condescending

coverage made it into the black press.

Minstrelsy as Racial Uplift Ideology: James D. Corrothers's Literary Quest for Black Leadership'. American Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Sept., 1993): 341-369; Frankie Hutton, The Early Black Press (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993); Bernell Tripp, Origins of the Black Press (Alabama: Vision Press, 1992); Mark K. Dolan, 'Cathartic Uplift: A Cultural History of Blues and Jazz in the Chicago Defender, 1920-1929 (PhD, Jacksonville University, 1980); Lawrence Schenbeck, 'Music, Gender, and “Uplift” in the Chicago Defender”, 1927-1937'. The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 81, No. 3. (Autumn, 1997): 344-370; and John Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) 13 Dolan, 34. 14 Gennari, 30. The Black elite and leadership in the 1920 was fairly unified in its belief that jazz and blues was the antithesis of bourgeois respectability and deserved to be repudiated. Jazz and blues were not mentioned in Du Bois’ The Crisis for example. The spirituals however, especially after Du Bois' defence of the form in his work The Souls of Black Folk (1903), received some praise and acceptance and yet other black leaders, such as the leaders of Garvey's UNIA, felt the spirituals too tied to slavery to aid the advancement of the Race in the 1920s. Many younger intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance disagreed on all three accounts as we shall see. John Runcie, 'Black Music and the Garvey Aesthetic', Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, Vol. 11, Iss. 2, (July 31, 1987), 7.

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 174

Ultimately, the advent of the record industry’s new Race Records catalogues took the tension

between the racial uplift ideology of the black press and the musical tastes of their readership and

greatly intensified it.15 This was further complicated by the troubled relationship the black press had

with the phonograph industry. The black press had been actively agitating for a wider representation

of ‘the Race’ on record for some time and yet was bitterly disappointed by the Race Records

catalogues when they appeared. The music writers of the black press therefore struggled with their

obligation to cover these success stories in the entertainment world, and in the white-dominated

world of the record business (stories which satisfied the criteria of traditional uplift in many ways),

and to conceal their resentment, disappointment and disapproval.

'This unusual event’ and the quick souring of a promising relationship

It did not start that way. To begin with, there was great enthusiasm in the black press about the

possibility of black artists recording for the white recording companies. In January 1916, the

Defender made a plea to its readers to petition the major companies to this end. This initiative was

announced in an article entitled, ‘Race Artists to sing for Victrolas', which carried the subheading,

‘If Race makes Demand for Our Singers to be heard, Edison and Victrola People Will Be Eager to

Employ Them – Demand IS Coming from Foreign Countries'. It featured a second subheading,

‘OUR ARTISTS CAPABLE', and the story read, 'During the Christmas holidays there were

thousands of dollars spent by people for Victrolas...they paid to hear Tettrazini, Caruso,

Paganini…But how many of our race ever asked for a record of Mme. Anita Patti Brown, Mr.

Roland Hayes, Miss Hazel Harrison…Are these not our great artists?' It continued, ‘Tis true we

hear Bert Williams, Myers, Fisk and Hampton Jubilee Singers in the Victrolas – but you never hear

of an artist who is a great violinist or a pianist. What is the reason? The answer partly is, we make

no demand for them'.16

Ten months later the Defender ran a short piece from the editor's desk that announced: ‘Victor

Records Made By Race Artists in Sight'.17 It informed readers that the industry leader sought to

ascertain how many ‘Victrolas’ were owned by ‘members of the race’, and that, ‘when this is

15 As discussed in Chapter Two, Mark K. Dolan, in his study of Race Records advertisements in the black press has argued that this phenomenon represented a clash of uplifts between the traditional uplift of the black elite with the 'cathartic uplift' of blues music. He argues that the blues, 'was presenting an uplift that had to do with feeling rather than values, and that feeling was emanating from a community of readers for whom The Defender became an unwitting source of symbolic meaning'. Dolan, 'Cathartic Uplift', iii. 16 Chicago Defender, January 8, 1916, 3. 17 Ibid., October 21, 1916, 5.

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 175

known, then records of the Race’s great artists will be placed on the market’. Rather proudly, the

article proclaimed, ‘The Defender has promised to furnish the desired information and will ask that

each owner of a Victrola send name and address to this office at once and oblige'. A more aggressive

article appeared a month later. ‘Demands records for our Artists’ acknowledged the recordings by

The Fisk Quartet Company and The Tuskegee Quartet, two well established jubilee acts who were

among the few exceptions to the rule, and then proclaimed: ‘Our plea now is that such big artists

as…Miss Hazel Harrison, Roland Hayes, and Clarence Cameron White…and other celebrities

should be heard in the Victor records. An appeal should be sent to the Victor records company

asking that these noted artists be heard, giving reasons that it would be a paying proposition to have

them'.18

It is immediately apparently from this early advocacy why the black press was so bitterly

disappointed with OKeh and Columbia's first Race recordings. The list of artists the Defender

presented here, ‘Miss Hazel Harrison, Roland Hayes, and Clarence Cameron White’, were all

classically trained concert musicians. Not one of them was to appear in the first Race Records

catalogues. When it became apparent in 1920 that it was the likes of Mamie Smith and Ethel Waters

who were being made into recording stars, the high priority of this advocacy disappeared and the

story went cold.

The first records by black 'classic blues' singers were announced in the Defender, but enthusiasm for

the idea had evaporated.19 On July 31, 1920, the Defender reported the Mamie Smith recording, but

the headline was not about Smith, it read instead ‘Pace and Handy', the black publishing firm run by

W.C. Handy and Harry Pace, who would go on to form Black Swan Records. The piece reported,

‘Announcement was made this week by the General Phonograph Company, makers of the famous

OKeh record, of the first release of a phonograph record made by a colored girl'.20 ‘Miss Mamie

Smith', it continued, ‘a Harlem young lady, has recorded for the OKeh two numbers published by

Broadway’s large Race publishing house, Pace & Handy Music Company, Inc'. It claimed, ‘This

unusual event was secured only through the influence of Pace & Handy Music Company, who in

two years on Broadway have taken their place among the largest and oldest publishers in

18 Ibid., November 11, 1916, 4. 19 In his biography, Perry Bradford, who had met with various New York companies to convince them to record one of his songs with a ‘colored girl', wrote of the placement of the first Race Records ad, placed by OKeh in 1920 in the Defender: 'anyone working for the Chicago Defender looking back to 1921 would see the time when OKeh Records was the first company to give an ad to our Negro newspapers (I know because I secured that ad for my pal Tom Langston who was a columnist on the Chicago Defender when he came to New York and was staying at my home….and Elwood Knox’s Indianapolis Freeman followed with the OKeh advertising soon after'. Perry Bradford, Born With The Blues: Perry Bradford's Own Story (New York: Oak Publications, 1965), 28. 20 Chicago Defender, July 31, 1920, 4.

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 176

America'.21 This had quickly turned from a story about Mamie Smith to a story about Pace and

Handy, a fact explored in the following section, although it does note in conclusion, ‘Lovers of

music everywhere, and those who desire to help in any advance of the Race, should be sure to buy

this record as encouragement to the manufacturers for their liberal policy and to encourage other

manufacturers who may not believe that the Race will buy records sung by its own singers'.22

And that was that. No celebration, congratulation, no news item thanking the readership for

providing the details of their phonograph habits to the Victor Phonograph Company. One has to

look hard to find any mention of the burgeoning field of recording at all. An editorial in the Afro-

American on May 20th, 1921, entitled 'Jazz versus', mentioned the success of Mamie Smith's

recordings but only in passing and not particularly favourably.23 It opened with the question, 'Has

classical music had its day?', and recalled, ‘Once upon a time, phonograph records of Caruso, the

great tenor were rated the best sellers by music houses. Then came along McCormick with “Who

Knows” and similar songs still more popular and set a new sales mark for “canned music”. It

remained for Mamie Smith to beat both this spring and as a result the company which makes her

records announces it has sold a million dollars’ worth of Mamie Smith records'. It noted that while

this may be a personal triumph for Smith, it is 'more indicative of the hold jazz music has upon the

popular fancy...two musical recitals in this city by real artists are but scantily noticed by the musical

public, which nevertheless crowded Richmond Market Armory to see and hear Lucille Hegeman, a

“blues” singer and her orchestra'. The remarkable achievement of Mamie Smith's recordings was

already being used as just another example of the dominance of jazz over better sorts of music.

Pace and Handy and Black Swan: Respectable Businesses

Almost immediately the coverage of the recording of the female 'classic blues' artists changed to the

coverage of successful black businesses such as the publisher Pace and Handy and Black Swan

Records. The black press’s disapproval ;of the kind of artist and music represented in Race Records

catalogues led it to embrace the uplift story of the businessmen behind them, who are presented as

somehow removed from the unseemliness of the jazz and blues music itself.

In September 1920, a thinly veiled advertisement, or reprinted press release, was published in the

21 The role of Pace and Handy is not mentioned in Perry Bradford’s account of the first OKeh recording of Mamie Smith. 22 This article was reprinted in other black newspapers, such as the Philadelphia Tribune (July 31, 1920) with the erroneous title, at this time anyway, ‘Colored Girl Sings For Columbia Phonograph Co'. 23 Afro-American, May 20, 1921, 9.

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 177

Defender as an article about the Pace & Handy company: ‘The company specialises in blues,

ballads, spirituals and songs pertaining to Negro life and has done much to improve the status of our

Race in general along musical lines. They claim the distinction of having the first popular song ever

recorded on the phonographs by a Colored singer in the person of Miss Mamie Smith'.24 It then

concluded with the hard sell, 'They conduct a mail order department for the purpose of supplying

our people with all the latest music'. In October, the Defender published another piece on Pace and

Handy publishing: ‘The P& H Music Co. has spent a small fortune in an effort to turn into money

the musical compositions of our writers; it is pitiable to think of how these latter have been

swindled and exploited by the ‘other’ race, bringing about a situation in which the composer gets

little for his work aside from the glory of having his name on the sheet music'. Mamie Smith’s

‘good work’ with the ‘OKeh record people', is mentioned at the end of the article as opening the

opportunity for other singers to secure contracts with phonograph companies.25

The rise and fall of Black Swan Records has been covered thoroughly by other historians and the

story does not need to be retold here, yet Black Swan deserves some attention here if only because

it can be seen as the most direct reaction to the Race Records catalogues by the black elite.26

Created and run by a protégé of W.E.B. Du Bois, Harry H. Pace, the raison d’etre of Black Swan

was to redress the restrictions placed upon black musicians by the white-run record companies. It

promised to release opera and classical music alongside blues and spirituals and jazz. As an

embodiment of racial uplift ideology it became a darling of the black press, for as Pace explained in

his speech before the National Association of Negro Musicians in 1921, 'I believe that we want

every kind of music other people want and it behooves some of us to undertake the job of elevating

the musical taste of the race…Black Swan Records are trying to do their part'.27

Black Swan was not only an agent of racial uplift, it marketed its catalogues on this platform. Along

with its slogan, 'the Only Genuine Colored Record. Others Are Only Passing For Colored', it placed

advertisements in the Chicago Defender, The Crisis, and The Messenger, that challenged the black

24 Chicago Defender, September 25, 5. 25 Ibid., October 23, 4. 26 For a detailed account of Black Swan, see David Suisman, ‘Co-Workers in the Kingdom of Culture: Black Swan records and the Political Economy of African American Music'. The Journal of American History, Vol. 90 Iss 4, (Mar 2004): 1295-1342; David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); Ted Vincent, 'The Social Context of Black Swan'. Living Blues 86 (May-June 1989): 34-40; and Helge Thygesen, Mark Berresford and Russ Shor, Black Swan – The Record Label of the Harlem Renaissance (Nottingham: Vintage Jazz Mart Publications, 1996). 27 Du Bois and others lamented the white record industry’s concentration on the ‘down home’ forms of black musical expression, and in an editorial in The Crisis in 1921 Du Bois wrote about the degrees to which African American performers were hemmed in by white demands for 'comic darky songs'. He concluded that the only solution was a black-owned record company and he announced, we are pleased to hear that such a company is now forming with adequate capital and skilled management of guaranteed integrity'. Arthur P. Davis and Michael W. Peplow, The New Negro Renaissance: An Anthology (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1975), 496.

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 178

community to make the link between racial identity, ideology and consumption. The black press

held high hopes for the new enterprise. The announcement of the formation of the label in the Afro

American read, ‘Harry H. Pace Forms Organization To Produce Records Of Colored Artists': ‘At

present only three colored people sing for the records out of the hundreds of artists that are

employed in this work. One of these is making purely comic records, another is singing blues and

the third is singing his own syncopated songs'.28 It continued, ‘While not depreciating the

commercial value of comic songs, ‘blues’ and ragtime songs, the new corporation to furnish every

type of race music, including sacred and spiritual songs, and popular songs of the day and the high

class ballads and operatic selections'. The attitude is clearly stated here that comic songs, meaning

mostly minstrelsy, and blues, are of commercial value only, and while this is not to be entirely

discounted, Black Swan intended to promote ‘good music’ also.29

The black press continued to depict Black Swan, through all of its struggles and concessions – in

the end blues, popular songs, and dance music made up two thirds of its total releases – as a noble

enterprise and it was the number one story followed about black involvement in the phonograph

industry.30 The many articles about the touring schedules and concerts of artists such as Trixie

Smith, Albert Hunter, and Ethel Waters were presented as news from Black Swan rather than blues

recording artists. These articles were filed under titles such as ‘Black Swan notes’ and ‘Black Swan

Jazz Babies Are Great', and every piece of news from the company was faithfully reported. In 1923,

the Pace Phonograph Corporation changed its name to the Black Swan Phonograph Company

Incorporated and this merited a two-column article on the company in the New York Amsterdam

News.31 The story was one of triumph over adversity, mostly racial discrimination, and success from

humble beginnings, with the company forming ‘less than two years ago in a basement room with a

force of one stenographer and the organizer'. This piece went on to tell the reader, ‘During the year

the company paid to colored singers and musicians over $5 000 for records made, furnishing

opportunities to our singers denied by white companies'. It then listed the artists who made records

during the previous year and the rhetoric of this article is somewhat undermined by the fact the real

earners in this list, Ethel Waters and Trixie Smith, were exactly the sort of artists who could be

found on the Race Records roster of any the major white record companies. Nevertheless, the article

maintained, ‘Every type of song from Grand Opera, Sacred, and Standard to Popular numbers are

made. The company’s recordings compare favourably with any records made'. It is certainly true,

28 Afro-American, January 14, 1921, 11. 29 An article in the Norfolk Journal and Guide (January 15, 1921), noted that the point of the serious recordings was not to demean 'the commercial value of comic songs, “blues” and ragtime songs' but rather to supplement them with 'every type of race music, including sacred and spiritual songs, the popular music of the day, and the high-class ballads and operatic selections'. Again, here blues has only a commercial value. 30 Suisman, Selling Sounds, 218. 31 New York Amsterdam News, Feb 14, 1923, 6.

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 179

Black Swan did for a short time release records of a much wider range of musical styles than the

white companies, but very quickly it was forced to produce much more blues and jazz than anything

else to stay solvent, and in 1924 it was bought out by Paramount.

The news of the first Race Records catalogues in 1923 (prior to this, the recordings of the blues

queens sat in the popular catalogues along with the jazz tunes and parlour songs etc.), is reported as

a Black Swan story, even though Black Swan was in many ways following OKeh and Columbia by

issuing similar blues and jazz recordings: ‘Following the lead set by the Black Swan Phonograph

Company which uses only Negro singers and musicians on its records, several of the leading

phonograph companies have issued complete catalogues of records made by their colored artists'.

And when Black Swan folded and sold its back catalogue to Paramount in 1924, the Defender

managed to put a positive spin on the story, depicting the take-over as 'a consolidation' and casting

the demise of the only black-run label of the 1920s as a great opportunity.32

Coverage of the Blues Queens: The ads come alive

On February 1928, the Pittsburgh Courier published an article entitled ‘Spivey’s Records Best

Seller'.33 This article, however, was in reality a piece on the ubiquitous Race Records advertisement

in the black press in the 1920s, the only article my research into the subject has uncovered that

actually addresses the phenomenon. ‘Many readers have doubtless wondered where all these

present-day blues come from that are so extensively advertised in the Negro press', Floyd Calvin

writes: ‘The Lion’s share of them are put out by the OKeh Phonograph Corporation, 25 W. 45th

street, in New York'.

This strikingly detached article neatly encapsulates the attitude of the black press towards Race

Records in the 1920s. The fact that this article is the only one of its kind to explore this otherwise

seemingly impossible-to-ignore advertising is of course in itself revealing, yet in this article Calvin

presents the position of the black music critic to Race Records clearly. Having decided to

investigate ‘this kind of intriguing copy’, Calvin visits the OKeh office to find ‘a young white

woman with a mannish bob, a sophisticated air and radiating efficiency to her finger tips, who

reluctantly admitted she writes the ads’. This is Miss A. M. Kennard, the advertising manager at

OKeh, and Calvin comments: 'All the catchy phraseology and arresting pictures and cartoons which

32 Chicago Defender, April 19, 1924, 6. 33 Pittsburgh Courier, February 25, 1928, A1.

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 180

accompany these titles are the product of Miss Kennard's fertile brain and imagination'. When

Kennard enquires about the reception of her advertising copy by the black readership of Calvin's

paper, Calvin comments, ‘I couldn’t help Miss Kennard out much on how the public takes her

advertising. The folks I know don’t go in for phonograph records, but choose the radio and Irving

Berlin’s popular tunes'. He continues, 'They rather frown on these blues...but it is because they don’t

know how much money is in it'.

He then quotes the Brooklyn-born advertising executive on the subject of drafting the

advertisements: ‘We can’t give them too much highbrow stuff, we must keep it down where they

can get it. The same is true with white people. The whites who read tabloids like the Daily News

and the Graphic are in the same class. They all go in for sensation and jazz. They love it.’ Here is

captured the strong class distinction and snobbery which lay at the heart of the refusal of black

music critics to take jazz and blues seriously. When Calvin writes, ‘The vocal numbers go over with

colored people themselves, due, Miss Kennard thinks, to the fact that the colored people understand

the peculiar lingo and Southern colloquialisms better than the whites', he displays the detachment

with which the black elite regarded the music and musicians of Race Records, which can be

achieved by this implied class distinction. Being a cultivated, middle-class black man with no

knowledge of, or interest in, the jazz, blues, or religious music which were the most popular black

music styles of the 1920s, it is only natural, from his perspective, that he should have no idea about

what appeals to the common blues or jazz fan, and therefore he defers to the expert, a white record

executive from Brooklyn. It is this conceit that allows the black music critics through the 1920s to

report on the success of black blues and jazz artists, and their various activities, without offering

any sort of engaged criticism.

The coverage of Race Records artists encapsulates the style of journalism prevalent in the black

press in 1920. This coverage combined the sensationalism or ‘yellow journalism' of the Hearst

papers with racial uplift ideology, a concentration on financial success, validation in the white

world, and racial pride. Yet, a third element, the widespread revulsion within the black elite from

the 'low brow' music of jazz and blues, and what this music might say about black people, figured

strongly here as well, leaving a hole in the place where critical engagement might have been. This

resulted in the curious situation where music critics rarely engaged with ‘classic blues’ as a form of

music, while the ‘blues queens' were featured as celebrities quite frequently in news columns,

entertainment pages, and even in music review columns when the recent visit by Bessie Smith to

Chicago or Baltimore was such an event it simply could not be ignored.

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 181

The coverage of the 'classic blues' singers in the black press bears all the hallmarks of puff-piece

journalism. They are full of faint, superficial praise and tell a familiar, traditional uplift story of

triumph over adversity and racial bigotry, and eventual success through hard work. These

conventional, rags-to-riches tales, consistently hit several key notes that signified respectability and

success, including: humble beginnings, an unspoiled nature, strikingly light brown complexion,

incredible earnings and material wealth, and a lack of indulgence (which of course is another

opportunity to remark on their material wealth). There is little mention of the reason for their

success: their talent for singing the blues.

In a biographical piece on Mamie Smith, who was performing in Baltimore the week of September

the 23rd 1921, the Afro-American made much of Smith’s success as the first coloured phonograph

star, a rare occurrence in the black press, and yet the nature of this portrayal is a good example of

the attempt in this coverage to re-cast the success of these vaudeville blues singers in a manner

more in keeping with conventional uplift. She is described as, ‘the first colored girl artist to attain

world-wide fame as a phonograph singer of the first rank'.34 Her rise to fame is described in this

way: ‘she studied music in New York and became a concert and light opera singer, gaining much

praise for splendid voice and personality. Last summer she was engaged to make a series of

phonograph records, and almost overnight she became the most popular graphaphone artist of the

day, her popularity in this respect rivalling Caruso, McCormack and Melba'.35 Smith's portrayal as a

'concert and light opera singer' misrepresents the real basis of her success, her vaudeville career, and

does not account for her new title, 'the Queen of the Blues'.

In a biographical sketch of Ma Rainey, the oldest and most influential of the 'classic blues' singers,

in the Afro-American, the key points were listed in a series of headlines: ‘Adopted Seven Children’,

‘Thirty Years of Singing', 'Started At Salary of $6'. This article even had a headline pertaining to the

blues, ‘Blues are mistreated Lover’s heart throbs', a gesture towards the sort of engagement with the

form the music critics rarely conceded.36 One of the subheadings of the article is ‘“Ma’s” Earnings',

which read: ‘The singer’s first engagement was Charles P. Balley at the 81 Theatre in Atlanta at the

handsome salary of $6 a week. Today the star modestly remarks that her income from her stage and

record making activities are beyond her power of calculation. Among her rather meagre early

possessions is a three story apartment on Grand Boulevard, Chicago, assessed by the tax men at $36

000'. There is certainly no assumption that the reader, or the writer, has a familiarity with, let alone

34 Afro-American, September 23, 1921. 35 The Graphaphone was Alexander Graham Bell's version of the phonograph which was being sold by Columbia Records. 36 Ibid., April 10, 1926, 4.

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 182

a working knowledge of, the musical form of the blues. The reporter quotes Rainey explaining,

‘“Young Man,” said “Ma”, “the blues is only a lamenting of a wounded lover who has lost the

object of his affection”’. The reporter then comments, ‘she has recorded hundreds of what are now

popularly called “indigo” numbers’. This kind of elementary description and explanation of the

blues is not discernibly different from that found in the white newspapers such as the New York

Times, except perhaps here it is less engaged and enthusiastic, and indeed it is the sort of distance

that the white newspaper man working for the New York Times would have from these forms, that

these writers seemed to strive for.37

The headlines of a biographical piece on Bessie Smith in the Afro-American upon the eve of her

show at the Royal Theatre in Baltimore in May 1926 were: ‘Singer Began At Seven Years Old', and

‘From $10 weekly salary now $2500'.38 The piece read, ‘Miss Smith has travelled hard and far. She

has known what it means to work for ten dollars a week and “find” yourself and now, she told me,

her show grosses $2500 a week'. It continued, ‘Miss Smith might be best considered “buxom”. Her

clothes are made and fitted well, and together with her smooth brown skin, which is not rouged, she

presents a very attractive appearance'. 'She is a likeable person, not “upstage” in manner, nor has

she forgotten her struggles before she became famous', read the lead paragraph. Another piece on

Smith in the Afro-American in 1929 read, ‘It looks like a long jump from a little ramshackle cabin

in Chattanooga, Tenn., to the leading lady of a Broadway Musical Comedy, but that was the course

of Miss Bessie Smith'.39 In this and in other puff pieces on ‘classic blues’ artists, there is very little

comment on the style of music they performed. The story was not what Ethel Waters did, but rather,

that she was a black American from Baltimore who made a salary, 'even bigger than bankers', as the

Afro American claimed in 1921.40 In all of these pieces on the blues queens, their status as blues

artists was left off the list of traits; they are portrayed instead as attractive, successful, and talented

black women.

In the columns of music critics

The music critics of the black press, figures such as Nora Douglas Holt, Tony Langston, Bob Hayes,

and Dave Peyton in the Defender and James A. Jackson of the New York Amsterdam News, freely

37 The New York Times in fact featured many articles on jazz and blues in the 1920s, with titles such as 'Sad Raucous Blues Charms The World Anew', and 'Spirituals and Folk Ballads of the South of Slavery days sweep the in an Amazing Renaissance'. 38 Afro American, May 27, 1926, 4. 39 Ibid., June 1, 1929, 8. 40 Ibid., December 2, 1921, 6.

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 183

offered their opinions of jazz and blues at times, and yet cognizant of the overwhelming popularity

of many jazz and blues artists, they faithfully covered them when absolutely necessary. The degree

to which the coverage of vaudeville-cum-recording stars thinly disguised disapproval and disdain

for low-brow entertainment varied from writer to writer, but some degree of disapproval is

discernible throughout this coverage. Some were musicians of repute themselves, such as Dave

Peyton, while others were steeped in the world of vaudeville and distrusted the record industry, but

all of them shared a general disapproval of jazz and blues.41 When they did cover the 'blues queens',

their copy was for the most part unfailingly polite, full of faint praise and superficial niceties, but

devoid of any real engagement with the musical form or performance. From their perspective, the

blues was not worthy of serious musical critique, or even particular attention.

While this stance represented a consensus view among the black elite and the writers of the black

press who emulated white middle-class mores and believed jazz and blues to be anathema to their

uplift goals for the black musician, there were voices of dissent. Some younger writers of the

Harlem Renaissance held jazz in higher esteem than the newspaper music critics, were in fact proud

of this music as an authentic form of African-American cultural expression, and took issue with the

attitudes towards this music presented in the black press. Poet Langston Hughes embarked on a

particularly virulent attack on the snobbishness of the black press towards blues and jazz in 1927.

He wrote an article entitled, 'Best Negroes Not Really Cultured’ that was published in the

Pittsburgh Courier. He argued, 'The best Negroes, including the newspaper critics, still think white

people are better than colored people. It follows, in their minds, that since the drawings of Negroes

do not look like the drawings of white people they are bad art'.42 He continued, 'The best Negroes

believe that what white people think about Negroes is more important than what Negroes think

about themselves', and continued, 'many of the best Negroes, including the newspaper critics, are

not really cultured Negroes after all, and, therefore, have little appreciation of any art and no

background from which to view either own or the white man's books or pictures'. He railed against

what he characterised as their 'slavish devotion to Nordic standards, their snobbishness, their

detachment from the Negro masses'. A year earlier, in June 1926, Hughes had written another

article, 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain', published in The Nation, where he wrote, 'Let

the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing the Blues penetrate

the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand'.43 The

41 There was more discussion of blues as emergent musical form in white music and vaudeville magazines, such as Variety and Etude. 42 'Best Negroes Not Really Cultured'. Pittsburgh Courier, April 9, 1927, A1. 43 'The Negro and the Racial Mountain'. The Nation, 122, 23 June, 1926, 693. Another prominent Harlem Renaissance intellectual, Alain Locke, juxtaposed an essay on jazz with his own on the spiritual in his seminal New Negro publication of 1925, but as Alwyn Williams has noted, he then ignored it for the rest of twenties. Alwyn Williams, ‘Jazz

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 184

black press were happy to publish these incendiary remarks, but it had little effect on the reportage

of music critics in their pages. Throughout the 1920s their position remained stoic, despite the

ubiquity and insistent fame of the ever-growing stable of Race Records artists that continued to

make incursions into its columns and insinuating itself into the mainstream.

When obliged to cover these artists, the music critics, while covertly (and occasionally overtly)

disdainful of this music, sought the traditional uplift story in the lives of these artists nonetheless,

and there is frequent praise of their deportment, humble nature, beauty (usually light-brown skin)

and the audiences' enjoyment of their shows. Again, there is a concentration on the evidence of

material success, i.e. salaries, bejewelled gowns, and numbers at performances. The lazy repetition

of these signifiers of success allowed the critics to avoid offering any kind of serious musical

critique that might validate this music in the eyes of the reader. The occasional comment is made

about vocal style and stage presence but very little time is spent discussing the blues as a musical

form, or the jazz band that supported these singers.

In a review of Ethel Waters in the Afro-American in 1921 we learn that this, ‘stately very handsome

young woman of a real ‘teasing’ brown complexion’– made her appearance beautifully gowned in a

costume of blue pan velvet and gold brocade', at the sight of which the audience burst into

‘prolonged applause'.44 Later we learn that when she returned for the second number, ‘She was

wearing a $500 creation of gold'. In April 1924 Bob Hayes in the Defender covered a show by

'Madam “Ma” Rainey' at the Grand Theatre and her performance, 'the feature attraction' of the

night, received this appraisal: ‘She clearly proved that she was far superior to any of her

predecessors. The curtain goes up and finds her concealed in a Victrola box. While her Jazz Wild

Cats played she sang her first number. Her gowns were most wonderful creations of the

dressmakers' art’.45

Certainly, the costumes that the blues queens wore were an important element of the vaudeville

appearance at this time, and as indicated in this piece, singers often changed costume several times

in one show, displaying a tremendous quantity of jewels and high-end fashion. But beyond this, the

music critic of the black press seemed far more comfortable commenting on this aspect of the show,

and the New Negro: Harlem’s Intellectuals wrestle with the art of the age’. Australasian Journal of American Studies, Vol. 21 Issue 1 (200): 3. For more on the opinions of race leaders and writers within the Harlem Renaissance on the subject of black music see: Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., ed, Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance: A Collection of Essays (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990); Davarian L. Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007); John Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and its Critics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006); and John Runcie, 'Black Music and the Garvey Aesthetic' Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, Vol. 11, Iss. 2, (Jul 31, 1987), 7. 44 Afro-American, Dec 2, 1921, 4. 45 Chicago Defender, April 1924, 6.

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 185

the spectacle, than on the music, especially when compared to musical critique of classical

performances at this time.

One element of musical performance that did, at times, draw comment from black press music

critics was vocal technique, in so far as there was a strong preference for quieter, more refined

voices over what were derogatorily described as blues 'shouters'. This preference for less bawdy

vocal styles is tied to the general disapproval of ‘low down’ or ‘hot’ jazz and a desire to see blacks

perform more dignified styles of music. One positive review of Mamie Smith suggested she was not

what was advertised:

One would imagine from the records that she was of a rough, coarse shouter. To the

contrary, she was a splendid reproduction of Mary Irwin, who made this class of amusement

what it is today and what it will remain. One of Miss Smith’s features was that she rendered

her numbers clean and void of all foreign dancing, ‘slapping the finger’ acts, and added to

her personality a good lesson in stage dressing. Her three gowns made the audience gasp.46

In ‘Stage Music’ in the Afro-American in 1927, there was an item on ‘Hard Hearted Hannahs', that

was similarly displeased with the coarser tones of some blues singing:

It is quite amusing the way the 'Blues’ singers are trying to keep alive that ‘hard hearted

hannah’ air made famous by Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith, and a few others...Ethel Waters is

an exception. Her way of handling ‘blues’ is solely artistic, losing none of the harmony

therein or the rhythm that is affiliated with Negro music. Miss Waters only pulls out the hard

stuff occasionally, but when she does, it contains a sense of humor that is placed in such a

way and so brief, we are not overburdened.47

This kind of praise for the more sophisticated style of Waters was echoed in other articles which

made this distinction. In these reviews, the implication was that these singers who had attained such

celebrity were now in a different class because they had crafted a subtle art out of the crude music

of blues shouting. They had refined a form of raw expression that was unseemly when performed

by less gifted singers. However, this is the full extent of praise of vaudeville blues singers, and as

we shall see next, music critics such as Dave Peyton preferred not to discuss them at all.

46 Chicago Defender, Mar 5, 1921, 5. 47 Afro-American, Jan 15, 1927, 9.

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 186

Dave Peyton and 'The Musical Bunch'

Dave Peyton at The Chicago Defender was one of the most influential music critics of the era at the

most widely circulated black newspaper and a closer look at his column illuminates many of the

attitudes and obligations of the music critic in the black press in the 1920s. A musician himself, part

of the high class Café De Paris Orchestra, Dave Peyton was a man after owner Robert Abbott’s own

heart. Replacing Tony Langston in 1925, who was a slightly less virulent opponent of jazz music,

Peyton possessed the right attitude towards music but also served as a good role-model to the

fledgling musician.48 His column, ‘The Musical Bunch', appeared in the Defender from 1925-1929,

and was an instructional, pedagogic, inspirational, industry-based column aimed at the working

musician rather than the music lover. Although he was obliged to cover the world of music more

broadly, his articles were designed to educate the black musician by extolling the virtues of the

European classical music tradition. Whatever the supposed topic of a particular edition might be,

the true purpose was always to convert the fan of popular music to the greater rewards of highbrow

music.

Mark K. Dolan, in the only sustained treatment of Peyton's column, focuses on Peyton's coverage of

jazz, with the explanation that Peyton 'dealt primarily with ideas of instrumentation and small group

orchestra. Blues, on the other hand, emphasised vocals and lyrics'.49 And this is true, blues is

featured even less in 'The Musical Bunch' than jazz, and Peyton did not care much for jazz of any

sort. But blues musicians did feature in Peyton's columns and here we will investigate Peyton's

attitudes towards popular music in general and examine the occasions when the blues did enter his

coverage of the musical culture of the mid-1920s.

Peyton's fundamental position is stated clearly in the May 8, 1926 edition of 'The Musical Bunch’:

There are different kinds of music, and each kind has its power to control the emotion that is

susceptible to its charm. On the battle field it inspires, in the sick room it soothes, in the

church it causes repentance, this is one kind. Another kind is the ballroom music, that carries

with it a spirit to fascinate, to invigorate, to make happy. And still there is another kind – the

crude, barbaric, vulgar, and suggestive so-called jazz-music – which is degrading, appealing

only to the animal emotions of the dancers who are susceptible to its charms. Nevertheless,

48 McGuire, 114. 49 Dolan, 'Cathartic Uplift’, 112.

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 187

no matter what kind of music it is, it has its influence upon one group or another.50

Further into this column he included a segment entitled, 'Good Music Controls', where he wrote: 'It

is very true that popular music has a grip on the dance world and is very big in the amusement

environment, but that environment is not one-eighth of the class that are lovers and devotees of real

good music'. He regularly explained the superior pleasure of classical music. ‘“Standard” European

classical music 'carries in its theme a moral lesson, it recites history, it appeals, it is absolutely

essential in the gallery of the world’s art'. Furthermore, he suggested classical music contained all of

the thrills of popular music: 'most of the symphony scores tell a story. They tell a story of either

remorse, oppression or jubilancy'.51 He went on in this piece to explain why training in classical

music was a good career choice for the modern musician, noting that the movie theatres employed

'15 to 100 players' to play the overture which is a regular feature of the movie theatre program.

There was a constant strain running throughout his columns of uplift, racial pride, and validation:

'Among our Race group of musicians versatility is the watchword. We have outclassed the Nordic

musicians in this respect. I suppose it is because our field is so limited and in order to keep the wolf

away from the door we study more in order to hold our jobs'.52 There was much space given to the

poor position of the black musician in the white world of professional music: ‘The great curse of

race prejudice is pitted against us, although we have the goods and can deliver them', he railed in

October 1927.53 These pieces, while full of race pride, also had a scolding tone, where the musician

himself was, to some degree, held accountable for his lowly position. He attributed some of the

blame to the misbehaviour and crude conduct of black musicians and urged musicians to be careful

and disciplined in front of observant whites. He lamented that, ‘James Europe held the ship

together', and that, 'at his passing the bunch went wild and lost their foothold'.54 These pieces often

ended with advice on how to improve the reputation of black musicians, who have to be doubly

conscious of their behaviour in a field where the white musician was waiting to steal their music

and jobs. This same article ended with a list of ways to avoid trouble, entitled, ‘Do these things’,

which included ‘stay away from guests’ and ‘eliminate smoking on the bandstand'.55

Due to the popularity of this music amongst the Defender’s readership, and perhaps also due to

direct pressure from the heavily-advertising record and vaudeville companies, Peyton was obliged

50 Chicago Defender, May 8, 1926, 6. 51 Ibid., March 24, 1928, 6. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., October 8, 1927, 6. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid.

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 188

to cover at least some popular music, and this meant jazz and very occasionally, it’s even more

primitive and carnal relative, blues. This resulted in schizophrenic columns which contained his

own unchecked tirades against 'barbaric' jazz (that only appeals to 'the animal emotions'), alongside

coverage, probably copied verbatim from press-releases, of, for example, The Kentucky Jazz

Syncopators, and 'Stomp King' James Davis and 'his Full of Pep jazz band'. This practice saw

Peyton sign his name to sentiments such as these, clearly very closely resembling record company

copy:

The significant contribution of the Negro to the music of America is increasingly apparent in

the work of Race musicians and composers of today. Blues that are the deepest indigo, jazz

that stresses rhythm to an extraordinary degree, congregational singing that preserves all the

atmosphere and sincerity out of which the spirituals were born, are to be found in some of

the more recent recordings by nationally famous Race musicians.

The next paragraph in this column stated, 'it would be difficult to find jazz that is calculated to

stimulate lagging feet to the same degree as a new Victor recording by the Dixieland Jug Blowers of

“Don’t Give All the Lard Away”’, which was a direct quote from the Victor advertisement featured

elsewhere in that very edition of the Defender.56

Yet, despite Peyton's almost complete silence on the subject of the female 'classic blues' singers, not

to mention male country blues singers such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, Barbecue

Bob, or the musical ministers such as Reverend J.M. Gates, there was one figure who did inspire

Peyton to discuss the blues and that was W.C. Handy, 'The Father of the Blues'. Even then, twenty

years before the publication of his autobiography of the same name, Handy was an exception in the

black press and was the one ‘blues’ figure that all commentators unreservedly praised.57

In April 1926, Peyton dedicated a good portion of his page to the 'Career of W.C. Handy': 'one of

the country's most famous musicians'. It was only in these articles on Handy that Peyton discussed

the blues at any length. He explored Handy's most famous compositions, 'Memphis Street Blues',

'Beale Street Blues', and 'St. Louis Blues', all published before 1917.58 He wrote, 'W.C. Handy, one

56 Ibid., July 2, 1927, 6. 57 Jelly Roll Morton received some press in the late 1930s for taking exception to the constant claim that Handy was father of the blues or created jazz, and claimed himself to have created jazz at the turn of the century. 'Handy Not Father of the Blues, Says Jelly Roll', Afro-American, April 23, 1938, and 'I created Jazz in 1902, Not W.C. Handy', Down Beat, September, 1938. 58 Adam Gussow, ‘“Make My Getaway”: The Blues Lives of Black Minstrels in W.C. Handy’s Father of the Blues’. African American Review, Volume 35, Number 1 (2001): 5-28, 12.

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 189

would think, is an ordinary musician, because his line is the writing of “blues” music. Such is not

the case'. He then related a story of their first meeting in New York several years earlier at which he

was 'surprised while sitting in his music room, listening to him demonstrate his compositions,

which ranged from opera to syncopation, to learn that he was a theorist in music, a master of

counterpoint and harmony, and an arranger in the first class'. Peyton insisted it was one of the most

'pleasant times of my life. I had heard so much of him as a “blues” writer that it was surprising to

me to learn that he was a real musician'.59

‘The Musical Bunch’ of June 26, 1926, announced the publication of 'Blues', an anthology of 'blues'

compositions compiled by Handy and others. Peyton commented, offering a rather spectacular

reversal of opinion, ‘“Blues” an anthology tracing the development of the most spontaneous and

appealing branch of Race folk music from the folk blues to modern jazz, is sweeping the country'.

Indeed, in a column the previous month he wrote extensively on different forms of music, including

'national music', 'good music', 'spirituals', and 'folklore music', and blues did not rate a mention. He

continued, ‘W.C. Handy, of whom I have spoken so often in this column, is the author of this book',

and goes on to note, 'in the book are over 40 pieces of music and words, with contributions by such

well-known artists as Handy, Spencer, Williams, Nashe, Geo. Gershwin, Jerome Kern and Irvin

Berlin'.60 This list is revealing. Clearly the music in this publication is far removed from the 'blues'

on Race Records, and no Race Records artist or even vaudeville act was involved in the project.

This music could more accurately be described as blues-inspired. This was an orchestrated and

highly adapted variety of blues that was more at home in Broadway musicals than Harlem

nightclubs, and this is the key to Peyton’s appreciation of the form. For Peyton, Handy was a genius

because he took this primitive folk music and 'with his great creative and analytical powers',

'revolutionized their construction, eradicated vulgarities, commercialized them'. Elsewhere Peyton

wrote, 'Some time ago “blues” were considered inferior music in the home; they appealed only to

the lower classes of Race folk [but Handy] labored to bring this soul-stirring music before the world

[and] today he can be proud of the distinction of being the father of the “blues”’.61

This perception, that Handy had crafted from this raw material something civilised and fit for

cultured consumption, lay at the heart of the rhetoric of the music appreciation movement of the

59 Chicago Defender, April 17, 1926, 6. 60 In fact, figures such as Irving Berlin and Gershwin were doing a lot to get the jazz and blues of black musicians into the pages of the white press. In Jan 10, 1925, The New York Times reported that ‘Berlin calls Jazz American Folk Music'. Berlin opined that, ‘It began with the old Southern songs of Stephen Foster and the negro spirituals, but it isn’t purely negro in its characteristics…there is a tinge of the Russian and Italian folk songs about it'. He concluded, ‘the national expression is there just as truly as in the German waltz or the fiery Italian music'. 61 Chicago Defender, June 26, 1926, 6.

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 190

early twentieth century as well as that of many Race leaders. For many in the music appreciation

movement, the spirituals, the white folk songs of the Southern Appalachians, and now the blues,

were all crude, yet authentic, American forms that could form the basis of a truly American music if

combined with the principles of European classical composition.62 For a good uplift man like

Peyton, Handy encapsulated everything he could hope for in the musical endeavours of the black

composer. In fact, special mention is made within 'The Musical Bunch' of any jazz musician who

had taken heed of the constant call, by critics and uplift men such as Peyton, to incorporate classical

music into jazz compositions. 'The Dixie Crackerjacks', he writes in 1926, 'is an exceptionally

clever jazz combination, possessing a decided touch of symphonic jazz'.63 In April 1927, his column

ran the headline, 'Just a hint to our composers: Let's get busy and compose some jazz symphonies'.

'The white brother is running ahead of us', he argued, 'they are taking jazz themes and expressions

and are writing jazz symphonies on them'. He then urged the black composer into action: 'why

should we go to sleep now and let our own music be developed into the symphonic atmosphere

when we have theorists in music that are just as capable as anyone in the world'.64

Handy, of course, had a lot to do with his image in the press himself, moulding it with significant

help from his literary and financial associate, Abbe Niles. According to music historian David

Evans, 'Niles singlehandedly contributed as much to the building of the Handy legend as the entire

puff press of the day, while giving it a more serious and permanent form in his articles, and his work

on Handy's books'.65 Handy was cast as once removed from the actual practitioners of blues music

as well as its original inspiration. His interest in the form, he openly admitted in interviews and in

his autobiography in 1941, was strictly financial. As he recounted in his autobiography, his

revelation occurred one night when a local band in Cleveland, Mississippi in 1903 were 'showered

in coins in appreciation' for playing 'one of those over-and-over strains that seem to have no very

clear beginning and certainly no ending at all'. He was shocked but it was then 'I saw the beauty of

primitive music...My idea of what constitutes music was changed by the sight of that silver money

cascading around the splay feet of a Mississippi string band'.66

62 For more on music appreciation and the black music, see Chapter Two. 63 Chicago Defender, May 8, 1926, 6. 64 Ibid., April 30, 1927, 6. 65 David Evans, ed, Ramblin' On My Mind: New Perspectives On the Blues (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 138. For more on Handy, see Abbott and Seroff, ‘“They Cert'ly Sound Good to Me”’; Adam Gussow, ‘“Make My Getaway”: The Blues Lives of Black Minstrels in W. C. Handy’s Father of the Blues'; and Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004). 66 Perry Bradford, a figure who occasionally popped up in the entertainment pages as either a performer, composer, or occasionally, as the man credited with convincing OKeh to record Mamie Smith after Sophie Tucker turned down the offer, wrote bitter words about those in the black elite who believed themselves above the blues in his own autobiography. Bradford detested what ‘“fakers” did to our own people up in Harlem by teaching them to “hate” their own birthright music'. Bradford, Born With the Blues, 77.

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 191

As Karl Hagstrom Miller has pointed out, 'Handy described himself as a cultural middle-man

between Southern “primitive” artists and the nation at large', and this is precisely why the black

press adored him.67 He had commodified, commercialized, in their eyes 'tamed' and made

respectable, a primitive, even barbaric, form of musical expression that the black elite had been

embarrassed by. As a professional composer who transformed this music, rather than a blues

musician himself, there was a class distinction and the recognition of man who was one of their

own. Moreover, his musical career, and his music, sat much more comfortably with the sort of racial

uplift promulgated by the black press, as an embodiment of Washington's separate-but-equal-ethos.

For the music critics, Handy’s distance from the genuine blues was also a model for their own

detachment. They were middle-class blacks who, regardless of the truth, could maintain that they

had no knowledge of the primitive music favoured by lower class blacks who did not have the class,

or the will, to better themselves.68

There were several other figures that were singled out as being different to the rest of the jazz and

blues pack, the sort that considered refined, or accomplished, enough to be given their due in the

columns of music critics. Some were white, such as the 'King of Jazz' Paul Whiteman, who received

much praise from Peyton for introducing symphonic music into jazz. Peyton wrote: ‘To know Paul

Whiteman is to understand at last the phenomenon of American jazz'. ‘Never was there a clearer

vision of what it’s all about', he coos, ‘Whiteman is pure American, like his art'. Peyton concludes:

‘The fact that Whiteman’s records sell in the millions proves his point'.69 Another was James Reece

Europe. In January 1926, Peyton wrote a column entitled 'Our Musicians in Europe', which

lamented again the loss of James Reece Europe, the one-time musical advisor to Irene and Vernon

Castles, the most famous dancers in the country in 1916, and the jazz musician who had had the

most success in the white world of entertainment.70 Here Peyton writes of this beloved figure:

The late James Reece Europe – how we loved his memory! – was a great, distinctive figure

in the musical world of Europe and America, and the history of Jim Europe will live to

inspire the new comer to do great things like him. The wealthiest class of Americans bid for

67 Miller, 'Segregating Sound', 243. 68 Handy was lauded throughout the black press. The New York Amsterdam News published an article in 1923 entitled, ‘Race of Phonograph Companies to Record ‘Blues’ Recalls Handy’s Work', seeing the Race Records phenomenon as homage to Handy. The subtitle reads, ‘Handy Saw Possibilities and Present Demand Five Years Ago and Did Everything Within His Power to Organize Colored Artists and Musicians'. The article lists his ‘firsts'. These include: the originator of the Blues, first Blues publishing company to locate on Broadway, first to have a ‘laughing trombone on the record',‘the first to publish the songs and to advertise the first Colored girl on the records', 'the first to show the commercial possibilities in Blues, for which more than sixteen phonograph companies in America are clamoring', and ‘the first to give Colored pianists, Colored stenographers, Colored bookkeepers, Colored arrangers, Colored auditors, Colored pluggers employment in a Blues institution'. Aug 15, 1923, 5. 69 Chicago Defender, May 19, 1928, 6. 70 Ibid., Jan 2, 1926, 7.

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 192

artistic service rendered by Jim Europe and his musical units, and at his death the country

lost a powerful factor in its artistic life.71

Conclusion

The Race Records advertisements in the black press represented everything the staff writers already

abhorred about blues and jazz. Many in the black press already reviled this music, but these ads

must have smarted as lurid encapsulations of their worst fears. Jazz and blues, in their eyes,

represented a poor image of black Americans as slaves to primitive desires and vices such as

alcohol, gambling, crime and infidelity, and here they were, leering out at them in the pages of the

principal platform for the uplift of the race. They did not say as much however. The response to

Race Records was subtler than that, and involved a negotiation of the commercial realities of the

black press at the time. While the priorities and ideology of the black press remained true

throughout the 1920s, ignoring Race Records became easier as the decade progressed because the

blues queens gave way to the country bluesmen on Race Records who were not headline vaudeville

acts and did not visit the North as regularly as did the 'classic blues' singers. Then came the

Depression and the production of Race Records dropped to a trickle and the extensive advertising

stopped with it.

Yet, for most of the decade, this increased tension between the uplift goals of music critics in the

black press and the blues culture that had spread throughout the black press and into the homes of

millions of blacks, created an odd dynamic in the columns of the music critics. Unable to reconcile

themselves with this music, they simply avoided engaging with it, and focused on the traditional

uplift story that could be salvaged from this otherwise unfortunate development. What this shows in

relation to the construction of the visual and verbal rhetoric of Race Records is that the record

industry did not pander to the tastes or ideological notions of the music critics or their editors, and

yet this did not hurt sales. Race Records sold incredibly well throughout the 1920s, and while the

blues queens were somewhat displaced by country 'down home' solo bluesmen in the late 1920s, the

biggest stars of the 'classic blues', Bessie Smith, ‘Ma’ Rainey, Victoria Spivey and Clara Smith,

71 Roland Hayes, the tenor who had earlier been a member of the Fisk Jubilee Quartet, is another Race musician who was celebrated in the black press. On Nov 8, 1924, a news item in the Defender declared, ‘Has Roland Hayes commenced a new era in the history of our Race in America? Within a short span of a century this Race has risen from the savagery of life in Africa through slavery in America to today, when it has produced one of the finest singers of the times'. On the success of Roland Hayes’ tour of Europe, an irate reporter from the Afro-American (August 26th, 1921) exclaimed, 'Mr Hayes has been a finished artist for the past ten years. But his ability won scant recognition from the press or from the big musical managers in New York. Phonograph companies refused to record his singing of operatic selections and compelled him to confine his attention solely to Negro folk songs. So much for America'.

Chapter Six – In the Press: The Reception of Race Records in the Black Press 193

remained strong sellers and retained some presence in the black press throughout the decade.72 In

fact, the ongoing success of these artists in vaudeville after the record boom had collapsed, meant

that there would continue to be some presence of the blues queens in the black press throughout the

1930s as well.

However, this was not simply a case of the Northern white industry imposing its own conception of

black musical expression on a passive black population, but rather an incredibly effective

exploitation of the emergent musical forms of the black working-class. Black consumers embrace of

Mamie Smith's 'Crazy Blues' in 1920 prompted an incursion into the pages of the black press

otherwise dominated by a traditional uplift ideology beholden to white middle-class values. The

readership of the black press bought millions of copies of the records of these artists and flocked to

the appearances of the blues queens. While the black press did not have to like it, they did need to

cover it. The response by the music critics to this music – the concentration on the success of

respectable business rather than on blues artists themselves, the downplaying of the innovation and

true art of blues and jazz, the concentration on the material trappings of success, the preference for

'refined' singing over impassioned blues 'shouting', and the privileging of artists who introduced

aspects of classical composition into jazz performance – all reflected the struggle of the black elite

to maintain its hegemonic power in the face of an assertion of black working-class musical culture

that was enabled by an incipient mass consumerism, and assisted by a white-run Northern industry.

72 Each of these continued to have a new record released every two months. Dixon and Godrich, 56.

Epilogue – What the Depression did to the Marketing of Southern

Vernacular Music

The Wall Street crash and the ensuing Depression had a devastating effect on the record industry.

This prompted some dramatic and sudden changes in the marketing strategies for Southern

vernacular music before severely curtailing advertising of any sort for several years. First, however,

the industry shrank and many companies simply folded. By the mid-1930s, most of the independent

record companies, including Paramount, OKeh, and Vocalion, had gone out of business or were

acquired by larger corporations. Victor, which was taken over by RCA in 1929, was still the leader

of the industry in the 1930s, but its annual gross revenue from records fell from nearly $40 million

in 1928 to $7 million in 1931 and barely $3 million in 1932.1 To some degree, the Depression was

the final blow to the industry that had been struggling against radio's greater affordability for some

time, and while many companies had been producing successful combined radio/phonographs, the

radio became the ultimate, low investment Depression entertainment.

Very quickly, the vast consumer choice the industry had offered in the 1920s shrank to a very

narrow output based on the highest-selling products. The focus of record company marketing fell

on orchestrated versions of instrumental music and songs by canonised American masters such as

Stephen Foster, Rudolk Friml, and Victor Herbert.2 With the development of the 'talkies', Tin Pan

Alley's hit making machine moved to Hollywood and as the music industry became increasingly

enmeshed with the movie business, the movie tie-in became an increasing focus of the record

industry.3 The Race Records market was one of the first to be drastically cut back, along with

foreign language records. One of the responses to the Depression within the fields of Race Records

1 William Roy, ‘“Race Records” and “Hillbilly Music”: Institutional Origins of Racial Categories in the American Commercial Recording Industry’. Poetics, Vol. 32, Issues 3-4, June-August 2004: 265-279, 275. 2 Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years, Vol. 3 From 1900-1984 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 72. 3 Suisman notes that by 1935, Warner Brothers, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount, and Twentieth Century Fox controlled over half of the music licensed by ASCAP. Record labels became controlled by film companies also, with Columbia being sold to the Consolidated Film Industries in 1929 until 1938 when it was sold to the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 263 and 269. It is important to note that the 'talkies' first great hit was The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson. While the music featured in the film itself was not really jazz but orchestrated tin pan alley pop, it did signify the powerful hold that jazz now held over the popular imagination as well as indicate the ongoing popularity of blackface minstrelsy.

Epilogue – What the Depression did to the Marketing of Southern Vernacular Music 195

and Old Time was to promote the two together, and Victor's budget label Bluebird and other

companies released new record supplements that promoted Old Time and Race Records side by

side. While not exactly bringing the shared tradition together again, this new approach certainly

indicated the industry’s view of the two catalogues, as two marginal catalogues of quaint music

from the South, one white and one black.

In 1934, a new competitor entered the Race Records market, the American arm of the English

company Decca Records. Run by Jack Kapp, previously from Brunswick-Balke-Collender's Race

Records, Decca employed Mayo Williams, previously of Paramount and Black Patti, the only black

record executive of the 1920s, as head talent scout.4 Vocalion, RCA-Victor's Bluebird, and Decca,

were the three companies that continued to produce Race Records throughout the Depression.

Gospel records were released, and some dance band jazz from artists such as Duke Ellington,

Fletcher Henderson, and King Oliver, all of whom were on Victor (and who, according to Russell

Sanjek, commanded sizable white audiences made up mostly of college students).5 Originating

predominantly from Chicago and Detroit, a new form of urban blues emerged, dominated by figures

such as Leroy Carr (one of the first really successful blues pianists), Tampa Red, Memphis Minnie,

Big Bill Broonzy, Roosevelt Sykes and Walter Davis, but the content and message of Race Records

advertising did not particularly change with them, in fact the practice of advertising Race Records

had become by the mid-1930s too much of an expense for the struggling companies.6 The urban

blues included in Race Records catalogues in the 1930s however was already moving towards the

piano and guitar dominated blues-band form that would in the late 1940s become known as 'rhythm

and blues', although this term was just another catch-all industry term given to the genre by a white

Northern industry figure.7

In 1929, Old Time was being called Hillbilly throughout most of the industry and in fact seemed to

be going strong.8 Jimmie Rodgers had had a huge hit a year earlier with ‘Blues Yodel Number 1’ – a

tune that has been described as essentially an Old Time version of a black blues – , and this record

outsold all of Victor's popular catalogue. Also in 1929, Sears, Roebuck entered Hillbilly as a

category in its catalogue, and Montgomery Ward followed in 1930.9 Yet none of this prevented the

4 R.M.W. Dixon and J. Godrich, Recording the Blues (New York: Stein and Day, 1970), 77. 5 Sanjek, 72. 6 Dixon and Godrich, 80. 7 Billboard writer Jerry Wexler, who would go on to helm Atlantic Records and produce records with some of the biggest black artists of the 1960s and 70s, including Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles, coined the term. 8 Sanjek has estimated it accounted for 25% of popular music sales in 1930. Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years, Vol. 3, 72. 9 Archie Green, 'Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol'. Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 78, No. 309, Hillbilly Issue (Jul-Sep, 1965): 204-228, 222.

Epilogue – What the Depression did to the Marketing of Southern Vernacular Music 196

industry from severely curtailing Old Time releases after the Depression hit.10 Although new

companies did enter the market in the 1930s, and in 1935 Decca produced a 'Hill Billy Records'

catalogue with the sub-headings 'Old-Time Singing, String Bands, Sacred, Fiddlin', Old Time

Dance', very few Old Time records were being made and even the most successful acts of the late

1920s barely managed to eke out careers in radio. One of the most successful Old Time acts of the

late 1920s, the Carter Family, moved in the mid-1930s to Texas, where they found work across the

border on radio station XERA, in Villa Acuna (now Cuidad Acuna), Mexico. The Carters projected

a cleaner, soberer, more family-oriented version of Old Time than some of the groups in the 1920s,

and they avoided the more outlandish, comic dimension that flourished on radio in the 1920s. They

famously promoted their own live performances with bills that read 'This Program is Morally Good'

and it was this moral, socially-upstanding version of Old Time that took hold on radio in the 1930s

on stations like Charlotte's WBT, which ran the 'Crazy Water Crystals Show', a barn dance show

modelled on the 'National Barn Dance' on Chicago's WLS and the 'Grand Ole Opry' on Nashville's

WSM. Pamela Grundy has argued that, in response to the hardships and social problems that arose

in the Depression era in the new industrial centres, such as the Carolina Piedmont, the largest

textile-producing centre in the world in 1930, listeners fashioned their own version of Old Time

musical entertainment, that avoided the clichés of the comic hayseed and the bawdier, rebellious

aspects of the form and its associations with alcohol.11 This image was certainly a descendant of the

first record industry marketing of Old Time musicians discussed in this study, which emphasised

their membership in a humble, authentic, folk community that proudly carried on mountain cultural

traditions.

The biggest movement in Southern Old Time music at the turn of the decade was the rise of the

cowboy. As Bill C. Malone has argued, by the mid-1930s the cowboy had well and truly replaced

the mountaineer as the romantic symbol of the true American pioneering spirit.12 Most widely

popularised by Gene Autry in the early 1930s, although presaged by Eck Robertson and others such

as Harry McClintock in the 1920s, association with the romanticism of the cowboy image became

the new, more exciting, and more dignified, image for the rural musician if he wanted to appear

removed from the traits of the comic hayseed. This also coincided with the move of the wider music

industry from New York to Hollywood, and the gaining of movie contracts surpassed the recording

contract as the marker of success for 1930s musicians. Some Old Time musicians, such as Bascom

Lamar Lundsford, Jean Thomas, and others, sought refuge from the commercial swing away from

10 William Ruhlmann, Breaking Records: 100 years of Hits (New York: Routledge, 2004), 47. 11 Pamela Grundy, 'We Always Tried To Be Good People: Respectability, Crazy Water Crystals, and Hillbilly Music on the Air, 1933-1935’. The Journal of American History, Vol. 81, No. 4. (Mar., 1995): 1591-1620. 12 See Bill C. Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1993).

Epilogue – What the Depression did to the Marketing of Southern Vernacular Music 197

mountain sounds in the folk festival, dissociating themselves from the commercial image of the

hillbilly.13 A few, such as the Carter Family and Bradley Kincaid, forged a path somewhere in-

between, never quite removing themselves from the commercial aspirations and associations of

country music, particularly on the radio, but nevertheless presenting themselves as somehow

removed from the more degrading aspects of the radio hillbilly, and as true mountain musicians.14

Throughout the history of country music, the purity of mountain musicians has been returned to

periodically as a marker of authenticity and this has its roots in the marketing of Old Time in the

1920s. One of the instances of this is Victor’s marketing of Woody Guthrie in the 1940s. Guthrie,

whose tales of Dust Bowl hardship became an important link between Old Time and the folk revival

of the 1960s, was portrayed by Victor as a conduit for traditional, as well as contemporary, folk

music, a duality that can be directly linked to the marketing of Old Time musicians in the 1920s. In

1940, a Victor supplement, 'The Newest Black Label Classics, Specialities and Educational

Records', described Guthrie's 'Dust Bowl Ballads – Volumes 1 and 2' in this way:

These two volumes turn the pages of modern American history, and relate in folk songs one

of the most poignant and moving events in national life. The balladeer is an uprooted

'Oakie', a wandering minstrel of 1940, whose biting sagacity is only faintly hidden behind a

chuckle. These songs prove the existence of true, rugged, American pioneering spirit and

indomitable will to survive.15

In this blurb, the 'Oakie' (a term that in the 1930s denoted the thousands of farmers migrating out of

the dust bowl of Oklahoma and Texas but is now simply a term for people of that region) has

replaced the 'hillbilly' as the backward, down-on-his-luck itinerant folk musician and the cowboy as

the symbol of the 'American pioneering spirit'.16 Here Guthrie is presented as a 'folk' musician, and

we can see how by 1940, this image of the folk singer as not simply an antiquated relic of a bygone

era, but also an active chronicler of the times, had become a well-established trope, with the

romanticism of the 'wandering minstrel' image intact. This is yet another inheritance from 1920s

Old Time, in which the white musician of the Southern Appalachian Mountains emerged onto the

national stage as a symbol of a lost American past, as neither a backwards fool nor simply an old

timer, but with current 'event' songs that chronicled modern life alongside ancient ballads.

13 Bill C. Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers, 85. 14Although Kincaid did eventually relent to the cowboy image, in 1941, in WHAM Rochester he dressed as a cowboy and hosted a show entitled the 'Circle B Ranch’. Malone, 83. 15 RCA Victor Supplement 1940. Southern Folklife Collection, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 16 See Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers.

Epilogue – What the Depression did to the Marketing of Southern Vernacular Music 198

The Old Time musician of the 1920s had been depicted as the embodiment of the American ideals

of liberty, family, tradition, and the pioneering spirit, and removed from the 'miasma' of the South,

as well as from Southern blacks. In the continuing project of the redemption of the South, and the

redemption of poor whites, country music played an important role from this moment on. Indeed,

the marketing imagery of both Race Records and Old Time not only established the racial

dichotomy of Southern music in the marketplace, but also a catalogue of markers of authenticity

and appeal that would be drawn upon in both rhythm and blues and country music, and beyond this,

in popular music, for the rest of the century.

As a result, when the folk revival emerged in the 1960s, it was not the cowboy singers (who were

now stars of commercial country music), but the early Old Time musicians who were seen as

representing the true folk music of America. Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music,

produced by Moses Asch's Smithsonian Folkways Recording, became a founding document of the

folk revival, canonising many of the Old Time musicians of the 1920s, long-forgotten as true

preservers of the folk music of America. With the Anthology, Smith argued for a definition of

American folk music that was far broader than the conventional folklorist focus on the Child

ballads, one that might have been close to what the Southern musician, if they had thought of such

things at all, might have offered in the 1920s. Somewhat aligned to Big Bill Broonzy's much

discussed observation about folk music that 'I guess every song is a folk song – at least I never

heard a horse sing 'em!', Smith presented many of the early recording artists of Old Time and Race

Records (he includes everyone from the Carter Family and the Carolina Tar Heels to Blind Lemon

Jefferson and Blind Willie Johnson) as purveyors of an American folk music that cared less about

definitions, and more about utility.17 If these musicians could use it, they did, and a wide variety of

music was included in the repertoire, the 'common stock' that Dixon and Godrich describe.18 It is

this dimension to the musicians that were featured in Old Time and Race Records catalogues; that

they did not fit neatly into the mould of the scholarly folk preserver, nor the crude 'hillbilly' or

minstrel caricature, that was perhaps one of their most appealing aspects for the folk revivalists, and

seminal figures such as Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, in the 1960s. This complexity was something

that was captured by the record catalogues of the 1920s. While it is important to acknowledge that

this does not ameliorate the artificial and harmful segregation of Southern musical culture by the

record industry in the 1920s, what the industry did unwittingly portray were Southern white

musicians as neither rubes nor scholars, and Southern black musicians as neither minstrels nor

17 Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 326. 18 See Dixon and Godrich, Recording the Blues.

Epilogue – What the Depression did to the Marketing of Southern Vernacular Music 199

simply singers of slave spirituals, but artists emerging from mere stereotypes, singing their own

music.

Conclusion

As I began this research and set out to de-construct the rhetoric of Race Records and Old Time

marketing, I imagined that, for the most part, this would be a study of the record industry and the

way certain key figures within the industry misrepresented Southern musical traditions. While this

industry focus remains to a large degree, I did not anticipate then that my research would suggest

that the music and the musicians of Race Records and Old Time had such a powerful influence on

the industry's rhetorical devices. Perhaps this is due to the concentration of previous studies on the

role of industry figures such as Ralph Peer and his entrepreneurial counterparts in radio, coupled

with a general sense of the exploitation of Southern musicians by the industry and the harmful

effects of the industry's racial segregation of their musical traditions. Nonetheless, this is what I did

find, and therefore my view of the process of the commercialisation of Southern musical culture

was changed by this research.

Alongside the obvious and crude stereotypes in the catalogues of Old Familiar Tunes and in the

advertising for Race Records, I have found surprisingly sensitive attempts to capture something of

the essence of this music and its appeal. The commercialisation process undoubtedly circumscribed,

narrowed, and reduced the conception of what the musical culture of the South was, as commercial

values took precedence over cultural ones. The segregation of Southern vernacular music by the

record industry not only defined and racialised this music, it helped commodify racial difference,

and irreversibly damaged the development of this musical culture by making certain music out of

bounds for certain musicians due to perceived racial exclusivity. For musicians, the effects of this

were equivocal and characterised by both constraints and opportunities. In an era when The Jazz

Singer and Amos ‘n Andy were two of the biggest sensations in the entertainment world, the advent

of Race Records certainly did not overthrow or put an end to the supremacy of minstrel stereotypes

in the public arena. But through the process of commercialising Southern vernacular music such as

the blues; through the response to consumer demand and the attempt to capture and expand markets,

the Race Records phenomenon produced many instances of cultural intervention in the marketplace

by music, and by musicians, that would have been inconceivable to many just a few years earlier. In

the severely racialised climate of the 1920s, segregation in practice meant that a great many

Conclusion 201

occupations and arts were completely shut off to African Americans. With the advent of Race

Records, previously marginalised musical cultures, such as the blues and gospel music of working-

class Southern blacks, burst onto the national marketplace, its representations splashed all over the

tightly elite-controlled black press. Certainly, in so far as this can be seen as an advance in cultural

power for African American musicians, this was sadly not matched in terms of economic power.

Besides the ill-fated attempt by Harry Pace with his Black Swan company, the access black

musicians and black industry figures had to the modes of production remained severely limited

throughout the 1920s, and most secured no rights to the intellectual property they were producing.

While some of the intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance celebrated jazz and the blues as

authentic forms of African-American musical expression, no-one claimed Race Records as a

demonstration of equal rights for black musicians. Likewise, for some Southern white musicians,

their small-scale yet hard-won commercial victories, such as the introduction of 'barn dance' shows

on the radio in the early 1920s, were rewarded with the arrival of the 'Old Familiar Tunes'

catalogues. These pioneering efforts influenced the form of this musical category and its marketing,

and yet this did not undermine the rise of the hillbilly fool as the defining image of the Southern

musician.

In the scholarship on the rise of consumer culture in America, there has been much rumination over

the role of corporate elites, the function of advertising, and the true motivations of those who

devised advertising images and strategies. This study is in sympathy with other work that has

looked beyond the conspiratorial top-down view of big business and has attempted to see the

development of these marketing categories for what it really was: a complex process involving the

influence of existing culture, business practices and marketing images, and the striving for

something new – the exploitation and expansion of new markets.1 This is a process that was

influenced by a matrix of forces, both commercial and cultural, that, quite without design, shaped

what we can now look upon as cultural historical artefacts. As Lisa Jacobson has observed of

consumer culture more generally: 'Simply put, cultural change did not merely reflect the economic

imperatives of corporate elites’.2 This is what I have found to be the case with Race Records and

Old Time marketing. Ultimately, the marketing rhetoric of these new catalogues of music reflected

who devised it, who consumed it and those who it claimed to represent: in this case, Southern

musicians.

The level of influence, or the degree of agency, within these three groups is of course contingent on

1 Such as Lisa Jacobson, T.J. Jackson Lears, Lawrence Levine, Pamela Grundy, and Mark K. Dolan. 2 Lisa Jacobson, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century (New York, Columbia University Press, 2004, 4.

Conclusion 202

many things, and in this particular case, it is uneven. First, the record industry's marketing of these

new catalogues of music, that were from an industry perspective part of a larger project of

providing consumer choice, was intrinsically tied to earlier cultural allegiances and economic

imperatives, and the prevalence of a certain ideology entrenched in the world-view of the industry

leaders. But there is a tension between tradition and the new within any industry, where the lessons

of the past, in the phonograph industry's case – that the use of celebrity highbrow figures such as

Enrico Caruso was the key to convincing the white middle class that the phonograph was an

attractive, convenient, and enriching source of living room entertainment – sit uncomfortably with

the pursuits of the present, namely the exploitation of markets for a variety of musics previously

unknown to record industry executives. This situation created a confusion, or dissonance, in the

policies and corporate rhetoric of the industry that the trade organ Talking Machine World attempted

to reconcile in an awkward and uneven manner throughout the 1920s, as discussed in chapters Four

and Five. Ultimately, the industry's solution for reconciling its allegiance to musical hierarchy and

highbrow European culture with its new catalogues of vernacular music was to market these musics

as part of hallowed folk traditions, or alternatively, as attempts to revive minstrelsy. As we have

seen, as the national market for this music was established, this misrepresentation gave way to a

truer representation of the musical forms released in Race Records and Old Time catalogues.

Second, the consumer played a significant role in the development of the rhetoric of Race Records

and Old Time, even in this era of little or no market research. From the beginning, through the

reception of vernacular musicians on the vaudeville, minstrel, or fiddling competition stages, and

then through the purchase of records, consumers played an important role in shaping Race Records

and Old Time catalogues. Although the preponderance of certain styles of music in the segregated

musical catalogues of the record industry, such as blues and traditional ballads, has greatly

exaggerated their position in the musical world of Southern whites and blacks prior to the creation

of these catalogues, the regional popularity of these artists was used by figures such as Perry

Bradford and Polk Brockman to sell the idea of recording these artists to the recording executives at

OKeh. Of course, beyond this, the industry attempted to respond to and follow the changing tastes

of the mass of consumers through a simple but effective method: determining what sold well and

what did not.

Race Records and Old Time artists had a direct influence on this rhetoric in the sense that they often

literally suggested key images and terms used in this marketing. While the industry relied heavily

on what it already knew about selling Southern vernacular music, namely minstrelsy and the

growing interest in American folk music, many of the key aspects of the marketing of Race Records

Conclusion 203

and Old Time came from the musicians themselves. The performative gestures of these musicians in

the live setting were influential. Old Time fiddlers' ability to embody nostalgia for the old ways was

well established prior to the creation of Old Time catalogues and this had been well exploited by

Southern politicians at campaign rallies, where the fiddlers' concurrent predilection for self-satire

entertained the crowds and kept the mood festive. Likewise, the blues artists’ ironic play with

minstrel tropes, their great propensity for finding humour in the most dire circumstances, and their

way with suggestive lyrics, among other attributes, informed many of the tropes of the Race

Records catalogue.

None of this of course ameliorates the artificial nature of the reification of racial difference by the

record industry through its segregation of Southern vernacular music, nor the industry's contribution

to the national project of segregation through the mass media and consumer culture. From its

inception, the record industry made a vital contribution to a racialised consumer culture through its

compliance with ideas of racial essentialism and bi-racialism. The earliest recordings of blackness,

such as the 'coon song', required the development of the new aural markers of race, and as historian

Mark M. Smith has observed, audiences increasingly 'interrogated records as racialized

performances', which separated the seeing and hearing of racial identity and, in the process, helped

establish race as a thoroughly sensory category, one 'beyond the eye but (supposedly) detectable by

the ear'.3

The commercial segregation of Southern music occurred at a time when the refinement of mass

production and mass consumption was moving apace. Every aspect of consumption was in

transition – from what people bought, to how they bought things, to how manufacturers attempted

to sell things to them. I return to David Suisman's point that the very idea of modern marketing, the

shift in the meaning of the term from simply bringing things to market to attempting to entice an

abstract consumer to buy products through advertising, was only a couple of decades old in the

1920s. The expansion of department stores, the development of mail-order buying, the

standardisation of products, vastly increased consumer choice prompted by vastly increased

industrial production – all of these things accelerated change within the culture of consumption in a

short space of time.

Advertising historians point to the 1920s as one of the most important decades in the development

3 Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2006), 55. See also, Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

Conclusion 204

of modern advertising: as the decade when advertisements became truly modern.4 Race Records and

Old Time marketing were part of this transition to some degree. Older styles of advertising, such as

'salesman in print' advertising, still figured significantly in record industry advertising, for example

the superiority of the OKeh's Race Records ('The Original Race Record') was still central to this

advertising, but it did encompass modern consumer-focused advertising by incorporating 'editorial'

or 'narrative' advertising techniques. Race Records advertisements in the black press did not boast

about the scale of production, rather they attempted to sell records by connecting to consumers

through a vignette depicting modern life. In Race Records advertisements the reader could identify

with, and learn from, the tales of cheating husbands and the evils of gambling etc., because the

lyrics of these songs were graphically portrayed in bold cartoon illustrations that took you straight

to the heart of the matter of the particular narrative. It also reflected the trend in blues composition

at this time of dwelling on the South, either as a recently left home, or as a setting for hardship.

Although advertising did not play as significant a role in Old Time marketing, the characterisation

of Old Time artists in catalogues, and to dealers in trade publications, cast the recordings of Old

Time as artefacts of a folk culture, the lost pastoral of white Americans, artefacts that were not only

a novel form of entertainment but one worthy of historical and anthropological study. This

marketing attempted to tap into the nostalgic longing of Americans who were, by and large,

pursuing modernity passionately, as huge numbers of rural dwellers moved into the industrial

centres of the South and the North. As scholars such as Lawrence Levine, David Theo Goldberg and

Ruth Mayer have observed, this process of nostalgic revision not only romanticised the past but

created the very idea that there was a monoculture that was now lost.5 The record industry, in

creating the segregated catalogues of Race Records and Old Time, contributed to this project by

presenting commercialised vernacular music as another site where the idea of bi-racialism and

separate, segregated cultures could be reified. And yet, despite this, the industry, through its fairly

crude renderings of a musical culture it knew very little about, and in an age in which the imperfect

science of marketing was but in its infancy, presented in Race Records and Old Time catalogues

images that very often transcended the tropes they drew upon. These images reflect the industry's

cultural and commercial dilemma of how to present Southern white and black musical culture in the

age of Jim Crow, but ultimately what they present us with are artefacts of a musical culture,

unnaturally bounded and distorted by the process of commercialisation, that managed to shine

through nevertheless.

4 Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 12 and xxii. 5 Ruth Mayer, ‘“Taste It!” American Advertising, Ethnicity, and the Rhetoric of Nationhood in the 1920s’. Amerikastudien-American Studies 43, 1(1998): 131-141, 131.

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