A&R Pioneers: Architects of American Roots Music on Record 2017023304, 9780826521750, 9780826521774

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A&R PIONEERS

Brian Ward and Patrick Huber

A&R Pioneers A R C H I T ECT S O F A M E R I CA N RO OT S M U S I C O N R ECO R D

CO U N T RY M U S I C F O U N DAT I O N P R E S S VA N D E R B I LT U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S Nashville

© 2018 by Brian Ward and Patrick Huber All rights reserved First printing 2018 Published by Vanderbilt University Press and the Country Music Foundation Press Nashville, Tennessee This book is printed on acid-free paper. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file LC control number 2017023304 LC classification number ML3790 .W35 2017 Dewey classification number 781.64/1490973—dc23 LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2017023304

ISBN 978-0-8265-2175-0 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-8265-2177-4 (ebook)

For our families: Jen and Katie, and Kate, Genevieve, and William, with love and gratitude

Contents L I ST O F F IG U R E S A B B R EV I AT I O N S U S E D I N N OT E S AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

I N T RO DU CT I O N

ix xiii xv 1

Defining A&R: Interwar Record Company Officials and Their Work

19

2

Finding and Securing Talent

47

3

Contracts and Copyrights: The Dark Heart of A&R

87

4

Choosing Songs and Building Repertoires

119

5

In the Studio: Creating and Recording Sounds

161

6

Post-Production: Defining and Defying Genre Boundaries

201

7

The Bottom Line: Selling Records

235

8

Nowhere Near Total Eclipse: A&R Work after World War II

265

N OT E S

313

1

SOURCES

399

INDEX

427

Figures INTRO DU CTIO N 1.

2.

3.

4.

Cover of Victor’s Old Time Melodies of the Sunny South brochure (1926).

3

Sheet music cover of “Crazy Blues” (1920), featuring a photograph of Mamie Smith & Her Jazz Hounds.

12

Sheet music cover of “The Wreck on the Southern Old 97” (1924), with a photograph inset of Henry Whitter.

15

Gennett recording truck (1934).

16

CHAPTER 1 1.1.

Ralph Peer in Havana, Cuba (1931).

23

1. 2 . Advertisement in Talking Machine World for James K. Polk Inc.

of Atlanta, “The South’s Largest Phonograph Supply House” (1925).

34

1. 3 . Chicago Defender advertisement for Kapp Music Company (1926).

37

1.4 . Studio portrait of Art Laibly in his later years.

41

1. 5 . Page from Complete Catalog of 1924 Records, Paramount—

The “Popular Race Record”—and Black Swan Race Records, featuring a photograph inset of J. Mayo Williams, Paramount’s “Recording Manager of Race Artist Series.”

44

CHAPTER 2 2 .1.

Harold Soulé and Grace Slovetsky examining the recording equipment used at Gennett’s May 1927 field session in St. Paul, Minnesota.

49

2 . 2 . OKeh notice in the Commercial Appeal (Memphis) recruiting

musicians to record “old-time songs not now on phonograph records” at an upcoming 1928 local field session.

56

2 . 3 . Eli Oberstein supervising a 1936 RCA Victor recording session

with Lydia Mendoza at the Texas Hotel, San Antonio.

57

2 .4 . Full page of Knoxville News-Sentinel articles chronicling

Brunswick’s 1930 local field session held in the St. James Hotel.

63

2 . 5 . Cover of the Crazy Water Crystals Company of the Carolinas

and Georgia’s Souvenir of the Crazy Barn Dance and the Crazy Bands folio (ca. 1934). 2 .6 . Gene Autry and Art Satherley (ca. 1941). 2 .7.

Helen Oakley and guests enjoying a jam session featuring Chick Webb, Artie Shaw, and Duke Ellington at Master Records Inc.’s studios in New York on March 12, 1937.

72 75

82

CHAPTER 3 3 .1.

Dennis Taylor with a group of his artists, Edgar Boaz, Welby Toomey, and Doc Roberts, at Gennett’s studio in Richmond, Indiana (1925).

91

3 . 2 . Ralph Peer and Jimmie Rodgers, relaxing with their wives and

Rodgers’s daughter at Rodgers’s home in Kerrville, Texas (1930).

97

3 . 3 . Cover of the Reverend Andrew Jenkins’s Christian Love Songs

folio (1924), featuring a photograph of Jenkins and his two stepdaughters, Irene Spain and Mary Lee Eskew.

99

3 .4 . Excerpt from a 1927 Chicago Defender advertisement

for J. Mayo Williams’s short-lived Black Patti label.

102

3 . 5 . J. B. Long standing in front of the United Dollar Store

he managed in Kinston, North Carolina (ca. 1934).

107

CHAPTER 4 4 .1.

OKeh Race Records catalog (ca. 1927), featuring a selection of recorded sermons by the Reverend J. M. Gates.

121

4 . 2 . Publicity photograph of Barbecue Bob (ca. 1927).

129

4 . 3 . Publicity photograph of Nat Shilkret (ca. mid-1920s).

131

4 .4 . Lester Melrose and several of his Chicago recording artists:

Little Son Joe, Big Bill Broonzy, Washboard Sam, Roosevelt Sykes, and St. Louis Jimmy (ca. late 1930s).

136

4 . 5 . Dave Kapp and Ernest Tubb, inside a recording studio (ca. 1941).

145

4 .6 . Cover of Bob Miller’s Famous Folio Full of Song Hits (1934).

152

4 .7.

Detail from a Conqueror dealers’ release sheet (1933), advertising Gene Autry’s “The Death of Jimmie Rodgers.”

x

155

CHAPTER 5 5 .1.

Frank Driggs’s two-page, 1961 letter, regarding Don Law’s recollections of recording Robert Johnson, with Law’s marginal comments.

163

5 . 2 . Postcard depicting the Starr Piano Company of Richmond,

Indiana, manufacturer of Gennett Records (ca. 1910). 5 . 3 . John Hammond in Columbia Records offices, New York (ca. 1939).

175 180

5 .4 . Studio portrait of Cléoma Breaux and Joseph Falcon taken

soon after their debut recording session for Columbia (1928).

186

CHAPTER 6 6 .1.

Chicago Defender advertisement for Austin and Lee Allen’s “Laughin’ and Cryin’ Blues” (1928).

6 . 2 . Cover of Gennett Records of Old Time Tunes catalog (1928).

202 208

6 . 3 . Sheet music cover of “The Wreck of the Shenandoah” (1925),

with words and music by Maggie Andrews, one of Carson Robison’s many songwriting pseudonyms.

212

6 .4 . Chicago Defender advertisement for Alec Johnson & His Band’s

“Mysterious Coon” (1928).

216

6 . 5 . Cover of Decca Hill Billy Records catalog (1938).

222

6 .6 . Cover of Decca Race Records catalog (1940).

223

6 .7.

Advertisement in the Crisis for the Black Swan Phonograph Company (1922).

231

CHAPTER 7 7.1.

Studio portrait of the Kentucky Thoroughbreds taken during the trio’s April 1927 visit to Chicago to record for Paramount.

7. 2 . Studio portrait of Frank Walker (ca. 1942).

241 251

7. 3 . Chicago Defender advertisement for Ma Rainey’s

“Mystery Record,” featuring the official contest rules (1924).

253

7.4 . Advertisement in the Daily Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, MS)

for the Speir Phonograph Company, with inset of its owner and manager, H. C. Speir (1929).

xi

257

7. 5 . Harry Charles and wife (1923).

258

7.6 . Full-page Chicago Defender advertisement for E. A. Fearn’s

“OKeh Cabaret and Style Show” (1926).

261

CHAPTER 8 8 .1.

Studio portrait of Eli Oberstein (ca. 1955).

269

8 . 2 . Owen Bradley, with Patsy Cline and Paul Cohen,

at Bradley Studios in Nashville (1957).

292

8 . 3 . Don Law and Johnny Cash, probably at Bradley Studios

in Nashville (ca. 1960).

293

8 .4 . Don Pierce and Charlie Lamb in front of the Mercury-Starday

Records offices in Madison, Tennessee (probably 1957).

xii

300

Abbreviations Used in Notes ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS AND JOURNALS

Archie Green Papers, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill CPM Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro CMFOHP Country Music Foundation Oral History Project, Frist Library and Archive, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee DRP Doc Roberts Papers, Special Collections and Archives, Hutchins Library, Berea College, Berea, Kentucky GDWC Gayle Dean Wardlow Collection, Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro JAF Journal of American Folklore JEMFN John Edwards Memorial Foundation Newsletter JEMFQ John Edwards Memorial Foundation Quarterly JKMC John K. MacKenzie Collection, Glick Indiana History Center, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis JCM Journal of Country Music OTM Old Time Music SFC Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill TMW Talking Machine World AGP

xiii

Acknowledgments This book, like so many academic collaborations, was born over beers at a late-night, early-morning, post-conference “bull session.” In November 2009, the two of us first met in Atlanta at an academic conference, “Popular Music in the Mercer Era, 1910–1970,” which celebrated the music made during the lifetime of legendary songwriter Johnny Mercer. The event was hosted by Georgia State University’s Special Collection and Archives Department and organized by history professor Glenn Eskew who, consequently, is the first of the many people we need to thank for making this book possible. After the opening reception, we retreated to a neighborhood sports bar on a downtown side street, appropriately named the Sidebar. According to Patrick, we watched a soccer match on one of the big-screen TVs; Brian insists it was football—the ball was round and feet were definitely being used. Whatever the case, it was an early glimpse into some of the linguistic challenges of a transatlantic collaboration, rather than into the fallibility of memory. What we both remember is that it was in the Sidebar, over revitalizing pints of Guinness, that we hatched a project that still seemed like a good idea the following morning. And the following week. After several years, a few more beers, and many refinements, those ideas evolved into this book. Along the way, we have profited from the expertise and assistance of a multitude of individuals and institutions. For their help, encouragement, ideas, and guidance, we especially wish to thank James E. Akenson, David M. Anderson, Harvey G. Cohen, Norm Cohen, Ronald Cohen, Don Cusic, Francis J. “Fran” Dance, Robert M. W. “Bob” Dixon, Kathleen Drowne, Wade Falcon, Kevin S. Fontenot, Steve Goodson, the late Archie Green, Tom Jacobson, Lance Ledbetter, Bill C. Malone, Barry Mazor, Kris McCusker, Ted Olson, Jim O’Neal, the late Jack Palmer, Diane Pecknold, Nolan Porterfield, Dunstan Prial, Tony Russell, Travis Stimeling, Paul Swinton, Allan Symons, Alex van der Tuuk, Gayle Dean Wardlow, the late Charles K. Wolfe, and Marshall Wyatt. We are deeply grateful to the anonymous readers for Vanderbilt University Press, as well as to Tim Brooks, John Broven, and David Evans, who reviewed our book proposal, for their helpful comments and suggestions. We are particularly indebted to John Rumble, who, in a Herculean effort, offered invaluable stylistic and substantive feedback that significantly improved the entire manuscript. This book is based chiefly on the remarkable research materials held at libraries and archives across the nation, including tape-recorded or transcribed oral histories of many of the major and minor figures of interwar A&R we discuss. Most importantly, our research benefited from the knowledge and courteous assistance of Jay Orr, John Rumble, and the staff at the Frist Library and Archive, Country Music Hall of Fame and xv

xvi A&R PIONEERS

Museum, Nashville, Tennessee, and of Steve Weiss and the staff at the Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, particularly Aaron Smithers. We also drew upon materials from the following libraries, archives, and institutions, and wish to acknowledge the assistance of their staffs in facilitating our research: both the American Folklife Center and the Recorded Sound Research Center, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, especially David Sager; Shannon H. Wilson, Rachel Vagts, and the staff of the Special Collections and Archives, Hutchins Library, Berea College, Berea, Kentucky, especially Harry Rice and Sharyn J. Mitchell; Gregory Reish and the staff of the Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, especially Grover Baker and Lucinda Cockrell; the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, Chicago, Illinois; the Columbia Center for Oral History, Columbia University, New York, New York; Kevin Fleming, popular music and culture archivist at Special Collections and Archives, University Library, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia; the Fillius Jazz Archive, Hamilton College, Clinton, New York; the Institute of Jazz Studies, Dana Library, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey; the Williams Research Center, Historic New Orleans Collections, New Orleans, Louisiana, particularly Rebecca Smith; the Glick Indiana History Center, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis, Indiana, especially Alyssa Boge and Nadia Kousari; Jazz at Lincoln Center, New York, New York; the New York Public Library, New York, New York; the Minnesota Historical Society, Minneapolis, Minnesota; the Music Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, especially Diane Steinhaus; Old Hat Records, Raleigh, North Carolina; Ralph Peer II and peermusic, Berkeley, California, especially Gudrun Shea; Randy Roberts, former curator and archivist of Special Collections and University Archives, Axe Library, Pittsburg State University, Pittsburg, Kansas; the Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Jonathan Manton, librarian at the Archive of Recorded Sound, Braun Music Center, Stanford University, Stanford, California; the Starr-Gennett Foundation Inc., Richmond, Indiana; and Oral History of American Music, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, especially Maura Valenti. We also owe a significant debt to private individuals, collectors, researchers, and scholars who generously provided us with documents and photographs from their own collections, or who otherwise facilitated the acquisition of materials for this book. Among them, we wish to especially thank Bruce Bastin, Ryan André Brasseaux, Margo Bruynoghe, Harry Charles Jr., Harvey G. Cohen, Norm Cohen, Andre Dael, Charlie B. Dahan, Francis J. “Fran” Dance, David Diehl, Wade Falcon, Cary Ginell, Tim Gracyk, Martin Halliwell, Tom Hanchett, Linda Gennett Irmscher, Tom Jacobson, Michael Jarrett, William Kornblum, Bill Link, Jane Lyle, Barry Mazor, Ted Olson, Ralph Peer II, Don Peterson, Dunstan Prial, Robert “Bob” Riesman, T. Malcolm Rockwell, Kinney Rorrer, Tony Russell, Gudrun Shea, Paul Swinton, Alex van der Tuuk, Gayle Dean Wardlow, Tom Warlick, Cary Wolfson, and Marshall Wyatt. On the campus of Mis-

PH, Rolla, Missouri

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BW, Newcastle upon Tyne

xvii

souri University of Science and Technology in Rolla, where he works, Patrick Huber also wishes to acknowledge the librarians at Wilson Library for their indispensable assistance in securing interlibrary loan materials. The generous support of several grants and fellowships, as well as assistance from our own institutions, helped bring this study to fruition. At Missouri University of Science and Technology, a University of Missouri Research Board Grant that Patrick received for spring 2015 helped accelerate the writing and revision of the manuscript. Northumbria University granted Brian a sabbatical to work on the book during the same spring, while some of his initial archival research into the world of A&R representatives was enabled by grants from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust. Special thanks are also due to Eli Bortz of Vanderbilt University Press, an extraordinarily thoughtful and patient editor who trusted us enough to commission this study and gave us consistent encouragement and good counsel through much of its writing. We are also grateful to Jay Orr and John Rumble at the Country Music Foundation, who were equally quick to see the potential of the project and offer personal and institutional support. After Eli’s departure from VUP, Michael Ames, director of the press, and Beth Kressel Itkin, our new editor, shepherded the manuscript through final revisions, into production and, ultimately, into print. Finally, our deepest thanks go to our family members, who have sustained us throughout our work on this book. Indeed, one of the many pleasures of collaborating is that our respective families have actually had the chance to meet and get to know each other, sometimes via the wonders of social media, but also in person. Patrick wishes to thank his wife, Kate Drowne, and his children, Genevieve and William Huber, for the unfailing love, support, and encouragement they have provided in all his endeavors. In addition, at critical moments, Kate took time away from her own work to edit multiple drafts of this manuscript and, in doing so, made it a far superior book. Brian owes everything that really matters in his life to his wife, Jen, and daughter Katie: this book is no exception to that simple truth. While it does not make up for the numerous times he has neglected them to chase down another reference or attempt yet another rewrite, they should know that their patience, love, and support have been very much appreciated. The book is dedicated to our families, with love and gratitude.

A&R PIONEERS

Jack Kapp is the newly appointed head of the Vocalion record division of Brunswick-Balke-Collender Co., in complete charge of sales and recordings. Kapp’s promotion follows a concrete survey of the country’s musical tastes, particularly the southern and midwestern demands for “hill-billy” and “race” records. These two departments have been chiefly developed by Kapp and have contributed to the Vocalion’s financial success. . . . It was Kapp who taught the mountaineer music dealers to capitalize [on] the hill-billy folks’ penchant for purchasing from six to 15 copies of the same record. The mountain people don’t come down into the valley towns for months at a time, and their chief amusement is the constant repetition of their favorite record, wearing one out and playing a new one. —“Inside Stuff on Music,” Variety, March 21, 1928

Introduction

I N T H E A M E R I CA N R ECO R D I N G I N DU ST RY O F T H E 192 0 S A N D

1930s, working in the A&R (Artists and Repertoire) field was a kind of frontier experience. Laws regulating the industry were sketchy and unevenly enforced; individualism and ruthlessness reigned; necessity and ambition propelled technological and commercial innovations; turf wars constantly erupted over patents and copyrights, artists and songs; and despite the best efforts of many individuals within the industry, there were still gaping holes in the boundaries that, in theory, were supposed to separate musical genres and their target audiences. No wonder, perhaps, that A&R work attracted people with almost as many varied backgrounds and beliefs, talents and 1

2 A&R PIONEERS

ambitions, prejudices and insights, as the nation itself. Collectively, this diverse group of pioneering A&R men, supplemented by a few extraordinary women, helped forge the modern recording industry and profoundly shaped the development of commercially recorded American “roots music.” Employed as talent scouts, recording supervisors, musical directors, sales representatives, and in other assorted positions, and sometimes serving as conduits to songwriters and concert promoters, they occasionally made important creative contributions as musicians, songwriters, arrangers, and promoters. In all of these roles, they helped document some of the most treasured and significant recorded music in American history. What’s more, whenever inspiration, taste, marketing, and the economy aligned, they sold enormous quantities of these musical recordings to audiences they helped create. This is their story. By the 1920s, the America these A&R officials inhabited was engulfed in a series of sweeping economic, social, cultural, and technological transformations that, though unevenly felt in different regions, ultimately affected citizens everywhere. This was also the period when, for the first time in the history of the still-fledgling recording industry, its agents began to reach deep into the nation’s cities, small towns, and rural heartlands, as well as into its trove of vernacular musical traditions, to find grassroots artists and music that they could record and sell. “That mountain ballad, the old-fashioned gospel songs sung at the arbor camp meeting accompanied by the portable organ that is often carried many long and weary miles, the self-styled country fiddler, ye old-time musicians who made merry for the corn shuckin’ and chicken stews at the tobacco barns, have their places in American music, is the opinion of the Okeh Record Company,” Winston-Salem, North Carolina’s Twin City Sentinel reported in the midst of OKeh’s local 1927 field-recording sessions. “This statement was made by a representative of the company who states that one desires records of music of this type, as dear to those living in the mountains or the rural districts, as the grand opera, jazz, popular or other types of music are to those living in the city or towns.”1 In a world of increasing urbanization and consumerism, national advertising and new forms of mass communication, rapid industrial development, and growing corporate power, A&R officials helped fashion and disseminate music that often evoked older, highly romanticized and reassuring visions of a simpler, less frenetic, and more communal past. Much of the black and white roots music with which this book is primarily concerned traded heavily on the kinds of moral certainties and traditional values that were associated in the popular imagination with rural communities, many of them located in the South, bound together by ties of place, family, faith, and history that seemed to be fraying under the pressure from new economic, social, and cultural forces. “Every record,” a 1928 Brunswick pamphlet promoting its “Dixie Songs” series proclaimed, “[is] sung with that simplicity and sincerity, which is only found today in the small towns where folks still attend ‘meetings’ for the good of the soul, and not just to show off a new hat.”2 Even the titles of record companies’ interwar hillbilly series eloquently expressed sentimental nostalgia for a vanishing time and often for particular places. In addition

3 INTRODUCTION

F I G U R E 1. Cover of Victor’s Old Time Melodies of the Sunny South brochure (1926). Courtesy of Kinney Rorrer.

to Brunswick’s “Dixie Songs” series (1927–1933), originally called “Songs from Dixie,” there were OKeh’s “Old Time Tunes” (1925–1932); Columbia’s “Old Familiar Tunes,” later “Familiar Tunes, Old and New” (1924–1932); Paramount’s “Olde Time Tunes” (1927–1932); Vocalion’s “Old Southern Tunes” (1927–1933), among other similar designations; and Victor’s “Native American Melodies” (1929–1931), followed by “Old Familiar

4 A&R PIONEERS

Tunes & Novelties” (1931–1934).3 Coupled with the quaint images of barn dances, log cabins, and mountain pines that often adorned hillbilly record catalogs and advertisements, these marketing labels all evoked a preindustrial rural South—particularly a Mountain South—that retained a great hold on the American popular imagination.4 “These old tunes rarely get into the cities,” explained Victor’s 1924 Olde Time Fiddlin’ Tunes brochure, “but mountain folk have sung and danced to them for generations. . . . 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.”5 Likewise, a 1927 newspaper ad promised that Columbia’s records of “Familiar Tunes, Old and New” could satisfy the musical desires of those record buyers who “get tired of modern dance music—fox-trots, jazz, Charleston—and long for the good old barn dances and the ‘Saturday night’ music of the South in plantation days.”6 Not surprisingly, African Americans were often much less sentimental than whites about the alleged bucolic delights of the Old South or, for that matter, of a New South where the combination of segregation, disenfranchisement, and racial violence still curtailed black freedom and opportunity. Nevertheless, for the millions of black migrants who made their way out of the Jim Crow South in search of a better life, and for those who stayed behind—many of them heading for the region’s burgeoning cities—their relationship to the rural southern past and its music was complicated. When Paramount released Blind Lemon Jefferson’s first record, “Booster Blues” / “Dry Southern Blues” (Paramount 12347), in April 1926, the label advertised the first major star of “downhome” blues to a national black audience as “a real, old-fashioned Blues singer . . . from Dallas” who “strums his guitar in real southern style—makes it talk, in fact.”7 Substitute “Hillbilly” for “Blues” and this regionally inflected nostalgia remains much the same. Bear down on the word “real” in Paramount’s advertising copy, and it is possible to see how recorded roots music, with its claims to authenticity, could help counter a sense of social and cultural dislocation, a deep anxiety about the increasing superficiality and transitory nature of a modern America characterized by disconcerting changes.8 By overseeing the commercial recording of roots music and stressing, often to the point of fabricating or at least redefining its connections to venerable folk traditions, A&R officials helped create and market music that satisfied what historian T. J. Jackson Lears describes as a national “antimodern quest for authenticity” in an increasingly complex and unsettling modern age.9 At the same time, these A&R pioneers were both products and co-creators of a new industry that helped define and provide one distinctive soundtrack for the new age of mass culture and leisure. Working for various record companies and their labels— among them Victor, Columbia, Brunswick, OKeh, Gennett, Paramount, Black Swan, and Decca—most of them headquartered in the New York area, this cohort of cultural gatekeepers were spirited innovators whose lives and livelihoods were inextricably bound up with the new technological developments and commercial opportunities in the world of mass entertainment that helped define modern America.10 As such, they encouraged experiments in recorded sound that captured the rich promise, as well as

5 INTRODUCTION

the perceived perils, of this period of intense flux and ferment. In an era characterized by what historian Nathan Miller calls a “perverse duality: innocent yet worldly, sentimental yet dissipated, idealistic yet cynical,” A&R officials came to prominence, Janus-faced and eager to make phonograph records and their fortunes, at a transitional moment in the cultural, economic, and musical history of the United States.11 Embedded in their experience and in the roots music they recorded is the story of a nation trying to navigate between the reassuring, nostalgic, but ultimately diminishing tug of an agrarian, small-town past and the irresistible, exhilarating, but sometimes frightening pull of an increasingly urban, mass-mediated future. Given their importance to the development of the recording industry and American roots music, and their significance as cultural mediators and agents of change, it is striking that the A&R men and women of the 1920s and 1930s have received relatively little collective scrutiny. The silence is not absolute, of course. Historians, musicologists, journalists, and whole communities of dedicated vintage record collectors and roots music enthusiasts have labored hard to recreate the murky origins of the roots music recording industry and track the careers of its seminal artists, producers, technicians, businessmen, and scouts. Thanks to this developing body of scholarly and popular literature, we now know a great deal about pioneering A&R giants such as Ralph S. Peer, John Hammond, Frank B. Walker, Art Satherley, Polk C. Brockman, and H. C. Speir, as well as some of their lesser-known colleagues such as Cliff Hess, Dan Hornsby, Harry Charles, Art Laibly, Don Law, Lester Melrose, Eli Oberstein, Nat Shilkret, and J. Mayo Williams.12 Williams, along with his protégée Aletha Dickerson, bandleaderpianist Fletcher Henderson, and pianist-songwriters Clarence Williams and Richard M. Jones, were among the few black recording directors to make a sustained impact in the A&R field before World War II. Dickerson’s exceptionalism was twofold: very few women were involved in such work. White men dominated the world of A&R. This short, highly selective list of the A&R representatives who already figure, to a greater or lesser degree, in histories of American roots music and of the interwar recording industry could be extended considerably. At least 125 additional figures, acting as A&R managers or talent scouts, gave much to this field of commercially recorded music. Despite their ubiquity, however, no one has stepped back from the sometimes fleeting and fragmentary glimpses into the lives of individual A&R pioneers to chronicle their collective contributions to the business, technologies, and sounds of the pre–World War II roots recording industry. This book begins to fill that gap. While it is deeply indebted to groundbreaking studies by many discographers, journalists, and scholars, it seeks to extend, explain, and, on occasion, challenge some of the conventional wisdom they have generated. As those early researchers discovered, primary sources about interwar A&R activities are scattered and varied. This history explores the roles of A&R officials in early roots music through evidence gleaned from phonograph records, trade journals, newspapers and magazines, and the letters and documents of record firms and their executives. Our story also depends heavily on the occasionally scurrilous, frequently

6 A&R PIONEERS

insightful, sometimes barely credible, but invariably entertaining firsthand accounts of A&R managers and scouts, their industry colleagues, and the artists they handled. Such autobiographical testimony can be extremely helpful, but it is also a notoriously slippery and unreliable source of information, especially when the subjects are colorful characters with silken tongues and a rare gift for self-promotion. A&R representatives eagerly claimed credit for things they did. But often they took credit for things they wished they had done, or thought they should have done, or, on reflection, decided that others had hoped they had done. Conversely, they tended to avoid some of the less savory aspects of an industry in which tales of blatant self-interest and greed, as well as of abuse and exploitation, racism and sexism, are legion. Indeed, if there is a weakness shared by many of the roots music scholars and fans who in the 1960s and 1970s sought out and interviewed aging veterans of interwar A&R, it is that they tended to believe too much, too readily, of what their informants told them. New archival discoveries, coupled with sharper analytical perspectives—particularly those that deepen our sense of how race, class, and gender played out in the world of commercial roots music recording—provide a fuller context for the compelling, if often self-serving, accounts of A&R men and women who found artists, brokered contracts, supervised the making of phonograph records, and sold those recordings to new audiences. We offer three final, interrelated thoughts by way of introduction. The first concerns our definition of “roots music”; the second relates to the chronological scope of the book; the third explains the kinds of A&R personnel we have chosen to include. A&R Pioneers deals primarily with the A&R managers and scouts involved in American roots music between World War I and World War II, an era when the commercial recording of hot jazz, blues, gospel, and hillbilly music began in earnest. These musical idioms take center stage in A&R Pioneers. However, the interwar years also saw the rise of other American roots-based styles, including Mexican, Cajun, and Hawaiian, as well as an assortment of traditional, foreign-language music popular among the nation’s many immigrant communities.13 Record companies’ insatiable desire for hit records meant that A&R men who regularly explored these important region- and ethnic-based genres also often worked in the fields of mainstream popular music and, on occasion, even opera and classical music. Clayton “Jack” Jackson, for instance, was a flamboyant A&R man and assistant sales director at Richmond, Indiana’s Gennett Records, with a typically keen eye for a fast buck and an equally typical lack of scruples about how he made it. Although only in his early twenties and hampered by what he described as a “tin ear,” Jackson supervised hillbilly and jazz recordings by the likes of Bradley Kincaid and Joe “King” Oliver, respectively. But he also “made a lot of Polish recordings,” gamely peddled discs of William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech alongside ones of Hopi Indians made on location at the Grand Canyon, and arranged recording sessions for Ku Klux Klansmen, at least one of them with his understandably reluctant Gennett colleague, chief recording engineer Ezra C. A. Wickemeyer. Wickemeyer was a devout Roman Catholic, and this was a time when the powerful, 250,000-member

7 INTRODUCTION

Indiana Klan directed its violent attacks and hateful propaganda against Catholics as often as it did against Jews and African Americans.14 Many A&R men were similarly eclectic. Nat Shilkret, manager and musical director of Victor’s “US Foreign Department,” supervised foreign-language recordings for domestic release while sometimes also overseeing sessions in the mid-1920s for the label’s “Export, Domestic, Hillbilly, Race and Red Seal” lines. “Foreign artists and their repertoire had to be discovered,” Shilkret explained in his memoir. “With other recording companies competing, it was necessary to attend Polish weddings and affairs, Jewish theaters, Italian vaudeville, German cafes, etc.—sometimes meeting immigrants arriving in America for concert tours.”15 As Dallas-based A&R man Don Law recalled, when he worked for the constellation of labels grouped under the American Record Corporation’s umbrella in the mid- to late 1930s, he was willing to search out and record “anything that we ran across in any field, whether it was Mexican or Cajun or black or whatever—if it was good talent, then we recorded it . . . as long as you knew you could sell, or thought you could sell, a certain number of records.”16 In determining the chronological scope of the book, there were several compelling reasons to concentrate on the interwar years as a distinctive phase in the history of recorded American roots music. Although discographies of the various genres that comprise this music sometimes reach back into the final decade of the nineteenth century to include commercially recorded prototypes for later musical styles, it is no coincidence that the most important such reference works for hot jazz, blues, gospel, and country music focus chiefly on the 1920s and 1930s, when the commercial recording of those styles first flourished, or that they end their coverage in the early 1940s, when the recording industry and roots music changed dramatically.17 To be sure, like all attempts at historical periodization, there is something unavoidably arbitrary about selecting beginning and ending dates for a study of processes and themes, events and trends, careers and musical forms, that defy the sharp demarcations of the calendar. Convenient temporal phrases like “the interwar years,” or “the Jazz Age,” or “the Great Depression,” or “the World War II era” can obscure origins and legacies, and often oversimplify the complexities of those periods. All of which is simply to say that, while this book focuses on A&R officials and their accomplishments “between the two world wars,” confident that this constitutes a distinct, formative period in the development of recorded roots music, it does not try to isolate or homogenize that period, either in the recording industry or in the broader sweep of American history. There were, for example, enormous disparities in how different groups of people in different regions experienced the “Roaring Twenties.” Widely perceived as a period of boom and prosperity, the 1920s was actually a decade of widespread and worsening economic distress for many Americans, particularly those living in rural communities. Similarly, not everyone’s fortunes dipped—and certainly not to the same degree—during the Great Depression; nor did they rebound with equal vigor when the United States’ entry into World War II revived the nation’s economy.

8 A&R PIONEERS

Within the world of commercial music, a whirlpool of equally complex currents and countercurrents provided an important context for A&R activities. Structurally, the period between 1920 and 1929 was one of phenomenal expansion for the American phonograph and record industry. Since at least 1905, Victor, Columbia, and Edison had dominated the field through their stranglehold on fundamental patents. During World War I, however, as those patents began to expire and the demand for phonographs and records swelled dramatically, dozens of new companies had entered the market. In 1914, there were eighteen phonograph manufacturers in the United States; by 1918, that number had soared to 166 firms, many of which also manufactured their own lines of records. During that same period, the value of the industry’s products skyrocketed from $27 million to $158 million.18 Among the new entrants were the General Phonograph Corporation of New York, with its OKeh and Odeon labels; the Starr Piano Company of Richmond, Indiana, with its Gennett label; and the New York Recording Laboratories of Port Washington, Wisconsin, with its Paramount label.19 One way these fledgling firms gained a foothold in the fiercely competitive post– World War I recording scene was by cultivating the growing market for foreign-language records. Since the 1890s, American phonograph companies had been releasing and selling these recordings domestically to immigrants. Over the next two decades, as the nation’s foreign population swelled, selections of Old World folksongs and dances, performed in an extraordinary array of languages, came to form a sizable part of these companies’ recorded output. During World War I, these recordings enjoyed a surge in sales. Fueled by “the feelings of nostalgia and patriotism stirred by the fighting,” Richard K. Spottswood writes, “domestic production and sales assumed a new priority,” a trend, he adds, that “continued unbroken until the Depression.”20 The headline of a June 1922 Talking Machine World article about promoting foreign-language records declared: “An Almost Untouched Record Selling Field with Millions of Prospective Customers.” The article enthusiastically reminded phonograph and record dealers that the foreign-born elements of the United States have the same purchasing power as the natives, and do their share in purchasing records from the regular monthly supplements. To offer them records in their native tongues, or in the native tongues of their parents, means simply to create an additional demand. There is no more logical field right now for the talking machine dealer, especially in the larger industrial centers and in districts where there are thousands of foreign-born, than to concentrate somewhat on the foreign record catalogs suitable for his particular location.21

Victor and Columbia, each of which issued records in more than two dozen languages, continued to dominate this field, but new firms did carve out market shares for themselves. By 1923, for example, the Odeon label, a leader in the ethnic records field, was catering to speakers of Arabic, Bohemian (Czech), French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Turkish, among

9 INTRODUCTION

others.22 Some new firms specialized in particular ethnic recordings. The Panhellenion Phonograph Record Company of New York (organized in 1919), the Polonia Phonograph Company of Milwaukee (founded in 1920), and the Gaelic Phonograph Record Company, also of New York (established in 1921), produced Greek, Polish, and Irish recordings, respectively.23 These, along with other firms formed during and after World War I, created an increased demand both for recording artists and for A&R officials to locate, sign, and record them. Another way these new enterprises competed in the crowded postwar market was to explore entirely new fields of commercial music. Since longer-established and betterfinanced companies such as Victor and Columbia had already signed most of the bestknown classical and vaudeville stars to exclusive contracts, upstart firms were forced to concentrate on different kinds of artists and cultivate new audiences. In particular, they developed markets among Americans at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, audiences that industry giants had long ignored. As a result, smaller labels such as OKeh, Paramount, and Gennett spearheaded intensive programs of recording American roots music, including material issued on what soon became known as “race records” and “hillbilly records,” aimed at specific racial and regional audiences. By 1927, record companies were releasing an estimated 675 new titles of hillbilly music and five hundred of blues and gospel music (although the same selection might appear on multiple releases and labels). Depending on the specific label, each of these categories accounted for somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of all popular releases for that year.24 The recording of American roots music opened up new markets and provided a windfall to many firms. But during the 1920s, A&R managers, their recording department staffs, and their regional networks of talent scouts still grappled with a host of thorny challenges in locating artists, signing them, recording their music, promoting the discs, and helping distributors and retailers stock and sell them. Just as race and hillbilly records began to flourish, the Great Depression dealt the recording industry a devastating blow, sending phonograph sales plummeting from 987,000 in 1927 to just forty thousand in 1932. Meanwhile, record sales plunged from 104 million to only six million.25 The dire financial crisis precipitated a massive shakeup in the industry. Collapsing sales bankrupted many record companies, while other struggling firms were swallowed up, either through buyouts or mergers orchestrated by larger, more solvent record, radio, and film corporations. The interwar years had begun with three giants standing astride the recording industry; it also ended that way. By 1923, for instance, no fewer than eleven companies were issuing blues recordings; by 1935, however, the economic crisis had driven nearly all of these firms out of business and left what remained of the market for blues and other roots-based styles to just three major firms: RCA Victor, the American Record Corporation—which leased the Brunswick and Vocalion labels from Warner Bros.—and newly formed American Decca, co-founded by British Decca’s Edward R. Lewis and former Brunswick executive Jack Kapp.26

10 A&R PIONEERS

During the interwar period, important technological changes also affected the work of A&R officials. The era began with double-sided 78-rpm disc recordings and, in the case of Edison, cylinder recordings that captured performances via the acoustical method, which had been in use since the advent of the commercial recording industry in the late 1880s. In this process, performers directed their voices or their music into a large horn connected at its narrow end to a cutting stylus. In response to the vibrations of the air in the horn, the stylus cut tiny grooves into a slowly rotating wax disc or cylinder that reproduced, more or less, the frequency and amplitude of the vibrations created by the music. The interwar period ended with only disc records still being produced commercially. Moreover, from the mid-1920s, those discs were made using the improved, higher-fidelity electrical recording method, in which performances were captured by a microphone and amplifier, and then transferred to a master record spinning on an electrically driven disk-cutter. During the mid- to late 1920s, the growing popularity of radios, jukeboxes, and talking motion pictures further altered the dynamics of roots music record production and dissemination, shifting the ground for many A&R representatives and their artists.27 Another important change in recorded roots music during the interwar years involved the hardening distinction between “race” and “hillbilly” recordings, itself a marketing division for which A&R men were largely responsible. Two trade journal articles published in the mid-1920s reflected that trend well. “Naturally, it is to be assumed that the negro is so much a definite part of our native population that he is expected to find his music desires completely fulfilled in the regular domestic catalogs,” a 1924 Talking Machine World editorial explained. “But through the medium of ‘race’ records he is given something that is distinctly his own.” Even so, the editorial stressed the cross-racial appeal of this material, noting “that some hundreds of thousands of whites might be expected to, and as a matter of fact do, purchase these records for their peculiar melodic value.”28 Two years later, a Talking Machine Journal article titled “Steppin’ High with This Hot Blues Business” described the remarkable sales that “race” records enjoyed, but emphasized the relatively discrete, segregated nature of the race records field and the need for specialized marketing expertise to court and serve African Americans: “The Negro trade is a business in itself, an enormously profitable occupation for the retailer who knows his way about. . . . In a number of . . . cities the segregation of the Negro population has enabled dealers to build up a trade catering to this race exclusively.”29 Increasing market segmentation notwithstanding, these kinds of stylistic and marketing divisions appear to have remained much less rigid than some industry insiders, trade journals, and subsequent scholars once claimed. A&R Pioneers is far more sympathetic to the arguments of recent commentators who, to borrow from one of the most perceptive among them, Erich Nunn, understand the history of American popular music “in terms of hybridity and reciprocal interracialism.” Nunn is particularly attentive to how, at the level of enjoyment, emotion, and emulation, “sounds constantly leak through the racial barriers” that the recording industry, mass media, and society-at-

11 INTRODUCTION

large have attempted to construct around particular musical forms.30 Although Nunn has little to say about the role of A&R in the construction and partial deconstruction of the racially circumscribed canons of interwar roots music, A&R men and women played a crucial, if ambiguous, part in the process he describes. Paradoxically, A&R officials created and policed the racial barriers between “race” and “hillbilly” music, but they also sometimes worked to subvert and transcend those barriers in their zealous pursuit of hit records. In the early decades of the recording industry, musical styles were forever evolving, and as a result, boundaries and distinctions within, as well as among, musical genres were often far from clear. In the race records field, for example, consumers initially favored “vaudeville blues”—an urban-centered blues idiom sparked by the success of Mamie Smith’s 1920 record “Crazy Blues” / “It’s Right Here for You (If You Don’t Get It ’Taint No Fault O’ Mine)” (OKeh 4169), and usually performed by female vocalists backed by piano players or small jazz combos. By the mid-1920s, rawer “downhome blues” recordings made primarily by self-accompanied male singer-guitarists began to eclipse the popularity of the vaudeville blues recordings that had been ubiquitous since the start of the decade. Simply identifying these kinds of broad trends within recorded blues obscures a multitude of regional and stylistic subdivisions that were often complicated by connections to other musical forms, including jazz, Tin Pan Alley pop songs, and even hillbilly music. Consequently, it is perilous to generalize about A&R work in the “blues” between the world wars, because the “blues” was such a diverse and protean commercial music form with numerous subcategories. Moreover, the blues in its myriad forms represented only a portion of the musical fare available on race records before World War II. Jazz instrumentals, spirituals, Tin Pan Alley hits, traditional ballads, sermons, and even some comedy skits, classical pieces, and operatic arias—along with a smattering of performances by white artists—were also among the selections to be heard on these records.31 A similarly eclectic hodgepodge of sounds appeared on hillbilly discs, often shepherded into existence by the same A&R directors responsible for overseeing the production of race records. Ultimately, one aim of this book is to reveal the critical contributions that A&R managers and scouts made to an enormous range of commercially recorded blues, hillbilly, and other American roots music forms, without undervaluing the artistry and creativity of the singers, musicians, and songwriters involved. Our emphasis on commercial recordings highlights the most basic characteristic shared by all the A&R personnel we discuss. A&R Pioneers examines those A&R officials who sought artists who could record hit records and, in many cases, who could write “original” songs (original at least according to the lax copyright standards of the day). But our story also differentiates among various kinds of A&R officials based upon the nature of their affiliations and their roles within the recording industry. A&R Pioneers is primarily concerned with what we call “A&R managers” or, alternatively, “A&R directors”: men and women who, as full-time record company employees, not only “discovered” talent but who also supervised recording sessions and were often

F I G U R E 2 . Sheet music cover of “Crazy Blues” (1920), featuring a photograph of Mamie Smith & Her Jazz Hounds. Songwriter Perry Bradford, a pioneering black A&R man, composed the words and music for this landmark blues song, which was published by his firm, the Perry Bradford Music Publishing Company. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

13 INTRODUCTION

involved in choices about which titles to issue commercially and how to market them. At the same time, though, it explores the pivotal roles of record store owners and salesmen such as R. T. Ashford, Paul I. Burks, Harry Charles, Jesse Johnson, H. C. Speir, and Van H. Sills, who acted as important regional or local talent scouts, and, to a lesser degree, of recording artists such as Big Bill Broonzy, Cow Cow Davenport, Doc Roberts, Ernest V. Stoneman, and Roosevelt Sykes who, though not strictly A&R men themselves, also passed on recommendations about prospective new talent to record companies and their A&R representatives. This semiformal, commercially oriented network of A&R managers and scouts differed from another group of pioneers who were also eagerly pursuing American roots singers and musicians in the interwar years. Several important folklorists and song collectors, among them Howard Odum, Guy B. Johnson, Dorothy Scarborough, and the father-and-son team of John and Alan Lomax, were also hot on the heels of similar, sometimes the same, talent. Broadly speaking, however, these scholars and collectors sought out roots musicians to record in order to preserve folksongs and idioms that they feared were disappearing amidst the rapid pace of social, economic, cultural, and technological change then engulfing America, not least as represented by the growth of the commercial recording industry and the mounting sales of phonographs and records in the nation’s small towns and rural heartlands. The divisions between “ballad hunters” and A&R officials were far from absolute, however. By 1931, for example, John Lomax explicitly invoked the mass popularity of hillbilly and race music when trying to secure funds from the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Song for his folk music recording projects. The success of hillbilly and race records, he argued, confirmed the centrality of rural musical idioms to American culture and, therefore, the pressing need to chronicle and preserve them.32 With John Lomax, there was always a sense that what he really wanted to do was to “save” America’s traditional folksongs from the corrupting influence of the recording industry, although this agenda did not prevent him or his son from copyrighting many of the songs they “discovered,” nor from accepting the royalties generated from commercially recorded versions of those songs. By 1938, though, his son Alan Lomax was beginning to revise his own attitudes toward commercially recorded vernacular music. Over the next couple of years, as assistant in charge of the Archive of American Folk Song, the younger Lomax abandoned the conventional folklorist wisdom that all such recordings were inherently debased, inauthentic mechanical reproductions of some pure folk spirit. Instead, he praised the vitality and innovation he often heard on hillbilly and race records. After working his way through the roots music catalogs of Decca, Vocalion, and RCA Victor’s budget-priced Bluebird line, and meeting with key A&R men such as Jack Kapp, Art Satherley, John Hammond, J. Mayo Williams, and Frank Walker, Lomax admitted to his boss Harold Spivacke, chief of the Library of Congress’s Music Division, that “the commercial recording companies have done a broader and more interesting job of recording American folk music than the folklorists and that every single item of recorded American rural, race, and popular music

14 A&R PIONEERS

that they have in their current lists and plan to release in the future should be in our files.”33 Many of the recordings made by folksong collectors eventually did see commercial release after World War II, often on Moses “Moe” Asch’s Folkways label, and several artists initially recorded on location throughout the United States as part of the Library of Congress’s song-catching expeditions went on to enjoy long careers that brought them into the world of commercial recordings, among them the now-legendary figures Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly) and McKinley Morganfield (Muddy Waters).34 Occasionally, there were even uneasy collaborations between A&R officials and ballad hunters. One striking example involved the Victor Talking Machine Company and Alan Lomax’s predecessor, eminent folksong scholar Robert Winslow Gordon, first archivist of the Archive of American Folk Song. In April 1929, only months after its purchase by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), Victor hired Gordon, largely at the behest of the label’s foremost roots music A&R manager Ralph Peer, to assist in the firm’s defense against a copyright suit concerning “Wreck of the Old 97.” Six years earlier, hillbilly singer Henry Whitter had made the first recording of this by-then traditional ballad for OKeh, under the title “The Wreck on the Southern Old 97” (OKeh 40015), ironically with Peer directing the session for his former paymasters. Within ten months, four cover versions by other artists on competing labels had hit the market.35 The most famous proved to be Vernon Dalhart’s rendition (Victor 19427), which, coupled with the sensational hit “The Prisoner’s Song,” became the first hillbilly record to sell more than one million copies and helped popularize this new musical genre nationwide.36 In the wake of that success, David Graves George, a Virginia railway telegrapher, came forward to claim that he had written the lyrics to “Wreck of the Old 97” and to recover his rightful portion of the royalties from the Victor disc’s phenomenal sales. Victor, though, believed it owned the rights to the song, having settled a similar copyright infringement suit in 1926. When the company refused to negotiate with George, he promptly filed a lawsuit. Victor, in turn, reached out to Gordon for assistance. Over the next two years, Gordon spent more than a thousand hours reconstructing the history of the ballad and establishing its rightful authorship for Victor, which, by the time the case eventually came to trial in 1931, had been reorganized as RCA Victor. According to folklorist Norm Cohen, “The results of Gordon’s labors formed the basis of RCA Victor’s defense” in George v. Victor Talking Machine Co. The lawsuit meandered its way through the court system for nine years, at one point even reaching the United States Supreme Court, before finally being resolved in 1940. In the end, due in large part to Gordon’s meticulous research, RCA Victor prevailed, and George was denied any share of the royalties.37 This was not the first time Gordon had interacted with the Victor Talking Machine Company. In 1925, while on a Harvard University fellowship, he had approached the company about funding his upcoming song-collecting expedition to North Carolina and about the possibility of his serving as a folksong consultant to the firm. In particular, Gordon believed he could be helpful in the complicated areas of copyright and royalties within the field of traditional music. As he explained in a letter to Victor

15 INTRODUCTION

F I G U R E 3 . Sheet music cover of “The Wreck on the Southern Old 97” (1924), with a photograph inset of Henry Whitter. Authors’ collections.

executive James E. Richardson, “The company was treading on very dangerous ground in certain instances where copyright was, to say the least, extremely questionable. I knew that in a number of cases the firm was paying royalty to unscrupulous pretenders who had no [vestige] of right in the texts they sold; and I knew that in other cases there were ample grounds for suit for infringement if only the facts happened to fall

16 A&R PIONEERS

into the hands of the right parties.” Although Gordon was highly qualified for such a consultancy position, Victor initially declined his proposal as well as his request for funding.38 Even so, as the protracted legal wrangling over “Wreck of the Old 97” makes clear, Gordon’s concerns about song copyrights and royalties in the murky, freewheeling world of commercially recorded American roots music were well founded. A&R officials were, in fact, intimately, sometimes infamously, involved in defining and exploiting the economic possibilities of controlling copyrights and royalties in the roots music recording and song publishing industries. In at least one instance, academic song collectors and record company A&R officials cooperated in recording American roots music. In 1926, Gennett sent a crew to make recordings of Hopi Indians in Arizona, under the direction of John O. Prescott, a “phonograph expert,” with chief engineer Ezra C. A. Wickemeyer handling the technical end. Supervising the actual sessions was Dr. Jesse Walter Fewkes, head of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethnography and a pioneering ethnomusicologist who in 1890 had made the first field recordings of Native Americans among the Passamaquoddy in Calais, Maine. Working from its base at the El Tovar Hotel near the Grand Canyon, and reportedly using a special truck rigged up with equipment, Fewkes and the Gennett team recorded twelve sides of tribal songs and chants. The “master records,” Music

F I G U R E 4 . Gennett recording truck (1934). Photograph by Harry Gennett Jr. Courtesy of Linda Gennett Irmscher and the Indiana Historical Society (m0428).

17 INTRODUCTION

Trade Review reported, were “sent to the Smithsonian Institute for preservation,” but copies of the records were released commercially by Gennett and “placed on sale all over the United States, particularly through the Southwest,” where they were marketed principally to tourists through Fred Harvey’s chain of resort hotels.39 As historian Rick Kennedy wryly observes, “Such Hopi numbers as ‘Tacheuktu [sic] Katcina’ and ‘Tuwina’Av’ [sic] were not exactly hits with the general public.” Talking Machine World concurred but in an editorial noted the historical significance of the records: “In this country, the music of the Indians of various tribes has been faithfully recorded for the generations that are to come, for no interpretation of any printed music could give to these tribal songs the fire and meaning that they carry when sung by the Indians themselves.” The editorial continued, “Records of this sort do not appeal strongly to those who are interested chiefly in record sales volume, but they have importance from a historical standpoint that should not be underestimated.” Jack Jackson, who, as Gennett’s assistant sales director, was forced to try to sell these records, remembered this unusual venture quite differently. Decades later, in a comment that underscored the tensions that beset collaborations between preservation-minded academic song collectors and commercially driven record company officials, Jackson described Gennett’s Hopi expedition as “a bucket of shit!”40 Jackson’s scatological summary indicates why such cooperative ventures were rare and often ill-fated. Early A&R officials were seldom concerned with cultural heritage or preservation; commercial success was their aim. If at first that agenda led to recordings of “old familiar tunes,” it quickly encouraged A&R personnel to find, facilitate, and occasionally force the recording of new, copyrightable, and profitable music. Although this original fare was often deeply indebted to older musical traditions, the new styles proved to be more diverse, more dynamic, more suited to a new age and, in the final reckoning, more popular with a much broader audience. These developments served both the financial ambitions of individual A&R officials and the economic interests of the record companies and publishing firms for whom they worked. At the same time, those commercial priorities, as they played out in the creative process of making phonograph records, shaped important trends in the history of American roots music. The vexed, sometimes exploitative, but often highly creative relationships among A&R managers, talent scouts, recording artists, musical directors, songwriters, arrangers, and fellow label executives helped create the stylistic canons and the business and marketing protocols of the recording industry. In terms of structure, A&R Pioneers begins by exploring the origins and meanings of the term “A&R,” and then goes on to describe its main characteristics and identify certain similarities in the backgrounds and motivations of the motley crew who were involved in interwar A&R work. Chapter 2 examines the ingenious and occasionally unscrupulous methods that A&R managers and scouts used to locate recordable talent, especially on southern field-recording expeditions, while also revealing how aspiring artists sometimes came a-knocking, literally as well as figuratively, on the doors of

18 A&R PIONEERS

grateful A&R men and women. Chapter 3 explains the messy, sometimes sordid world of contracts, copyrights, royalties, and remuneration to show how A&R representatives managed their business relationships with artists, other label executives, talent scouts, songwriters, and music publishers. In the process, they established lasting precedents for how the entire American recording industry operated, in both fiscal and organizational terms. Chapters 4 and 5 reevaluate the nature and extent of the creative contributions that A&R officials made to recorded American roots music between the two world wars, suggesting that some of them had far more impact on the scope, content, and sounds of those recordings than conventional wisdom usually allows. More specifically, Chapter 4 shows how A&R managers decisively shaped roots music repertoire, while Chapter 5, in turn, examines how they worked within recording studios, temporary and permanent alike, collaborating not only with singers and musicians but also with musical directors, arrangers, and recording engineers to create the sounds that were ultimately committed to disc. After those recordings were put on wax, A&R managers and their staff members often made or otherwise influenced decisions about which recordings and, in particular, which “takes” of those recordings would be released commercially and how they would be advertised and marketed. These post-production aspects of A&R work, crucial in constructing what have come to be thought of as the normative canons of American roots music, are the principal concerns of Chapter 6, which focuses on A&R managers’ and scouts’ roles in the selection and series assignment of discs for commercial release, and Chapter 7, which explores these officials’ central place in promoting and retailing those recordings. The book concludes with a final chapter that summarizes the changing roles of A&R representatives during and immediately after World War II. This period marked the beginnings of a new chapter in the American roots music story. But it was also an era when the legacy of those prewar A&R men and women who had built the industry was still keenly felt.

In the cow towns of the Southwest, in the honky-tonks of Memphis, in mountain hamlets in the Blue Ridge and the Cumberlands, a perennial visitor for 25 years has been a lean, loquacious man, with a slight British accent and a portable recording apparatus. Grey-haired Arthur Edward Satherly [sic] is paymaster, musical coach, father confessor to the blues singers, hillbilly fiddlers, guitar-strummers, jug-players, washboard-slappers who make Columbia’s Okeh records by the dozen. — “September Records,” Time, September 2, 1940

1 Defining A&R I NTE RWA R RECO RD CO MPA N Y O FFI CIALS A N D TH EI R WO RK

A & R M E N W E R E AT T H E H E A RT O F I T A L L . AT L E AST T H AT I S

what Bob Thiele reckoned. In 1939, at age seventeen, Thiele founded Signature, his first jazz record label, and, with this small company, launched an illustrious A&R career that spanned nearly six decades, including a long tenure as an executive at Decca (for whose Coral and Brunswick subsidiaries he recorded Buddy Holly & the Crickets in the 1950s) and later, in the 1960s, as manager of Impulse!, a jazz specialty label. Looking back on his formative years in the music business before World War II, Thiele explained just how much the recording industry had once depended on A&R

19

20 A&R PIONEERS

officials like him. “It was all left up to the A&R guy in those days as to who to record, when to record, how much to spend,” Thiele recalled. “Then you worked closely with the sales department. But the A&R guy was the important guy. Everyone relied on the A&R guy to have hit records.”1 Malcolm Rockwell, son of OKeh recording manager Tommy Rockwell, was close to the truth when he quipped that A&R men like his father were often a “combination of talent scout, producer, promoter, bottle washer & nursemaid in one person.”2 Indeed, perhaps one reason why music historians have shied away from attempting a collective biography of interwar A&R officials may be the sheer variety of people and contributions that might reasonably be gathered together under the A&R umbrella. Not surprisingly in a relatively new industry that was then rapidly evolving, job descriptions and titles were often improvised, fluid, and imprecise, leaving latter-day fans and scholars with a series of definitional and interpretive conundrums. Not least among these puzzles is the basic question of when the term “A&R” and the original phrase from which it derived, “Artists and Repertoire,” first came into use.3 That etymological riddle is as good a place as any to start to reconstruct the multifaceted world of interwar A&R.

A&R ORIGINS

Predictably, the origins of “Artists and Repertoire” and the initialism “A&R” are shrouded in mystery and further cloaked by layers of misinformation. On July 15, 1924, Talking Machine World—the nation’s premier trade journal of the phonograph and record industry—reported that Eddie King, manager of Victor’s “New York artist and repertoire department,” had recently organized a series of recordings for the label in Los Angeles, California. Art Hickman’s Biltmore Hotel Orchestra and Vincent Rose’s Montmartre Café Orchestra, along with “a number of locally famous Hawaiian and Mexican instrumentalists and orchestras,” were among those recorded on “a special recording apparatus” installed in the Hotel Alexandria, according to King’s instructions.4 Although the sessions produced nothing particularly memorable in terms of either music or sales, celebrated folklorist Archie Green, a giant in the development of serious scholarship on interwar roots music recording, once identified this brief article as “the earliest usage” of the term “A&R man” that he had discovered in print.5 Contrary to Green’s claim, however, neither the title “A&R man” nor the term “A&R” actually appear in this article. In fact, the initialism “A&R” probably did not enter regular usage until after World War II, when it may have been coined by Billboard, one of the nation’s oldest music trade magazines.6 The magazine was certainly using the term by January 1946, when it was featured in a headline (“Palitz Number 5 in Decca’s A&R with Dave Kapp”) for an article about the expansion of Dave Kapp’s “a. and r.” division at Decca to five men with the hiring of Morty Palitz.7 The inconsistent punctuation (“A&R”; “a. and r.”) suggests a neologism being hatched, with several variants still in play before the standard “A&R”

21 DEFINING A&R

became part of accepted industry “slanguage.”8 Indeed, in the early 1940s, there were many experiments with the long-form terminology to describe those record company officials most closely involved in spotting, signing, and recording musical talent. According to The Billboard 1943 Music Year Book, at Capitol Records, David Shelley served as “Talent & Tunes Manager”; at Beacon Records, the brainchild of Joe Davis—a singer, musician, recording artist, songwriter, music publisher, manager, and former freelance A&R man for Ajax, Gennett, and Edison, among other labels—Fritz Pollard acted as “Talent Manager”; at the tiny Standard Phono Company, which specialized in Greek and other ethnic recordings, Harold M. Kirchstein occupied the post of “Repertoire Director”; at the Columbia Recording Corporation, Art Satherley, one of the most important A&R men in the roots music field between the wars, held the position of “Manager of Country Dance, Folk Song and Race Artists and Repertoire.”9 If there was a curious mix of breadth and precision in Satherley’s designation, it nonetheless served to distinguish his roots-based fiefdom from Columbia’s classical and popular music empires, overseen by quite different A&R teams. By the end of the 1940s, though, the term “A&R” had become an instantly recognizable part of the music industry’s lexicon. Thus, we shamelessly use it anachronistically throughout this book as convenient shorthand for pre–World War II artists and repertoire officials and their work, fully aware that the initialism did not enter into widespread circulation until later. Although the short-form “A&R” is a relatively late linguistic innovation, the actual concept of an “artist(s) and repertoire” division within the music industry had a much longer lineage, stretching back to nineteenth-century grand opera companies.10 Within the commercial recording industry more specifically, the Victor Talking Machine Company proved particularly innovative in this area. By at least 1910, the firm had organized an “Artists’ Department,” which was still operating under that title in February 1916, when Calvin G. Child, longtime recording manager, took over as its director.11 Sometime during the next six years, the terminology at Victor changed. In January 1923, Music Trade Review reported that former sales manager John S. Macdonald had been promoted to associate director of the company’s “Artists and Repertoire Department.”12 Eight and a half months later, on October 1, Macdonald was appointed director when Child resigned due to poor health. That Talking Machine World considered Macdonald’s latest promotion newsworthy enough for its front page indicates how important A&R work had already become within the recording industry.13 The very next day, October 2, just as Macdonald assumed control of the Artists and Repertoire Department, Victor introduced an additional layer of A&R bureaucracy by creating a new “Artists and Repertoire Committee,” whose membership was drawn from managers and executives throughout the company.14 While the department was responsible for finding talent, matching that talent with suitable material, and supervising recording sessions, the committee was responsible for determining which of those recordings met Victor’s high standards of artistic and technical quality for commercial release. This was a rather unusual arrangement. At most other labels, decisions about

22 A&R PIONEERS

releases fell primarily within the purview of artists and repertoire departments, which at smaller labels might consist of only a few employees. One of the men drafted onto Victor’s new Artists and Repertoire Committee in October 1923 was superintendent of recording Harry O. Sooy, a machinist turned recording engineer who had worked for the company’s founder, Eldridge Johnson, since 1898, before the Victor Talking Machine Company had even been officially incorporated. Following a two-year apprenticeship, Sooy became what he called a “full-fledged recorder.” Over the next two decades, in addition to his duties in the firm’s permanent studios, he made a number of international recording expeditions, among them, trips to Havana in 1907 and, later that same year, to Mexico City. On both excursions, Sooy recorded native artists and essentially functioned as an A&R man. He also handled several important domestic sessions on location, away from Victor’s main studios, recording William Jennings Bryan at his home in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1908; William Howard Taft at a hotel in Hot Springs, Virginia, in 1908; Theodore Roosevelt at a hotel in Emporia, Kansas, in 1916; and Warren Harding at the White House in 1922.15 Meanwhile, upon Calvin G. Child’s promotion in 1916, Sooy was named manager of Victor’s recording departments and placed in charge of all the mechanical aspects of recording.16 In the summer of 1924, shortly after his appointment to the company’s newly created Artists and Repertoire Committee, Sooy was among the staff members who accompanied Eddie King, Victor’s New York A&R chief, to Los Angeles in search of fresh West Coast talent. That basic task, to search out musicians and music that could generate hit records, was already well established by 1924; it helps explain why A&R managers were so vital to the recording of American roots music. But first, a cautionary note. The diversity of interlocking responsibilities assumed by or imposed on A&R officials, who served in various capacities at a disparate group of record companies, makes it hard to generalize about what, exactly, they did. Writing a comprehensive job description for early A&R personnel, replete with a coherent set of “key performance indicators,” would have been a nightmare for any human resources department. Nat Shilkret recalled that Eddie King originally hired him in 1915 as “an arranger and conductor” at Victor. Shortly after, Shilkret became involved in A&R work in the firm’s Foreign Department, which then “recorded for thirty-two languages,” the most prominent being “Italian, Jewish, Russian, German, Greek, Polish, and Scandinavian.” As Shilkret explained, “Engaging talent, picking the music, orchestrating, recording, listening to masters and picking the best rendition, translating the title and write-ups for the catalogues, and contracting each artist became my full-time occupation.”17 If often-mundane tasks like evaluating masters, cataloging, recordkeeping, and negotiating contracts were frequently handled by low-level A&R officials who toiled away in record company trenches, their A&R superiors juggled a more important, if no shorter, list of responsibilities with the assistance of those lieutenants. In 1928, when Jack Kapp, head of Vocalion’s race record division, was promoted to manager of the label’s sales and recording departments, Talking Machine World announced that

DEFINING A&R

F I G U R E 1.1. Ralph Peer in Havana, Cuba (1931). Courtesy of the Peer Family Archives.

23

among his many new duties would be to “direct the supervision of releasing [records], development of talent, directing of recording, merchandising of records and the planning of sales campaigns.”18 Some A&R officials were clearly more autonomous than others, exerting various degrees of influence in locating and signing talent, selecting salable material, and then recording, releasing, and marketing records. But whether these A&R personnel were official company employees or independent contractors, their contributions were all shaped by complex relationships with record company presidents and senior executives, advertising and sales department staff, recording artists, musical directors, recording engineers, music publishers, distributors and retailers, theater owners, radio executives, jukebox operators, lawyers, and other A&R representatives. The fact that some A&R officials also filled some of these other roles complicated matters even further. Ralph Peer, probably the single most influential A&R man in interwar roots recording and music publishing, and a towering figure in the history of the larger American popular music industry, illustrates this complexity well.19 The same July 15, 1924, edition of Talking Machine World that chronicled Eddie King’s Victor recording trip to

24 A&R PIONEERS

Los Angeles also described a recent West Coast trip undertaken by Peer. Described as “director of record production for the General Phonographic Corp.,” Peer was in California to broker a statewide distribution deal for the firm’s OKeh and Odeon labels through San Francisco’s Walter S. Gray Company. “Mr. Peer spent the month of June in California and other points in the Far West,” a related article in that same issue reported, “visiting the jobbers in this important territory and arranging for an intensive sales campaign for the coming Fall.”20 Peer had already enjoyed major coups as an A&R man. In 1920, he had helped the hustling Perry Bradford—a singer, composer, and song plugger—and OKeh’s musical director Fred Hager bring Mamie Smith into the studio to wax her first record, “That Thing Called Love” / “You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down” (OKeh 4113), followed by “Crazy Blues” / “It’s Right Here for You (If You Don’t Get It ’Taint No Fault O’ Mine)” (OKeh 4169), whose spectacular sales sparked the “vaudeville blues” (sometimes called “classic blues”) boom of the early 1920s.21 Three years later, Peer traveled to Atlanta to supervise the label’s first location recording sessions and cut what is commonly considered the first commercially successful hillbilly record, “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” / “The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster’s Going to Crow” (OKeh 4890), by local favorite Fiddlin’ John Carson.22 Sometime in mid-1926, Peer moved to Victor. There he focused less on sales, per se, than on A&R work, talent management through Ralph S. Peer Inc., and, most lucrative of all, accruing copyrights of original songs recorded and often written by the artists he signed. Peer published songs by many of these entertainers through his Southern Music Publishing Company. Between 1920 and 1934, he established a reputation as an A&R man of the first order, recruiting and recording a galaxy of roots musicians, including bluesman Blind Willie McTell, jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton, and country music’s first superstar, Jimmie Rodgers.23 Like many of his leading A&R contemporaries—though with considerably more success than most—Peer always combined his core talent-scouting and recording duties with multiple other roles. Despite such overlapping responsibilities, several key functions united most recording managers and talent scouts active in recorded roots music during the interwar years. First, regardless of whether these agents were record company employees or ad hoc freelancers, they had to scout, recruit, sign, and develop singers and musicians who could record and perhaps even write commercially viable songs or instrumental numbers. Second, A&R men were often responsible for finding or selecting the material that those musicians recorded, working closely with musical directors, arrangers, songwriters, and composers, sometimes writing or arranging songs themselves. Third, although the activities of some A&R officials, especially talent scouts, ended with recommending promising artists to recording companies, others regularly organized and supervised recording sessions. Sometimes A&R men helped set up the studios, be they makeshift or permanent, and in at least a few cases, they even operated the recording equipment. Occasionally, they offered musical direction. In these various capacities, A&R officials

Offering useful generalizations about who A&R decision-makers were, where they came from, and how they got into the recording industry is every bit as challenging as trying to describe the precise nature of their A&R duties. Some A&R officials were mavericks—occasional, even accidental talent scouts whose contributions were random, short-lived, and without a discernible pattern. In this regard, the case of celebrated African American writer Richard Wright is especially revealing. In 1940, Wright befriended Clinton Brewer, a convicted murderer then serving a life sentence at Trenton State Prison in New Jersey for killing his wife. Brewer had begun exchanging letters with Wright after reading the author’s best-selling novel Native Son and enrolling in a correspondence course in harmony and counterpoint to hone his songwriting and arranging skills. Wright heard the results of Brewer’s studies when he visited the prison and an inmate band performed Brewer’s “Stampede in G Minor.” Impressed, Wright alerted his friend, Columbia’s iconoclastic A&R man John Hammond, who, in turn, showed the arrangement to prominent bandleader Count Basie. By the end of the year, Wright joined Basie and Hammond in Columbia’s New York studios as Basie and his orchestra recorded what the Pittsburgh Courier described as “discs of swing selections [penned] by a race convict.” Following the success of “Stampede in G Minor” (OKeh 5987) and thanks to the lobbying efforts of Wright, Hammond, and Basie, New Jersey Governor Charles Edison (son of inventor Thomas

DEFINING A&R

BAC K G R O U N D S

25

laid the foundations for a new position that fused technical, commercial, and creative functions. The “record producer” did not fully emerge until after World War II—when the development of magnetic tape allowed for new levels of sound manipulation during and after recording sessions—but some A&R men were trailblazers in this sense. They shared with artists and technical staff the chief responsibility of capturing or, in some cases, creating the sounds that were committed to disc. During the 1920s, this usually required at least two, or sometimes more, “takes” of the same selection. Finally, once the performances from a session had been satisfactorily recorded on usable masters, the fourth major role for many A&R men, especially recording managers, consisted of working closely with upper-level company executives and advertising and sales managers to decide which, if any, takes would be issued commercially and sometimes to determine how those releases would be marketed. To fulfill these multiple roles effectively, A&R officials ideally needed to have “good ears”—that legendary, elusive ability to identify major star talent and prospective hits among the hundreds of musicians and songs they heard or heard about. They also needed to cultivate a keen sense of potential audiences, tastes, and markets. Within their four principal functions, there were enormous variations of emphasis and expertise. Even so, these duties gave A&R representatives enormous power within the interwar recording industry.

26 A&R PIONEERS

A. Edison) granted Brewer early parole in July 1941. Hammond had “no hesitation in predicting a splendid career for him” as Basie’s musical arranger. Hammond had made better predictions, though. Just three months after his release, Brewer stabbed a woman to death for refusing his marriage proposal. He escaped the electric chair only through the intervention of acclaimed psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham, who, at Wright’s behest, helped Brewer’s attorney present a convincing insanity defense.24 It would be hard to extrapolate a model of commercial A&R practice from the singular circumstances in which Richard Wright discovered Clinton Brewer. But finding musical talent among prisoners was not uncommon in the early decades of roots music recording, at least among the nation’s ballad hunters. Folklorists John A. Lomax and his son Alan routinely combed southern prisons in search of “authentic” singers and supposedly unsullied folksongs to record for the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Song. In the process, they famously discovered Lead Belly in Angola, Louisiana’s forbidding state penitentiary. “Negro songs in their primitive purity can be obtained probably as nowhere else from Negro prisoners in state or Federal penitentiaries,” the elder Lomax contended. He was largely mistaken, however, in his belief that African American inmates, “especially the long-term prisoners who have been confined for years,” were isolated to the extent that they “have not yet been influenced by jazz and the radio,” and, as a result, still sang “distinctive old-time Negro melodies.”25 Even in highly secure, segregated prisons, inmates were keenly aware of evolving musical trends; despite nearly two decades behind bars, Clinton Brewer was steeped in the latest jazz and swing idioms. Commercially recorded music and the mass media had a long reach that regularly foiled or at least compromised the purist aspirations of the Lomaxes and many like-minded folksong collectors. Yet there was one important way in which Wright’s dalliance with musical talent-spotting was entirely typical of contemporary A&R practices. Just as Wright had told John Hammond about Brewer’s songwriting skills, casual and part-time scouts often steered promising performers to more experienced and better-placed A&R men. Hot tips from local talent-spotters were routinely forwarded to salaried company A&R officials or to others on semipermanent retainers who supervised recording sessions when needed. Notwithstanding Richard Wright’s idiosyncratic involvement, African Americans were sorely underrepresented in the world of interwar roots music A&R, despite their major contributions as singers, musicians, arrangers, songwriters, music publishers, and consumers. Nevertheless, a handful did manage to break into the A&R field and play a significant role in roots music recording. Clarence Williams, a pianist, composer, arranger, and prolific recording artist in his own right, entered A&R work chiefly through music publishing and served as a race records director for OKeh between 1923 and 1928. Born in 1894 in Plaquemine, Louisiana, Williams first became involved in music publishing in New Orleans in 1915. He continued to develop that side of his career under the wing of self-declared “Father of the Blues,” W. C. Handy, and later, in 1922, formed his own Clarence Williams Music Publishing Company in New York. Williams

27 DEFINING A&R

used his professional contacts to recruit and record new talent, initially at Columbia and later at OKeh, chiefly as a way, like Perry Bradford, to promote his publishing firm’s songs and gain mechanical royalties. Among the artists Williams recorded for the first time were jazz pianists Fats Waller and Willie “The Lion” Smith. In addition, Williams, who has as good a claim as most to having “discovered” the “Empress of the Blues,” Bessie Smith, accompanied her on several of her early sides and even wrote her first Columbia release in 1923, “Gulf Coast Blues” (A3844), one of nearly five hundred songs he had a hand in writing.26 Another leading African American figure in interwar A&R was Richard M. Jones, a fellow Louisianan who was born in 1892 in Donaldsonville, some twenty miles southeast of Clarence Williams’s birthplace. A gifted jazz pianist, composer, and recording artist who counted the perennially popular “Trouble in Mind” among his dozens of songwriting credits, Jones managed much of OKeh’s race records operation in Chicago during the mid- to late 1920s. Prior to assuming that position, he had worked for the Chicago branch of Williams’s publishing house before opening his own music shop on East 39th Street. Meanwhile, beginning in 1923, Jones recorded for a series of labels, including Gennett, OKeh, Victor, and Paramount, both as a solo artist and as the leader of the Three Jazz Wizards and later the Chicago Cosmopolitans. As an A&R man for OKeh, Jones produced sessions, as well as supplied the piano accompaniment, for several vaudeville blues singers, among them Sara Martin, Bertha “Chippie” Hill, Blanche Calloway, and even actress Hattie McDaniel. However, he was chiefly involved with jazz and gospel recordings, including overseeing approximately a dozen sides by Juanita “Arizona” Dranes, a blind gospel singer-pianist he had discovered in 1926 in the DallasFort Worth area. In addition, Jones may have organized and perhaps even supervised some of the historic OKeh recordings by Louis Armstrong’s highly influential Hot Five and Hot Seven ensembles. Eventually, Jones moved on to similar A&R assignments, first at Decca in the mid-1930s and then at Mercury shortly before his death in 1945.27 Aletha Dickerson, the only African American woman known to have served as an A&R manager in the interwar period, was a native of Chicago, where her Tennesseeborn father worked as a café musician and her Kansas-born mother, a music teacher. In 1923, she became a secretary for J. Mayo Williams at Paramount’s Chicago offices and for the label’s Chicago Music Publishing Company. She also ran a local music store, Dickerson’s Record Shop, at 31st and State Streets, with her husband, Alexander J. Robinson, a guitarist, piano player, and future recording artist. When Williams resigned from Paramount in 1928, Dickerson served as a Paramount recording manager and talent scout in her own right, albeit a “reluctant one,” according to historian Alex van der Tuuk. “I had no desire to or expectation of being what was then called [a] ‘recording manager’ for Paramount,” Dickerson later admitted. “I was neither asked whether or not I wanted such a position, nor even informed until three months after the fact. . . . Except that I could read music, play piano, arrange music, I was wholly unqualified for such a job.” Her duties mainly consisted of replenishing Paramount’s race records

28 A&R PIONEERS

catalog by recruiting new talent such as the Hokum Boys (which included her husband), Laura Rucker, and Arnold and Irene Wiley, and recording them alongside established artists such as Ma Rainey, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Meade Lux Lewis. In addition, Dickerson played piano on numerous sessions she supervised and sometimes composed songs for artists. For example, she provided the accompaniment on Blind Blake’s August 1929 session that yielded “I Was Afraid of That” (Paramount 12882). Dickerson also claimed—and, unlike some A&R officials who made similar claims during the period, probably merited—a share of the songwriting credits for a number of songs, including Ida Cox’s “Coffin Blues” (Paramount 12318), waxed four years earlier under J. Mayo Williams’s direction.28 Considering the examples of Perry Bradford, Clarence Williams, Richard M. Jones, and Aletha Dickerson, it is tempting to generalize that musical ability was more important, proportionately, as a point of entry into A&R work for the relatively few African Americans involved than it was for their white colleagues. One conspicuous exception to that trend, however, was the most influential of all African American A&R managers during this period: Dickerson’s onetime boss, J. Mayo “Ink” Williams. Born in 1894 in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and raised in Monmouth, Illinois, Williams won fame as a football and track star at Brown University before moving to Chicago in 1921 after graduation. There, despite no experience in the recording industry, he landed the job as A&R manager for what would become Paramount’s extensive race recording program. Meanwhile, Williams moonlighted for several seasons as one of the first African Americans in the newly formed National Football League with the Hammond (Indiana) Pros and several other teams. During his tenure at Paramount between 1923 and 1928, Williams supervised an estimated seven hundred recordings with race recording stars such as Ida Cox, Ma Rainey, Papa Charlie Jackson, Blind Blake, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Like many of his white A&R colleagues, Williams had no particular musical ability. He did, however, respect the cultural, as well as the financial, value of black roots music, even though his personal tastes leaned toward classical music and pop balladry, rather than toward the blues, gospel, and hot jazz performances he mainly oversaw. After resigning from Paramount, Williams went on to work in a similar capacity for Jack Kapp at Brunswick beginning in 1928, and then, after a short stint coaching football at Morehouse College in Atlanta, for Kapp again at Decca between 1934 and 1945. Williams built, in the words of historian William Howland Kenney, “the longest-running and most productive career of any African American in the phonograph business before World War II.”29 While the relative paucity of African Americans in interwar A&R reflected the racial prejudice and discrimination pervasive in the United States, in other ways, the field was remarkably diverse. This was mainly due perhaps to the chief mandate of the job, namely to find and record talent and music that would appeal to as many consumers of as many different ethnicities and cultures as possible. Whatever the reason, the roots music A&R world was populated by dozens of men (and a few women) from

29 DEFINING A&R

extraordinarily varied backgrounds. Some came to the business from small towns and rural areas in America’s hinterlands, such as Frank Walker, who, born in 1889 on a farm near the tiny community of Fly Summit in upstate New York, found and recorded race and hillbilly talent at Columbia and later at RCA Victor.30 Ernie Oertle, the American Record Corporation (ARC) salesman and informal mid-South talent scout who brought Robert Johnson to his first recording session in San Antonio in 1936, was a native of Pittsburg, Kansas.31 Other A&R men who were instrumental in developing American roots music came from families that were themselves quite new to America. Andrae Nordskog, owner of the Los Angeles–based Nordskog Phonograph Recording Company, who supervised the first recordings of a black New Orleans jazz band in 1922, was born in 1885 in Sioux City, Iowa, to Norwegian immigrants.32 Chief recording engineer Ezra C. A. Wickemeyer, the son of a German immigrant father, oversaw historic jazz sessions featuring the likes of King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, and Bix Beiderbecke at the Gennett studio in Richmond, Indiana, his birthplace.33 And while relatively little American roots music was recorded in California, Oregon, and Washington State, the A&R field still attracted several West Coast natives. Wickemeyer’s colleague Harold Soulé, who occasionally scouted talent and eventually replaced him as Gennett’s chief recording engineer, was born in 1906 in Santa Maria, California, the son of a piano tuner and salesman for the Soulé Brothers Music Company of Portland, Oregon. 34 Harold’s Portland-born older brother, Gordon Soulé, was a classically trained pianist who, in his capacity as musical director of Gennett’s New York studio, organized the label’s only southern recording expedition, a nearly two-month venture in Birmingham, Alabama, in the summer of 1927, during which he recorded, among others, the blues duos Whistlin’ Pete and Daddy Stovepipe, and Joe Evans and Arthur McClain.35 Some A&R men came from the far-flung territories of the American empire. Johnny Noble, co-writer of “Hula Blues” and “My Little Grass Shack in Kealakekua, Hawaii,” was a musician, composer, and orchestra leader of mixed English and native Hawaiian parentage who helped popularize Hawaiian music in the continental United States. In 1928, Noble recruited the talent and supervised the sessions for a Brunswick recording expedition to his hometown of Honolulu, during which more than one hundred examples of Hawaiian music were recorded.36 Brunswick A&R man Ralph Perez (born Rafael Gómez Pérez), who specialized in recording Spanish-language music in the southwestern United States, the Caribbean, and Central America, was born in 1899 in Yauco, Puerto Rico. In 1935, during one of his many recording expeditions in Texas, the San Antonio Light identified him as “the gentleman largely responsible for the current American rage for languid Mexican songs and exotic Cuban rhumbas, a fad which started when he induced Brunswick to record ‘The Peanut Vendor,’ the daddy of all rhumbas, in Havana in 1929.”37 Other A&R pioneers came from much farther afield. Born in Warsaw in 1905, the son of a Jewish novelist and dramatist, Moses “Moe” Asch was a recording engineer turned record label owner who did much to establish the canons of American and

30 A&R PIONEERS

world folk music. In 1912, his family fled to Paris to escape Poland’s anti-Semitism and pogroms before finally immigrating to the United States in 1915, as war ravaged continental Europe. Some two and a half decades later, as a second world war broke out, Asch entered A&R work in the American roots music field. He initially supervised recordings of Jewish cantors and Yiddish secular singers, but soon added folk music giants such as Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie to his small Asch and Disc labels before launching his renowned Folkways Records (now Smithsonian Folkways Records) in 1949.38 Like Asch, most A&R managers who specialized in the foreign-language records aimed at immigrant groups in the United States were themselves immigrants. Born in Fünfkirchen (present-day Pécs), Hungary, in 1877, Anton Heindl served as longtime manager of Columbia’s foreign records department and personally directed the recording of many of the estimated six thousand foreign-language discs the label issued domestically between 1908 and 1923.39 His successor, Hans Kubies, a Munich native, not only organized recording expeditions to continental Europe but also made a 1924 recording trip to Chicago, where he supervised recordings by “two of Chicago’s leading Bohemian bands” and “some interesting Italian folk songs, with mandolin, guitar and flute accompaniment.”40 Kubies’s counterpart at Pathé, Dr. Józef Kálmán, was a Hungarian by birth. An opera and concert singer who prolifically recorded Slovakian, Hungarian, and German songs for several record companies, Kálmán immigrated to the United States in 1910. According to a 1919 Music Trades profile, he spoke “eight languages fluently” and “having been in the foreign record business for many years . . . thoroughly understands the tastes of the different nationalities, and knows the kind of music they want to be supplied with.” But, as phonograph industry historian Allan Sutton points out, Kálmán “seems to have concentrated on classical and semi-classical material, pursuing vernacular music less ambitiously than Pathé’s competitors.”41 A foreign records manager who worked for two of those competing companies was Albert Thallmayer. In a career that exemplified the job mobility and constantly shifting responsibilities that were a hallmark of interwar A&R, Thallmayer joined Columbia in 1902, working first in its Berlin office and then running its office in his native Vienna before coming to the United States in 1913. After a stint as a traveling salesman for Columbia’s foreign records department under Heindl, Thallmayer became the manager of the General Phonograph Corporation’s OKeh and Odeon foreign records catalogs, only to return to Columbia in 1925 to replace Kubies as head of its foreign records department.42 It made perfect sense to employ foreign-born A&R men who spoke several languages and possessed at least some rudimentary understanding of assorted ethnic music traditions and European markets. But immigrants were also involved in A&R work in the distinctly American fields of hot jazz, blues, and hillbilly music. Harry Lim, who became a fan and collector of jazz records while growing up in Amsterdam, was born halfway around the globe, in Batavia, now Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1919, when it was still part of the Dutch East Indies. In 1939, at around the age of twenty, he immigrated to the United States and, two years later, produced his first recording session in New Orleans,

31 DEFINING A&R

before supervising dozens of important jazz sessions for Keynote Records between 1943 and 1946.43 Arthur “Uncle Art” Satherley was born in Bristol, England, in 1889 and served in the British army before immigrating to Wisconsin in 1913. He worked there for the Wisconsin Chair Company, first grading lumber and then handling accounts for the phonograph cabinets that the firm made for Thomas A. Edison Inc. in New London. In 1917, when Wisconsin Chair established a record manufacturing plant at nearby Grafton, principally to support its diversification into phonograph production through its own Paramount label, Satherley helped develop a new, more durable formula for shellac. Subsequently, between 1922 and 1952, he became a major A&R figure in hillbilly and race recording at Paramount, QRS, ARC, and finally, Columbia. As Satherley later boasted, “I’m the only living man who’s been through this business with his hands, running the factories, making the records, making the formulas, finding the material, seeing that the pressing’s done, selling [the records], and, finding the artists. Nearly fifty years at it. And always of no fixed abode, just traveling, finding country people to make these recordings.”44 Satherley’s protégé, fellow Englishman Don Law, possessed a bit more humility but an even more exotic backstory. Born in London in 1902, he broke into the business world in Britain and Lithuania, coding and decoding secret business cables for A. G. de Sherbinin & Company, a London-based import-export concern. In 1926, after his Russian-born boss declared bankruptcy, Law followed him to the United States, first to Long Island and then to Alabama, where they tried to make a new start raising sheep and turkeys near Selma. When that ill-fated venture failed, Law headed west toward California but only made it as far as Texas. There he bluffed his way into a bookkeeping job in Dallas—“My bookkeeping was very rudimentary,” he later confessed— at Brunswick’s local branch, where he rose to the position of district sales manager. Shortly after ARC acquired Brunswick in 1931, Law met Satherley and, under his tutelage, soon began to juggle A&R work with his sales duties. Law eventually joined him at the new Columbia Recording Corporation, a subsidiary of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) formed in the wake of the network’s 1938 purchase of ARC, and enjoyed a productive career as A&R manager of Columbia’s country music division until his retirement in 1967.45 Another recording manager from the British Empire was Helen Oakley Dance, who came from an affluent Toronto family and supervised a series of seminal jazz recordings for the Variety and Vocalion labels between 1936 and 1939, including small combos fronted by Duke Ellington and several of his orchestra sidemen.46 Dance was one of very few women conspicuously involved in interwar A&R. Besides her and Paramount’s Aletha Dickerson, only one other woman appears to have worked as an A&R manager in American roots recording during this period: Kiria Koula Antonopoulou, a Greekborn singer and prolific recording artist who managed her own small, Greek-language specialty label, Panhellenion, from around 1919 to 1927. A few other women, however, did act as talent scouts, among them Edith North Johnson, wife of Jesse Johnson,

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proprietor of the De Luxe Music Shoppe in St. Louis and himself an A&R scout; Bee McCann, an employee of the El Popular Record Shop in San Antonio; Margaret Owen, music department manager for the Boggs-Rice Company in Bristol, Virginia; and possibly Viola Supper, wife of Paramount general manager Maurice Supper.47 The dearth of women in A&R reflected dominant gender ideologies and labor practices in the United States. Despite the influx of tens of thousands of American women into the workforce during World War I, while many men were serving in the military, women’s postwar employment opportunities remained limited. Notwithstanding the contemporary hullabaloo about flappers and the “New Woman” of the 1920s, prevailing social expectations still encouraged “respectable” women to prioritize domestic responsibilities: getting married, bearing children, and caring for home and family, rather than building professional careers. They were certainly not expected to pursue careers in the seedy world of popular entertainment doing A&R work that often required long stretches on the road and nighttime searches for talent in clubs, theaters, juke joints, and other perceived dens of vice and impropriety, where they had to deal with all manner of disreputable folk, not the least of which were musicians. There was, after all, always something vaguely unseemly about A&R work that put it on the edge of respectability and, occasionally, of legality. Still, the underrepresentation of women in the world of interwar A&R clashed with market logic. A conflict like this was rare in an industry in which commercial imperatives usually dominated, but it indicated the power of sexism and the persistence of gendered notions of propriety and employability in corporate America. Female talent was vital to American roots music as well as to other musical genres, creating at least a prima facie case that female A&R representatives might have been well positioned to recruit and supervise female performers. More importantly, they might have had particularly useful insights into female consumer preferences. As J. W. Watson, manager of the Edison Shop in Kansas City, Missouri, explained in 1919, “Women buy [by] far the greatest number of records.” Watson’s statement captured the general consensus of a national survey by Talking Machine World which revealed that, in some cities, women accounted for as much as 75 percent of record sales.48 Commenting specifically on the southern market for blues records, researcher Gayle Dean Wardlow recalled H. C. Speir, a Jackson, Mississippi, music store owner and talent scout, explaining to him, “Seventy-five cents was a lot of money in the 1920s. But the sharecropper didn’t buy the records. The woman who worked for the white man as a cook or maid in his home bought the records—she had the money.”49 Historian William Howland Kenney observes that in the early decades of the twentieth century, “Women dominated the market for phonograph records even more completely than that for the machines that played them.”50 Yet in the A&R field, professional opportunities for women remained scarce, just as they did in several other newly powerful economic sectors where women were key consumers, including advertising, radio, and motion pictures. Even when women did break into the executive ranks in

33 DEFINING A&R

those fields, patriarchal attitudes and blatant sexism frequently hampered their upward mobility. J. Mayo Williams, for example, later admitted that during his tenure as manager of Paramount’s race records catalog, he deliberately excluded Aletha Dickerson, his indispensable secretary and occasional arranger and session pianist, from certain business discussions and gratuitously rejected the songs she wrote, all in an effort to keep her in her place: firmly beneath and beholden to him.51 Amid the wide variety of backgrounds, skills, and employment histories among A&R personnel involved in roots recording, some recurring patterns do emerge. Commercial ambitions generally outweighed aesthetic considerations. Still, some A&R officials found their way into the industry through their passion for the music. Helen Oakley Dance and John Hammond were evangelical about jazz. They saw their A&R work as a way to showcase their favorite music and musicians on disc and, in Hammond’s case, as part of a lifelong commitment to using music to promote racial justice and interracial understanding. “Next to jazz, the NAACP became the means to fight for the social change I sought,” wrote Hammond, a long-standing board member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. His sense of priorities—jazz first, the NAACP second—reflected his belief in the progressive political potential of jazz; this, in turn, led to important A&R decisions and pathbreaking racially integrated sessions in the 1930s involving some of Hammond’s most significant discoveries, among them Benny Goodman (Hammond’s future brother-in-law), Teddy Wilson, and Billie Holiday.52 Other A&R personnel boasted impressive musical credentials. Conductor-composer Arthur Bergh was a former first violinist with the Metropolitan Opera House Orchestra who performed under the baton of the fiery Arturo Toscanini before serving between 1915 and 1931 as musical director or recording manager at labels with strong roots music catalogs, including OKeh and Columbia.53 Pianist-songwriter Cliff Hess worked as Irving Berlin’s arranger and private secretary for nearly six years before he became Vocalion’s recording manager around 1922.54 Homer Rodeheaver, a gospel composer, music publisher, and prolific recording artist, served for twenty years as trombonist and musical director for the internationally renowned evangelist Reverend Billy Sunday; in the early to mid-1920s, Rodeheaver occasionally supervised sessions for his own Rainbow label, which specialized in sacred music, as well as for Gennett and Paramount.55 Orchestra leader, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and arranger Nathaniel “Nat” Shilkret (born Naftule Schüldkraut) was a child prodigy on the clarinet who, while still in his teens, performed with the New York Philharmonic Society, New York Symphony Orchestra, and Metropolitan Opera House Orchestra. In 1915, Shilkret joined Victor, where he became a prodigious recording artist while also overseeing recordings of foreign-language folk music, jazz, and hillbilly music, including Vernon Dalhart’s million-selling disc, “The Prisoner’s Song” / “Wreck of the Old 97.”56 Richard “Dick” Voynow, the son of Russian immigrants, had played piano in the Wolverines alongside Bix Beiderbecke in the mid-1920s before he began his tenure as

F I G U R E 1. 2 . Advertisement commemorating the fourth anniversary of James K. Polk Inc., “The South’s Largest Phonograph Supply House.” Polk C. Brockman, the company’s owner and sales manager, is pictured at the top. Talking Machine World, September 15, 1925. Courtesy of the Recorded Sound Research Center, Library of Congress.

35 DEFINING A&R

musical director and assistant manager of Brunswick’s recording studios in Chicago, under Jack Kapp.57 Perhaps less romantic, yet arguably a far more crucial factor than musical prowess in the careers of most A&R officials, was a background in, or intimate connections to, the world of retail sales. Polk C. Brockman, for example, came from a wealthy family of Atlanta merchants. His maternal grandfather, a Confederate veteran, had moved to Atlanta after the Civil War and, in 1888, had opened a retail furniture store on Decatur Avenue called the James K. Polk Furniture Company. Brockman joined the family business around 1921. Alerted to the growing market for phonographs and records as a result of the calls he had made on furniture stores in his previous job as a traveling salesman for a bed and mattress company, he soon organized a phonograph and record department at his grandfather’s store. Within six months or so, he had built such a flourishing trade, particularly in race records, that, in September 1921, OKeh appointed the store its Atlanta wholesale distributor, with Brockman as sales manager of the new enterprise.58 Because of his association with the label, Brockman was asked to recruit much of the talent for OKeh’s first out-of-town recording expedition, which took place in Atlanta in June 1923, under the supervision of Ralph Peer. Apparently, it was Brockman’s promise to purchase five hundred discs for sale in his grandfather’s store that persuaded Peer to record Fiddlin’ John Carson on that trip and, in doing so, helped initiate the commercial recording of what OKeh advertising copy originally called “Hill Country Music” and later “Old Time Tunes.”59 That promise also launched Brockman’s career as a highly influential A&R man. He remained active in the race and hillbilly fields for the next two decades, first for OKeh and then for Bluebird, overseeing location recording sessions in cities such as Atlanta; Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Richmond, Virginia; New Orleans; Jackson, Mississippi; and San Antonio, among others.60 Around 1924, Brockman purchased his grandfather’s store, now named James K. Polk Inc., and, as its general manager, built it into OKeh’s largest distributor in the Southeast. Sales were so strong that in 1926 Brockman discontinued the store’s furniture business to focus exclusively on wholesaling and retailing phonographs, records, and radios. He also expanded his enterprise, opening a branch in Richmond in 1925, followed in quick succession by others in Dallas, Memphis, Cincinnati, and New Orleans. By 1929, Brockman later estimated, James K. Polk Inc. was making $2 million annually.61 Polk C. Brockman’s relative affluence was quite unusual among A&R officials. Toronto debutante Helen Oakley Dance (who had to settle for Fletcher Henderson’s band at her lavish coming-out party at the Greystone Ballroom in Detroit because McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, featuring Fats Waller, was unavailable), and New York–based Vanderbilt heir John Hammond were among the few A&R representatives whose careers in roots music recording were underwritten by anything resembling financial independence. (“The Vanderbilt children had no reason to play with toy trains,” Hammond later recalled. “We had real ones.”)62 By contrast, Brockman’s entry into A&R work through the world of retail was extremely common. As Don Law put it, “The best training in the world for an A&R man is to be in sales.”63

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Again, a few examples illustrate the point. Born in 1892, Ralph Peer grew up working in his father’s store in Independence, Missouri. The Peer Supply Company sold sewing machines and assorted household furniture, including Columbia “talking machines” and the cylinders and discs to play on them. This sales experience helped Peer find work as a shipping clerk and then later as a regional salesman and assistant manager for Columbia in the Midwest before joining the New York–based General Phonograph Corporation, manufacturer of OKeh Records, in 1919.64 Likewise, Lester Melrose became an independent A&R scout and recording supervisor via his retail experience. Shortly after World War I, Melrose and his older brother Walter opened a music shop, Melrose Brothers Music Company, on South Cottage Grove Avenue on Chicago’s South Side, which catered to the growing demand for jazz and blues. “We carried a full stock of pop sheet music, piano rolls, small musical instruments and records,” Melrose explained. Within two years of opening their store, he and Walter launched an in-house music publishing firm when they began receiving “inquiries from various composers, including colored, about publishing their music or getting it recorded on phonograph records. It was impossible for us to publish pop tunes at that time, so we decided to take a whirl at the blues. The blues selections started coming in and we soon had ten or twelve selections that we thought was good material.” Among them was “Dipper Mouth Blues,” a version of which, Melrose claimed, he and his brother convinced Gennett officials to record in April 1923 by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band (Gennett 5132). The Melroses, who began billing their publishing house as “Home of the Blues,” also placed the songs they published with other record companies and began organizing and supervising recording sessions for jazz luminaries such as Bix Beiderbecke and Jelly Roll Morton (who worked for the brothers’ publishing firm as a staff composer and arranger between 1923 and 1928). “ ‘Sobbin’ Blues,’ ‘Wolverine [Blues]’ and ‘Tin Roof Blues’ will be released on Victor, Okey [sic] and Paramount records for the month of December, also by the Connorized Music Roll Co.,” reported a 1923 Presto article on the Melroses’ recent string of successes. “Eighteen other big hits are about ready for release.” In 1926, Lester sold his interest in the retail store and publishing business to his brother Walter, who was himself a songwriter, and leveraged the knowledge and contacts he had acquired through those enterprises into a new role as a freelance A&R man. Melrose not only found talent but also, especially during the mid- to late 1930s, crafted a distinctive, increasingly urbane blues-swing sound (famously dubbed the “Bluebird Beat” by blues historian Samuel Charters) that could be heard on hundreds of recordings Melrose supervised for labels such as Bluebird, Columbia, and OKeh.65 Two other figures who graduated from retail sales to become important A&R managers were Jack Kapp and his younger brother Dave, the Chicago-born sons of Russian Jewish immigrants. Their father had once peddled phonographs and records doorto-door using a horse-drawn wagon. After he opened his own Columbia-franchised retail store, both of his sons worked in the family business while they were growing up. Upon graduating from high school, Jack joined the sales staff of Columbia’s Chicago branch and, while still only in his early twenties, became its record department

37 DEFINING A&R

F I G U R E 1. 3 . Advertisement for Kapp Music Company, Chicago Defender, May 29, 1926. Authors’ collections.

manager. Meanwhile, in 1921, the brothers followed their father’s example by opening their own shop, Kapp Music Company, on West Madison Street in Chicago. In addition to in-store sales, they developed a thriving mail-order business and record distributorship before closing the store in 1932. In 1926, Jack entered A&R work for the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company, initially as director of its subsidiary Vocalion’s

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race records department. Eventually he worked his way up to become recording director of Brunswick’s Chicago studios. In 1934, with the financial support of Edward R. Lewis, owner of the firm’s British parent company, Decca Record Company Ltd., Kapp co-founded Decca’s United States operation and recruited his brother Dave to become the A&R manager of the label’s hillbilly and race catalogs. The younger Kapp held this post until 1942, when he became involved in pop recordings at the company. Jack Kapp, in turn, served as president of what some referred to as “American Decca” until his death in 1949 at the age of forty-seven.66 Like the Kapp brothers, Tommy Rockwell, a native of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, also had a strong background in sales. During the mid-1920s, Rockwell gained experience as record department manager of the San Francisco branch of the Munson-Raynor Corporation, a Vocalion distributor. He later replaced Jack Kapp at Columbia’s Chicago branch, where, according to Talking Machine World, he “rapidly distinguished himself as a discoverer of record talent.” In 1927, Rockwell was appointed recording director for OKeh Records, by then a Columbia subsidiary, in New York. At OKeh, Rockwell’s duties included scouting talent and supervising sessions for its hillbilly and race artists, among them Louis Armstrong, whom he also managed from 1929 to 1931.67 Harry Bernstein was yet another executive whose entrée into the A&R world came through his wholesale and retail activities. A Ukrainian-born Jew who immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1905 when he was nine years old, Bernstein owned and operated the Northwestern Phonograph Supply Company, one of Gennett’s major regional distributorships, as well as eight retail outlets in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. For a brief time, he ran his own custom label, Herschel Gold Seal, and sold its releases through his stores. In conjunction with those enterprises, Bernstein organized and probably supervised sessions for Gennett’s May and September 1927 field sessions in St. Paul. According to Talking Machine World, the latter “recording expedition . . . resulted in the securing for the Gennett record catalog of a number of ‘hits’ by new and locally famous talent,” among them a Scandinavian-American fiddle-and-accordion duo, a black jazz band, a jubilee quartet, and a handful of hillbilly singers, guitarists, and harmonica players. Elaborating on Bernstein’s critical role in these September sessions, the journal reported that he had “selected all talent and arranged all numbers and he was instrumental in digging up several finds and securing much valuable publicity.”68 In Kansas City, Missouri, pioneering black A&R man Winston Holmes became involved in talent scouting and record producing through his retail business, the Winston Holmes Music Company. Only a block from the thriving African American entertainment district of 18th and Vine Streets, the store was advertised as “The Only Colored Music Store in Kansas City.” In addition to his business and political interests (in 1917, he had run unsuccessfully for alderman of Kansas City’s Fourteenth Ward), Holmes moonlighted as a freelance talent scout and secured recording sessions for several local blues and jazz artists, including Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra, whose debut recordings he co-supervised with Ralph Peer at a September 1923 field

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session in St. Louis. In 1924, Holmes formed his own race records label, Meritt, and began recording artists in a studio he set up in the back of his store. Among them were Lottie Kimbrough, the Reverend J. C. Burnett, Saintest Anna Grinstead and Sister Ora Miller, and Hattie McDaniel, the last while she was in Kansas City on a singing tour. A staunch supporter of deported, Jamaican-born Black Nationalist leader Marcus Garvey and co-founder of the Kansas City chapter of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, Holmes launched Meritt “after seeing how the Caucasian concerns were trying to control the Race market.” He proudly claimed that his “is the only record [label] on the market today that is owned and controlled by the Race.” But like the handful of other black-owned record labels of the interwar period, Meritt was doomed by limited distribution, and it folded in 1927 after only seven releases. Holmes, however, continued to scout talent and produce occasional sessions for an assortment of Kansas City artists (including himself) for Gennett.69 Like Polk C. Brockman, other Southerners, though far removed from the recording industry’s New York–area epicenter, also found their way into A&R by way of phonograph and record sales. Among them was self-styled “talent broker” H. C. Speir. Born in 1895, Henry Columbus Speir grew up in Leake County, Mississippi, where, he later recalled, as a child he heard black farm laborers singing in the cotton fields. In 1925, after a stint working at a Columbia phonograph assembly plant in New Orleans, he opened the Speir Phonograph Company in the black commercial district of Jackson, Mississippi. Over the next decade, Speir’s music shop served as the operations base for his freelance A&R work for some ten labels. Among the artists he discovered, or helped facilitate the first recordings of, were several important Delta blues singers, including Charley Patton, Son House, Skip James, Tommy Johnson, Bo Carter, and Robert Johnson, whom he recommended to ARC salesman and fellow scout Ernie Oertle. In addition, Speir arranged and co-supervised at least three field-recording sessions in Mississippi: one for OKeh in Jackson in 1930 and two for ARC in Jackson and Hattiesburg in 1935 and 1936, respectively.70 Another A&R man with a rural southern background was James Baxter “J. B.” Long, the son of a Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, truck farmer. Born in 1903, Long gained retailing experience as manager of a United Dollar Store in Kinston, North Carolina, before moving into A&R in 1934, initially as a sideline but later as one of ARC’s and then Columbia’s principal southern talent scouts. Long’s chain store background exposed him to the growing popularity of phonograph records among rural and smalltown consumers. “Down in Kinston, the farmers were coming in selling tobacco,” Long explained to folklorist Kip Lornell in 1974. “Well, I got this old phonograph out and began to pile a few records in.” Playing records in his store, Long quickly discovered, attracted large crowds of customers who often purchased not only records but also other merchandise. “So from that basis on,” Long continued, “I ordered a few records and they [the United Dollar Store] began to buy ’em and sell ’em there. Everybody thought that the radios’d kill the record business, but I satisfied so many people that I

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went ahead and ordered more and more [records].” Long’s sales skills so impressed his superiors at United Dollar Store that, around 1935, they appointed him manager of a larger store in Durham, North Carolina, where he intensified his A&R efforts by scouting and arranging recording sessions for several local African American bluesmen.71 Harry Charles, born in similarly humble rural circumstances in Jasper, Alabama, in 1899, likewise entered the A&R business via sales. One of nine children of a blacksmith and his wife, the resourceful Charles claimed to have spent time trading horses, running a livery stable, and driving a cab before finding work after World War I as a salesman and then as manager of the music department at Birmingham’s E. E. Forbes & Sons Piano Company, one of Paramount’s major regional distributors. Charles eventually established a string of some twenty retail record outlets of his own, usually located within department stores, in Atlanta, Birmingham, and other cities across the Southeast. These enterprises offered him a perfect vantage point from which to spot new artists and monitor shifts in consumer tastes, and he rose to become one of Paramount’s chief talent scouts in the South during the mid- to late 1920s.72 These recurring stories of movement from farming or other rural forms of labor into retail and service opportunities in cities and small towns, and from there into the world of A&R and mass entertainment, mirrored major demographic and economic trends during the interwar period. Crucially, working in retail sales meant interacting with customers in furniture and music stores; this experience ensured that many A&R men were intimately acquainted with the needs, desires, hopes, and worldviews of the people who might purchase the music they recorded. A vast army of regionally based retailers-cum-talent scouts were thus advantageously positioned to advise higher-placed A&R officials about the kinds of music consumers might buy if available on commercial records.

PREMONITIONS

Perhaps no major A&R man of the pre–World War II period better exemplified this reliance on regional and local talent scouts than Arthur “Art” Laibly, Paramount’s sales manager and recording director between 1925 and 1931.73 Laibly has been depicted quite unflatteringly in scholarly accounts, which have blithely accepted the criticisms of his methods and abilities made by some of his fiercest rivals and associates within the recording industry, notably J. Mayo Williams and H. C. Speir.74 In fact, Laibly’s career highlights the mixture of serendipity and luck—both good and bad—that often determined the success and subsequent reputations of A&R officials as hit-makers. In many respects, Laibly was an accidental A&R man. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1894, he worked as a bookkeeper for the Interstate Commerce Commission and for a Louisiana tap-line railroad, among other jobs, before being hired as a salesman for the Wisconsin Chair Company, parent firm of Paramount Records. He learned classical violin while growing up and even performed briefly as a violinist with several

DEFINING A&R

F I G U R E 1.4 . Studio portrait of Art Laibly in his later years (date unknown). Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

41

Cincinnati orchestras, including the Cincinnati Philharmonic Orchestra.75 When he succeeded Maurice Supper as sales director and recording manager at Paramount in 1925, however, he could claim no particular knowledge of or interest in roots music. Indeed, he had no real experience in the recording industry. Thanks largely to the progressive leadership of Supper, who struck upon the idea of transforming Paramount into a race records label in 1922, and the A&R efforts of J. Mayo Williams, who recruited and recorded popular blues and jazz acts, Paramount had become a major, if perpetually cash-strapped, player in the race records field. Laibly’s prime directive was simply to push as much Paramount product to as many distributors and retailers as possible across the nation. His main contacts were regional wholesale managers and store owners, not roots music singers and musicians.76 Yet those regional networks of wholesalers and retailers were indispensable to how scouting and recording worked in interwar commercial roots music, providing up-todate information about local musical trends, tastes, and talent. Sometime in late 1925, Laibly was contacted by R. T. Ashford, an African American entrepreneur who ran a combination shoeshine parlor–record store near the corner of Elm Street and North Central Avenue in Dallas. Part of a network of record retailers who regularly provided tips about hot musical prospects, Ashford encouraged Laibly to record a popular local blues singer-guitarist named Blind Lemon Jefferson, convincing the A&R man that, at the very least, a strong regional market existed for Jefferson’s music.77 As a consequence, Laibly arranged for the bluesman to travel to Chicago to record, either in December 1925 or January 1926. Jefferson’s first session resulted in two spirituals that Paramount

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initially declined to issue. A second session the following March, possibly under Laibly’s personal supervision, proved more fruitful, yielding Jefferson’s first release, “Booster Blues,” coupled with “Dry Southern Blues” (Paramount 12347). His next record, “Long Lonesome Blues” / “Got the Blues” (Paramount 12354), also waxed at this session, became Jefferson’s first major hit and announced the arrival of the first country blues superstar: Jefferson went on to record nearly one hundred titles before his death in 1929. This record also heralded a slow, uneven, but steady decline in the popularity of the female vaudeville blues singers who had dominated the blues records market since the early 1920s. Those women had usually recorded accompanied by solo pianists or jazz-pop ensembles; the new wave of male county bluesmen, as epitomized by Jefferson, generally favored an earthier—and cheaper to record—vocal sound backed principally by their own guitars, sometimes supplemented, especially in the 1930s, by a rollicking boogie-woogie piano and, occasionally, by other instruments.78 In Jefferson, Art Laibly had struck instant pay dirt in the race records field. He had done so, however, not by going on an extensive, costly scouting trip to the South and personally discovering that bluesman singing on the streets of Dallas (as suggested by a legend that the A&R man did little to dispel). Rather, Laibly had responded smartly to field intelligence provided by one of his local retailers.79 Relying on such grassroots expertise was perfectly common in interwar roots recording. After all, Ralph Peer only decided to record Fiddlin’ John Carson in Atlanta in 1923 after Polk C. Brockman had assured him that the fiddler’s record would sell well in Brockman’s store and backed up his hunch with an advance order. Laibly himself followed the same model when recording other acts such as Frank Stokes and Gus Cannon on the recommendation of talent scout Loren L. Watson, manager of Watson & Co., Paramount’s Memphis distributor.80 Laibly believed that local merchants, attuned to local markets, held the key to unlocking the musical tastes and purchasing habits of their customers. In March 1927, Laibly instructed Kentucky fiddler Doc Roberts—already a veteran of several sessions for Gennett—to travel to Chicago for his first Paramount recording date via Louisville, Kentucky, so that he could visit Paul I. Burks, owner of Paramount’s local distributor, P. I. Burks & Company, located on West Broadway. Laibly wanted Roberts to get a clear sense of what kind of records Burks believed his customers would buy. “We want to make some records just exactly as Mr. Burks wants them since he is the main one to sell them and we want everything absolutely right,” Laibly explained to Roberts.81 Laibly made twice-yearly scouting expeditions in the company of regional scoutscum-record dealers such as Harry Charles and H. C. Speir, visiting St. Louis, Birmingham, New Orleans, Mobile, Meridian, and Vicksburg, among other cities. But his dual responsibilities as Paramount’s sales manager and recording director meant that he was often more interested in securing new retail sales accounts than in hunting or auditioning talent himself. This resulted in a fairly random “open-door policy,” making it appear that he was willing to record just about anyone simply on the recommendations of dealers or scouts, without having first heard a prospective artist in person or on an

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audition record. Although this approach had produced spectacular results with Blind Lemon Jefferson, blues scholars Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow argue that, within a few years, “thanks to Laibly’s somnambulence, Paramount became a dumping ground for uncommercial ‘race’ talent.”82 Laibly never replicated the enormous success he enjoyed with Jefferson. “By end of 1928,” Calt and Wardlow argue, “the bankruptcy of Laibly’s reliance on dealer discoveries was apparent. . . . Nearly all of the artists were dismal sales flops.” As an A&R man, Laibly was, they declare, “a rank failure.”83 For Calt and Wardlow, what compounded Laibly’s twin crimes against creativity and commerce was that, flushed by his success with Blind Lemon Jefferson, he had marginalized J. Mayo Williams, celebrated in their history of Paramount as the one truly inspired A&R man at the label in the mid-1920s. As Laibly and Williams clashed over their relative roles, merits, and opportunities within the company, Laibly pulled rank and hired Harry Charles to approve Paramount records for release, a job previously assigned to Williams. Even worse for Williams—and for Calt and Wardlow—Laibly began using Aletha Dickerson, Williams’s assistant, as his own personal secretary.84 The final straw, precipitating Williams’s departure from Paramount in the first months of 1928, came when Otto E. Moeser, vice president of the Wisconsin Chair Company, tried to put him under contract as a salaried employee, rather than allowing him to continue operating “more or less on an expense account,” with his main income derived from song copyrights and royalties.85 The criticisms of Art Laibly made by Calt and Wardlow, as well as by Williams, Charles, and Speir, on whose partisan accounts they mainly rely, are not without foundation. But Laibly certainly was not the only A&R man to trust the marketplace more than his personal preferences in deciding who and what to record. “My personal opinion never comes into anything I ever have anything to do with when it comes to merchandizing,” Polk C. Brockman proudly declared in a 1961 interview. “I always look at it through the eyes of the people I expect to buy it.”86 Laibly may have possessed a tin ear for musical talent, and he may have been cavalier to the point of recklessness about whom he agreed to record; but, insofar as he used retailers like R. T. Ashford, Paul I. Burks, and H. C. Speir to help him gauge the preferences and tastes of record buyers, he was utterly typical of A&R managers involved in interwar roots music. J. Mayo Williams did much the same thing. On a page headlined “What Does The Public Want?,” the 1924 Paramount catalog stressed that the label’s officials “will always continue to give the people what they want,” and reassured record buyers, “If your preferences are not listed in our catalog, we will make them for you, as Paramount must please the buying public.” Reaching out for ideas and referrals, the catalog declared, “There is always room for more good material and more talented artists. Any suggestions or recommendations that you may have to offer will be greatly appreciated by J. Mayo Williams, Manager of the Race Artists’ Series.”87 Moreover, even if one accepts his critics’ assessment that, aside from Blind Lemon Jefferson, Laibly recorded little of enduring artistic merit (though, this would require

F I G U R E 1. 5 . “What Does the Public Want?” Complete Catalog of 1924 Records, Paramount—The “Popular Race Record”—and Black Swan Race Records, featuring a photograph inset of J. Mayo Williams, Paramount’s “Recording Manager of Race Artist Series.” Southern Folklife Collection Discographical Files (#30014), Southern Folklife Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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dismissing the 1929–1931 sides that Laibly supervised by Charley Patton, Skip James, Son House, and Willie Brown, among many others), that he was clueless on scouting trips, and that he failed to meet H. C. Speir’s fairly arbitrary “one hit in ten” strike rate test for a decent A&R man, those shortcomings need to be placed into broader context.88 A&R work was never an exact science. When left, more or less, to his own devices in 1927 as manager of Black Patti, a short-lived label surreptitiously subsidized by one of Paramount’s competitors, Gennett, J. Mayo Williams failed to notch a single hit from among the fifty-five records he released by the likes of Sam Collins, Jaybird Coleman, and the Black Birds of Paradise. Distribution problems, compounded by racial prejudice against a black-run race records company—albeit one which, in a telling illustration of the eclecticism of the interwar roots recording industry and the opportunism of A&R officials, released at least ten sides by white artists—hampered Williams’s cause and contributed to the label’s collapse after only six months.89 Stephen Calt declares Williams “the most successful ‘race’ producer of his time. . . . By the venal standards of A&R work he may have been the most successful recording scout of all time.” Hyperbole aside, there is no doubt that, while at Paramount, Williams was a prodigiously effective and successful A&R manager. Yet some of the credit for his accomplishments ought to go to other company executives, particularly Maurice Supper, who initiated Paramount’s foray into the race records field and taught Williams basic studio-craft. When it came to the sessions themselves, Williams—who lacked any particular musical gifts or training and was unable to recognize any but the most glaring imperfections of pitch, timing, or tone—often ceded musical direction to either Aletha Dickerson or Lovie Austin, a vaudeville blues singer-pianist who worked as one of his arrangers and session musicians. Without that support system, Williams’s talent-scouting and hit-making credentials took a beating during his doomed Black Patti venture, only to be revived, at least partially, when he later worked for Jack Kapp, first at Vocalion beginning in 1927, and then from 1934 at Decca.90 Williams’s dry streak at Black Patti demonstrated that A&R managers had no surefire formula for success, no matter how gifted, hardworking, ruthless, or ambitious. Even someone like H. C. Speir, who jazz and blues authority Ted Gioia claims “did more than any single individual to promote and preserve the music of the Delta region,” regularly misjudged the potential of artists.91 Speir told Gayle Dean Wardlow that he had been unimpressed when Jimmie Rodgers auditioned in his store and, as a result, chose to pass on the figure that would become known as “The Father of Country Music.”92 Speir also rejected singer Johnny Temple, who subsequently had a modestly successful career at Vocalion, Decca, and Bluebird, at the same 1931 auditions at which Speir heard Skip James for the first time and recommended him to Laibly. Speir even cut a test recording with Robert Johnson in 1936 but, having passed his name along to ARC scout Ernie Oertle, apparently never followed up on him. Speir quickly forgot about the singer-guitarist who would be hailed posthumously as perhaps the most important and influential of all the Delta bluesmen. Around this same time, Speir fell out with ARC

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after the company deemed fewer than 25 percent of the more than 170 recordings he had co-supervised at recent sessions in Jackson and Hattiesburg, Mississippi—with blues “discoveries” such as the Delta Twins, Sarah & Her Milk Bull, the Edgewater Crows, the Mississippi Jook Band, and Rajah Evans—suitable for commercial release. Under its contract with him, ARC had agreed to pay Speir only for issued sides.93 As Gioia sensibly concludes, “While we can laud these early pioneers of field recording for their discriminating judgments and savvy assessment of talent, the dross they recorded far outweighed the memorable sides.”94

Dave Kapp, Decca records official, . . . will soon start on another of his trips to the South and Southeast with a portable recording truck to cut platters of hillbilly and primitive Negro music. He finds his materials in ginmills, honkytonks, private homes, street corners, plantation fields, and says that on some of the Negro records, altho English is sung, a white man can’t understand the words, so idiomatic and guttural is the language. —“The Broadway Beat,” Billboard, November 20, 1937

2

Finding and Securing Talent

R EGAR D LESS O F TH EIR PERSO NAL O R PRO FESSIO NAL

backgrounds, the A&R officials who were involved in the interwar American roots recording industry proved endlessly resourceful in their efforts to find, sign, and record talent. If exploiting connections with record retailers and distributors represented one of the most common and successful strategies for doing so, those business relationships cannot compete for romance with colorful accounts of intrepid A&R men embarking on epic recording expeditions deep into the heart of rural America, particularly Southern Appalachia. However, the now-fabled excursions to Bristol, Tennessee, and to other destinations in this mountainous region accounted 47

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for a relatively small fraction of southern recording trips. A&R managers and their engineers conducted more than one hundred forays into the American South between 1923 and 1932, but they were chiefly to Atlanta and other cities in the Southern Piedmont.1 “Mountaineer musicians of western North Carolina who know little of cities except by legend and who play by native instinct will come to Charlotte today to perpetuate their art for an invisible audience of hundreds of thousands of people,” proclaimed the Charlotte Observer in a front-page, August 9, 1927, article headlined “Records Made in Charlotte to Perpetuate Mountain Ballads.” The excitement was palpable as the Observer described the opportunities for local musicians: “They will make records for the Victor Talking Machine company for distribution in a dozen nations, it was declared yesterday by Ralph S. Peer, scout for the company. Folk-lore songs and banjo selections by artists of the soil who have never read a note but through whose music runs the passion of river torrents and mountain feuds and the melody of valley meadows are to be recorded.”2 Recording hillbilly music was not the only goal of these ventures, however. Depending on the location, A&R men and their engineers also sought to capture country blues, gospel, hot jazz, Cajun, Mexican, and other foreign-language selections at the same sessions in order to expand these various series within their catalogs.3 “At times,” according to Tony Russell, the recording crews of the various companies “were lining up behind each other. On October 22, 1928, as Victor [engineers] packed their equipment after twelve days in Atlanta, somewhere else in town Columbia [personnel were] unpacking theirs. For a few days during September 1929, while Victor was recording in Memphis’s Municipal Auditorium, a crew from Brunswick was similarly engaged just a few blocks away at the Peabody Hotel.” The Great Depression decimated phonograph and record sales and, by October 1932, had effectively halted field-recording activities. But, after a nearly seventeen-month interruption when there were no southern fieldrecording expeditions, record sales slowly began to recover and recording trips resumed. In 1934, Victor, Brunswick, and the newly formed Decca label collectively conducted field sessions at eight locations, generating no fewer than 774 recordings; three years later, in 1937, such trips produced some twenty-three hundred hillbilly, race, Mexican, and Cajun sides—the highest annual yield in the history of American field recording.4 A&R officials did forage deep into the Mississippi Delta, the mountains of Southern Appalachia, and the Southwest. But for logistical reasons—like growing numbers of rural migrants—they invariably gravitated to the burgeoning cities of the southeastern United States. Primarily, this was because in these major trade centers record companies benefited from established networks of regional distributors and retailers who could identify prospective talent and even assist in recording that talent on location, all in an effort to help meet the growing demand for roots music records. Forty-three of the one hundred-plus field expeditions involving hillbilly artists prior to 1933 targeted the Piedmont cities of Atlanta, Birmingham, Charlotte, Richmond, and Winston-Salem.5 Between 1928 and 1934, none of the Cajun recordings by pioneering artists such as Joseph F. Falcon, Cléoma Breaux, Dennis McGee, or Leo Soileau were waxed in the

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F I G U R E 2 .1. Gennett engineer Harold Soulé and Grace Slovetsky, secretary of the Northwestern Phonograph Supply Company, examining the electrical recording equipment used at the May 1927 St. Paul, Minnesota, field session. Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society.

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Acadian country of southwestern Louisiana; rather, these discs were cut in cities such as Atlanta, Memphis, New Orleans, and San Antonio, or, alternately, in New York or Chicago.6 Moreover, as Eddie King’s 1924 Victor excursion to Los Angeles demonstrates, the American South was not the only destination for these recording trips. Tony Russell, who prefers the designation “location recordings,” notes that the forty-four recording expeditions staged between mid-1923 and mid-1927 by Victor, Columbia, OKeh, Brunswick, and Gennett encompassed eleven states and thirteen cities, among them such decidedly non-southern locales as Cincinnati, St. Paul, Salt Lake City, and Buffalo. Except for St. Paul, though, few if any examples of roots music were recorded

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at these locations.7 By contrast, Chicago became an important site for recording blues and hot jazz, as the Pittsburgh Courier reported in 1923. “America’s musical center is moving westward,” the Courier declared. “So many race stage and song stars are now appearing in Chicago that the New York Recording Laboratories, makers of the famous Paramount Race Records, have temporarily shifted their recording offices from New York to Chicago.” Within a few years, several prominent record companies would establish fully equipped permanent studios in Chicago and, by the late 1920s, in Los Angeles and Oakland as well, marking a major industry shift that helped break what Talking Machine World called “the Eastern monopoly” on recording.8 In August 1934, New York–based Decca further advanced this trend by making its first field recordings in Los Angeles with Stuart Hamblen, the Sons of the Pioneers, and other hillbilly acts.9 As these statistics demonstrate, American roots recording in the interwar years was a profoundly modern and urban phenomenon. Although the music itself often retained an intimate relationship to the rural communities that continued to influence and inspire its artists, the commercialization of roots music was driven by the new technologies of recording, radio, and eventually talking motion pictures. It was also shaped by modern corporate business models of consolidation and vertical integration, whereby all stages in the process of finding talent and material, recording and copyrighting those musical selections, and then advertising, marketing, and selling the resulting records were controlled by increasingly bureaucratic, multinational corporations headquartered in northern cities, chiefly New York or, in the cases of Victor and Edison, in nearby Camden and Orange, New Jersey, respectively. The largest of these firms were international enterprises with vast networks of offices, factories and pressing plants, subsidiary labels, distributors, and retailers scattered around the globe. To take one example, Brunswick, the nation’s third-largest record manufacturer, maintained its headquarters in the Brunswick Building on South Wabash Avenue in Chicago, with studios there as well as in New York and Los Angeles. Its main warehouse was in Long Island, New York, but it owned phonograph factories and record-pressing plants in New York; Chicago; Dubuque, Iowa; Muskegon, Michigan; and Toronto that employed some five thousand workers. By 1926, in addition to its cabinet factories and pressing plants, Brunswick controlled forty-five thousand acres of timber in northern Michigan and some forty miles of rail line, and claimed total annual revenue in excess of $29 million. In 1928, its foreign affiliates included British Brunswick Ltd. of London, Deutsche Grammophone Gesellschaft of Berlin, and Companhia Brunswick de Brasil of Brazil, which manufactured Brunswick records for distribution in Great Britain, continental Europe, and South America, respectively.10 In a form of American cultural imperialism that gathered momentum and extended its reach after World War I, due largely to the export of motion pictures and music, Brunswick and other companies distributed their recordings of American roots music worldwide. Hillbilly records, for example, were marketed throughout the English-speaking world, including India, South Africa, and Australia, and even in parts of Sweden, Japan, and the French-speaking provinces of Canada.11

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Whether recording in permanent studios in the New York area or Chicago, or in provisional facilities temporarily set up in other cities across the nation, firms used state-of-the-art equipment, including, as of 1925, microphones and electrical recording machines, to capture the sounds of downhome blues and hillbilly musical forms that were widely conceived of and generally promoted as the quaint, unvarnished expressions of rural, sometimes small-town, American culture. Yet the association of these recorded musics with a kind of romanticized, premodern rusticity was always at odds with the thoroughly modern circumstances under which the records were made, distributed, advertised, sold, and ultimately played on one of the technological marvels of the age: the phonograph.12 Though it runs counter to one of the most enduring myths about early country music’s origins and cultural significance, vast numbers of hillbilly records were made in northern studios by versatile professional “citybilly” singers who had few agrarian connections and who, often as a result of formal musical training, were able to perform in a wide range of musical styles. One-third of the estimated 11,400 hillbilly records issued in the United States before 1933 were waxed in northern studios using these freelance singers, quite often accompanied by professional session musicians, rather than at southern field-recording sessions by indigenous “folk” artists who performed solo, or with a musical partner, or with their own stringbands. Remarkably, nearly 85 percent of these northern-produced citybilly releases were recorded by just six artists—Vernon Dalhart, Carson J. Robison, Arthur Fields, Frankie Marvin, Bob Miller, and Frank Luther, all of whose records appeared under a bewildering number of pseudonyms on an equally overwhelming number of record labels. Between 1924 and 1931, Dalhart alone recorded more than eighteen hundred masters that appeared on more than five thousand sides issued by some one hundred US labels. An additional eighty-five or so labels carried Dalhart recordings worldwide. Roughly two-thirds of his recorded output was hillbilly music.13 Recording amateurs or semiprofessionals at southern field sessions or in northern studios may have had its charm; it certainly generated some magnificent, heart-felt recorded performances. But A&R managers and their staffs often preferred working with professional studio singers and back-up musicians who turned up to sessions more or less on time, and who could read music and quickly learn new songs or arrangements. None of this is to deny that the field-recording expeditions conducted by A&R men to recruit and record local performers were enormously important in the stylistic and commercial development of American roots music. Ralph Peer’s experimental OKeh sessions in Atlanta in 1923, at which Fiddlin’ John Carson recorded his—and, arguably, hillbilly music’s—first successful disc, established the basic format. It also established the regular practice of recording roots-based artists on location in hotel rooms, warehouses, radio stations, and other temporary facilities located far away from the permanent northern studios of most record companies. As Talking Machine World observed in July 1924, OKeh recording officials “established some time ago a policy of taking recording outfits at regular intervals to different sections of the country, and they have made very successful trips to Atlanta, New Orleans, Cincinnati, Cleveland

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and Chicago. The early part of August an expedition will probably leave for Atlanta for additional recordings in that city.”14 These domestic ventures were part of the recording industry’s global efforts to capture and market what Karl Hagstrom Miller calls “local music.” Since the dawn of the twentieth century, the London-based Gramophone Company and many of its competitors had been dispatching so-called recording experts to record singers and musicians on portable equipment in the capitals of Western Europe and the major cities of Russia, the Far East, Mexico, and Latin America.15 Within the United States, the Victor Talking Machine Company began recording on location as early as 1908, sending its chief recording engineer, Harry O. Sooy, to wax several speeches by Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan at his home in Lincoln, Nebraska.16 In 1915, when the outbreak of World War I cut off supplies of ethnic recordings from continental Europe, Columbia’s foreign records manager Anton Heindl took a portable recording machine to Chicago and, with the assistance of engineer William Freiberg, recorded “local German, Austrian, Bohemian, Polish, Spanish and Italian talent” in “a temporary but perfectly equipped laboratory” set up in the Atheneum Building on East Van Buren Street. “Although failing to bring Europe to America in a musical sense at this time, nevertheless, as a result of Mr. Heindl’s exhaustive study and marked initiative[,] the Columbia Co. is, so to speak, developing the Europe that is within us,” remarked Talking Machine World.17 In a portent of how many future roots music recording expeditions would be organized, Heindl relied on local retailers to steer him to promising neighborhood talent, while also conducting his own scouting operations. Heindl not only called upon “all the dealers in the foreign colonies of the city,” explained Talking Machine World, but he also “visited cafes, dance halls, and attended concerts, and went every place where anything musical could be heard.”18 Two years earlier, Heindl told the trade journal that the artists he recorded for Columbia’s foreign-language catalogs were “oft-times found in many peculiar places and under odd circumstances. Many of the best Neapolitan singers,” he observed, drawing upon contemporary ethnic stereotypes, “have been found in dark, ill-smelling basements where the light rarely enters and empty bottles bar the entrance. Cabaret shows, restaurants and music halls have all given their quotas to the foreign artist list, and no incident nor report, no matter how trivial, is overlooked in the search for talent.”19 Beginning in 1921, these once-rare recording expeditions, as they were called in the trade, became somewhat more common. By June 1923, when Peer visited Atlanta, record companies had already dispatched supervisors and engineering staff to record dance orchestras and other locally popular acts in cities such as Chicago, Kansas City, and San Francisco.20 Some crews had even ventured into the American South, where the first known location recordings occurred in 1908. In the midst of that year’s presidential campaign, Victor, Columbia, and Edison all recorded speeches by Republican nominee William Howard Taft at a hotel in Hot Springs, Virginia. The next year, an

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Edison crew made cylinder recordings in Richmond, Virginia, of Polk Miller & His Old South Quartette, an African American singing group organized and directed by Miller, a local white banjoist, raconteur, and all-around entertainer. Like OKeh’s 1923 Atlanta sessions, this special effort appears to have been staged at the behest of a local phonograph distributor, in this case a man named Charles B. Haynes, owner of C. B. Haynes & Company, who happened to be a personal friend of Thomas A. Edison.21 These, however, were one-off events, not conceived of as part of a coherent or sustained industry strategy. It was only after Peer’s Atlanta sessions that companies began to dispatch mobile crews on a regular basis to make commercial recordings on location. Within a few years, as labels pursued profitable recordings of artists and material unavailable in the New York area, field recording became standard practice within the emerging roots music field. It remained so for nearly two decades.22 The precise circumstances surrounding Peer’s pathbreaking 1923 Atlanta sessions remain murky, but it seems that he initially organized them primarily to record Warner’s Seven Aces, a local white society jazz band. Once again, Peer appears to have been swayed by the recommendations of OKeh’s local distributor, Polk C. Brockman, who was aware of the dance orchestra’s growing popularity through its performances at local theaters and on fledgling radio station WGM. Radio broadcasts on rival Atlanta station WSB were also important in bringing Fiddlin’ John Carson to Brockman’s attention, although the colorful fiddler’s local celebrity predated his radio career. Beginning in 1913, Carson was a frequent participant in, and occasional winner of, the annual Georgia Old-Time Fiddlers’ Convention, which attracted extensive newspaper coverage in the Atlanta dailies. On June 15, 1923, shortly after Peer and his crew arrived, an Atlanta Journal article announced, “ ‘Canned music’ recorded by local musicians will be made for the first time in Atlanta by [the] Okeh company of New York,” using “a recording machine recently invented by an engineer of the Okeh company, which lowers the high cost of producing the records away from the home laboratories.” The article stated that “about thirty recordings will be made” during the visit, and it went on to list Warner’s Seven Aces, Carson, and a “quartet of negro singers” from Morehouse College among those scheduled to record. The eclecticism here reflected the wide net that A&R officials cast in their ceaseless pursuit of best-selling talent and material.23 By the time Peer began recording in a makeshift studio rigged up in a loft on Nassau Street, Brockman had recruited a varied group of black and white performers from Atlanta and, in at least one case, Alabama. Among this crowd was singer Lucille Bogan of Birmingham, whose “The Pawn Shop Blues” (OKeh 8079) became the first race recording produced outside of New York or Chicago.24 Most recording expeditions followed a broadly similar pattern. A&R men followed up on specific tips and sometimes acted on mere hunches about locally popular artists passed on to them by retailers, distributors, or other musicians. According to Brockman, he was somewhat unusual in this respect. He remembered the sessions in which he was involved as less haphazard and better organized, with much of the talent and

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even some of the material selected well in advance. During his A&R tenure with OKeh in the 1920s and early 1930s, he claimed that he personally canvassed cities and the countryside for talent and auditioned much of it himself before the OKeh recording crews arrived. This helped eliminate “no-hopers” and maximize the efficiency—and, label executives hoped, the hit-making strike rate—of field sessions, always a matter of great concern. “We had a programme all laid out ahead of time,” Brockman explained to Gayle Dean Wardlow. “We knew exactly what we were gonna do, unless something just bobbed up.”25 Most location sessions, including many that Brockman organized and, occasionally, supervised, were rather less well structured than he implied. Even for the most successful A&R managers and talent scouts, there was always something inherently speculative and inscrutable about the process of finding promising artists and material to record, and then turning that potential into hit records. Consequently, A&R men usually left ample time for something exciting or unexpected to “just bob up,” as Brockman put it. Most field-session organizers maintained an open ear for possible hit songs and artists across all categories of American roots and popular music, recognizing that they were, to a large extent, at the mercy of happenstance and the range of talent available in any given location at any particular time. “Winston-Salem, where Okeh Records spent ten days in 1927, was a rich source of old-time music, but turned up no blues or jazz,” Tony Russell observes. “Victor’s June 1931 session in Louisville, by contrast, was replete with blues and jazz, but elicited very little local hillbilly talent.”26 A&R managers needed to be pragmatic about such local vagaries, even as they sought to rationalize and, months in advance, carefully plan their field-recording operations. This helps explain why, prior to 1933, recording crews returned again and again to major metropolitan centers such as Atlanta, Dallas, New Orleans, and Memphis, where they had enjoyed previous success, rather than revisit smaller cities like Ashland, Kentucky; Shreveport, Louisiana; or even Nashville, which had produced only modest results. Partial exceptions to this pattern were Fort Worth and San Antonio, which, although only medium-sized cities in the mid-1930s, had become disproportionately important in roots music recording, not least for the highly lucrative trade in Mexican music. In 1939, the San Antonio Express made an already familiar appeal to notions of cultural “authenticity” surrounding many roots music genres when it reported, “San Antonio is the center for the recording of Mexican music, a commercial venture using the material of genuine culture . . . [that] has reached the size and importance of a major musical industry. Twice each year the chief pho[n]ograph companies, Victor, Decca and Brunswick, send technicians and sound equipment to make records of Mexican music. Each of these companies has a special series that is devoted entirely to this type of music.”27 Prior to 1933, mobile recording units also stopped over in southern cities like Savannah, Houston, and Louisville, while making more regular stops in New Orleans, St. Louis, and San Antonio. In the mid- to late 1930s, Art Satherley of the American Record Corporation (ARC), who was at that time mostly concerned with building

Even Polk C. Brockman appreciated that some of his best musical “finds” had come to light by sheer chance rather than through meticulous planning. A case in point occurred when Walter Vinson and Lonnie Chatmon wandered into a February 17, 1930, session he was supervising for OKeh in Shreveport, Louisiana. Brockman had organized the session expressly to cut a series of custom spoken recordings by W. K. “Old Man” Henderson, the nationally known, controversial owner and announcer of local radio station KWKH, who wanted something for his vanity label, Hello World Dog Gone—named for his on-air catchphrase. “We were up there on the roof (of a hotel),” Brockman recalled, “and they just strayed in while we were setting up there to record Henderson.” Chatmon and Vinson, with occasional support from Chatmon’s brother Armenter (better known on his solo records as Bo Carter), made up the black stringband that Brockman billed as the Mississippi Sheiks. Their unscheduled Shreveport session yielded the group’s first releases, among them the best-selling “Sitting on Top of the World” (OKeh 8784), a Vinson-Chatmon composition destined to be covered over the next few years by black and white performers alike, among them Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys, the Light Crust Doughboys, Two Poor Boys, Charley Patton (retitled “Some Sunny Day”), and Big Bill Broonzy (as part of the Harum Scarums). “It wasn’t the thing you planned in recording,” Brockman mused, “but the biggest things have been by accident. Things you didn’t plan at all.”30 One strategy that Brockman and other A&R scouts routinely employed to increase the likelihood of such happy accidents at field-recording sessions was advance advertising in local newspapers. Brockman claimed that as a result of these efforts, combined with spreading the word among his retail dealers, he sometimes found scores of hopeful performers waiting to audition at temporary local studios. “I’d go into a town,” he said, “and here was a hundred or two hundred of them there, all waiting for me when I got to town, just like the President was going to show up.”31 The local press coverage

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P L A N N I N G F O R G O O D LU C K

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Vocalion’s catalogs, organized expeditions to southern locales such as Birmingham, Memphis, and Jackson, Mississippi, that had either fallen out of favor or seldom been visited by recording crews. ARC teams traveled to new venues as well, including Augusta, Georgia; Hattiesburg, Mississippi; Hot Springs, Arkansas; and Columbia, South Carolina.28 As a rule, though, A&R men spent most of their time and energy targeting larger southern metropolitan centers. For recording officials hoping to catch a break, these were the most likely spots for discovering the broadest assortment of singers and musicians spanning the various genres of popular and roots music. In the process, A&R managers and their scouts helped define hillbilly music and downhome blues as distinctly “southern” phenomena and then deployed this regionalized image to reach national and international audiences, including many customers who were either still residents of, or migrants from, the American South.29

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F I G U R E 2 . 2 . “We Want Fiddlers.” OKeh newspaper notice recruiting musicians to record “old-time songs not now on phonograph records” at an upcoming Memphis field session. Commercial Appeal (Memphis), February 10, 1928. Courtesy of T. Malcolm Rockwell.

that Ralph Peer orchestrated for his 1927 Victor sessions in Bristol, Tennessee—both ahead of and during his visit—proved to be an important factor in their immediate commercial success and their long-term historical significance. On July 27, following two days of sessions, Peer told a Bristol News Bulletin reporter that Ernest V. Stoneman, one of his most popular hillbilly artists and a talent scout in his own right, had earned $3,600 from recording work the previous year. The newspaper article “worked like dynamite” in turning out prospective talent, Peer later wrote, “and the very next day I was deluged with long-distance calls from the surrounding mountain region. Groups of singers who had not visited Bristol during their entire lifetime arrived by bus, horse and buggy, trains or on foot.” Among those who auditioned after seeing the news story were the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, both of whom would become patron saints of country music.32 In nearby Johnson City, Tennessee, where Columbia A&R man Frank Walker organized “copycat sessions” in 1928 and 1929 hoping to replicate Peer’s success in Bristol, the powerful formula of print and word-of-mouth advertising worked just as well. Walker remembered how “people would show up sometimes from eight or nine hundred miles away” at location-recording sites, in “dozens and dozens of

F I G U R E 2 . 3 . Eli Oberstein supervising a 1936 RCA Victor recording session with Lydia Mendoza at the Texas Hotel, San Antonio. Originally published in the San Antonio Light, October 21, 1936. Courtesy of the Institute of Texan Cultures, University of Texas at San Antonio.

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So we would decide that we would record, for instance, in Johnson City, Tennessee. And you would write down to various people that you’ve heard about, and you’d let that be known, and it would be mentioned in the paper, and the word would get around in churches and school houses, that somebody was going to come down there for a recording—not session—but for a recording “to-do.” And we’d be very glad to listen to people.

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different places, all the way from San Antone to Houston and Dallas and Johnson City, Tennessee, and Memphis and Little Rock and New Orleans and Atlanta—everywhere.”33 Walker’s memories of these excursions perfectly capture the mix of serendipity and strategy, planning and plum luck, that often characterized interwar recording expeditions and helped determine their relative success or failure. Walker certainly relied on Columbia dealers, other talent scouts, and newspaper announcements to locate prospective artists for the field sessions he organized and supervised. As he explained in 1962:

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And they came in from all over. We had a regular party. . . . We’d sit up all night long and listen to them, and we would weed out the things that we wanted and those that we didn’t want. . . . “We’ll use this” and “We won’t use that.” And you rehearsed them the next morning, and you recorded them in the afternoon and the evening. It was a twenty-fourhour deal, seven days a week.34

In Texas, where a huge push to record Mexican music was well underway by the mid-1930s, the San Antonio Light regularly reported on the recording activities of visiting A&R men such as Eli Oberstein of RCA Victor, Dave Kapp of Decca, and Ralph Perez, Don Law, and Bob Pampe of Brunswick, then an ARC subsidiary. “The native music of Old Mexico—as sung and played in San Antonio—is being recorded here by the Brunswick Record company of New York so that the whole world may hear,” proclaimed the Light in its coverage of a 1932 recording expedition led by Perez. “A recording studio has been set up at the Gunter hotel, and 60 selections from the Mexican repertoire are being recorded. Virtually all the talent is drawn from San Antonio’s Mexican population.”35 The local press also highlighted the success of local and regional Mexican recording artists such as singer-guitarist Lydia Mendoza (“La Cancionera de los Pobres”) and accordionist Narciso Martínez (“El Huracán del Valle”). A native of Reynosa, Mexico, who grew up near Brownsville, Texas, Martínez achieved the remarkable feat of cutting thirty sides in a single, three-and-a-half-hour session for Bluebird at the Blue Bonnet Hotel in San Antonio on September 13, 1937. For sheer productivity, the session may well be unsurpassed in the annals of commercial field recording.36 Newspaper accounts of local recording sessions also helped fix in the popular imagination the links between certain musical idioms and quite specific locations, adding to the sense that grassroots entertainers and their music were, quite literally, rooted in local cultures. “Almost everyone is familiar with the haymarket plaza and its chili queens and Mexican musicians in native costumes, for because of its picturesqueness, it is one of the favorite tourist haunts,” observed a 1939 San Antonio Express article. It continued: It is not generally known, however, that these strolling musicians play a large part in one of the most unusual industries of the city, phonograph recording. . . . Many of the outstanding Mexican artists are native San Antonians. Lydia Mendoza, who sings and accompanies herself on the guitar, had the distinction of being the most popular artist in the low-priced field. Among the other prominent musicians are Eva Garza, songstress; Arturo Vasque, tenor and pianist; and [Juan] Gayt[a]n and [Francisco] Cantu, guitarists. Most of the performers are under contract to a specific company and are paid either on a straight salary basis or on that of royalty. Top price for a single recording is about $50.37

This kind of press coverage inspired more Mexican singers and musicians to seek recording opportunities, either by auditioning when the next mobile unit came to town or by making the trek to other recording centers.

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It was much the same with race records. In May 1926, Houston-born Victoria Spivey, an aspiring nineteen-year-old blues singer then living in the small town of Moberly, Missouri, was among the hopefuls lured to St. Louis by a published announcement that an OKeh recording crew was scheduled to visit that city. First, however, Spivey had to audition for Jesse Johnson, a freelance talent scout and owner of the local De Luxe Music Shoppe. On May 11 and 13, after passing that test, Spivey cut four sides, under the direction of OKeh musical director Justin Ring, in a temporary studio installed in the Wurlitzer Building, among them perhaps her most famous song, “Black Snake Blues.” Coupled with “No More Jelly Bean Blues” (OKeh 8338), the record reportedly sold 150,000 copies and marked the first of some forty recordings Spivey made for OKeh. Despite the continued decline in vaudeville blues’ popularity, she would go on to wax nearly three dozen additional issued sides for Victor, Decca, and Vocalion between 1929 and 1937.38 A&R officials’ relentless efforts to replenish their catalogs were driven, in part, by the very nature of the roots music artists they recorded. As Charles K. Wolfe explains, most of the white Southerners who made hillbilly recordings “were basically amateurs who, though often highly gifted and innovative folk artists,” had limited repertoires of only four to six marketable songs, and had little, if any, formal musical training. Frank Walker recalled that most of the singers and musicians he encountered had “maybe eight or ten or twelve things that they did well, and that was all they knew.” Partly because few of these artists could read music, it was highly inefficient to teach them additional songs that A&R men might wish them to record. Although these artists could have learned new material by ear, A&R managers and scouts ordinarily could not afford to spend what limited time and resources they had on helping these performers develop larger repertoires. “It was a culling job, taking the best of what they had,” Walker explained. “You might come out with only two selections or you might come out with six or eight, but you did it at that time. You got everything that you thought they were capable of doing well and would be salable, and that was it.” Consequently, most hillbilly artists recorded only a few selections. Of the more than three hundred acts that appeared in Columbia’s 15000-D “Familiar Tunes, Old and New” series between 1925 and 1932, Wolfe estimates that “well over half ” made only a single record, or two selections.39 Much the same held true in other roots music genres, particularly downhome blues. “Many of the singers had just one recording session, in a makeshift studio in a southern city,” folklorist Jeff Todd Titon writes. Thus, under continuous pressure to expand their hillbilly and race catalogs, A&R managers were forced to locate more and more new talent to record, though, if their initial releases sold well, artists were often called back for a follow-up session.40 Perhaps because of these realities, Frank Walker preferred to “amass as large a collection of master recordings as possible,” writes historian William Howland Kenney, “and recorded nearly everyone who applied”—again suggesting that Art Laibly’s approach

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at Paramount was not as unusual as Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow imply.41 Still, prescreening of artists was common A&R practice. Some regional scouts, such as Birmingham’s Harry Charles, set up talent offices equipped with pianos, at which to audition hopeful singers and musicians.42 In Jackson, Mississippi, H. C. Speir went so far as to install a recording machine on the second floor of his music store to make test recordings of aspiring performers, and then sent the discs to his contacts at various record labels for their review. If A&R officials at one of those labels deemed an artist acceptable, they wired Speir to schedule a recording session, and Speir, in turn, made the necessary arrangements with the artist.43 Once scouts such as Charles and Speir established reputations as influential talent brokers whose recommendations record companies trusted and regularly accepted, ambitious singers and musicians often wrote to them or simply showed up to audition, thereby reducing the need to canvass city neighborhoods and rural districts for potential artists. In the late 1920s, Louisiana-born bluesman Willard “Ramblin’ ” Thomas and his younger brother Jesse “Babyface” Thomas, who were both then living in Dallas, auditioned at a local record shop run by R. T. Ashford, who scouted for several labels. It remains unclear precisely how the Thomas brothers came to Ashford’s attention, but they may have been recommended by another of his discoveries, Blind Lemon Jefferson, with whom the elder Thomas sometimes performed locally in the “Deep Ellum” neighborhood. In any event, after passing their auditions, Ashford arranged for Ramblin’ and Babyface Thomas to record for Paramount and Victor, respectively.44 J. Mayo Williams recalled that, during the mid-1920s, he rarely wandered far from his South Side Chicago office to seek out talent, confident that his status as the only African American race records scout in the city and his location in the heart of its premier black entertainment district on State Street would bring a procession of prospective recording artists to his door. “There wasn’t any trouble finding artists,” Williams later explained to researcher John K. MacKenzie. “By that time, so many [singers and musicians] had come up here from the South and other parts of the country, because this had become a recording center along with New York. They’d bum rides and hop trains to get up here, any way they could, to get somebody to make a record of them.”45 As Williams told Stephen Calt, “We never sent anybody away, though a lot of ’em could talk better blues than sing them.” After allowing them about thirty minutes to audition their best material, Williams estimated that he accepted only about half of the artists who tried out.46 Gus Nennstiel, phonograph department manager of the Knoxville, Tennessee, branch of the Sterchi Brothers furniture chain, scouted talent on the side and also managed some of his discoveries, among them hillbilly recording artists George Reneau, Mac and Bob (Lester McFarland and Robert A. Gardner), and Charley Oaks. “We would come home in the evening,” Nennstiel’s widow told Charles Wolfe, “and the yard would be full of musicians, sitting on the lawn, on the porch, waiting for us. They wanted Mr. Nennstiel to listen to them, to help them get on records.”47

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Many performers who passed their auditions were initially recorded on location, in cities hundreds of miles from record companies’ main studios, as happened with Victoria Spivey in St. Louis in 1926 and Babyface Thomas in Dallas in 1929. But A&R officials who primarily worked local or regional beats—including Harry Charles, H. C. Speir, Polk C. Brockman, Dennis Taylor, W. R. Calaway, Ralph Lembo, and J. B. Long—routinely sent the performers they rated most highly to studios in New York; Camden, New Jersey; Chicago; Richmond, Indiana; or Grafton, Wisconsin, sometimes personally escorting their discoveries to their recording sessions.48 “If I ran across something I thought was exceptionally good,” Brockman explained, “then I’d wire New York and say, ‘How about a date for Thursday morning?’ or ‘When’s the earliest date you can give me? I’ve got something here that looks very good.’ And I’d go to New York with them.”49 Up North, scouts handed off those performers to A&R staff members who then worked closely with the artists and supervised their recordings in permanent studios. This pattern highlights an important dynamic within interwar A&R: there was a difference and sometimes an acute tension between two distinct kinds of A&R personnel. In one camp were recording managers like Ralph Peer, Frank Walker, J. Mayo Williams, Art Laibly, Art Satherley, and Dave Kapp. These were full-time record company executives who worked primarily in the North, where the major firms maintained their headquarters, while also making frequent trips to other regions to find and often record new artists. In the other camp were talent scouts and occasional session contractors who principally covered a local, usually southern, beat, often as a sideline to their regular employment as record distributors or retailers, or sometimes as club owners or concert promoters, or occasionally as radio station executives or jukebox operators. Relatively speaking, they seldom traveled to northern record company offices and studios, but they often recommended local artists to be recorded and occasionally supervised or assisted with their sessions on location in southern and midwestern cities. These regionally based scouts were rarely salaried record company employees; rather, they received finder’s fees, plus incidental expenses, for the performers they located and recommended, if those artists were ultimately accepted. Another financial incentive for some of these agents was the possibility of boosting sales at their stores by selling records of locally renowned artists they had helped secure recording contracts. Many southern retailers who scouted talent, including Polk C. Brockman and H. C. Speir, had initially entered A&R work for this very purpose.50 RCA Victor’s February 1932 field sessions in Dallas clearly reveals the interplay between national and regional A&R men. As Ralph Peer, who supervised more than a week’s worth of recordings there, told the Dallas Morning News, “On almost every recording tour new artists are discovered and such is the desire of our current endeavor.

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Many artists found in this manner have later developed into internationally noted musicians and singers, with initial auditions in their own locality proving far more satisfactory than bringing them to New York for recording.” Cooperating with Peer to arrange the venture was William Schnelle, owner of the Texas Radio Sales Company, RCA Victor’s local distributor. Schnelle, the newspaper reported, was “firm in his belief that recordings made in Dallas of Southwestern artists will be in demand throughout this territory and in other sections of the country as well.” Scouting and securing those artists were George Jeffries, RCA Victor’s southwestern sales manager, and Otho C. Slover, Texas Radio Sales Company’s record sales manager. Both men, the Morning News emphasized, had conducted “an exhaustive survey of Texas talent . . . during the last few months” and were convinced “that this new recording effort will bring a large group of expert talent before the public.”51 Dave Kapp’s memories of his first southern field trip for Decca, in January 1935, were quite similar. “My job was to build a hill billy catalog. That is the thing for which I was hired,” he later explained, although he also scouted and recorded other roots-based genres for the label. Leaving his Chicago office, Kapp traveled first to St. Louis, where he held impromptu “auditions of colored talent . . . with about forty colored people,” before moving on to Jackson, Mississippi, where he auditioned a parade of promising performers already identified by local scout H. C. Speir. “There was a furniture dealer there,” Kapp recalled, “who was in the record business, and who supplied talent for the record companies.” From there, “I went to New Orleans, Birmingham, Atlanta; and I signed my first talent.” Until 1942, Kapp spent six to eight weeks a year on recording expeditions to the South and, with the assistance of his engineer Brad Bradshaw, recorded hundreds of sessions of hillbilly, western swing, blues, jazz, Cajun, and Mexican music, sometimes making “two to three trips a year to Texas and [North] Carolina.”52 How long A&R managers and their engineers stayed at each of their scheduled stops varied considerably. On October 18, 1924, OKeh’s mobile unit set up in Dallas for only a single day. During the summer of 1927, while Ralph Peer and his Victor crew spent ten much-feted days recording in Bristol, Tennessee, Gennett’s team camped out in Birmingham for almost two months and came away with nearly 170 recordings, most of them blues and hillbilly numbers.53 Brunswick A&R man Richard Voynow spent three months on the road in 1929, visiting, in order, Knoxville, Memphis, New Orleans, San Antonio (where United States immigration officials granted him special permission to bring Mexican musicians across the border to record), Dallas, and Kansas City, before returning to company headquarters in Chicago. According to Talking Machine World and Radio-Music Merchant, Voynow supervised the recording of more than five hundred selections on this lengthy expedition. In addition to Spanish-language performances, sessions embraced “the types of record[s] known in the trade as the ‘hill billy, French-Cajan [sic], race and popular.’ ”54 Some companies eventually established permanent or semipermanent recording facilities in cities their recording staff visited regularly. For instance, OKeh crews held

F I G U R E 2 .4 . “Perpetuating Our ‘Hill-Billy’ Harmonies.” Full page of newspaper articles chronicling Brunswick’s 1930 Knoxville field session held in the St. James Hotel. Knoxville News-Sentinel, April 13, 1930. Reproduced from the book accompanying Ted Olson and Tony Russell, The Knoxville Sessions, 1929–1930: Knox County Stomp, 4-CD boxed set (Bear Family BCD 16097). Used by permission.

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their earliest Chicago sessions in a series of provisional studios temporarily set up at the headquarters of its local distributor, the Consolidated Talking Machine Company, on West Washington Street. Then in May 1925, OKeh engineers installed a permanent studio in the building. “In the past, it has been necessary to transport from New York and install here a considerable amount of equipment in order to make Okeh records,” explained a Talking Machine World report. “The new laboratory will do away with this unnecessary labor and will effect a great saving in time.”55 Several other northernbased companies set up similar workspaces in the South. Atlanta proved to be such an important recording center for blues and hillbilly music that, by the late 1920s, Victor and Columbia had both established permanent studios there, for a time occupying office space across the hall from one another in the same Peachtree Street building.56 During the mid- to late 1930s, ARC held its Dallas sessions in a semipermanent studio installed in the Brunswick Records Building at 508 Park Avenue, headquarters of its local distributor. RCA Victor staged all three of its 1936 Charlotte field sessions in the second-floor warehouse of its distributor, the Southern Radio Corporation on South Tryon Street, but for its next few expeditions in the city, transferred its recording activities to a remodeled suite on the tenth floor of the Hotel Charlotte, located a couple blocks away on West Trade Street.57 More often, however, A&R men and their recording engineers quickly rigged up temporary studios in hotels, warehouses, auditoriums, radio stations, and an assortment of other readily available spaces, including, on one occasion, a Ku Klux Klan hall, site of Victor’s October 1928 sessions in Atlanta.58 Some of these sites have become the stuff of American roots music legend, none more than the Taylor-Christian Building at 408 State Street in Bristol, Tennessee. Leased by Ralph Peer during late July and early August 1927, this venue served as the site of Victor’s historic “Bristol Sessions,” now heralded, albeit hyperbolically, as “The Big Bang of Country Music.” Another significant location was WNOX’s radio studios inside the St. James Hotel at 311–13 Wall Avenue in Knoxville, where Richard Voynow and Wilford J. “Bill” Brown held important hillbilly sessions for Brunswick in the summer of 1929 and again in the spring of 1930. Room 414 of the Gunter Hotel on East Houston Street in San Antonio, where, in November 1936, under the supervision of ARC’s Don Law, future blues icon Robert Johnson made his recording debut, also proved to be a much-revered historic recording site.59

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Jesse Johnson, the resourceful owner of St. Louis’s De Luxe Music Shoppe, successfully scouted blues artists for a number of labels, including Victor, Paramount, Brunswick, and OKeh. Although he often attended recording sessions of his newly found artists, it remains unclear if he was present in the studio in May 1926 when Victoria Spivey cut her first OKeh recordings. Nor is it known if he ever personally supervised any recording sessions. Still, Johnson’s A&R activities highlight the importance of retailers in finding new artists, while also providing a different perspective on how

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these scouts sometimes unearthed their finds. In addition to running his music store, Johnson promoted dances and concerts in St. Louis (including several “battles” between aspiring local bands and nationally renowned jazz orchestras), and wrote songs. One of these, “Mr. Johnson’s Blues,” appeared on the first release (OKeh 8253) by the influential blues and jazz guitarist-singer Lonnie Johnson (no relation), who recorded it in St. Louis in November 1925. The enterprising Johnson installed a piano in his store, partly for entertainment, but also so he could instantly audition aspiring singers and musicians who wished to make recordings. He also staged regular talent shows as a means of finding potential recording artists, often at the Booker T. Washington Theatre, a major black vaudeville venue that was located across the street from his store. In these ways, Johnson and his wife, blues singer Edith North Johnson, used their contacts among local and traveling entertainers to find prospective recording artists they could recommend to A&R officials at various labels.60 One of their discoveries was blues-boogie-woogie pianist Roosevelt Sykes, who had auditioned for Johnson on De Luxe’s in-store piano. Johnson, Sykes recalled, “decided that the numbers were all right and that they would go,” and then accompanied Sykes to New York. There, on June 14, 1929, Sykes waxed six sides for OKeh, including his first release, “44 Blues” / “Boot That Thing” (OKeh 8702). Over the next decade, as Sykes became better acquainted with the recording industry and its seamier practices, he cut a series of pseudonymously issued sides for Paramount (credited as by Dobby Bragg), Vocalion (Easy Papa Johnson), Victor (Willie Kelly), and Champion (St. Louis Johnny) that modestly increased his income. He also began to scout for Johnson, as well as for J. Mayo Williams and Jack Kapp. “Those fellers figgered I knowed pretty well about blues singers and that I knowed pretty good materials when I heard it, so they ask me would I go out and find some new artists for them,” he told blues scholar Paul Oliver. His A&R contacts even provided him with a formal letter of introduction, which proved particularly useful when he recruited blues singers from among black laborers on southern plantations and farms owned by suspicious white landlords. “You had to show them what you was up to; that you didn’t come to steal the guy away and to show them what you was up to in that you be there for makin’ records, and you didn’t come to take nobody off their job and they’d return right back and carry on with whatever they were doin’, ” Sykes explained. This whole situation spoke volumes about the complicity of A&R officials in the oppressive structures of the Jim Crow South, where white planters and employers even attempted—with mixed success—to control how African American workers capitalized on the musical talents they honed during their precious leisure time. One of Sykes’s first finds was blues singer Walter Davis, for whom he scheduled an audition with Jesse Johnson. Johnson, in turn, arranged for Davis to make recordings, initially for Victor at a June 1930 session in Cincinnati’s Hotel Sinton, with Sykes himself backing Davis on piano.61 Not all A&R officials used talent to beget yet more talent. H. C. Speir claimed that he never employed any of the many blues singers he discovered as talent scouts. Rather, he preferred to do his own recruiting and bragged to a succession of interviewers about

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his infallible instincts when it came to identifying top-grade talent and material. As Jeff Todd Titon notes, “Speir had no formal training; he simply relied on his musical taste. Unlike other scouts, he placed no weight on the prospective singer’s popularity in his community.” In particular, Speir prided himself on his ability to distinguish between those performers who communicated well in live settings and those whose voices and songs reproduced well on recordings.62 There is no denying that Speir compiled an impressive résumé. Among the blues acts whose recording careers he launched or otherwise enabled were Tommy Johnson, Son House, Skip James, Bo Carter, Ishmon Bracey, and, perhaps most important, Charley Patton. That track record earned gushing praise from Gayle Dean Wardlow, who interviewed Speir on several occasions between 1964 and 1970, and dubbed him “the Godfather of Delta Blues.” “If Speir hadn’t been there,” Wardlow maintains, “the greatest of the Delta blues singers would probably never have recorded.”63 There is no particular reason to challenge Speir’s claim that, in the spring of 1929, he drove out to Dockery Plantation, west of Cleveland, Mississippi, to hear Patton and quickly determined that he would work well on record. But it is worth noting that Patton, a veteran entertainer and a mentor to several local bluesmen who had already made commercial recordings, had previously written to Speir, in either late 1928 or early 1929, to request an audition. It is also highly likely that Patton had been recommended to Speir either by other musicians or by black record buyers who patronized his store. 64 Similarly, Speir admitted to Wardlow that, in 1930, he had sought out Blind Joe Reynolds at a sawmill-camp barrelhouse near Lake Providence, Louisiana, precisely because another artist—either Bo Carter or Charley Patton—had recommended him.65 Despite Speir’s attempts to weave a magical spell around his allegedly preternatural talent-spotting abilities, and the willingness of commentators to accept the notion that he was some kind of iconoclastic blues savant, it strains credulity to think that he did not regularly avail himself of the same kinds of preexisting intelligence networks of customers and musicians that his A&R colleagues regularly relied on. In truth, ambitious and savvy A&R men throughout the recording industry were usually only too eager to take advantage of local expertise and were grateful to performers who could supply them with tips on new talent and, sometimes, assist them in getting that talent into the studio. According to blues singer-guitarist Sleepy John Estes, it was veteran recording artist and fellow blues singer-guitarist Jim Jackson (ironically, one of H. C. Speir’s “finds”) who initially encouraged him and mandolin player Yank Rachell to audition at a September 1929 Victor field session that Ralph Peer was then supervising in Memphis.66 Will Shade, leader of the prolific and versatile Memphis Jug Band, performed A&R duties for Victor and later RCA Victor, introducing banjo player Gus Cannon and other local black artists to label officials. During the firm’s May–June 1930 sessions in the Memphis Auditorium, Shade even assisted Peer in the studio as a session supervisor for several blues acts’ recordings. At the peak of the Memphis Jug Band’s popularity and Shade’s scouting success, Victor put Shade on a weekly retainer,

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and before he lost everything in the Great Depression, he was able to purchase a house and $3,000 worth of the company’s stock with his earnings.67 In Chicago, J. Mayo Williams was beholden to blues singer-guitarist Kansas Joe McCoy, first husband of Memphis Minnie, for persuading the frenetic slide-guitarist Kokomo Arnold to take time off from his moonshine liquor business and record with Williams for Decca in 1934.68 Several years earlier, during his tenure at Brunswick, Williams had formalized with Cow Cow Davenport what was usually an ad hoc arrangement between A&R officials and talent-scouting artists. One of Davenport’s first recommendations was fellow blues pianist Pine Top Smith, whom he introduced to Williams by letter in 1928, beginning a process that soon led to eight boogie-woogie piano sides for Brunswick’s subsidiary label, Vocalion.69 With his songwriting gifts and a string of hit records under numerous guises, Big Bill Broonzy ranks as one of the most successful blues recording artists of the interwar years. But he also proved invaluable to Lester Melrose’s A&R efforts on behalf of many labels during the 1930s and 1940s. This was particularly true after the Chicago-based Melrose made an ill-fated scouting trip around 1938 into the heart of the Mississippi Delta searching for bluesman Tommy McClennan on a farm outside of Yazoo City. Following a terrifying experience during which angry white locals, alarmed at the sight of a Yankee stranger prowling around the plantations where hundreds of black workers toiled, chased him away and forced him to abandon his automobile, Melrose vowed never to return to the South in search of talent. Instead, according to Broonzy, “he used to send me all the time after artists. He never did go down South again.”70 In the hillbilly recording field, A&R officials likewise responded favorably to tips from trusted artists. Ernest V. Stoneman, for instance, advised Victor A&R man Ralph Peer to make field recordings in Bristol, Tennessee, in the summer of 1927. Stoneman, of Galax, Virginia, also exemplifies how would-be recording artists often went in search of A&R officials, rather than wait for talent scouts to find them. In 1924, underwhelmed by the first OKeh recordings he heard by fellow Virginian Henry Whitter, Stoneman traveled to New York by train, at his own expense, to audition for several labels, among them OKeh, where Peer was director of record production. Impressed, Peer signed him to a five-year personal management contract, during which time Stoneman recorded for OKeh, as well as for Edison and Gennett, before following Peer to Victor.71 By 1927, Stoneman was not only a recording artist but also Peer’s friend, musical advisor, and talent scout. In preparation for an upcoming recording expedition, as he recalled, Peer asked him “to go out in the mountains and hunt up people that have got something on the ball, that we can use.” Stoneman, in turn, found a rich bounty of musical talent in the Virginia-Tennessee border region near Bristol, whose main street actually straddles the line separating the two states. Accepting Stoneman’s recommendation, Peer famously chose Bristol as one site of his three-city recording expedition, telling the Bristol Herald Courier that “in no section of the south have the pre-war melodies and old mountaineer songs been better preserved than in the mountains of East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia.”72

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According to his biographer Barry Mazor, Peer may have first learned about Jimmie Rodgers, one of his major discoveries at the Bristol sessions, from another of his former OKeh recording artists, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, who had heard Rodgers performing on WWNC-Asheville. Along with WBT-Charlotte and WPTF-Raleigh, WWNC became a key broadcasting outlet for hillbilly singers and stringbands during the 1930s. Like many radio and stage entertainers, Rodgers was busily firing off letters to record labels, looking for an opportunity to make recordings and bragging of the regional popularity his radio appearances had earned him.73 Peer recalled that, once he began releasing race and hillbilly records at OKeh in the early to mid-1920s, he started to receive “a tremendous amount of correspondence” from aspiring recording artists. But, he explained, “I’m thinking it’s the hillbilly it applies to mostly because the niggers can’t write.” His crude language and stereotyping aside, Peer rightly suggested that “the production of these records, both the race and the hillbilly, led to the discovery of new artists. One sort of led to the other, and we got a lot of mail, especially on hillbilly . . . from actual artists.”74 In truth, the whole concept of “discovery” is quite slippery and of limited value when discussing A&R work in the interwar roots music field. Most “discoveries” were made on the basis of referrals: sometimes from distributors or retailers, sometimes from other singers and musicians, and sometimes in the form of self-referrals. Moreover, most referrals concerned artists who had already garnered considerable experience and local, perhaps even regional, renown from live performances, radio broadcasts, or both. A&R officials may have honed raw talent and shaped recording careers, but they were rarely, if ever, the first persons to recognize the musical gifts of the blues and hillbilly artists they recorded. Nevertheless, in their efforts to advance their own careers or burnish their legacies, they often took more than their fair share of credit for finding the artists they brought into the studio and immortalized on records.

T H E RO L E O F RA D I O A N D M OT I O N P I CT U R E S

During the 1920s, commercial radio became essential to the world of A&R. Initially, some record company executives resisted the broadcasting of recorded music lest it undermine the careers of working musicians or, more importantly, damage sales of phonographs and records. But radio quickly proved itself both a rich source of talent and a valuable publicity tool for record companies. Radio broadcasting was increasingly seen as a means to promote records and boost sales. This was one reason why radio stations were so reluctant to pay for the privilege of broadcasting phonograph records, arguing that they were, in effect, providing advertising for those discs. Beginning in 1923, this conflict of interest spawned a spate of bitter and protracted legal battles between radio broadcasters and the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), the preeminent performance rights licensing organization, which then represented most of America’s major music publishers and an elite group

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of some eleven hundred writer members who penned the vast bulk of the nation’s vaudeville hits and sheet music favorites. ASCAP—alarmed about the prospective loss of revenue to its members from decreasing sheet music sales as a result of the growth of the recording and radio industries, and eager to secure performance royalties for the broadcasting of music, whether in live performances or on records—initiated a series of lawsuits against individual radio stations and eventually the powerful national radio networks. Although there were some local variations, by the mid-1920s, blanket licensing agreements allowed many stations and network affiliates to broadcast an unlimited number of ASCAP-licensed songs over the airwaves in return for fixed annual licensing fees. In 1930, under the terms of these agreements, ASCAP collected about $800,000 in royalties from broadcasters; by 1948, that figure had risen to $6.5 million. That revenue was channeled back to the writers and copyright holders of the songs that were aired, which sometimes meant the money went into the publishing arms of record companies formed or administered by A&R men such as Ralph Peer and J. Mayo Williams. In short, performance royalties from radio airplay became an increasingly lucrative source of additional income not only for older, well-established, ASCAP-affiliated music publishers and writers but also for record companies and occasionally, depending on their contractual arrangements, performers.75 Further complicating commercial music’s business relationships was a series of radio and record company buyouts, beginning, most significantly, with the Radio Corporation of America’s purchase of the Victor Talking Machine Company in January 1929, followed in December 1931 by the sale of the Columbia Phonograph Company to the Grigsby-Grunow Company, a Chicago-based radio manufacturer. When GrigsbyGrunow went bankrupt in 1934, Columbia was bought by ARC, which, in turn, was purchased, along with its subsidiary Brunswick Record Corporation, by the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in December 1938.76 In the new media conglomerates created through these acquisitions, record companies and their A&R departments usually operated as separate corporate entities from their parent company’s radio operations. Nevertheless, these buyouts and mergers were symptomatic of important changes in the broader economic landscape of mass media and entertainment in the United States. With the advent of “talkies”—movies with soundtracks—in the late 1920s, Hollywood motion picture companies began purchasing major music publishing firms, or at least acquiring controlling interests in them, so the studios could avoid being held hostage by publishers in negotiating rights to use copyrighted music in films. As the radio and motion picture industries competed for consumer dollars and advertising revenue, recording companies and music publishing firms often became pawns in bigger corporate battles.77 If financial considerations and business associations were more than enough to keep A&R managers in close contact with broadcasters, radio’s continued use of live music also offered a potentially rich source of new, as yet unrecorded, talent. African American blues artists were seldom heard on radio during this period, but jazz

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orchestras, gospel quartets, and hillbilly stringbands regularly broadcast on local stations and, by the early 1930s, on national networks as well—and A&R men were listening. John Hammond discovered much of his recording talent at jazz clubs and bars in Manhattan, but he also heard promising new musicians performing live on nighttime broadcasts carried up and down the Eastern Seaboard. In September 1933, for example, Hammond was listening to his car radio when he first heard elegant jazz pianist Teddy Wilson performing a live set at Chicago’s Grand Terrace Café. Enchanted by what he heard, Hammond telephoned station WMAQ to ask who the musician was. After learning Wilson’s identity, he gave bandleader and saxophonist Benny Carter $150 to bring Wilson to New York and then immediately placed him with Carter’s orchestra at Columbia. Hammond would later team Wilson with Benny Goodman and Billie Holiday for some of the most important sessions in jazz history.78 Similarly, Harry Charles recounted how one night while driving in Tennessee he heard an unidentified female trio on his car radio. “Just turned on my radio about 4:30 in the morning and those girls was singing. . . . I found them at the studio and signed them,” he explained.79 Van Sills, an A&R scout from Charlotte, North Carolina, who managed the record department of the Southern Radio Corporation, RCA Victor’s regional distributor, was introduced to the Blue Sky Boys, a guitar-and-mandolin brother duo, via WGST-Atlanta around 1936. Their sponsor, J. W. Fincher, president and manager of the Crazy Water Crystals Company of the Carolinas and Georgia, had encouraged Sills to tune in to their broadcasts. Sills subsequently recommended the act to Eli Oberstein at RCA Victor.80 A few years later, Sills, then scouting for Decca, found a similar act, Whitey and Hogan, on WGNC-Gastonia, North Carolina, and sent them to that label. “Evidently, Dave Kapp and the folks up at Decca in New York knew Van pretty well,” Roy “Whitey” Grant remembered. Like most record retailers and distributors, “Van knew his numbers. He knew records, knew what would sell.”81 Particularly significant links between broadcasters and A&R officials were forged around the many radio barn dances that crowded the nation’s airwaves during the 1920s and 1930s. One of the most important in this regard (though not the first) was the National Barn Dance, which premiered on WLS-Chicago on April 19, 1924. Over the next decade or so, it was joined by dozens of similar shows, including WBTCharlotte’s Crazy Barn Dance, WRVA-Richmond’s Corn Cob Pipe Club and Old Dominion Barn Dance, and WSB-Atlanta’s Cross Road Follies. Initially, most of these programs catered to regional audiences, but beginning in the early 1930s, some were broadcast coast-to-coast over major radio networks. As a result, several achieved national and enduring prominence, including the National Barn Dance, WLW-Cincinnati’s (later WHAS-Louisville’s) Renfro Valley Barn Dance, and, most spectacularly, WSM-Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry, the nation’s longest-running radio program.82 While these programs often featured well-established recording artists, they also provided A&R scouts with opportunities to hear popular but unrecorded talent. Sometimes bullish radio executives and producers even assumed A&R functions in their own right, promoting their

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performers as a means to publicize their stations and programs. One chief example was George D. Hay, a former WLS announcer who served as WSM-Nashville’s radio director and founded the Grand Ole Opry. In 1927, Hay personally arranged for three of the program’s regular attractions to record for Columbia at an Atlanta field session: white singer-Jew’s harp player Obed “Dad” Pickard, a black gospel group called the Golden Echo Quartet, and, most popular of all, African American “harmonica wizard” DeFord Bailey. “WSM artists are meeting with unusual success in the field of musical records as a result of their broadcasting,” crowed the Nashville Tennessean, adding “WSM is holding its own as regards representatives on the big records.” A couple of weeks later, Hay used his contacts to secure Bailey a second recording date, this time with Brunswick in New York. On April 18 and 19, 1927, Bailey recorded eight selections, six of which were released in Brunswick’s new “Songs from Dixie” series, while an equal number of them appeared on its Vocalion subsidiary in its “Old Southern Tunes” counterpart, a reminder of the often-unacknowledged racial diversity of interwar hillbilly series.83 Like Bailey, Bradley Kincaid had already established himself as a popular radio singer-guitarist who specialized in sentimental ballads and mountain songs on WLS’s National Barn Dance before he secured a recording deal in 1927. Clayton “Jack” Jackson, the Gennett assistant sales manager-cum-A&R man who first recorded Kincaid for that label and its subsidiaries, dutifully acknowledged this radio pedigree by billing his rising star on record labels as a “WLS Artist,” just as George D. Hay had encouraged Columbia to identify DeFord Bailey and the other Opry stars on their releases as “of Station WSM, Nashville, TN.”84 Jackson also signed and recorded other WLS talent, including Chubby Parker, the Arkansas Woodchopper, and the Maple City Four, whose members may actually have first tipped off Jackson about Kincaid’s growing radio following.85 “We were hunting talent, that was my main occupation after hours, finding talent we could hire,” Jackson said of his time trawling Chicago’s radio stations and nightspots. “You had the Trianon Ballroom, the Aragon Ballroom, you had WGN. That’s where we found Gene Arnold. We found Chubby Parker in a beer joint up in the north end of the Loop. We found George Gobel in a cellar there in the Loop.”86 Bradley Kincaid proved to be a significant recording artist, going on to enjoy success with Gennett, Brunswick, Bluebird, and Decca into the mid-1930s, and with several other labels after World War II.87 Roy Acuff turned out to be an even greater find, coming to the attention of ARC’s A&R man W. R. Calaway thanks to the reputation that Acuff and his band had developed as stage performers and as regulars on both WROL and WNOX in Knoxville. Calaway was particularly excited at the prospect of recording what, by then, had become Acuff ’s signature song: “The Great Speckled Bird”—a song of such convoluted provenance that it was subject to multiple copyright claims. Acuff ’s first recording of the song (Vocalion / OKeh 04252, plus other releases)—or “The Bird,” as he affectionately called it—as well as his classic rendition of the Carter Family’s “Wabash Cannon Ball” (Vocalion / OKeh 04466, plus others), were both waxed for ARC in Chicago under Calaway’s supervision in October 1936. Calaway also oversaw Acuff

F I G U R E 2 . 5 . Cover of the Crazy Water Crystals Company of the Carolinas and Georgia’s Souvenir of the Crazy Barn Dance and the Crazy Bands folio (ca. 1934). Courtesy of Old Hat Records.

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& His Crazy Tennesseans’ session in Birmingham, the following March. By the time Acuff became a rising national star, singing “The Great Speckled Bird” on the Grand Ole Opry in February 1938, his relationship with Calaway had soured, however. “He wanted ‘The Bird,’ ” Acuff later said. “He didn’t want me.”88 Acuff ’s comment reflects the critical importance that songs and their copyrights held for many A&R officials involved in interwar American roots music. Along with Polk C. Brockman, J. Mayo Williams, and Ralph Peer, the North Carolina–born Calaway was one of the first to appreciate the true potential of copyrighting the material his recording artists composed or arranged. Working as a freelance scout for Gennett in the late 1920s and then as sales manager for ARC throughout much of the 1930s, Calaway wheedled his way into receiving royalties on a number of songs that he copyrighted in his own name—with doubtful creative input—notably selections by the prolific hillbilly singing duo John McGhee and Frank Welling. Later, after he joined ARC, Calaway redoubled his efforts to appropriate other lucrative song copyrights. In eight years, he filed registrations for approximately 180 songs; the last, in 1938, was for Acuff ’s hugely popular version of “Wabash Cannon Ball.”89 Calaway’s strategy offered a lesson in the economics of the roots recording industry that Acuff took to heart. In 1942, Acuff co-founded Acuff-Rose Publications with Fred Rose, a former vaudeville entertainer turned radio performer, recording artist, and Tin Pan Alley songwriter. “Fred had so many talents,” recalled Jimmie Davis, the former twotime governor of Louisiana, enormously successful singing star (best known for “You Are My Sunshine”), and purveyor of a heady mix of hillbilly prurience, religion, and sentimentality. As Davis’s testimonial emphasizes, A&R officials often wore many different hats with equal aplomb: “[Fred] was a great songwriter, he was a good A&R man, he could direct a recording session,” in addition to making a number of his own recordings for Brunswick during the 1920s and touring briefly as a pianist with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra.90 From its headquarters in Nashville, Acuff-Rose would become a major force in the postwar music industry, especially after Rose began shepherding one of country music’s most memorable songwriters and recording stars, Hank Williams, in 1946. When the Columbia Broadcasting System acquired ARC in December 1938 and formed the Columbia Recording Corporation, Roy Acuff signed with that company and began working closely with pioneering A&R man Art Satherley. Satherley supervised all of Acuff ’s Columbia recordings, released across the complex of subsidiary labels that Columbia soon acquired or revived, especially Vocalion and OKeh.91 Satherley also accelerated the rise of another major hillbilly star of the interwar years, a man whose career illustrates not only the close connections between radio stations and A&R departments but also the growing links between those departments and an even newer entertainment technology: talking motion pictures. That artist was Gene Autry, nicknamed “Public Cowboy No. 1” after the title of one of his 1937 western films. As with many origin myths, the precise circumstances by which Autry secured a recording contract and eventually transformed himself into the greatest of Hollywood’s

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“singing cowboys” are hotly disputed. What is clear, however, is that several A&R men played important roles in his story. In 1928, the ambitious Autry, then working as a telegraph operator in Vinita, Oklahoma, traveled to New York to try his luck with a number of record companies. Johnny Marvin, a popular Victor recording artist and fellow Oklahoman whose family Autry knew, almost certainly helped arrange an audition at the label. Autry later preferred to recount how he had loitered in the lobby of Victor’s offices, waiting for his chance, eventually singing a version of “Jeannine, I Dream of Lilac Time” for the receptionist that was overheard by the song’s composer, Nat Shilkret. In Autry’s account, Shilkret, Victor’s New York studio manager and musical director, recommended Autry to his assistant, Leonard Joy, who supervised a test record with Autry. Joy apparently liked Autry’s voice, but considered the twenty-yearold singer-guitarist’s performance too nervous and unpolished to warrant an actual recording session. As Autry remembered, Joy advised him to “go back to Oklahoma and get a job on radio and get some experience and then in maybe six months or a year, you come back.”92 Autry dutifully took Joy’s advice. Back in Oklahoma, he secured a regular time slot on KVOO-Tulsa and built a regional reputation as the “Oklahoma Yodeling Cowboy”— a sort of Jimmie Rodgers with chaps—before returning to Victor in October 1929 to begin his recording career. His first Victor releases were cut under the direction of Loren L. Watson, the same Memphis record distributor, talent scout, and occasional session supervisor who had recommended bluesmen Gus Cannon and Frank Stokes to Art Laibly at Paramount. Soon, however, Autry was working with Eli Oberstein, who replaced Watson in 1930 as Victor’s record sales manager, but who, like many record company executives, still worked with talent in and out of the studio. Over the next eight months, as was common for nonexclusive artists, Autry also waxed a mix of originals songs and cover versions under a variety of pseudonyms for cheaper competing labels, among them Harmony, Velvet Tone, Grey Gull, QRS, and Gennett and its subsidiary, Champion. With the growing success of his records and his expanding radio exposure, thanks to a new spot on WJJD-Chicago (where Dave Kapp was program director), when Autry and Art Satherley first met in late 1930, the singer was a rising, if hardly yet a major, star.93 At the time of their first studio collaboration, in November 1930, Satherley was working for ARC, a new company formed by the merger of several dime-store labels, including those marketed by the Plaza Music Company. Only a month earlier, Consolidated Film Industries (CFI), one of the nation’s leading motion-picture processing laboratories, had purchased ARC, opening up promising possibilities for the cross-promotion of songs, recordings, and movies. CFI’s president, Herbert J. Yates, encouraged Satherley to expand ARC’s involvement in roots music. In 1935, after he had secured control of Republic Pictures, Yates also supported Satherley’s efforts to refashion Autry’s radio and recording celebrity into what proved to be an extraordinarily successful on-screen persona as a singing cowboy star. This fueled a commercial and

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F I G U R E 2 .6 . Gene Autry and Art Satherley (ca. 1941). Autry’s inscription reads: “To ‘My One Pal Who Made Me’—Always Best Wishes to the greatest of them all Art Satherley.” Courtesy of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

creative synergy between Hollywood motion pictures, western imagery (both lyrical and sartorial), and hillbilly musical stylings that deeply influenced the development of country music.94 By the time he appeared in his first starring movie role in Republic Pictures’s Tumbling Tumbleweeds in 1935, Autry was a major radio star, due to his regular broadcasts on Chicago’s WJJD and WLS, and one of the era’s best-selling hillbilly recording artists. His long streak of hit records began with the phenomenally popular “Silver Haired Daddy of Mine,” which enjoyed multiple concurrent releases on ARC’s assortment of dime-store labels (Banner 32349, Oriole 8109, Perfect 12775, and Romeo 5109, among others). Satherley had personally selected “Silver Haired Daddy of Mine” from among Autry’s repertoire and then supervised his recording of it (with duet partner, Jimmy

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Long, the song’s composer) in New York on October 29, 1931. Again blurring the lines between the scouting, producing, and selling aspects of A&R work, an excited Satherley took a test pressing of Autry and Long’s sentimental ballad to Jeff Shay, chief buyer for the music department of the Chicago-based mail-order firm, Sears, Roebuck & Company. Shay recommended that Autry start appearing regularly on a time slot the company sponsored on WLS, home of the National Barn Dance. By gaining Sears, Roebuck’s support and underwriting a WLS program for Autry (“We paid Gene Autry $30 a week for nearly two years out of our petty cash,” Satherley later recalled), the A&R man did not so much “discover” Autry as help him shift his career into a much higher gear.95 “Silver Haired Daddy of Mine” reportedly racked up sales of a half-million copies, and despite complex legalities, Autry eventually signed something resembling an exclusive contract with both Satherley and ARC that guaranteed him eight record releases a year. By the end of 1932, Autry had earned roughly $2,200 in royalties from the record company, although as a result of a “hand-shake agreement,” Satherley took a 25 percent standing commission.96 Two years later, Satherley brokered a meeting in Chicago between Autry and Nat Levine, a Hollywood film producer for the independent Mascot Pictures. Soon afterward, Autry debuted in the B-western movie, In Old Santa Fe (1934). He sang a handful of songs and, in the role of a traveling entertainer, was credited as “Gene Autry— Cowboy Idol of the Air.” As historian Douglas B. Green puts it, this cameo heralded “the transformation between cowboys who sang . . . and singing cowboys.”97 In June 1935, Yates’s CFI empire acquired Mascot Pictures. (Autry’s first two starring films with Republic Pictures, though, still bore the legend “Nat Levine Mascot Production.”) Three months later, Republic released Tumbling Tumbleweeds. Autry’s first starring feature film included not only his best-selling song to date, “Silver Haired Daddy of Mine” (which was reissued on Vocalion 02991 as a tie-in with the movie’s release), but also what would become another hit, the title song “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” (Banner 33348, Oriole 8434, Perfect 13113, Romeo 5434, and Vocalion 03007, among others). From this point forward, motion pictures worked in much the same way as did radio for Autry: as one part of an intersecting network of mutually beneficial media outlets for records and songs. For the next decade or so, Autry biographer Holly George-Warren explains, “Gene’s movies would cross-promote his record releases, while his well-known songs gave recognition to his new films.”98 Art Satherley created Autry’s singing cowboy persona neither by himself, nor out of whole cloth. Rather, he and Autry both credited Anne Williams, announcer for WLS’s Conqueror Record Time program on which Autry made his radio breakthrough, for helping hone that image. There were also links to his “Oklahoma Yodeling Cowboy” days. Nevertheless, from 1930 onward, Satherley exerted the strongest influence on Autry’s career, both inside and outside the recording studio. Together they created a smooth, wildly popular fusion of cowboy aesthetics and hillbilly music that fed directly into the mainstream of American commercial music, radio, and film. “I sang cowboy songs, not

Art Satherley carefully guided Gene Autry’s recording career for some two decades, eventually producing roughly 450 sides with the nation’s favorite singing cowboy, including his million-selling 1947 hit, “Here Comes Santa Claus (Right Down Santa Claus Lane)” (Columbia 37942). Satherley maintained a similarly close, almost proprietorial connection with several of his other major acts, among them Roy Acuff and Bob Wills. This proved to be a common practice in the A&R field, where the tasks of finding, recording, and managing talent often overlapped. Ralph Peer signed all his talent to his management agency and supervised almost every recording by his best-selling acts, notably Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. Likewise, J. B. Long managed North Carolina bluesman Blind Boy Fuller and arranged all his sessions for ARC, although Satherley oversaw them.100 Such attentiveness to established acts reflects another aspect of A&R work that tends to get lost amid the romance of scouting expeditions, the thrill of making major discoveries, and the excitement of first recordings. A&R officials actually spent a considerable amount of time developing artists who they—or others—had initially discovered and already recorded. In the unruly and underregulated world of interwar roots recording, A&R officials often dedicated themselves to courting and recording singers and musicians who had already established themselves with rival companies and who were often legally still under contract to them. Like some kind of bizarre plot in an Autry Hollywood western, talent rustling was endemic in the interwar recording industry—and sheriffs were scarce. Regardless of the provisions of their recording contracts, few successful roots music artists recorded for a single company. Even if they were nominally signed to a particular firm as exclusive artists, many disguised their true identities behind aliases to make recordings, often of the same material, for competing labels. A telling example can be found in the discography of Charlie Poole & the North Carolina Ramblers. In May 1929, Poole and his bandmates attended a recording session in Manhattan for their regular label, Columbia, but brought along two additional musicians with the intention of recording as a five-piece band instead of as their usual trio. They also planned to record “A Trip to New York,” a lengthy skit scripted by the group’s guitarist, Roy Harvey, that recounted the misadventures of a hillbilly stringband on its first recording trip. Columbia A&R man Frank Walker, however, refused to record both the larger

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because I felt the listeners like ’em better,” Autry later admitted, “but because Arthur insisted up on it.” Autry also acknowledged that it was Satherley who had eased him into movies in the first place: “I think that Art Satherley recommended me. Naturally.” The final, ambiguous “naturally” speaks volumes about both Satherley’s importance and ambitions as an A&R man. It was only “natural” that Satherley would be on the lookout for new ways to promote his artists and their music to the widest possible audience. That was, after all, what A&R representatives did.99

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ensemble and the comedy skit. A frustrated Poole, backed only by his customary two sidemen, was left to record a series of by-now-familiar material for Columbia at these May 6 and 7 sessions.101 Although signed to Columbia as exclusive artists, Poole & the North Carolina Ramblers responded by making clandestine recordings for two rival companies. A day or two after completing their Columbia sessions, the musicians cut six sides as an expanded, five-piece band for Paramount, which credited the releases to the Highlanders. Some of these sides were simultaneously released on Broadway, Paramount’s budgetpriced subsidiary label, on which the group was billed as the Tennessee Mountaineers or, alternatively, the Mountaineers. On May 11, at their fourth recording session of a busy week, Poole & the North Carolina Ramblers waxed Harvey’s four-part skit, “A Trip to New York,” for Brunswick (Brunswick 324 and 325), with the discs credited to the Allegheny Highlanders.102 It is not entirely certain whether Poole and his band invented these aliases to evade their contractual obligations to Columbia and successfully hoodwinked the A&R staffs at Paramount and Brunswick, or whether, as seems more likely, the recording officials at those labels knew perfectly well who they were dealing with and assigned or approved these pseudonyms in order to avoid legal complications. Either way, this episode reveals that disgruntled or enterprising recording artists, whether acting independently or in collusion with A&R men at competing companies, had few qualms about breaking their exclusive contracts whenever opportunities presented themselves. Regardless of who was responsible, this practice of disguising artists’ identities proved to be so widespread that it makes compiling reliable discographies of pre–World War II American roots music records a treacherous business. Freelance studio singer Vernon Dalhart’s remarkable ninety-eight known nom de disques on domestic releases alone may have put him in a league of his own, but many roots music performers, even ones with relatively modest recording careers, followed suit. “I recorded under about ten different names,” recalled blues singer-pianist James “Stump” Johnson, among them Shorty George, Snitcher Roberts, and the Little Man. Equally telling, Johnson claimed to have “signed a contract with just about every big recordin’ company there was.”103 A&R officials were often as complicit as recording artists in encouraging this furtive dance of allegiance and betrayal, and of naming and renaming. “At Victor they didn’t even ask you what name you would like to go under besides your own name,” recounted Dwight Butcher, a Tennessee-born hillbilly singer-guitarist who first recorded in December 1932 at a New York session for the short-lived Crown label. Adrian Schubert, the A&R man who supervised the session, released Butcher’s debut sides, “Lonesome Road Blues” / “Mystery of Old Number Five” (Crown 3433), under the billing Slim Oakdale. Schubert even played chimes on a couple of Butcher’s later recordings, “Cowboy’s Heaven” (Crown 3503) and “Prairie Lullaby” (Crown 3529), both of which also appeared under this same pseudonym. Meanwhile, in 1933, Butcher signed a personal management contract with Ralph Peer. Over the next few years, he

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cut material for Victor, its Bluebird subsidiary (whose catalog Eli Oberstein managed), Decca, and, until its demise in the fall of 1933, Crown. Butcher also saw his sides issued domestically on Champion, Continental, Electradisk, Montgomery Ward, and Varsity, and, in Canada and overseas, on HMV, Melotone, Minerva, Panachord, Regal-Zonophone, and Twin. Because he had signed with Peer, rather than with RCA Victor, Butcher was free to record for as many labels, under as many names, as he and Peer desired. Butcher explained that A&R men at the different companies often chose his pseudonyms. “While I was under contract with Peer, a suggestion was made by the record company . . . that since I was from Oakdale, Tennessee—I had a little trio then . . . [by] the name of the Slim Oakdale Trio, and I recorded [for] Crown under the name of the Slim Oakdale Trio as well as my own name.” All of Butcher’s Victor releases appeared under own name, but “they called me Joe Smith the Lonesome Cowboy on Bluebird. Slim Oakdale, and Slim Butcher, and Hank Hall, and all these names . . . you know, that Eli Oberstein would put on the labels and keep putting out new labels.” Still more of his releases were credited to Slim Dwight, Tex Slim, the Texas Drifter, Andy Long, and Bill Palmer.104 The whole business of renaming artists and rerecording, or reissuing, their most popular sides highlights an important, if not especially glamorous dimension of interwar A&R. Intrepid scouts may sometimes have found magnificent singers and musicians in dancehalls, bars, theaters, churches and on radio stations and street corners, and helped them record their music for the first time, but they also devoted considerable energy to scouring rival companies’ catalogs with a view to poaching well-established artists, often recording them incognito. Scruples were in short supply among this first generation of A&R managers and scouts as they competed for hot talent and hit records. In 1926, to cite one case, Harry Charles spotted James Jackson playing on the streets of Birmingham and that August, after receiving Art Laibly’s approval to record him, accompanied the singer-guitarist to Chicago by train for a session with Paramount. Once there, Charles presented his new artist as Bo Weavil Jackson and purposefully neglected to provide the bluesman’s contact information to the label. At the conclusion of Jackson’s recording debut, Charles escorted him a few blocks to Brunswick’s studios on South Wabash Avenue to record for the Vocalion label. This time, all of Jackson’s releases, including the coupling of “Poor Boy Blues” and “Jefferson County Blues” (Vocalion 1057), were credited to Sam Butler. When Paramount officials discovered that a recording artist they believed was under exclusive contract had recorded for a competitor at the instigation of one of their own talent scouts, they sent a flurry of telegrams to Charles, who was then working in Charlotte, North Carolina. According to Charles, “[Art] Satherley came to Charlotte the next mornin’ when I wouldn’t answer the wires. He asked me: did I jump ’em? The deal on that talent? I told ’im ‘Yes!—they wasn’t payin’ me enough.’ . . . I said ‘I’m gonna sell ’em all—you don’t have a contract with me.’ ”105 Even allowing for Charles’s characteristic braggadocio and disdain for Satherley’s prowess as a talent scout (“When he was with Paramount, I didn’t think he knew a

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nickel’s worth,” Charles told Gayle Dean Wardlow. “I don’t know why they hired him”), his bullish attitude suggests the power that effective A&R representatives wielded.106 As talent brokers, as human gateways to the artists and songs that record companies needed to generate salable product and profits, A&R officials occupied a vital place in the structure of the roots recording industry. In a corollary to the kind of shenanigans Charles described, firms routinely raided the artist rosters of their competitors, luring away, if only for a single session, some of their exclusive-contract artists and, occasionally, even a few of their best-selling ones. In 1927, for instance, OKeh’s recording director Tommy Rockwell and Polk C. Brockman traveled to Dallas in search of Blind Lemon Jefferson, then the nation’s most popular country blues artist. Undeterred by Jefferson’s exclusive contract with Paramount, they took him to Atlanta to record eight sides for OKeh. Only one record was issued, “Black Snake Moan,” a remake of one of Jefferson’s previous Paramount hits, coupled with the first recording of his now-classic “Match Box Blues” (OKeh 8455), before Paramount sued OKeh for damages and secured its promise not to release any more material from its surreptitious session.107 Although such duplicitous practices were rampant in the cutthroat world of interwar American roots music, respect for laws and contracts did occasionally break out, with A&R departments and recording artists formally agreeing to nonexclusive arrangements. In 1927, when Paramount’s recording manager Art Laibly sought to recruit Doc Roberts, he asked the Kentucky fiddler to send confirmation that he had secured a release from his Gennett contract to record for other labels. “For information and at the same time an insurance against possible legal difficulties, wish you would forward a copy of this release to this office,” Laibly instructed Roberts, “since I remember that you said . . . you had just signed up for a period of two years with an extension of two years.”108 Once Roberts provided the necessary documentation, Laibly arranged to record him. Initially, Laibly hoped to spare Paramount some of the travel costs of bringing Roberts from his home in central Kentucky to Chicago by piggybacking on the artist’s next scheduled recording date for Gennett in Richmond, Indiana. “It would be better for you as well as ourselves to make the trip all in one. For instance, if you are recording for the Gennett people—come to us either before or after,” he wrote. But he also recommended that Roberts keep his upcoming session for Paramount a secret, advising him to “say nothing to the Gennett people that you expect to go ahead to Chicago or that you have been to Chicago, whichever the case may be.” Laibly understood that Roberts had “a partner and that you will both play.” Clearly anxious that Roberts’s Paramount sides be as distinct as possible from those he had recorded for Gennett, Laibly requested that “since you are under contract with the Gennett people that you record as a duet exclusively for the Paramount Co.” Laibly also urged Roberts to develop new material for his Paramount sessions. “We are leaving it up to you that you give us a fair shake—that you do not record records for us that you have recorded for Gennett, as undoubtedly they would make the same request were they apprized [sic] of this fact.”109

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Helen Oakley Dance also recruited and recorded established artists, and as one of the most significant women involved in A&R between the wars, her career merits especially close attention. Born in 1913 in Toronto, the daughter of a prosperous textile mill magnate, Oakley enjoyed a privileged upbringing that included a series of English governesses, regular European tours, and a finishing school education in Switzerland.110 After moving to Chicago in 1934 to be nearer the heart of her beloved hot jazz scene, Oakley juggled assignments as a journalist for the Chicago Herald-Examiner and the jazz magazine Down Beat, with concert promotion as a member of the Chicago Rhythm Club. Among her many shows was a pathbreaking Easter Sunday concert by Benny Goodman’s band at the Congress Hotel on April 12, 1936, during which she organized a short, racially integrated set featuring two white musicians, clarinetist Goodman and drummer Gene Krupa, with black pianist Teddy Wilson. Although John Hammond had previously encouraged the cautious Goodman to record with African American musicians behind closed studio doors at Columbia, Oakley later proudly boasted, with a good bit of license, that this “was the first time that inter-racial anything was ever given in public.”111 In addition, Oakley began to organize and direct recording sessions for local jazz musicians, among them Jess Stacy, George Wettling, Paul Mares, and Boyce Brown, an alto saxophone player who was a particular favorite. “Boyce Brown was the one,” she recalled in a 1998 interview, her enthusiasm for the music and respect for the musicians undiminished by the passing years. “He was a white boy and he was blind, and very soulful. . . . If you hear those records you will see that he had a natural gift and it was wonderful.”112 An independent operator, Oakley used money from the sold-out concerts she promoted in Chicago hotels to pay for the recording sessions she oversaw, frequently at Brunswick’s studios in the American Furniture Mart building on North Lake Shore Drive. “The concert would be a special event apart from their run in the hotel. . . . And we’d sell tickets. And whatever we made on it we put that aside for a record session,” she explained.113 As her reputation as a successful music journalist and concert promoter grew, so too did her personal connections with a long parade of jazz musicians, including nationally known luminaries such as Goodman and Duke Ellington. In 1936, Irving Mills (born Isadore Minsky), Ellington’s manager and song publisher, hired Oakley to assist him in setting up Master Records Inc., a new recording venture in New York that went on to release some classic jazz sides on both its Master and Variety imprints. At the outset, Oakley helped Mills secure funding from prospective investors and ensure that the proper legal paperwork was filed. Once arrangements for financing, pressing, and distribution were sorted out in early 1937 (thanks to a deal with Herbert Yates of ARC, which already distributed the Columbia, Brunswick, and Vocalion labels), Oakley assumed much of the responsibility for running Master Records and securing its talent.114 Bright, articulate, and passionate about music, Oakley was simultaneously charming and determined. Those characteristics, coupled with her reputation as a mover and

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F I G U R E 2 .7. Helen Oakley (in light-colored dress) and guests enjoying a jam session featuring drummer Chick Webb, clarinetist Artie Shaw, and pianist Duke Ellington, at Master Records Inc.’s studios in New York on March 12, 1937. Oakley helped her boss, Irving Mills, organize the event to promote the debut of the firm’s two record labels, Master and Variety. Oakley’s future husband, jazz critic Stanley Dance, stands in the rear at center. Photograph by Charles Peterson. Used by permission.

shaker in Chicago’s jazz circles, helped generate at least a modicum of respect when she entered the male-dominated world of label management in New York. “I used to sit at this long table with about twenty accountants and people,” she recalled, “and then they said to me, ‘What have you to say?’ And . . . so somebody said, ‘She did those Goodman things, and she did this and she did that,’ you see.”115 Although her gender made her unusual and doubtless presented her with challenges not faced by her male counterparts, in other ways Oakley’s story was quite typical. She successfully handled the kind of multitasking—talent scout, accountant, fund-raiser, label manager, session supervisor, publicist—that characterized the careers of many A&R managers involved in interwar American roots music.

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At Master Records, Oakley was able to indulge her first love, which was to bring talent into the firm’s newly constructed, state-of-the-art studios at 1776 Broadway to record. Master’s first official release was “I’ve Got to Be a Rug Cutter” / “The New East St. Louis Toodle-O” (Master 101) by Duke Ellington & His Famous Orchestra. Six more Ellington records followed, including some solo piano sides, before the label folded less than four months later. Master tended to mix innovations in jazz with novelty numbers that sometimes enjoyed impressive sales—a juggling act exemplified in the Raymond Scott Quintette record, “Minuet in Jazz” / “Twilight in Turkey” (Master 108). “That was terrible music,” Oakley somewhat uncharitably remembered. “But that was Master Record’s big hit,” she admitted, recognizing that, notwithstanding her own predilections, the chief role of any A&R manager was to deliver commercial product and, if possible, best sellers.116 More generally, Oakley’s tenure at Master Records reveals the enduring tensions between creative and commercial agendas that shaped A&R decisions and defined the recording business. To use Oakley’s words, Charlie Weintraub, the company’s accountant, was one of the first “bottom-line men” she had encountered in the industry. Uninterested in the music per se, Weintraub focused exclusively on matters of revenue and cash flow, questioning any projects that Oakley or her artists might propose that seemed to lack clear money-making potential.117 Ultimately, as cultural historian Harvey G. Cohen suggests, the growing influence of bean counters like Weintraub probably stunted the artistic development of swing music, privileging recordings that repeated proven formulas over pathbreaking experimentation. “The ‘bottom-line’ short-term thinking of men like Weintraub may have led to better quarterly reports for a while,” Cohen argues, “but that formulaic, conservative approach also probably helped speed the artistic and financial demise of the Swing Era.”118 Nevertheless, as Helen Oakley’s A&R work at Master Records suggests, in the ongoing, sometimes fraught negotiations that occurred within record companies, the accountants did not always win. Sometimes the artistic vision and innovation of recording artists and the enthusiasm of A&R officials like Oakley complemented, trumped, or simply transcended base commercial calculations and concerns. More indicative of Helen Oakley’s own tastes, and her real pride and joy, were the records she supervised for Master Records’ budget-priced Variety label, beginning with Cab Calloway & His Orchestra’s “Swing, Swing, Swing” / “That Man Is Here Again” (Variety 501), waxed in March 1937. On the premium, flagship label Master, Irving Mills and Charlie Weintraub exercised more control and had more input; on Variety, in contrast, Oakley was largely free to recruit and record whomever and whatever she wanted. In particular, Oakley displayed a real flare for assembling novel combinations of jazz musicians, often drawn from the ranks of well-established orchestras, to make intimate, irresistibly swinging records. Ellington’s orchestra supplied a particularly creative and fruitful crop of musicians from which to organize these classic small-group

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sessions. Under Oakley’s supervision, Barney Bigard, Johnny Hodges, Rex Stewart, Cootie Williams, and vocalist Ivie Anderson all recorded sides in 1937 as the leaders of various small combos. According to Cohen, however, only one of the now-revered eighty-eight sides released by Ellington or his sidemen on Master and Variety even approached being a hit record, and eventually the bottom line bit back.119 By October 1937, just seven months after its first release, Variety was defunct. Master had ceased issuing records even earlier, in mid-July. Both labels fell victim to the crippled economy of the Great Depression and to the fierce competition within the crowded marketplace for swing records. As the Master and Variety labels folded, Mills sold his back catalog to ARC, which, in turn, reissued them on Brunswick and Vocalion, respectively. Meanwhile, Master Records Inc., with its coveted new studios, remained in business until 1940, producing new recordings for Brunswick and Vocalion. For those final few years, Helen Oakley remained in place as chief talent scout and producer. When World War II broke out, she closed that chapter of her life and joined the Office of Strategic Services, working both in the United States and abroad for an intelligence organization that was the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.120 After the war, she returned to writing, producing a fine 1987 biography of blues guitarist T-Bone Walker. With her husband, British-born jazz critic Stanley Dance, she remained a prominent fixture of the jazz and blues scene until her death in 2001.121 The story of Helen Oakley Dance illuminates and complicates the history of roots music A&R in important ways. During her time at Master Records Inc., she oversaw the recording of an astonishing array of legendary jazz talent, including Sidney Bechet, Chick Webb, Claude Thornhill, Hot Lips Page, Chu Berry, Charlie Barnet, and Glenn Miller, as well as old friends Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and Cab Calloway, all of whom were by this time seasoned studio veterans. She also organized sessions for some fabulous new groupings of established talent in her small combo recordings. Oakley did occasionally find, develop, and record new talent. These discoveries included Boyce Brown, who first recorded with Paul Mares & His Friars Society Orchestra under her supervision in Chicago in 1935, as well as Chauncey Morehouse & His Swing Six, Jo Sodja’s Swingtette, and Frank Newton & His Uptown Serenaders, all of whom she recorded in New York during the late 1930s.122 Yet her real forte was assembling experienced, often extremely well-established recording artists, supplying them new material and new session-mates to inspire their creativity, and allowing them to record in new combinations that rarely threatened prior contractual obligations. Much the same can be said of Milton “Milt” Gabler. Born in 1911, the Jewish son of an Austrian immigrant father and a native New Yorker mother of Russian lineage, Gabler got into the business of recording hot jazz after an apprenticeship working in his father’s radio store and then, after taking over its management in 1931 and converting it into a phonograph and record store, running his own Commodore Music Shop on East Forty-Second Street in Manhattan. Having aquired tens of thousands of old, discarded jazz and blues records at bargain prices from record companies, Gabler’s

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shop became a mecca for record collectors and music fans, particularly of original Dixieland-style jazz. In 1936, as his stock dwindled, Gabler began reissuing classic and in-demand rare recordings on his own United Hot Clubs of America (UHCA) label. Two years later, he formed the Commodore label, which, like its UHCA predecessor, was among several small jazz specialty labels founded during the late 1930s and early 1940s, including Blue Note, Savoy, Keynote, and Signature.123 The goal of Commodore, as Gabler envisioned it, was to rerecord old standards, along with some new material, performed by veterans of the 1920s hot jazz scene. Among the artists he rerecorded were Sidney Bechet, Pee Wee Russell, Eddie Condon, George Buries, Bunk Johnson, and Wild Bill Davison, many of whom had been languishing in obscurity and sometimes poverty since their glory days in New Orleans and Chicago. Although Gabler continued to trade in reissues of older sides by the likes of Cow Cow Davenport, Django Reinhardt, and Fletcher Henderson, he eventually expanded Commodore’s scope to include original recordings by a new crop of swing and blues artists, sometimes in unusual settings. In 1938, for example, Gabler recorded Lester Young playing clarinet rather than his usual tenor saxophone. Perhaps most famously, Gabler produced Billie Holiday’s now-classic 1939 recordings “Strange Fruit” / “Fine and Mellow” (Commodore 526) by agreement with her label, Columbia, and her A&R man there, Gabler’s friend John Hammond, who, although deeply committed to social and racial justice, was still nervous about releasing the politically charged “Strange Fruit,” with its searing indictment of southern white racial violence.124 As the 1940s dawned, Gabler slipped into a more familiar A&R role, turning the operation of his store over to his brother-in-law Jack Crystal, father of comedian Billy Crystal. In 1941, Jack Kapp recruited Gabler to work at Decca, where, over the next two decades, he was instrumental in developing the careers of Peggy Lee, Lionel Hampton, and Louis Jordan, the biggest star of the 1940s jump scene. Jordan’s musical stylings paved the way for what would become rock & roll, a form whose breakthrough Gabler also did much to facilitate. In 1954, he signed a perennially minor-league western swing band, Bill Haley & His Comets, and produced their smash hit “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” (Decca 9-29124). Gabler initially put the song on the B-side of the deservedly now-long-forgotten “Thirteen Women (And Only One Man in Town),” a song of jaw-droppingly bad taste and relatively modest commercial appeal that described the romantic opportunities available to the lone male survivor of a nuclear holocaust.125 It remains a reminder of the fallibility of even the best A&R men. Meanwhile, as his A&R work diversified, Gabler kept Commodore going with a string of quality jam-session recordings that mobilized the after-hours talents of some remarkably loyal hot jazz musicians. Gabler’s generosity, sometimes at the expense of his own business interests, became legendary and was celebrated by saxophonist Bud Freeman in “Tappin’ the Commodore Till” (Commodore 508). Guitarist Eddie Condon signed with Decca in 1939 only after securing a provision in his contract stipulating that he could also record for Commodore whenever Gabler needed him. “Milt picked

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me up off the floor,” a grateful Condon remembered, and he, in turn, wished to repay the debt. In saltier language, another musician described Gabler as “the nicest bastard I know.”126 In an industry where exploitation was rife, this kind of rugged affection for an A&R man was not exactly universal among musicians. The key point here, however, is that Gabler broke into A&R work chiefly by recruiting and arranging sessions for extensively recorded, if no longer much in-demand artists, rather than by discovering and developing new ones. The careers of Helen Oakley Dance and Milt Gabler represent only a few of the myriad ways in which singers and musicians judged to have record- and hit-making potential came to the attention of A&R managers and scouts. Some of these performers, such as Doc Roberts, Duke Ellington, and Eddie Condon, were already veteran recording artists; others were unrecorded but presented themselves to A&R officials as likely hit-makers by writing letters, making telephone calls, or auditioning in person; some recording artists recommended other performers to their A&R contacts, as did many record distributors and retailers with their fingers on the pulse of who was creating a buzz in their localities; and, in some cases, A&R scouts did find promising artists performing on street corners, in theaters and juke joints, at churches, or on radio broadcasts. But finding talent was only part of the job. The courtship dance between A&R representatives and their discoveries (and rediscoveries) did not end until the terms and conditions under which those artists would record had been settled and a contract signed. In 1927, for instance, Paramount’s recording director Art Laibly proposed to pay Doc Roberts and his two bandmates a “straight 2¢ per record of two sides less 10% and your transportation both ways as well as reasonable hotel and meal expenses while at Chicago.” As part of the contract, however, they were required to “relinquish all claim to [Paramount] to all numbers recorded.”127 As interwar roots music recording evolved, this represented only one among numerous possible financial arrangements that A&R officials offered blues and hillbilly artists in return for their efforts.

I was better than 50 percent honest, and in this business that’s pretty good. —J. Mayo Williams Ink Williams robbed me. Not only me, everybody. The people who didn’t know how to have their songs copywritten [sic], he took all their music. —Alberta Hunter

3 Contracts and Copyrights TH E DA RK H E A RT O F A&R

AMONG

THE

MOST

I M P O R TA N T

A&R

RESPONSIBILITIES,

located somewhere between scouting for talent and recording that talent, was the business of contracting with singers and musicians for their recorded performances and, often, their compositions as well. “I was equipped to give a contract right on the spot to anyone that I felt was worthy of recording,” recalled Art Satherley of his days as a recording manager at Paramount, the American Record Corporation (ARC), and Columbia during a career that spanned some thirty years.1 Although not everyone involved in pre–World War II A&R enjoyed quite this latitude—and even Satherley was accountable to his record company paymasters for his choices and 87

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expenditures—A&R managers and their staff members were often heavily involved in determining how and how much roots music artists and songwriters were paid for their work, or sometimes were not. Perhaps unsurprisingly, few of the formal contracts or the many less formal incentives offered to artists and songwriters were models of unbridled generosity.

CO N T RACT S A N D CO N T R I C KS

The contracts offered to race and hillbilly artists during the 1920s and 1930s were invariably weighted heavily in favor of the record companies. For example, the contract Arizona Dranes signed on June 17, 1926, to record exclusively for OKeh stipulated that it was to remain “in force and effect for a period of indefinite years.” During the unspecified lifetime of the agreement, she was to record “as many selections as the Company may require,” at a rate of $25 per selection, “payable upon the acceptance by the Company of a master recording.” The contract also gave OKeh “the exclusive right to use her name and photographs, or other reproductions of the Artist’s likeness, in connection with or as part of advertisements, printed matter or any other material or act designed to promote or assist in the sale of phonographs, phonograph records or any parts or articles pertaining to phonographs.” The firm retained this right, though nonexclusively, even after the termination of the contract.2 Dranes’s contract made no mention of either “mechanical” or “performance” royalties: she was destined to make the same flat fee of $25 per released side, regardless of how many copies of her records were sold. This was common practice. “Mechanical royalties” for an artist, or a songwriter, or a publishing firm that owned the copyrighted selection, were directly related to the sales of records; “performance royalties” were notionally due whenever a piece of music was played publicly, whether in a studio, at a concert, or over the radio. If contracts that assigned decent mechanical royalty rates to roots artists and songwriters were as rare as gold dust, then contracts offering them performance royalties were more like hen’s teeth. Doc Roberts’s 1928 exclusive contract with the Starr Piano Company contained similar provisions to the one Dranes signed. “First Party [Starr Piano],” it specified, “may require each number to be repeated until a record satisfactory to First Party and fit for its purpose is produced, and shall be sole judge whether any recording made is acceptable for the catalogue. First Party does not bind itself to make any fixed number of records at any time or place, nor pay Second Party’s [Roberts’s] expense of any sort unless other terms are agreed to in a separate writing signed by both parties.” The agreement also conferred to Starr Piano “the optional right to command the personal services of Second Party, as performer and artist, at times and places and as frequently as First Party may determine necessary or desirable, for and during the period of two years from and after the date of exercise of said option.” Every recording that Roberts produced under the contract, “together with all rights and privileges of every character

The contract prohibited Morton as well as his orchestra from performing “for any other person, firm or corporation for the purpose of producing commercial sound records of any of the musical selections recorded hereunder.” In the event of such a breach, RCA Victor was “entitled to an injunction to enforce same, in addition to any other remedies available to it.” In exchange, Morton’s seven sidemen each received the regular “union scale” (then $30) for the session, while he earned double that rate as the “contractor and leader,” plus a “total of $75 for 4 arrangements.”5 Even when singers and musicians signed exclusive recording contracts with companies, A&R officials at rival firms often conspired with those artists to enable them to record pseudonymously for other paymasters. Some A&R personnel were equally promiscuous when it came to their own employment status. Most of the biggest players in the interwar roots recording business had exclusive contracts with individual companies. Yet, even among those elite A&R men, moonlighting for competitors was not uncommon. The best personnel were always being courted and sometimes hired away by other firms, making it hard to keep track of who was “A&R-ing” for which companies

CONTRACTS AND COPYRIGHTS

(1) the right to manufacture, advertise, sell, lease, license or otherwise use or dispel of in any or all fields of use, throughout the world, or to refrain therefrom, throughout the world or any part thereof, records embodying the performances to be recorded hereunder, upon such terms and conditions as the Company may approve; (2) the right to use your name and photograph, and the name and photograph of the Musical Organization, or any of its members, if desired, in connection with the exploitation of said records; and (3) all rights in and to the matrices and records, and the use and control thereof, upon which are reproduced the performances to be recorded hereunder.4

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and together with all profit, benefit and advantage pertaining thereto and from publishing, vending, using and dealing in and with the same, shall be the sole property of First Party.” Under the agreement, Roberts was to receive mechanical royalties of “one cent per side” on the sales of each of his Gennett records, with a reduced royalty rate of “one half cent” per side for releases on all of Starr Piano’s subsidiary labels as well as the “stencil” labels it custom pressed for client companies. Roberts, in turn, agreed “not to give or lend” his name “or use an assumed name . . . in connection with, or for the purpose of the production, reproduction, use, sale or advertisement of phonograph records, whether for compensation or otherwise.” If such a violation were to occur, Starr Piano would be “released and entirely freed from any obligation under this contract,” including payment of royalties. Furthermore, the company was “entitled to sue” and “collect damages” for breach of the agreement.”3 By the late 1930s, recording contracts had become even more complex and restrictive. On September 26, 1939, Jelly Roll Morton signed a contract with RCA Victor to cut four selections with his orchestra, billed as the New Orleans Jazzmen. The agreement granted the company and its subsidiaries

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at any given moment. In 1927, J. Mayo Williams managed both Paramount’s race record catalog and, unbeknownst to that label’s executives, that of a short-lived competitor, Black Patti.6 Indeed, interwar A&R was very much a revolving-door occupation, as recording department personnel frequently resigned from one record company to join another, or sometimes dropped out of the business entirely to pursue more lucrative or fulfilling opportunities in the allied fields of radio, music publishing, or motion pictures. That many A&R scouts and contractors, particularly those working territorial beats away from record companies’ northern headquarters, recruited talent or occasionally oversaw sessions for many labels simultaneously only intensified this confusion. With multiple connections and allegiances, freelance scouts and session contractors employed a wide variety of contractual arrangements—and displayed an equally broad range of attitudes toward honoring them. Harry Charles, for example, located race and hillbilly talent principally for Paramount in the mid- to late 1920s, but always on a nonexclusive basis.7 J. B. Long received a flat “finder’s fee” for bringing his discoveries into the studio and estimated that he “averaged about [$]250, $300 above all expenses” for arranging each of Blind Boy Fuller’s eleven blocks of sessions for ARC and eventually for Columbia between 1935 and 1940.8 This was a fairly common model of remuneration for A&R personnel who were not formally on record company payrolls. H. C. Speir, who scouted for at least nine labels between 1925 and 1936, received no royalties but rather a flat-rate fee of $100, plus expenses, for each artist he found who was recorded. Speir later complained that W. R. Calaway at ARC never paid him for the seventy or so recordings—most of them allegedly unusable or at least unmemorable—that they had supervised together at a July 1936 field session in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Clearly, A&R men sometimes duped not only their artists but also one another.9 Other A&R representatives enjoyed more regular and plentiful income, especially when their discoveries were selling well. Irving Mills, Duke Ellington’s controversial manager, song publisher, producer, and putative co-composer of some of his most popular numbers of the 1930s, was initially “recording for all the different record companies,” before signing “a very terrific deal” with ARC in the early 1930s. That deal, according to Mills, made him “the highest priced A&R man in the whole business at that time.”10 Between 1925 and 1931, Dennis Taylor, a Kentucky farmer turned talent scout, facilitated hillbilly recordings for Gennett and its subsidiary and stencil labels by perhaps as many as one hundred singers and musicians, among them Doc Roberts, Asa Martin, John D. Foster, and Red Foley. The paternalistic Taylor, who according to scholar Tony Russell “ran his cadre of musician-employees in the style of a plantation owner,” signed many of his artists to personal management contracts under which he covered the costs of working up songs and transporting his musicians to the recording sessions and then paid them a flat-rate fee per recorded side. In exchange, Taylor pocketed any royalties from the sales of those records, an arrangement that displeased more than one of his artists. In his best years, Taylor regularly earned between $800 and $900 per month from Gennett.11 Similarly, J. Mayo Williams said that he was never a salaried employee at any of the record companies he worked for between the early

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F I G U R E 3 .1. Dennis Taylor (third from left), flanked by (from left) guitarist Edgar Boaz, singer Welby Toomey, and fiddler Doc Roberts, at Gennett’s studio in Richmond, Indiana (1925). Courtesy of Berea College Special Collections and Archives, Berea, Kentucky.

1920s and the mid-1940s. “I never had no salary contract, nothing like that because I would get mine from the royalties from the songs,” he explained.12 This business model was typical for many enterprising A&R managers and scouts, who often earned the majority of their income in the recording industry from controlling copyrights. For many roots recording artists and subsequent critics, however, the harvesting of copyrights and royalties was one of the most contentious and exploitative aspects of A&R work. While the sometimes shady contracts and dubious copyright deals arranged by A&R men may seem far removed from the passion, artistry, and inspiration that fans like to imagine fueled the making of the now-classic blues and hillbilly recordings of the 1920s and 1930s, these practices constituted the vital financial lifeblood—as well as the dark heart—of the interwar roots music recording business.

F L AT R AT E V S . R OYA LT I E S

When it came to artists’ contracts, J. Mayo Williams claimed, “[Gennett] wouldn’t pay any flat salaries for artists, but they’d give them royalt[ies]. . . . No advance, nothing

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but paid expenses down there and back, and if your record sells you make something. . . . If it don’t, you’ve had a nice trip.”13 In truth, even at Gennett, there was a far wider range of practices than Williams remembered. According to chief recording engineer Harold Soulé, while more established acts were placed on a “royalty basis,” most “starters” and “beginners” received only a single “out-and-out payment” for their performances, usually $50 per selection, with “right and title” ceded to the record company. The recording artist had “made his record and gotten paid for it and that was all[;] he wasn’t entitled to any more money,” Soulé explained.14 His colleague, assistant sales manager and occasional A&R man Clayton “Jack” Jackson, remarked, “In those days recording companies didn’t pamper artists. Nobody paid their expenses. . . . Hell, we didn’t even buy them a sandwich.” And even if some of the more successful artists did receive royalty agreements, Jackson colorfully confessed, “Gennett fucked them on royalties,” not only by offering them an appallingly low rate but also by sometimes withholding payments. This was especially true on sales of the company’s cheaper Champion records, on which the identities of artists were almost always disguised behind pseudonyms and sides were occasionally released without those artists’ knowledge. Although Jackson somewhat defensively insisted that, after the contracts with singers and musicians had been signed, decisions about who ultimately got paid what were beyond the control of A&R men and in the hands of Gennett executive Fred Gennett, the bottom line remained that “they didn’t pay [royalties] to a lot of them.”15 The mixed moral, financial, and legal economy at Gennett indicates a wide range of practices when it came to contracting with and compensating roots music artists— and an equally variable set of standards when it came to delivering on what had been promised. As at Gennett, OKeh in the mid-1920s usually offered first-time recording artists only a flat-rate fee, but this was not always the case. Victoria Spivey, for example, received a $5,000 royalty payment for the sales of her 1926 debut release, “Black Snake Blues” / “No More Jelly Bean Blues” (OKeh 8338). The label’s more established artists regularly secured a share of royalties. In an all-too-common occurrence, however, Spivey was forced to sue her manager, Jesse Johnson, the A&R scout who had discovered her, for cheating her out of more than $2,400 in royalties from the sale of these and eight of her other compositions, which, she alleged, he had copyrighted in his own name.16 In 1931, four years after he had signed Doc Roberts to a royalties-plus-expenses deal, Paramount recording manager Art Laibly allowed bluesman Skip James to choose between a deferred royalty scheme and a flat fee for his first recordings. James, confident in the commercial appeal of his records, opted for the former, plus a basic $250 fee to cover the recording of more than twenty sides over the next two years. As the Great Depression deepened, however, record sales became increasingly sluggish and James probably would have been better off taking the flat fee rather than gambling on royalties from sales.17 Unlike James, few struggling roots music artists, particularly those from impoverished backgrounds making their first records and facing an uncertain future in the

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industry, were willing to turn down cash in hand for the prospect of future royalties. Most Cajun musicians, for example, gladly accepted flat fees of between $25 and $50 per recorded side, knowing that this far exceeded the $4 or $5 they could expect to receive for playing at a local dance, and that a single session was likely to pay as much as several months of backbreaking work as an agricultural day laborer.18 In order to balance the risk of failure against the potential for sizeable royalties from a hit record, some savvy artists did manage to negotiate a mixed-payment scheme with A&R officials. At Decca, Roy “Whitey” Grant and Arval Hogan struck an agreement with Dave Kapp to pay “so much flat and so much royalty” on their recordings, starting with $360, plus travel expenses, for the sixteen sides the duo cut in New York on November 8, 1939. In an interesting counterpoint to the more common tales of duplicity and deceptive written agreements, Grant later said that the “contract that we had with Decca was more or less an oral contract.” Apparently confident that he and his partner had received what was due to them from their label, Grant somewhat romantically explained, “Back then, in 1939, when a man told you something, that was almost as good as a contract then.”19 Diverse business practices notwithstanding, J. Mayo Williams’s generalization is largely on target: A&R officials preferred to pay artists a flat-rate fee for their studio work, rather than negotiate royalties linked to record sales or, in the case of original, copyrightable compositions, tied to what were known as “mechanical royalties.” According to the Copyright Act of 1909, mechanical royalties at the rate of two cents per copy of every recording sold were supposed to be paid to the copyright holder of the music reproduced on cylinders or 78-rpm discs. This provision extended not just to the first recording of any musical composition, but to all subsequent recordings during the life of the copyright. Until 1978, that time period was fixed at twenty-eight years, renewable once for an additional term by the author, his or her heirs, or whomever held legal claim as the proprietor of the copyright.20 By the mid- to late 1920s, A&R men such as Williams, Polk C. Brockman, W. R. Calaway, and Ralph Peer had come to appreciate the enormous profits to be reaped through controlling song copyrights and encouraging multiple recordings of each song. This may help explain the relaxed attitude of some, if by no means all, A&R officials toward artists who used pseudonyms to record copyrighted songs for multiple record companies. As long as the mechanical royalties derived from record sales—or at least a substantial portion of them—flowed into the coffers of the labels (or their publishing arms), or, better yet, into the pockets of the A&R men themselves, all was well. These peculiar economic and legal dynamics launched A&R officials on a feverish search, not just for new talent to record but also, more specifically, for new talent with original material that might be copyrighted. With the roots recording industry still in its infancy, definitions of “new,” “original,” and “author” were conveniently elastic: new versions of traditional songs, or even new arrangements of more recent compositions, could also be copyrighted as original compositions. As Art Satherley told a writer for the Saturday Evening Post in 1944, in his role as a Columbia A&R man he would

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willingly travel far and wide to record a hillbilly singer who had “a very original ballad.” Along these same lines, H. C. Speir maintained that whenever he found a bluesman he liked who had only two original songs, he encouraged him to develop additional material because most record companies were only interested in an artist who came to the studio with “at least four different songs of his own composition.”21 In this madcap scramble for original material, roots artists who composed their own songs, or who arranged traditional pieces, or who recast more recent numbers in ways that made them copyrightable, often signed away their own copyright claims. In return, they received what were usually modest onetime payments from the record companies or their publishing affiliates, which became, in legal parlance, “proprietor of copyright in a work made for hire.” Under these conditions, these songwriters were virtual company employees; the fruits of their creative labors were owned exclusively by that firm, to be exploited for its own—rather than for the artist’s or the songwriter’s— benefit, in whatever ways it wished.22 The flat-rate fees offered for recording work and song copyrights varied widely according to an artist’s previous sales figures, the predicted commercial prospects of that particular artist and his or her compositions, and the general state of the economy at any given time. Earlier in his career, while still working at Paramount, Art Satherley’s first major success in the race market occurred with the Norfolk Jubilee Quartet’s gospel number “My Lord’s Gonna Move This Wicked Race” (Paramount 12035), waxed in New York in April 1923. Although his recollections fluctuated about the precise compensation the group received for this recording (claiming at different times payments of $6 or, less likely, $100), Satherley consistently stated that it was a flat-rate fee, with no royalties from sales. As was customary, however, the quartet’s members were reimbursed for travel and expenses to attend the session.23 In a 1965 interview, Son House remembered that, in the early 1930s, Paramount was “paying $15 a side”—although at other times he claimed it may have been as much as $40.24 Even $40, though, was significantly less than the $75 per usable side that the same label had paid fellow Mississippi blues singer-guitarist Charley Patton for his debut recordings, made in Richmond, Indiana, on June 14, 1929, before the Wall Street Crash. Given that Paramount issued all fourteen songs he recorded that day—albeit with “Mississippi Boweavil Blues” / “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues” (Paramount 12805) pseudonymously credited to the Masked Marvel and the two-part sacred number “Prayer of Death” (Paramount 12799) to Elder J. J. Hadley—Patton may have left Richmond with more than $1,000 in fees for a day’s work. On one hand, this was an astonishing sum for an itinerant African American blues musician to take home to the Delta. On the other, it was barely a drop in the Mississippi River compared to the profits Paramount reaped from any one of the hits Patton recorded that day, among them the seminal “Pony Blues” (Paramount 12792).25 With the onset of the Great Depression, record sales plummeted from about seventy million discs generating $75 million in income in 1929 to only about four million

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discs yielding $5 million in 1933. Whereas a hit pop record might sell 350,000 or more copies in the late 1920s, within a few years average sales for a best-selling record sank to around five thousand copies.26 This economic collapse forced record companies and their A&R departments to recalibrate their payments to artists in all genres. In roots music, the example of Ralph Peer is again instructive. At the dawn of commercial hillbilly recording, Peer had offered Fiddlin’ John Carson the standard mechanical royalty rate of two cents per side for his second set of OKeh recordings, made in New York in November 1923, following the success of his debut record. Polk C. Brockman, however, maintained that OKeh quickly placed Carson on a monthly salary once he had demonstrated his commercial viability, again indicating that the single most important factor in determining remuneration to recording artists was usually their actual or perceived market value.27 By 1926, when he moved to Victor, Peer fully grasped the importance of securing and controlling song copyrights in order to cash in on the mechanical royalty payments that he had once routinely assigned to Carson and many of the other hillbilly and race artists on his OKeh roster. At Victor, Peer famously negotiated a contract for himself whereby he waived all but a token salary in exchange for being allowed to copyright and publish the blues, gospel, and hillbilly songs he recorded. Here the innovative Peer was pioneering a new model of vertical integration within the American roots recording industry; he placed the development and exploitation of new copyrighted musical properties at the core of a management structure that gave him enormous influence over every aspect of the music business: artists, repertoire, recording, publishing, and marketing.28 Between 1926 and 1934, Peer signed all his talent to exclusive contracts with his Ralph S. Peer Inc. artist management agency and recorded a guaranteed minimum number of selections with those artists each year. In return, his artists usually received a flat fee of $50 a side, plus travel, room, and board expenses. Jimmie Rodgers, for instance, received a total of $100 for his recordings of the traditional “Sleep Baby Sleep” and his own composition, “The Soldier’s Sweetheart” (Victor 20864), both of which were waxed at his debut session in Bristol, Tennessee, on August 4, 1927. By this time, Peer was prioritizing, almost to the point of exclusivity, artists like Rodgers and the Carter Family—his other major Bristol “find”—who could write or arrange their own original material. Peer copyrighted and published that music through his Southern Music Publishing Company Inc., which he formed in 1928. As his biographer Barry Mazor explains, this model virtually gave Peer a license to mint money, and by the following year, he was earning an estimated $50,000 per month “from mechanical royalties, the publisher’s share of performance royalties, and smatterings of sheet music publishing.”29 Between 1928 and 1935, Peer’s Southern Music deposited with the United States Copyright Office almost thirty-five hundred pieces of music, either as original compositions or, where copyrights already existed, as new arrangements. This constituted more than 75 percent of all the blues, gospel, and hillbilly selections released by Victor or its successor, RCA Victor, during this period.30

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Unusually, however, in the cutthroat world of A&R, Peer never bought copyrights outright, eschewing a widespread industry practice that effectively captured for record companies and their publishing subsidiaries all the mechanical royalties that might otherwise have gone to the songwriter. Nor did Peer ever insert his own name as cowriter, as was also a fairly common practice. Irving Mills, for example, regularly claimed co-authorship of Duke Ellington’s compositions, including “Mood Indigo,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” and “Sophisticated Lady,” which, according to Harvey G. Cohen, “he almost certainly did not help write.” To compound this dubious arrangement, that music was then published by Duke Ellington Inc., a company two-thirds owned by Mills and his lawyer Samuel Buzzell, thus leaving Ellington with just a one-third share of his compositions’ royalties, which had already been reduced by having to share composer credits with Mills. While this arrangement may have been better than those that many of Ellington’s contemporaries endured, it would later, as Cohen notes, “be viewed as unethical (especially Mills’s and his lawyer’s take of the proceeds).”31 As some artist-songwriters gradually came to recognize the potential value of controlling copyrights, they worked hard to secure or reclaim the rights to their own compositions. According to pioneering blues scholar Samuel Charters, Ralph Peer used to write to Will Shade, leader of the Memphis Jug Band, a couple of weeks before a recording session to give him and his bandmates time to write and rehearse new material. Appreciating that having his songs committed to print was crucial to securing copyright, Shade was careful to have them transcribed in the form of lead sheets, so that they could be copyrighted by Peer’s Southern Music. In this way, Shade secured his share of the royalties accrued from his compositions.32 Blues guitarist Sylvester Weaver likewise managed to copyright the instrumentals featured on his debut 1923 release, “Guitar Blues,” coupled with the much-covered “Guitar Rag” (OKeh 8109), as well as seven of his other recorded compositions. However, over the next few years, Weaver collected fewer than $138 in combined royalties for them; by 1927, he had apparently sold six of them to OKeh. His publisher, the Clarence Williams Music Publishing Company Inc., also pressured him to sell his copyrights. On May 12, 1924, the company’s president, Clarence Williams, himself an OKeh race recording artist, talent manager, and A&R director, wrote to Weaver explaining that his next royalty check was not due until August. “However,” Williams added, “if you are pressed for funds and desire to sell your share of the numbers, it may be possible for us to come to an agreement.”33 Some less-than-scrupulous recording artists sometimes followed the example of A&R officials by buying original songs from struggling songwriters who were desperate for quick cash. Under the terms of a lucrative agreement with Peer’s Southern Music, hillbilly singer Jimmie Davis published and copyrighted many songs in his name on which his contributions ranged from negligible to nonexistent, including, most famously, “You Are My Sunshine.” “There’s no doubt that he was willing to buy songs from others over the years and add his name to the credits,” explains Barry Mazor.

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F I G U R E 3 . 2 . Ralph Peer and Jimmie Rodgers (left), relaxing with their wives and Rodgers’s daughter at “Blue Yodeler’s Paradise,” Rodgers’s home in Kerrville, Texas (1930). John Edwards Memorial Foundation Records (#20001), Southern Folklife Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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“While Peer never engaged in that practice himself, he considered such dealings by his songwriting performers, if done legitimately as a purchase, not as theft, but as their business.” In the A&R field, where there were many shades of gray when it came to the legitimacy of certain practices, Mazor concedes that Peer was perfectly “capable of looking the other way.”34 In 1926, when he joined Victor, Peer had negotiated a deal with A&R chief, Walter Clark, whereby the company and Peer each took half of the standard two-cents-per-side mechanical royalty. Peer then split his share of the royalties with the songwriters, who were thus offered—and, more remarkably for the time, invariably received—half a cent for every recording of their compositions that sold.35 “We had royalties right from the start, and RCA [Victor] was always very, very honest, right from the very first,” recalled Patsy Montana, whose first sessions were organized by Peer in November 1932.36 Under these sorts of business agreements, leading hillbilly artist-songwriters of the late 1920s, such as the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, worked for a mixed schedule of modest flat fees and advances, plus expenses. But most importantly, they enjoyed a

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share of the mechanical royalties derived from sales of their compositions as recorded by themselves as well as by others. When the Great Depression hit, however, many small record companies foundered, and even industry giants such as RCA Victor, which had been formed in 1929, were forced to prune their rosters dramatically and revisit their pay schedules. In late 1930, Eli Oberstein, soon to be embroiled in a bitter power struggle with his former mentor Peer, placed draconian restrictions on both the kinds of artists who could be recorded (only the most proven and popular) and the number of records RCA Victor could release each year. The Carter Family and Rodgers survived the cut, but Peer modified their financial arrangements so that, rather than having to wait for ever-dwindling mechanical royalties from an eviscerated market, they would now receive set payments up front, just as most roots recording artists always had. A. P. Carter, the group’s chief songwriter and arranger, was to be paid $100 per side; Rodgers, at the time hillbilly music’s brightest star, would receive $250 per side.37 This contractual restructuring appears to have mystified and angered both acts. Rodgers fired off several letters to RCA Victor inquiring about his royalty checks, not comprehending that they had been replaced by a flat-rate fee that, given the dire market situation, probably reaped more—and certainly faster—financial rewards than a royalty arrangement would have. The Carter Family’s total mechanical royalties for the first quarter of 1934 amounted to only $69.94, far less than the trio earned for a single recording under Peer’s new compensation scheme. Over the years, Peer’s dealings have drawn a good deal of criticism, many of them rooted in the Carters’ and Rodgers’s expressions of dissatisfaction about their loss of royalty payments. Nonetheless, Barry Mazor makes a compelling case that Peer genuinely seems to have been trying to protect his prize assets and some of his lesser acts from the worst ravages of the Great Depression by guaranteeing them money in hand.38 Across the recording industry, sales had fallen precipitously, and the sales of records, regardless of artist or genre, naturally tapered off the longer a release was on the market. Some artists failed to appreciate this basic reality or the benefits of Peer’s new up-front, per-session, per-song method of payment. This is not to say that Peer was suddenly oblivious to the long-term and, ultimately, far greater financial benefits of securing more copyrights and commanding an everbigger share of mechanical royalties for himself. When Peer reclaimed sole personal control of Southern Music, which Victor and later RCA Victor had run from 1928 to 1932, with Peer acting more or less as a salaried employee, its astonishing success was predicated on just such an understanding. It is, however, to suggest that Peer was not quite the unscrupulous figure some artists and scholars believed him to be.

COPYRIGHTS AND WRONGS

With his broad expertise in the recording industry, Peer was a visionary when it came to maximizing the financial benefits he derived from his A&R work. Yet he was hardly alone among that entrepreneurial cohort in spotting the economic potential of song

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F I G U R E 3 . 3 . Cover of the Reverend Andrew Jenkins’s Christian Love Songs folio (1924). Polk C. Brockman published this songbook, which features a photograph of Jenkins flanked by his two stepdaughters, Irene Spain (right) and Mary Lee Eskew, who performed with him on radio and records as the Jenkins Family or, alternatively, Jenkins’ Sacred Singers. Southern Folklife Collection Song Folios (#30006), Southern Folklife Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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publishing and copyright control. As early as October 1923, his colleague and sometime collaborator Polk C. Brockman started copyrighting material written by some of the artists he helped usher into recording studios with his eponymous Brockman Publishing Company. At first, he registered blues songs, but he soon came to focus on hillbilly numbers, beginning with Fiddlin’ John Carson’s “You’ll Never Miss Your Mother Until She’s Gone” in February 1924. Brockman not only copyrighted and published sheet music for the song, but he even claimed co-authorship (pseudonymously as E. B. Brockman), despite the fact that this sentimental piece was based closely on a circa 1910 shape-note gospel number titled “Mother and Home.” Carson’s recording (OKeh 4994) apparently sold briskly, while Brockman’s publishing company raked in additional royalties from other recorded versions by hillbilly artists such as George Reneau (Vocalion 14811 and 5030), Riley Puckett (Columbia 240-D), and G. B.

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Grayson and Henry Whitter (Gennett 6320 and Champion 15395, among others).39 Following this initial success, Brockman steadily expanded his company’s catalog of hillbilly, blues, and both white and black gospel songs until, by 1932, it contained some 250 musical copyrights, the vast majority related to recordings made for OKeh.40 Somewhat misleadingly, Brockman later claimed that he “never published any sheet music or song folios on my own. My sole interest was in the mechanicals and recordings.”41 In fact, because Carson, like most roots recording artists, recorded “head arrangements” with no written music and lacked the formal musical training to transcribe retrospectively whatever they had recorded, Brockman hired transcribers who copied the lyrics and music from records into publishable and copyrightable form on lead sheets. Irene Spain completed much of this work, often assisted by her stepfather, the Reverend Andrew Jenkins—himself a prodigious OKeh recording artist and songwriter who worked extensively for Brockman. “Poor John,” Spain recalled, “couldn’t make a record unless he was a little more than half drunk and he always had to have a ‘jaw-breaker’—a candy ball about half as big as a golf ball—in his mouth and he would roll that around while singing. His words were so muddled up at times that we had to almost guess at what he was saying to get them on paper.”42 Brockman also published a couple of Carson song folios, among them a ramshackle 1932 collection titled Fiddlin’ John Carson: Dixie’s Champion of Champions that bore very little connection to his actual repertoire. Brockman appears to have been utterly indifferent as to whether Carson had actually composed any of the songs for which the fiddler claimed authorship and that Brockman copyrighted. Brockman, in fact, doubted that any of Carson’s pieces were original to him. Most of his recordings consisted of reworked songs from vernacular tradition, where matters of provenance and authorship were notoriously tangled, or original compositions provided by professional songwriters, including Jenkins.43 Jenkins wrote dozens of songs for Brockman in return for a flat-rate commission. When Brockman copyrighted (and occasionally even published) that material, he often reaped enormous financial rewards, particularly in the case of Jenkins’s hugely successful and widely recorded topical ballad, “The Death of Floyd Collins,” which Brockman sold to Shapiro, Bernstein & Company Inc. of New York. In turn, this premier Tin Pan Alley publishing firm issued it in sheet music form. Characteristically, Vernon Dalhart cut versions of the song for seven record companies between May 1925 and February 1926, including one, under the pseudonym Al Craver, for Columbia (Columbia 15031-D). Paired with Dalhart’s rendition of another tragic song, “Little Mary Phagan,” this disc sold more than three hundred thousand copies, making it the best selling of all 782 records issued in the label’s “Familiar Tunes, Old and New” series.44 According to both Irene Spain and Barbara Brockman McClenny, Brockman’s daughter, the enterprising A&R man was able to purchase a luxurious $20,000 house in Atlanta’s swanky Druid Hills neighborhood—a house McClenny believed was subsequently used as one of the set locations for the 1989 feature film, Driving Miss Daisy—with the royalties from “The Death of Floyd Collins” alone. Brockman had purchased the song from Jenkins for just $25.45

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Equally prescient about the value of copyrightable songs was J. Mayo Williams, Paramount’s race records A&R director. Assisted by his secretary Aletha Dickerson, Williams handled the management of Paramount’s copyright, publishing, and royalty affairs through, first, its Chicago Music Company and, then, after it was dissolved and reincorporated in 1924, its Chicago Music Publishing Company. These music publishing companies proved lucrative for Paramount’s parent company, the New York Recording Laboratories (NYRL), which was itself a subsidiary of the Wisconsin Chair Company of Port Washington, Wisconsin. Initially headquartered in that city but later based in Chicago, Chicago Music was, according to Stephen Calt, “the first record company publishing satellite.” It filed its first “notice of use” with the United States Copyright Office on December 26, 1922, to prevent, at least temporarily, Alberta Hunter’s “Down Hearted Blues” (Paramount 12005) “from becoming ‘public domain’ material” and therefore susceptible to being recorded without royalty payments by rival record labels. Two months later, Chicago Music submitted its first formal copyright registration for the same song, although it was only after Williams joined Paramount in 1923 that the firm really began to exploit this aspect of the recording industry effectively. That year, Paramount’s publishing arm registered only ten musical compositions for copyright; between 1924 and 1928, under Williams’s management, the renamed Chicago Music Publishing Company annually copyrighted about one hundred compositions, all of them blues numbers.46 While at Paramount, Williams recalled, “I did do A&R work for [the label], but I didn’t work on a regular salary. I was getting a drawing account or expense account from both the publishing company and the NYRL. . . . They knew I was getting mine [his main income] from the publishing company.”47 It was much the same when Williams later worked for Jack Kapp at Brunswick and then, beginning in 1934, again for Kapp, at Decca. In 1928, Williams set up the State Street Music Publishing Company to protect Brunswick’s song publishing interests just as he had managed the Chicago Music Publishing Company at Paramount “to protect the company and the artists from outside concerns.”48 Working without a salary, Williams earned a good living off royalties from the songs he controlled. “I was getting the songs for half a cent, see,” he explained, suggesting that he was keeping for himself one and a half cents of the standard two-cents-per-side mechanical royalties owed to the copyright holder.49 At other times, Williams claimed a share of the copyrights to songs to which he had contributed minor grammatical amendments or purged of cruder, often overtly sexual imagery in order to make them more commercially acceptable, occasionally employing the songwriter pseudonym Everett Murphy.50 Williams’s behavior exposes the economics of the American roots recording industry at the point where the key roles of A&R officials as talent scouts, recording supervisors, contract negotiators, and music publishers intersected. In a 1970 interview, Williams gamely tried to argue that the publishing companies from which he derived most of his income “protected the artists,” claiming that “we paid the composers royalties on their songs.” But he freely admitted that the main motivations were to “to protect

F I G U R E 3 .4 . Excerpt from an advertisement for J. Mayo Williams’s short-lived Black Patti label, which specialized in blues and gospel records. Chicago Defender, May 21, 1927. Authors’ collections.

Virtually all of the artists Williams signed and recorded for Paramount, Brunswick, and Decca, as well as those who made original recordings for his Gennett-subsidized Black Patti experiment, “received a flat fee.” He added, “I don’t know of a single one that was on a royalty basis.”52 Such financial arrangements may have benefited A&R men and the record companies that employed them, but they were often profoundly unfair to artists and songwriters, even when they were not necessarily illegal. Alberta Hunter always maintained that Williams had denied her the compensation she deserved for her songs at Paramount by secretly negotiating with other companies to record her compositions and by the widespread use of “cut-ins”—which gratuitously added the names of other individuals to composer credits to gain them shares of royalties. “That man was a thief from the day he was conceived,” Hunter railed. “He robbed all of us. . . . Not only me, everybody.”53 As historian William Howland Kenney summarizes, Williams’s “creative bookkeeping assured that the vast majority of all artists saw no sales royalties, realizing only however much might be left of their flat recording payment after Williams’s ‘fee’ had been subtracted.”54 Williams happily conceded, in loaded language, that “I’ve got a good bit of Shylock in me,” and that, during his decades-long A&R career, he readily subscribed to the industry maxim, “screw the artist before he screws you,” all while complaining that “there wasn’t much loyalty among the artists.” Such attitudes undercut Stephen Calt’s insistence that “it would be inaccurate to castigate Williams as a ruthless exploiter who habitually ‘cheated’ talent,” although Calt is undoubtedly right to assert that most roots recording contracts, not just those in the race field, were “inherently exploitative.”55 Williams’s practices were insensitive at best, cynically indifferent at worst, to the primary interests of the African American artists and songwriters who worked with him. A case in point is pianist Cow Cow Davenport, who recorded blues and boogiewoogie numbers for Williams at Vocalion in 1928 and 1929, and again for him at Decca in 1938. Davenport also regularly assisted Williams as a talent scout. In 1940, Davenport applied for membership in the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) but was refused because he lacked enough copyrighted songs to qualify.

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35% of the artists sold off their compositions outright for a flat proposition. They didn’t want to wait and see what they might earn on royalties. They’d say, “Give me $50-$75or $100 and forget about it.” That’s where the publishing company made money. Not only did the publishing company receive all the royalties from the compositions that they owned outright, but they stood to make a lot if another company made a record using that composition.51

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the recording company” and, equally important, to secure his own income. Moreover, Williams also conceded that opportunities for exploitation were plentiful. “Artists at that time didn’t know anything about copyright,” he explained, noting that

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This, he pointed out in a letter to Down Beat magazine, was because Williams and his State Street Music Publishing Company had purchased the rights to all his music for next-to-nothing in the late 1920s. Carlton Brown, a Down Beat journalist, investigated Davenport’s claims and, in 1945, confirmed that the pianist-composer had indeed surrendered his rights to his original songs, including “Mama Don’t Allow No Easy Riders Around Here” and the widely covered “Cow Cow’s Blues,” for as little as $2 apiece.56 Ironically, when Davenport pursued legal action to reclaim some of his copyrights and royalties, his biggest payoff, in the amount of $500, came for “Cow Cow Boogie” (Capitol 102), a big 1942 hit for vocalist Ella Mae Morse, accompanied by Freddie Slack & His Orchestra. Davenport, however, had not actually written that song, nor did it bear any obvious link to any of his compositions.57 Similar accounts abound implicating A&R officials in both the casual exploitation and the calculated abuse of recording artists and songwriters. On February 16, 1923, Bessie Smith recorded “Down Hearted Blues” / “Gulf Coast Blues” (Columbia A3844) in New York for Columbia A&R man Frank Walker. Smith, who would reign as the most popular of all the vaudeville blues singers of the 1920s, reportedly received a flat rate of $125 per usable side for what turned out to be an extremely lucrative record that eventually sold more than 275,000 copies.58 Unbeknownst to Smith, however, her manager and piano accompanist on these sides, composer, music publisher, and sometime A&R man, Clarence Williams, had signed her to a contract with himself, not Columbia, as she believed. Williams was secretly collecting for himself half of Smith’s flat-rate fee as per the recording contract he had negotiated with the label on her behalf. In April, after the intervention of her future husband Jack Gee, Smith did obtain a more favorable deal from Walker, this time contracting directly with Columbia. Under her new contract, Smith received the entire amount of $125 per issued side (later raised to $200 in December 1923), with a guaranteed annual minimum income of $1,500 (later raised to $2,400). But, in return, she had to relinquish the copyrights to her compositions, which Walker, now installed as her manager with regard to her recording career, registered with his own publishing companies, Frank Music Corporation and later Empress Music Inc. This arrangement allowed Walker to collect a good-sized share of the substantial mechanical royalties Smith’s recordings generated, the remainder going into Columbia’s coffers.59 According to John Hammond, at the peak of her fame between 1923 and 1928, Smith sold roughly six to seven million records for Columbia, which equates to twelve to fourteen million sides. But her popularity dipped toward the end of her career, along with the fees she commanded: Smith was paid a total of only $150 for her final four sides, which she cut with Hammond at Columbia’s Fifth Avenue studios on November 24, 1933. Had she not signed away the copyrights to thirty-eight of her own compositions she cut for Columbia, at the standard mechanical royalty rate of two cents per side sold, Smith’s efforts would probably have netted her more than $30,000. Moreover, although such arrangements were unusual, had Smith also been able to

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secure royalties at the same rate on sales of all the sides she recorded during a decade with Columbia, irrespective of whether or not she wrote the songs, she may have been due royalties in excess of $240,000. Instead, “The Empress of the Blues” earned a grand total of $28,575 from the label.60 By most measures, Frank Walker hardly approached the levels of heartlessness and deceitfulness typical of many A&R men who prowled the American roots recording industry in the 1920s and 1930s. He even earned a reputation for being somewhat more progressive on racial issues than most of his white A&R contemporaries, and his actions toward Smith seem far less craven than those of Clarence Williams. Nevertheless, Walker casually exploited the naiveté of Smith and Gee, who, understandably, simply did not appreciate the potential rewards of retaining the rights to the thirty-eight songs that Smith had written herself and that were initially copyrighted in her name.61 It was an all-too-familiar story, though one with countless variations. Another example involves Billie Holiday, one of the multitude of singers Bessie Smith influenced. Holiday claimed that she received $35 for the first Columbia session John Hammond arranged for her, singing for a small combo led by Benny Goodman in November 1933. Her rate was summarily reduced to $30 for the half-dozen Brunswick sides she waxed with Teddy Wilson’s band in July 1935. Not surprisingly, it was only when Holiday started making—and selling—a considerable number of records under her own name, rather than as a featured vocalist, that her pay scale increased. But even the modest hike to a flat rate of $75 per side was a hard-fought victory, dependent on the benevolent intervention of songwriter Bernie Hanighen, who doubled as a musical director at Columbia and, in effect, co-produced several of her classic 1930s recordings with Hammond. Years later, in her memoir Lady Sings the Blues (1956), Holiday remained decidedly lukewarm toward Hammond and his influential role in her career, maintaining that he could and should have done more to protect her interests and reward her talents.62 Although defensive about the particulars, Hammond had few quibbles with Holiday’s characterization of the exploitation that lay at the heart of the industry. In 1936, writing for the radical magazine New Masses under the pseudonym Henry Johnson, Hammond condemned the “shady practices” that enveloped the music business, especially “in connection with Negro and hillbilly artists and composers. In the ‘race’ and hillbilly catalogs,” he complained, “it has long been the practice to acquire tunes which sell in the hundreds of thousands for sums ranging from a jug of mountain corn to $10 or $15. One leading company assigns all this material to a publishing company which is owned by one of its officials. Others merely save the penny-odd royalty that would ordinarily go to the artist and publisher either for themselves or favored officers.”63 Billie Holiday was on the receiving end of this kind of abusive practice and expressed the bitterness that many roots music performers felt toward the industry for favoring onetime payments to recording artists and for harvesting copyrights and royalties from songwriters in return for flat fees. “In those days,” she wrote, “you could take it or leave

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it. It didn’t make any difference if the record companies made thousands off the records later, you’d never get another dime. This seventy-five bucks sometimes included tunes of my own that I had written. I got no royalties for them either.”64 As Hammond had recognized, the story was not much different in the hillbilly music field. The Callahan Brothers, for example, also received no royalties on their records. In late 1933, W. R. Calaway heard Joe and Bill Callahan, then both in their early twenties, perform in Asheville, North Carolina, probably on WWNC, and only days later, on January 2, 1934, in New York, the duo made the first of some eighty sides they recorded for ARC. For this session, which generated, among other recordings, the popular, muchreissued, and much-covered “She’s My Curly Headed Baby,” the Callahans earned $12.50 per selection, plus their train fare, accommodations at the Wilson Hotel, and some extra pocket money with which to explore Manhattan. ARC, in turn, issued “She’s My Curly Headed Baby” on ten domestic releases across its complex of dime-store labels (including Banner 32955, Columbia 37633, OKeh 04359, Oriole 8300, Romeo 5300, and Vocalion 04359), as well as on Melotone in Canada. Reflecting on a career that extended into the 1950s, Bill Callahan expressed a not-uncommon blend of deep gratitude and bitter resentment toward his primary A&R contact. “W. R. Calaway did as much as anybody in the world for me. I can say that truthfully,” Callahan told interviewers in 1979. But, he continued, “you pay for what you learn through the years. . . . He drew the royalties and everything off our records.” In Callahan’s mind, Calaway had exploited their naiveté every bit as much as did the New York taxi driver who took them on an expensive, roundabout, thirty-five-minute ride to studios that were actually located just a block away. “That cabdriver found him a sucker,” Callahan admitted, and so had Calaway. “We were just little, young kids and everything, and didn’t know any difference.” Insisting, perhaps a little too forcefully to be entirely convincing, that he didn’t “regret a dime of it,” Callahan was still at pains to note that “one time [Calaway] showed me a picture [of] a huge, beautiful motel in Miami. He says, ‘Look what you and [Joe] done for me.’ Boy, that was [adding] an insult to injury.”65 A similarly complex, unequal, and manipulative relationship developed between Blind Boy Fuller and his A&R man and sometime manager, J. B. Long. Having worked with Long and Art Satherley since his first sessions for ARC in 1935, the disgruntled bluesman decided that he should be receiving more money and, in July 1937, briefly recorded for J. Mayo Williams at Decca, apparently earning $150 for twelve sides. Long, in turn, accused Decca of illegally enticing Fuller to break a contract that Long did not, at the time, actually have with the artist. Although Decca had already issued two records, Long successfully intimidated the company into withdrawing those, and it refrained, at least temporarily, from releasing any more of Fuller’s sides. After Fuller returned to Long’s stewardship, the A&R man scrambled to lock the blind singer-guitarist into a formal contract and tried to placate him with the gift of “a cheap car.”66 Long always claimed he never took a percentage of Fuller’s payments or sought to copyright his songs. It was, he maintained, his fellow A&R men Art Satherley and W. R.

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F I G U R E 3 . 5 . J. B. Long at the United Dollar Store he managed in Kinston, North Carolina (ca. 1934). He stands in front of boxes containing more than 5,600 phonograph records, reportedly the largest such shipment ever received by any store in the state to that point. Courtesy of Bruce Bastin.

Calaway who were responsible for administering the meager share of royalty payments that he and Fuller sometimes received beyond their flat-rate finder and recording fees, respectively. For Fuller, those onetime payouts seem to have ranged from a low of $18.75 per side for his single 1939 session to a slightly more generous $20 per side for his two 1940 sessions.67 Two things are especially striking about the recording contract for the 1940 sessions drawn up by Satherley in March, which called for the bluesman to cut twenty-four selections over the next year at $20 per side, with an option to renew at an increased rate of $22.50. The first is that Fuller was strangely designated a “hillbilly” artist. This was almost certainly a clerical error, albeit an intriguing one. The boundaries separating roots music genres remained quite porous in the years between the two world wars. Paradoxically, A&R managers sometimes found themselves encouraging this kind of musical fluidity through decisions about who and what to record and how to sell those recordings, even as they aided the segmentation of the untidy roots music market into more circumscribed stylistic and sales categories, most obviously “race” and “hillbilly.” The second striking feature, and surely no mistake, is that the contract stipulated “payable to J. B. Long.” This raises the possibility that, despite Long’s disclaimers, Fuller may not have received all, or perhaps even any, of his recording fee.68 Whether or not this arrangement strictly conformed to the terms and conditions of Fuller’s personal management contract with Long, their relationship reflected the

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inherently exploitative dynamics of the American roots recording industry, dynamics that A&R officials rarely did much to challenge. In 1939, William Lewis, a government social worker, investigated Fuller’s precarious health and financial circumstances. In part, this was to determine if Fuller’s commercial recordings, combined with his busking performances on the streets of his native Durham, North Carolina, generated enough income to make him ineligible for welfare benefits. Lewis’s report concluded that Fuller was in dire health, dirt poor, and, under his contract with Long, receiving only a fraction of the income generated by his records. Long, meanwhile, was said to be “mopping up.”69 Decades later, Long lamented that, while more savvy and betterpositioned A&R men such as Satherley and Calaway got rich through their control of song copyrights during the mid- to late 1930s, he made relatively little money off his artists beyond his finder’s fees. While there is no denying the self-serving nature of Long’s account, his plight probably did mirror that of many minor-league A&R scouts. “And that’s about the only big time that I could ’a made some money out of it if I’d ’a had any of the things copyrighted,” Long recalled, “but I didn’t know anything about copyrightin’ ’em back in those days.”70 Ignorance and naiveté undoubtedly made roots recording artists—and occasionally A&R men like Long—vulnerable, particularly concerning issues of copyright. Some singers and musicians, though, did come to appreciate the value of songs as commercial and legal properties. Unfortunately, recognizing value did not always mean that artists, songwriters, and even A&R officials could redeem that value. Millie Good, who, with her younger sister Dolly, formed the highly successful Girls of the Golden West, provides a curious but revealing illustration of this problem. The duo came to the attention of Eli Oberstein at RCA Victor in 1933 as a result of their regular appearances on WLS-Chicago and the efforts of their enterprising manager, William Ellsworth, a former St. Louis radio station director. The Girls of the Golden West began their recording career that July, originally for Oberstein on RCA Victor’s budget-priced Bluebird label, but later worked with Art Satherley at Columbia, with recordings issued on Vocalion and OKeh, among other labels. Initially, they received a share of the royalties from their record sales, 15 percent of which went directly to Ellsworth, who, in the fashion of some personal managers, also supervised a couple of his act’s 1934 Chicago sessions. Although their records featured both original songs and cover versions of others’ material, the Goods neglected to publish or copyright any of their own compositions, only belatedly learning of their potential worth. “I did finally have most all of them copyrighted,” explained Millie Good McCluskey in a 1988 interview. She also said that she and her sister were owed royalties on songs that they had bought and recorded, but never penned, such as “Texas Moon” (Vocalion / OKeh 04373). “We didn’t write it,” McCluskey admitted. “Another girl wrote it, but we bought it from her outright. So we own that. So I have had that copyrighted.” Even so, it remains unclear whether or not McCluskey had any success in claiming her royalties for this song, as it had not been formally published and, as she mistakenly believed, “you can’t collect on it

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unless you have them published.” Rather forlornly, McCluskey admitted to interviewer John Rumble, “I don’t know how to get it [published].”71 Even better informed and more seasoned recording artists struggled to secure financial rewards commensurate with their commercial success, let alone reflective of their creative talents. The fate of the Dixon Brothers, a guitar-and-steel-guitar act featuring Dorsey M. Dixon and his younger brother Howard, was typical. With regular day jobs as textile mill workers in East Rockingham, North Carolina, the gifted duo honed their musical skills performing at stage shows in local schoolhouses, theaters, and churches. The brothers rose to regional prominence in the mid-1930s, like so many other hillbilly artists, via radio, in this case on WBT-Charlotte’s Crazy Barn Dance, a Saturday-night variety program sponsored by the regional division of the Crazy Water Crystals Company of Mineral Wells, Texas, manufacturer of a popular laxative. The Dixons had a broad repertoire, but fueled by Pentecostal passion, they specialized in Dorsey’s bracing religious jeremiads and “event songs,” which usually focused on death and tragedy. On February 12, 1936, the Dixon Brothers recorded their first six sides for RCA Victor, under Eli Oberstein’s direction, at a field session in Charlotte, North Carolina. Over the next two and a half years, they cut forty-nine additional sides for the company, plus thirty-six sides separately, with sundry musical partners. The duo’s recordings, as well as those of their related groups, were released on the firm’s low-priced Bluebird label, or on the custom-pressed Montgomery Ward mail-order label, or sometimes on both. Among the most popular of Dorsey’s compositions was “Wreck on the Highway,” initially recorded by the brothers in 1938 as “I Didn’t Hear Anybody Pray” (Bluebird B-7449 and Montgomery Ward M-7489) and later turned into a major national hit by Roy Acuff & His Smoky Mountain Boys in 1942 (OKeh 6685 and Columbia 37028, among others).72 Dorsey Dixon knew there was money to be made off his original songs. Yet he still failed to nail down adequate copyright protection and thereby secure appropriate royalties for his compositions, some of which, such as “Wreck on the Highway,” were widely covered by other artists after World War II. For this, he blamed Oberstein, accusing the A&R man of brazen deception. According to Dixon, on the first night he and his brother recorded for Oberstein, he had signed a contract that “looked all right.” It later became apparent that Oberstein had folded the bottom of the contract to conceal the section pertaining to song copyright. Oberstein subsequently sold the copyrights to a number of Dixon’s songs to various Manhattan music publishers, including the Georgia Music Company (later the Georgia Music Corporation), owned by songwriter, music publisher, and sometime A&R man Joe Davis, apparently in exchange for under-the-table payments. “Eli Oberstein tricked me, you know,” Dixon declared in a 1962 interview, “and he tricked me all the way through, ’cause when I put in claim, why my copyrights was scattered all over New York City.” In a rather unusual twist to this familiar tale, Dixon also accused Wade Mainer, the singer and banjoist for J. E. Mainer’s Crazy Mountaineers, with whom the Dixon Brothers often performed on WBT,

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for persuading him to copyright six of his songs, including “I Didn’t Hear Anybody Pray,” in both their names. “Wade Mainer, he sweet talked me,” Dixon complained. He accused his onetime friend and more experienced fellow musician of trying to gain control of these potentially lucrative copyrights by claiming he would be able to help the industry newcomer protect his compositions. Disillusioned, the Dixon Brothers dropped out of the music business after their recording contract ended in 1938. They returned to the regular low-wage jobs that they, like most roots recording artists, never managed to escape for long.73

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Eli Oberstein seems to have been particularly unscrupulous in his dealings with artists and business colleagues alike. But similar tales of duplicity among A&R men are legion, judging by the testimony of victimized performers and songwriters. Still, such stories, true as they may be, must be placed within the context of an industry in which simple economic imperatives meant that most A&R officials were striving to record the greatest number of hit records, at the lowest possible costs, with the highest possible financial benefit to themselves and the record companies they served. In this commercial calculus, singers and musicians often appeared as a necessary evil or, more generously, as a decidedly mixed blessing. Without artists and songwriters, there were obviously no recordings to make or sell and, therefore, no profits to be made. Consequently, at a very basic level, they had to be courted and rewarded, especially once they had demonstrated their market appeal. At another level, the drive to maximize profits encouraged executives to keep those rewards to the minimum needed to retain the most popular artists and songwriters. So what conclusions can be drawn about the often-manipulative and sometimes openly abusive relationships that existed among A&R officials and the creative artists they needed to make both commercial recordings and a living for themselves? William Howland Kenney asserts that recording managers such as J. Mayo Williams ultimately “had little choice about dunning the vocalists and musicians; if he had not worked in this way, it is hard to see how he could have made any money at all.”74 Likewise, Robert Springer and Jeff Todd Titon harbor some sympathy for the travails of A&R men, while sharing Kenney’s appreciation that to explain their predicament is not to excuse their skullduggery. “The only plausible argument in defence of the exploiters of the 1920s and 1930s might have been that producing records was a precarious, high-risk venture,” Springer contends.75 Titon argues much the same point with particular reference to country blues artists. “It would be easy to conclude that the record industry exploited downhome blues singers by denying them artist royalties, stealing composer copyrights, and paying them a pittance for their talent,” he writes. But Titon sets these indictments against the fact that locating talent and producing hit records was an uncertain undertaking.76 It was precisely because of the speculative nature of the business that,

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A lot of people give J. B. Long a hard time, but I don’t give J. B. Long a hard time. I thought he was a marvelous fellow. He may not have given me every dime I was supposed to get, but how much did I know I was supposed to get? He saw some talent, he saw some quality

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before Ralph Peer agreed to gamble on recording Fiddlin’ John Carson in 1923, Polk C. Brockman had to assure him that he would order five hundred copies of the disc to sell in his Atlanta furniture store. In later interviews, H. C. Speir echoed Brockman’s point that it often took that kind of pledge from a record dealer to persuade reluctant A&R managers to record a new artist.77 “Sales income from most downhome blues records was insufficient to meet the expense of their recording, manufacture, and distribution,” Titon elaborates. “The company was not required to pay the artists any flat fee for their services. By trading a lump sum for copyrights and artists royalties, the singers were assured of immediate cash, no matter how badly their records performed on the market.”78 Ultimately, those blues and hillbilly artists who recorded material that was never commercially issued or that generated sales of only a few hundred copies, or who wrote songs that sold poorly or were never covered by other artists, were probably ahead of the game if they took their onetime cash payments, no matter how meager, upfront. By contrast, it was those artists and songwriters like Bessie Smith, whose records or songs consistently did well for a number of years, who stood to lose the most money when they waived their mechanical royalties and signed over their copyrights in return for a flat fee. It is also important not to dismiss or underestimate testimony from recording artists such as Bill Callahan. Perfectly secure in the knowledge that he had been royally fleeced by W. R. Calaway, Callahan still insisted that he was eternally grateful for the opportunity that Calaway had provided.79 It sounds irredeemably patronizing and selfserving, however, when an A&R man like Frank Walker, who profited considerably from blues and hillbilly artists, claimed that some of those who recorded for him simply “never asked you for money. They didn’t question anything at all. They just were happy to sing and play. . . . They had made a phonograph record, and that was the next thing to being president of the United States in their mind, you see.”80 Similarly, it grates to hear Ralph Peer, who grew enormously wealthy from American roots music, insist that most of his hillbilly acts “expected to record for nothing” and that they looked on the 25 percent of the two-cents-per-side mechanical royalties he shared with them as “manna from heaven.”81 And yet, for many artists, making a commercial recording really was a genuine thrill, a reward sufficient unto itself. It gave them pleasure, garnered them some measure of prestige in their own communities, and generated publicity for the personal appearances that served as a major source of income for many musicians. And sometimes, almost as a bonus, making a record also provided a little extra income. In this context, blues singer-guitarist Brownie McGhee’s comments about J. B. Long, who served as his manager and arranged his first series of sessions for Columbia in 1940 and 1941, are instructive. In a 1973 interview, McGhee explained:

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involved and he used his ingenuity to get me on record, so automatically I owe him a vote of thanks for gettin’ Brownie McGhee alive. Long made it possible for me to get on records, so what little money he did take from me, if any at all, he was entitled to it. He didn’t take something from me. He made it possible for me to get something for myself if I was intelligent enough to go on and do it and not stop and sit down. And that’s what I mean: Anybody blazes a path to a highway that never end [sic], you should appreciate ’em some.82

In the final analysis, hustling A&R officials were deeply implicated in a culture of commercial exploitation that intersected with and, paradoxically, fostered acts of soaring creativity. They helped generate some outstanding recorded music as well as countless tales of greed and chicanery. But while blatant discrimination was endemic in the business, there was a curiously egalitarian aspect to much of this blatant misbehavior. In an industry, indeed in a nation, rife with racism, sexism, and a kind of classism that often manifested itself in prejudices toward rural singers and musicians—especially Southerners—there was less discernible difference in the treatment of white or black, male or female, urban or rural artists by A&R officials, white and black alike, than one might expect. Race, gender, and class seldom served as the sole or simple determinants of fairness when it came to the economic rewards that A&R managers and scouts made available to roots music artists. Interwar A&R men, it seems, were often equal-opportunity exploiters. The racial, gender, and class dynamics of A&R work were truly complex. This was a world in which white men dominated the business of recruiting, signing, recording, and marketing the music of thousands of African American and southern white artists, among them female performers of both races. Most female roots artists worked in the race music field, since, prior to 1931, only roughly 3 percent of hillbilly records were made by women.83 By contrast, the relatively few African Americans involved in A&R seldom recruited or recorded talent outside race music. “They didn’t want me to be identified with white records, or the white side of the situation at all,” J. Mayo Williams recalled of his tenure at Paramount during the mid- to late 1920s. Williams accepted, however reluctantly, that the racial segmentation of the recording industry, and the more general patterns of racism upon which that segmentation drew, essentially placed white artists out of his reach. Meanwhile, white A&R managers and scouts were free to work with artists of either race, reaping the rewards of their own white privilege.84 While race limited their opportunities in A&R, and despite the discrimination they themselves faced, black recording managers and talent scouts showed no more sensitivity toward their talent than did their white colleagues. Indeed, J. Mayo Williams, Perry Bradford, and Clarence Williams would all merit a fairly prominent place in any rogue’s gallery of interwar A&R miscreants. Although a few white A&R officials involved with jazz, such as John Hammond and Helen Oakley Dance, socialized with African American musicians and actively supported social justice campaigns against racial discrimination, such activities were exceptional. There was certainly no clear or

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causal connection between A&R work in the race records field, on the one hand, and progressive racial attitudes, on the other. As Paramount’s recording director Art Laibly put it, “I liked the colored folks, but it was only in the studio.” Only once did Laibly mix socially with any of his black artists outside the studio, when he and local talent scout R. T. Ashford accepted an invitation to dinner at the Dallas home of an unidentified female blues singer. “And so help me, that’s the only time I ever [socialized] outside of work with any of my talent,” Laibly recalled decades later, implying that he was still rather shocked that such an unusual thing had ever happened.85 Eli Oberstein was, in many ways, an undiscriminating scoundrel, happy enough to rip off just about everyone with equal zeal. But Brad McCuen, an A&R representative and record producer at RCA Victor during the 1950s and 1960s, caught a chastening glimpse of Oberstein’s unsavory racial attitudes. In mid-1945, having been fired from RCA Victor by Frank Walker six years earlier, Oberstein returned to the label as recording director and was given the responsibility of supervising sessions with Duke Ellington’s orchestra. Eye firmly on the bottom line, Oberstein tried to steer Ellington away from musical experimentation toward more commercial, pop-oriented fare. “In the main, we played what we wanted,” a deeply irritated Ellington explained in a December 1945 Variety article, “But we were forced to make concessions. The payoff came when Victor failed to release 17 of our best sides. Only our pops reached the public.”86 There was, however, another reason why Ellington’s relationship with RCA Victor had soured. At one session, Oberstein had forgotten to turn off the intercom linking his producer’s booth to the studio. As McCuen, who heard about the incident from one of the session’s recording engineers, recounted, “Eli was there, and he says ‘OK boys, you ready for a little Saturday night nigger music?’ or something to that effect. Well, that went right out into the studio and everybody in the Ellington band just kind of looked up. . . . And Duke, you know, turned slowly back and said to the band, ‘Gentlemen, pack up.’ ” Ellington eventually agreed to honor the remaining two years of his contract with the label, “but Eli Oberstein couldn’t set foot near the studio. . . . Some of the recordings were just stock arrangements. . . . It was a dreadful thing for Duke.”87 It is difficult to imagine that kind of language or even sentiment from “Uncle Art” Satherley, as his recording artists fondly referred to him. Yet even the courtly Englishman could adopt a patronizing, paternalistic attitude toward his black artists that betrayed the insidious racism within the industry, as he did when the Norfolk Jubilee Quartet renegotiated the terms of their contract with Paramount in the mid-1920s. Satherley began, as he recalled in a 1975 interview, by explaining to the group’s members that he simply could not afford to pay them at a higher rate. “I said, ‘Boys, the money is not in it. Look, you’re very fortunate to be on a record, let alone make a lot of money! We’re not making it.’ ” Determined to retain the quartet in his roster of artists, Satherley arranged another meeting and, in preparation, “bought probably a dozen neckties at a quarter apiece off some Jewish peddler, you know, the hawkers or whatever they used to call them, [who] had the barrows down in the Bowery, New York. And I got these

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ties in all the different colors. They looked more like one of these snakes that has all the different colors in it, the coral snake. Had all those colors. And so I thought, ‘Well, I’ll take these down to the boys.’ So when I got down there I took a pocketful of these things . . . and the contract.”88 At first, negotiations went poorly, and Satherley was forced to bluff and bait. “While we sat around the table,” he continued, they said, “Well, we don’t think we can quite sign here.” So I said, “Well, boys, you probably want me to give this contract to somebody else who’s waiting to take your place.” In the meantime, I’m just moving some of these ties up, and so all of a sudden one of those little guys spots those colors. “Why, white folks, what have you got in your pockets? What’d you bring us? What’d you bring us?” I said, “What do you mean, what did I bring you?” “Well, what you got in your pocket?” “Oh, that’s just a few ties. I’ll have to take them back and wear them, I suppose.” “Well,” he said, “can’t you leave them for us?” “Well,” I said, “let’s talk business first.” He said, “Well, we’ll talk business—where’s the contract?” They signed it, I threw out both these pockets, full of ties . . . and they took those ties.89

In Satherley’s mind, giving the Norfolk Jubilee Quartet a handful of colorful neckties as a peace offering when he could not afford to increase their recording fees was a sign of his integrity; it was, he believed, the reason they signed the contract. As he said, it “shows you that I wasn’t trying to be funny with them—that was all I could afford in those days! I had to get them, but I couldn’t pay any more money for them.” Satherley threw in an additional $20, so that the quartet members, as well as a black policeman who accompanied them as a kind of minder, could purchase a good meal. “ ‘Look, I’m giving you $20,’ ” he said to the cop. “ ‘Please take these boys out, and make sure that it doesn’t go for any wine, women, and song. They are going to have the best chicken dinner they’ve had in months, and so are you, officer.’ They thought that was fantastic.”90 The moral that Satherley drew from this exchange was that “if you’re kind to people, in a proper way, they’ll do it for you.”91 In fact, the language and structure of his reminiscences exemplify how casual, yet deeply ingrained, racial stereotypes informed the attitudes of many white A&R men, even well-meaning ones like Satherley. Regardless of the veracity of his memories, Satherley’s account of how four black professionals, nonchalantly referred to as “boys,” were easily distracted from the serious business of negotiating their livelihoods by a few cheap but cheery gifts and the promise of a chicken dinner—assuming that is, they could be trusted to stay away from liquor and loose women—reads like a minstrel show skit, or maybe like an excerpt from a plantation romance, where white folks gently mock the childlike naiveté of the black folks who happily labor for them, bearing the darkies no ill will but quietly confident that they are in every way superior. Other white A&R men displayed similar racial assumptions and prejudices. Although they jar modern sensibilities, these attitudes critically shaped the interactions

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among A&R officials and black performers and audiences, affecting both commercial calculations and aesthetic judgments. “We never paid a nigger over $5.00 for a recording,” boasted Gennett’s Jack Jackson. “What the hell, why bother. They were so thrilled to be on a record.”92 Discussing the race records artists he located for OKeh, Polk C. Brockman slipped easily into stereotypes of primitivism that regularly characterized white responses, even nominally “positive” ones, to African Americans and their culture. “You couldn’t understand half of ’em,” he told interviewer Gayle Dean Wardlow. “A lot of it was a lotta moanin,’ you know. Didn’t mean anything. You couldn’t even call it a language.”93 When H. C. Speir complained how he often had to guarantee to buy five hundred records from a record company “just to record some nigger,” his reminiscences may have revealed useful information about industry practices, but as Paul Oliver pithily observed, they also revealed a basic lack of “respect for the artist.”94 The precise nature and depth of the commitment A&R men like Satherley, Oberstein, Long, Jackson, Brockman, and Speir brought to the jazz, blues, and gospel music they recorded, and their attitudes toward the race—and, for that matter, toward the hillbilly—artists they worked with will always be somewhat inscrutable. Still, blues scholar David Evans was surely too credulous in accepting, seemingly without comment or challenge, Speir’s own testimony on the matter. “Since he grew up in Mississippi hearing and enjoying folk blues,” Evans writes, “we can assume that his taste and aesthetic standards in blues differed little from those of most black people in the state.”95 In fact, Evans assumes far too much here. His characterization ignores the profoundly unequal social and racial context within which a white Mississippi man would have heard and responded to blues music and black musicians in the heart of the Jim Crow South during an era when the ideologies, laws, and practices of white supremacy held sway. No amount of love for the blues, if such love there ever was among Speir and his like, could ever erase those social realities. Shared enthusiasm for the same musical forms could open up the potential for more tolerant and progressive racial attitudes, as in the case of John Hammond; there is, however, precious little evidence that those white Americans who appreciated black music, or who made a living from it in A&R work, were more likely to support the fight for racial equality than those who despised blues, jazz, and gospel. White racism and sincere admiration for black musical prowess have never been mutually exclusive. Like racial attitudes, prejudices surrounding gender affected the opportunities and treatment of female recording artists and songwriters in interwar American roots music. One example of the gender discrimination and double standards rife in the industry involves the best-selling vaudeville blues singer Ethel Waters and Black Swan, one of only a few black-owned and operated record labels of the era. According to the Chicago Defender, under a provision in her renegotiated 1921 contract, Black Swan president Harry Pace secured Waters’s agreement that she would not marry “for at least a year.” During that period, the newspaper reported, she was “to devote her time largely to singing for Black Swan records and appearing with the [Black Swan] Troubadours. It

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was due to numerous offers for marriage, many of her suitors suggesting that she give up her professional life at once for one of domesticity that Mr. Pace was prompted to take this step.”96 Clearly, sexism was a key factor here. The personal lives of male singers do not appear to have been contractually regulated in this way. And yet gender bias alone offers an inadequate, or only partial, framework to explain differences in the contractual terms and conditions that women and men were able to obtain from A&R officials. Class disparities also played an important role in determining pay scales and contractual arrangements. Widespread lack of formal education among impoverished, rural, or working-class roots artists and songwriters of both races and sexes increased the chances that they would be ignorant of possible legal protections for their work, less able to negotiate effectively for better terms, and unable to afford proper legal representation, at least until—for a lucky few—they became successful, by which time they were often locked into unfair agreements. Poverty also helps explain why cash-strapped, hard-pressed artists and songwriters took flat fees paid up front rather than risk the deferred and uncertain gratification of royalties, assuming they were even offered. Class disparities also shaped other aspects of interwar A&R work. Art Satherley, the refined transplanted Englishman, seemed especially sensitive to the contempt with which many Americans regarded poor rural white Southerners and their culture. This attitude, he believed, denigrated the whole category of hillbilly music and encouraged the mistreatment of its recording artists. As an A&R man, he was certainly complicit in the industry’s tendency to take advantage of less business-savvy singers and musicians, but he also strove to elevate the image of this musical genre among record industry insiders and the nation’s record buyers. Beginning in the mid-1930s, Satherley waged a quixotic struggle to find another term to categorize the music of Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys, one more respectful and dignified than “hillbilly music”—though he never claimed to have alighted on “western swing,” the term by which the substyle of country music that Wills played later became widely known. “They were called ‘breakdown fiddle,’ or a ‘onestep,’ or an ‘old time waltz,’ or a ‘hot dance with vocal,’ ‘stomp dance,’ ‘old-time playing and singing,’ ‘breakdowns,’ ” Satherley explained. “I had to come up with those because I hated the word ‘hillbilly.’ ” That term, he argued, reeked of a regionally inflected class disdain on the part of “merchants in New York or Chicago, because those who were born in New York or Chicago never knew anything about our forebears [sic].”97 Ralph Peer was far more sanguine about the marketing label “hillbilly music,” perhaps because he claimed to have coined it. But he never entirely lost his sense that the music was somehow inferior, and certainly less lucrative, than other genres of American popular music. “Of course, I was always trying to get away from hillbilly and into the legitimate music publishing field,” Peer recounted in a 1959 interview that oozed with a mixture of racial and class condescension toward much of the “hillbilly and

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the nigger stuff,” which he claimed to have “invented”—at least in terms of marketing categories—and which had made him very rich.98 For artists at broadly similar levels of popularity, factors such as race and gender undeniably affected levels of reward and opportunity. Successful hillbilly artists working for Satherley at Columbia, for example, were more likely to have royalty agreements in their contracts than were equally popular blues artists, although royalties were the exception rather than the rule for all of his roots music performers, most of whom received only flat fees, plus expenses. Nevertheless, it was often evidence of commercial success that, ultimately, proved to be the most decisive factor in determining who secured the most advantageous, or the least disadvantageous, deals. While the treatment accorded Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and innumerable hillbilly and blues performers stands as testament to the fact that race-, gender-, and class-based discrimination were real and pernicious forces in the industry, individual artists sometimes overcame these social barriers and negotiated relatively lucrative contracts thanks to their commercial success. As Paul Garon and Beth Garon wryly note with regard to Memphis Minnie, one of the first and certainly the most successful among a relatively small group of downhome blueswomen to record between the late 1920s and World War II, “It’s doubly ironic that Minnie, who was so often said to ‘play like a man’ was also paid like a man.”99 Fluctuating popularity also affected the remuneration doled out to talent in American roots music genres, as recording careers waxed and waned, as certain styles became hot and others passé. As the overall economic climate shifted, artists’ contracts were regularly modified, and particulars were endlessly renegotiated. Given this fluidity, it is difficult to generalize about which kinds of artists were paid more or paid less between the two world wars, let alone ascertain precisely why this might have been the case. During the Great Depression, the flat-rate fees offered to many singers and musicians plummeted in tandem with falling sales revenue. Memphis Minnie, whom the Garons estimate probably received about $15 for each of her first sides for the Columbia Phonograph Company in 1929, earned only $12.50 per side from the Columbia Record ing Corporation in 1939–1941. Although the Garons rightly stress that this was more than some of her male colleagues received, the artists they selected for comparison (Curtis Jones, Little Buddy Doyle, and Buddy Moss) were simply not in her league when it came to proven commercial appeal. Consequently, Memphis Minnie’s higher pay rate was completely logical, even though she still received less than the recommended union scale of $17.50 per side—something reserved only for the most popular of all Columbia race artists, such as Big Bill Broonzy.100 In 1948, Art Satherley, Columbia’s longtime A&R man in the roots recording field, was paying Memphis Minnie $45 per selection, a few dollars higher than the union scale of $41.25 per side. Since Satherley set up this contract as “c/o Lester Melrose,” it remains unclear how much of her recording fee she actually received. Melrose, however, enjoyed a slightly better reputation than most of his peers for treating his artists

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fairly, and Memphis Minnie may have collected the entire payment—not least because Melrose, like so many of his major-league A&R colleagues, focused on controlling song copyrights and earned much of his income from the resulting royalties.101 In fact, Lester Melrose was, arguably, the single most important A&R manager and scout working in the race records field during the 1930s and 1940s. In a portent of things to come, his studio work encompassed many of the same activities that would come to define the postwar role of “record producer.” He snared some spectacular black talent and, with their collaboration, helped fashion a distinctive urban blues sound that was dubbed the “Bluebird Beat” in reference to the Bluebird label on which much Melrose-produced material appeared.102 Melrose juggled the task of finding artists with the business of shaping their repertoires and determining the styles in which they recorded. Memphis Minnie certainly benefited financially from this kind of assistance. Her increased, if hardly generous, fees in the years after 1945 reflected both an upswing in her record sales as well as a general revitalization of the domestic record market. That she enjoyed this revived popularity was primarily a consequence of her own talent, but it was also because Melrose helped her find a more commercial vein in which to record. It serves as one of the many examples of how Melrose and other A&R managers and scouts could make genuine creative contributions to the content and form of American roots recordings, contributions that often centered on choosing which songs and tunes to record.

Keep me advised how you are coming on new stuff—that is not out on records. Notice that you have been up in the mountains and it may be that some old numbers have been recalled to your mind that have not been made on records. This is the cream of the business. —Art Laibly, letter to Doc Roberts, May 27, 1927

4 Choosing Songs and Building Repertoires

O N A P R I L 24 , 1 9 2 6 , T H E R EV E R E N D J . M . GAT E S R E C O R D E D

his first four sermons for Columbia at an Atlanta field session organized by Frank Walker. For the past decade, Gates had served as pastor at the Mount Calvary Baptist Church in the local Rockdale Park neighborhood. It was probably there, while conducting his regular rounds of talent scouting, that Dan Hornsby or one of his colleagues first heard Gates’s soul-stirring oratory and decided that the fiery black preacher belonged in the growing market for recordings of African American sermons and gospel music. Or the minister may have decided on his own to audition for Walker, though this appears less likely.1 Whatever the case, for Gates’s debut, 119

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Walker and his Columbia staff used state-of-the-art Western Electric equipment. Thanks to its sensitive carbon microphones and electrical recording process, this new hardware produced sonically superior recordings and helped create a more relaxed studio experience than was possible with the older, acoustic, horn-to-wax method that had, until recently, dominated the recording industry.2 Gates’s first release, “Death’s Black Train Is Coming” / “Need of Prayer” (Columbia 14145-D), proved to be among the best selling of the more than two hundred sermons he committed to disc between 1926 and 1941. Although not the earliest recorded sermons, they were the first to include singing, provided by two women from Gates’s congregation. In Gates’s hometown, the Atlanta Phonograph Company alone sold more than two thousand copies in just three weeks. As the store’s manager told Talking Machine World, “Never before in the time that I have been connected with the phonograph business has there been such a demand for a record. It is impossible for us to keep in stock on this number.”3 Elsewhere, the situation was much the same. “Dealers in this territory, as well as those in nearby states, have been astonished at the tremendous sales of a sermon recorded by the famous negro preacher,” noted a Baltimore report. “No one could have guessed this record would sell as well as it did until suddenly colored people began to swarm into dealers’ stores and the wholesalers were deluged with orders by telephone and telegraph for quantities of fifty and in some cases as high as 500 of this one record. One dealer sold over 600 of this one record in two days’ time.”4 The phenomenal popularity of Gates’s debut disc sparked what blues scholars Robert M. W. Dixon and John Godrich call a “sermon boom” within the race recording industry, as companies scrambled to release more selections by Gates and other African American preachers. Unfortunately for Columbia, though, Frank Walker and his assistants had neglected to sign Gates to an exclusive recording contract. Meanwhile, as sales continued to mount and sensing an opportunity to capitalize on Columbia’s misstep, Atlanta talent scout Polk C. Brockman shelled out a $200 advance to persuade Gates to sign a personal management contract with him rather than commit to a single record company. Under this arrangement, Brockman subcontracted his new artist’s services to any and all interested labels.5 By the end of 1926, Gates had waxed nearly one hundred sides, issued across some twenty labels, by nine record companies, each of which probably paid Brockman a finder’s fee of between $50 and $100. Gates, in turn, almost certainly with Brockman’s support, shrewdly copyrighted his own material. He even fended off competition from feisty New York A&R man Joe Davis, who prematurely bragged to Billboard that he had secured the rights to “Death’s Black Train Is Coming” for his Triangle Music Publishing Company and predicted that it would prove to be even more valuable than the million-selling “Wreck of the Old 97.”6 Eventually, Brockman secured an exclusive recording contract for Gates, first with OKeh beginning in 1928, and then with RCA Victor’s Bluebird subsidiary between 1934 and 1941. Decades later, Brockman hailed Gates as the most consistently popular and lucrative of all his discoveries. “I guess I

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stole him,” Brockman admitted. “He made his first record for Columbia but they let him wander around and didn’t sign him up.”7 Brockman vigorously promoted Gates’s recording career in other ways. Not only did he personally supervise many of the preacher’s sessions, but he also suggested topics for sermons, such as the morbid “Death May Be Your Santa Claus” (OKeh 8413) and “Pay Your Furniture Man” (OKeh 8606), the latter of which gave an oblique nod to Brockman’s occupation prior to his switch to phonograph and record wholesaling. Commenting on Brockman’s studio work with Gates, historian Lerone A. Martin suggests that, unlike “his contemporaries, [Brockman] did not simply hope an artist would produce a hit record. Rather, he got actively involved. He arranged the recordings, set up the technology, and even contributed lyrical content.”8 Martin is surely correct about

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F I G U R E 4 .1. OKeh Race Records catalog (ca. 1927), featuring a selection of recorded sermons by the Reverend J. M. Gates. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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Brockman, whose studio activities edged him closer to the role that would later be filled by a new breed of post–World War II cultural workers called “record producers.” The only quibble with Martin’s analysis is that he may be too accepting of the conventional wisdom that this sort of creative input was rare among A&R representatives. In fact, Brockman was by no means unique among his A&R colleagues in actively helping shape the sound and scope of interwar recorded roots music. Whether as creative forces in their own right, or by assiduously encouraging the talents of others, or by channeling those talents in particular musical or lyrical directions according to personal preferences or, more often, commercial calculus, A&R managers and scouts served as important architects of recorded American roots music during the 1920s and 1930s.

C R E AT I V I T Y A N D C O M M E R C E I N A & R W O R K

Such a reassessment challenges prevailing generalizations about the roles of A&R officials in encouraging and contributing to the artistry and creative energy heard on interwar roots recordings, which routinely cast these men and women as largely indifferent to the artistic merits or cultural significance of the music they recorded and as doing little to enhance either. Sociologist Richard A. Peterson summarizes this common perception when concluding that “in most instances,” A&R officials involved in roots recording “didn’t like the music, didn’t understand it, and had no respect for its audience.” Peterson insists that “this first generation of A&R men did not try to impose their own aesthetic standards, either during the recording process or in the process of selecting which cuts to release.”9 Firsthand accounts only tend to confirm this theory. According to his wife Eunice, Brockman’s favorite sound was “the sound of the cash register.”10 The conventional wisdom here, however, is far too sweeping, too reductive, and based on a relatively small sample of A&R representatives. More importantly, it relies on an exceedingly narrow definition of “creative input” and a simplified view of how commerce and creativity can intersect. In the quest to produce recordings that would resonate with record buyers and generate hits, commercial forces were as likely to encourage creativity as to curtail it. And, as the early roots music story played out, they did both.11 Art Laibly’s creative contributions to Paramount’s catalog clearly demonstrate how even those A&R men supposed to be the least musically talented could still leave their mark on roots music.12 Laibly subtly influenced the repertoire, the form, and the sounds of the music his talent recorded, precisely because he was so attentive to commercial imperatives. In 1927, when he first approached Doc Roberts of Richmond, Kentucky, about recording a batch of hillbilly numbers for Paramount, Laibly was explicit in his musical instructions to the fiddler, who, though a veteran recording artist, specialized primarily in instrumentals. Laibly instructed him to assemble and rehearse a batch of songs that prominently featured lead and harmony vocals. Undoubtedly, this was partly to ensure that any sides Roberts might record for Paramount would differ ap-

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preciably from those he had previously made for Gennett. Nonetheless, it shows an A&R man proactively defining the creative parameters of an artist’s upcoming sessions. “The present demand in this type of music is not for the single singer,” Laibly advised Roberts, “ . . . and it would be necessary that you practise [sic] with someone who plays a lead instrument and can sing in harmony with you in order to make your proposition a success.”13 Following Laibly’s directive, on April 13 and 14, 1927, Roberts duly recorded his first twelve Paramount sides, accompanied by singer-guitarist Dick Parman, with another singer, Ted Chestnut, contributing harmonies on eight of the selections. In a perfect example of the taxonomic tsunami that raged throughout the interwar recording industry, none of the six double-sided records that Paramount eventually released from these sessions was credited to Doc Roberts or either of his collaborators. Four discs identified the artists as the Kentucky Thoroughbreds, while the other two billed them as the Quadrillers. Several of the same sides also appeared on the Paramount-produced Broadway and Herwin labels credited variously to the Lone Star Fiddlers, Old Smoky Twins, and Blue Grass Boys—pseudonyms all. Five months later, on September 21, 1927, Laibly engaged Roberts, Parman, and Chestnut for a second Chicago session that produced three additional Paramount records, this time credited to the Kentucky Thorobreds, who had somehow lost their “ugh” during the summer.14 Other A&R managers were even more categorical in their demands for particular kinds of music. On February 14, 1928, five months after the Kentucky Thorobreds’ second session, songster-bluesman Mississippi John Hurt recorded eight sides for OKeh at a Memphis field session supervised by the label’s recording director, Tommy Rockwell. Hurt’s first release, “Frankie” (a variant of “Frankie and Johnny”) / “Nobody’s Dirty Business” (OKeh 8560), “sold fairly well,” Rockwell informed him that November. None of the other sides were issued, however, because “we did not obtain satisfactory masters on the balance of your recordings.” Consequently, Rockwell asked Hurt to “make arrangements . . . to come to New York for some more recordings,” offering him “$20 per accepted selections and all your expenses to New York and return for this work.” For this follow-up session, Rockwell was quite specific about the number and kinds of songs he was seeking. “We would like to have you get together about eight selections,” he explained, “at least four of them to be old time tunes similar to selections ‘Frankie’ and ‘Nobody’s [Dirty] Business.’ There are a great many tunes like these that are known throughout the South.” Hurt agreed to the terms and traveled to New York the following month, where at two sessions, on December 21 and 28, 1928, he waxed a dozen sides. Among them were a handful of traditional secular and sacred numbers as requested, including “Louis Collins” (OKeh 8724), “Praying on the Old Camp Ground” (OKeh 8692), “Spike Driver Blues” (a variant of “John Henry”; OKeh 8692), and “Stack O’ Lee Blues” (OKeh 8654). Constituting what Tony Russell calls “common-stock material,” songs like these were widely known among both white and black Southerners, as Rockwell himself had noted. Released at the onset of the Great

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Depression, Hurt’s second set of records sold poorly, and OKeh never invited him to make additional recordings. Hurt returned to his life as a Mississippi sharecropper and did not record again until his “rediscovery” in 1963.15 Rockwell’s request for “old time tunes” is particularly interesting given that Hurt was African American. In his native Carroll County, Mississippi, though, Hurt often performed at dances with a white neighbor, fiddler Willie Narmour, when Narmour’s regular guitarist was unavailable. Indeed, it was Narmour who had initially recommended Hurt to Rockwell. According to OKeh studio files, Rockwell (or another company official) originally intended to release Hurt’s recordings from his initial February 1928 Memphis session in the label’s “Old Time Tunes” series aimed at white southern record buyers. But someone, perhaps Rockwell, had second thoughts. The documents were amended to change the designation to “Race,” the series in which all of Hurt’s 1920s releases were issued.16 In assigning them so, Rockwell may have been catering to a niche audience among African American record buyers for such popular “commonstock” repertoire that, as a result of prevailing market preconceptions among his fellow A&R representatives, was seldom represented in OKeh’s blues-and-gospel-dominated 8000 race records series. Of course, it would be misleading to exaggerate the extent or the significance of A&R officials’ involvement in the recording process. Most talent scouts’ work ended, for example, as soon as they had located a promising singer or musician, packed that artist off to a recording studio, and collected their finder’s fees. Many had little or no input into the choice of recording material or how it was recorded. Sometimes this was a matter of personal choice. At other times, company structures and protocols, even language barriers (for sessions involving some ethnic musicians), kept A&R managers away from the frontlines of recording, even at sessions they organized and nominally supervised. At Gennett, it appears that A&R chief Fred D. Wiggins only occasionally oversaw sessions. Wiggins, as Rick Kennedy and Randy McNutt emphasize, was a “notoriously opinionated” man with “no training in music.” Nonetheless, as manager of the Starr Piano Company’s Chicago branch store, Wiggins scouted and signed acts for the firm’s Gennett label, among them King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, and Jelly Roll Morton, all of whom recorded seminal early jazz sides for the company between 1922 and 1924. According to Kennedy and McNutt, Gennett’s laissez-faire recording practices allowed artists “more latitude and thus provided an atmosphere for greater creativity.”17 In this model, it was the absence of intervention and direction that facilitated important and enduring creativity on disc. But Wiggins’s relative disinterest in direct creative participation was only one among many possible options for A&R men in interwar American roots recording, even among Gennett’s other recording department officials. In 1924, Wiggins was summoned to Starr’s headquarters in Richmond, Indiana, and placed in charge of its record division’s day-to-day operations. There, although

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he still did little to shape his artists’ output in terms of musical direction or technical management, as Gennett’s sales manager and recording director, he exerted considerable personal authority over who was signed and recorded, what material was waxed, and which of the resulting masters were commercially released. In this way, Wiggins, like many of his equally detached A&R colleagues, influenced and filtered the music that Gennett eventually placed on the market.18 Even though Wiggins seldom exercised his power within the confines of Gennett’s Richmond studio (where artists were often substantially left to their own devices), recording engineers such as Ezra C. A. Wickemeyer, Harold Soulé, and Joe Geier, as well as assistant sales manager Lee A. Butt and musical director Harold M. Little, were essential in crafting the sound of Gennett’s recordings. Indeed, these men sometimes served as de facto record producers: at various times, they worked with singers and musicians to achieve the optimum sonic balance, made alterations to overcome the studio’s notoriously “dead” acoustics, and voiced many ideas about repertoire and arrangements.19 Usually, Gennett’s A&R staff began preparing weeks in advance of recording sessions. On October 9, 1928, for example, Lee A. Butt wrote to Doc Roberts regarding an aspiring singer-guitarist from Log Lick, Kentucky, named Green Bailey. Bailey had contacted Roberts six weeks earlier about the possibility of recording together for Gennett, for which the fiddler continued to work even after Laibly had signed him to Paramount, albeit nonexclusively. Roberts had forwarded the letter to Butt, who had encouraged Roberts to “give [Bailey] a trial and if you believe him capable of making satisfactory recordings, bring him along on your next recording trip.” Roberts had done so and passed his assessment along to Gennett officials. “With reference to Green Bailey,” Butt wrote Roberts in response, “we note that he has an exceptionally good voice but somewhat weak.” Butt believed that Gennett’s recording staff could compensate for this deficiency “by placing him close to the microphone and amplifying his voice somewhat. At least we are willing to give him a trial.”20 Butt, who was eager to acquire Bailey’s services because Gennett was “in need of old time vocals at this time,” scheduled him to record on the afternoon of Friday, November 30, and all day on Saturday, December 1, accompanied by Roberts. On November 15, as the date of those sessions approached, Butt reached out to Roberts again, this time to discuss the accompaniment: “We are wondering about a more novel accompaniment or something a little different in regards to the numbers Green Bailey is to record. Have you any artists who are capable of playing a Jews Harp [sic]? This idea we would like for an experiment only. However, if none of your men play the Jews Harp [sic], that will be all right. Anyway [sic] which you might arrange the accompaniment for Mr. Bailey, we are sure, will be satisfactory with us.” When Bailey made his debut sides two weeks later, with Roberts and his regular guitarist, Asa Martin, providing musical backup, the Jew’s harp did not figure in any of the selections. Either Roberts did not know anyone who played the instrument or he simply disregarded Butt’s suggestion.21 Nevertheless, Butt’s attempt

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to influence the musical arrangements, like his commitment to compensate for Bailey’s lack of vocal power, pointed toward a more proactive role for A&R officials than commonly assumed.

M O D E S O F A & R I N V O LV E M E N T

Broadly speaking, the creative work of A&R managers and talent scouts fell into four major categories. Their first contribution to the sound of recorded American roots music occurred weeks, even months, before artists ever faced a recording horn or a carbon microphone. Whenever recording officials and their talent scouts found and auditioned prospective artists, their recommendations about who, or who not, to accept helped determine what recorded roots music ultimately sounded like. Those decisions were informed by an elusive alchemy of gut instinct, personal sensibilities, and a carefully honed sense of what record buyers in various markets might want to purchase. Even as those foundational decisions were being made, many A&R officials were already fashioning their artists’ repertoires into portfolios of songs and tunes they deemed suitable for recording and seemed to have the greatest commercial potential. Thus, the second category of A&R involvement concerns decisions regarding which material would be recorded and, if necessary, which artists would be matched with those selections. Sometimes that simply meant agreeing with a performer’s own preferences. But A&R officials often dictated the kind of music that was chosen, composed, or, in the case of traditional material, adapted for recording. Some A&R men even wrote songs themselves, confident that they knew best what would sell. Others supplied artist-songwriters with precise musical or lyrical ideas that found their way onto commercial records, as happened with Polk C. Brockman and the Reverend J. M. Gates. Sometimes, this kind of creative assistance could be as simple as proposing the title for a new composition. This is what appears to have happened in 1938, when American Record Corporation (ARC) A&R man Art Satherley famously named “San Antonio Rose” (Vocalion / OKeh 04755), a Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys’ instrumental that consisted of an improvised inversion of the bridge to their earlier hit, “Spanish Two Step” (Vocalion / OKeh 03230). After the recording of “San Antonio Rose” became popular, Satherley recommended that lyrics be added to the irresistible melody. Most of these lyrics were supplied by Wills’s trusty sidemen, particularly Everett Stover—a trumpeter whose very presence in a western swing band reflected the eclectic musical vision of a bandleader whose music regularly fused jazz, blues, Mexican, Bohemian and Czech, and hillbilly strains. Moreover, Wills’s use of saxophones, drums, and brass instruments indicated both the diversity within hillbilly music and the permeable nature of the barriers that theoretically separated it from other genres of American popular music. On April 16, 1940, under Satherley’s direction, Wills and his band waxed a new

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rendition of “San Antonio Rose” that included the recently penned lyrics. Strategically rechristened “New San Antonio Rose,” the song became one of the best-selling hits of the early 1940s, retaining only vestigial traces of its hillbilly roots, including on Wills’s own horn-driven, swing-band-influenced hit version (OKeh 05694, plus others).22 Even Bing Crosby, “the Caruso of the juke boxes,” borrowed Wills’s arrangement for the most successful version of all (Decca 3590), which, Time magazine reported, sold more than eighty-four thousand copies in January 1941 alone.23 Although proud of his titular contribution to the original “San Antonio Rose,” Satherley regretted that he had failed to acquire its copyright, which he claimed Wills sold to Bourne Music Company of New York in 1940 for just $1,000. It was a considerable sum, but far less than the million-selling song ultimately proved to be worth.24 The third category of A&R involvement consists of various kinds of management— of music as well as of personnel. Most importantly, recording directors and their assistants decided who would perform on any given recording. These choices entailed not only selecting the principal artists whose names might appear on releases, but in addition, sometimes hiring and paying additional musicians to accompany those artists. It also fell to A&R officials to ensure that the singers and musicians showed up to a scheduled session in the best possible physical and mental state to deliver strong performances and, moreover, felt comfortable in the often unsettling, alien environments in which recordings were made. This was especially important for artists making their recording debuts. In the freewheeling world of American roots music, where temptations were plentiful, attitudes toward punctuality sometimes mercurial, and notions of professionalism variable, this pastoral aspect of A&R management, the proverbial herding of musical cats, could prove extremely challenging and frustrating. Once inside the recording studio, with songs selected and musicians in place—and, hopefully, fit to perform—A&R managers joined recording artists and engineers in the creative trinity that produced commercial recordings. Not surprisingly, the amount, type, and significance of A&R officials’ guidance varied considerably. Some recording directors, like Fred D. Wiggins at Gennett, intervened little in the recording process; many were not even present for sessions. Others, however, were far more proscriptive and actively involved at this stage. Thus, the fourth analytical category of A&R contributions to the sounds of recorded roots music concerns these officials’ musical and technical influence in the studio. A&R managers’ activities in this regard ranged widely, from offering musical ideas to actually performing themselves on the recordings they supervised. In addition, many A&R men worked hard to modify studio acoustics to help create or capture a certain “sound,” “feel,” or “mood.” These A&R directors and engineers established the kind of sonic management practices that helped define the nature and acoustical foundations of new relationships between performers and audiences in commercially recorded roots music. Through their studio work, they helped create ever-more-intimate zones of affective and emotional bonding between artists and

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listeners through the medium of recorded sound. In short, through a mix of calculated experimentation and rather less calculated trial and error, they were trailblazing the kind of work that came to characterize record production in the post–World War II era.25 These four categories encompass most of what A&R managers and their staffs did to influence the sound and content of recorded American roots music—although selecting recordings for release and deciding how to market and advertise those releases also involved A&R officials in judgments that helped define the canons of roots music. The lines between these different modes of A&R creativity, however, were frequently blurred. Dan Hornsby typifies how A&R men often straddled creative, technical, and commercial roles in ways that left multiple marks on the roots music they recorded. Indeed, Hornsby was a versatile jack-of-all-trades in the interwar recording industry. The son of a painting contractor and occasional Baptist minister, Isaac Daniel Hornsby was born in 1900 in Atlanta, but spent part of his childhood in Fort Worth, Texas, before returning with his family to Georgia. While working as a house painter, Hornsby attended North Georgia College in Dahlonega for two years. Around 1920, after marrying Louise Wise, a singer and dancer originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, he began pursuing his own interest in music more seriously. Starting off as a singer and trumpeter in popular Atlanta dance bands, he soon formed his own small combo, which landed a regular program sponsored by a local bakery on prominent Atlanta radio station WSB. There he became known as “Cheerful Dan,” “the man with the two-octave voice.” Initially, Hornsby entered the recording industry as a result of his musical talent. In November 1927 in Atlanta, he waxed his first sides for Columbia as leader of the Dan Hornsby Trio. These recordings revealed his musical versatility. Coupled on Columbia 1268-D, “Cubanola Glide” and “O, Susanna!” appeared in Columbia’s standard popular series, while “Dear Old Girl” (Columbia 15769-D) was issued in the label’s hillbilly series. The following year, Hornsby hit his stride when another hillbilly release, his recording of his self-penned event song, “The Shelby Disaster” (Columbia 15321-D), sold a fairly respectable nine thousand copies. Hornsby continued to record sporadically for Columbia as late as 1931, amassing a discography of more than two dozen sides released under his own name or that of his band. Later in the 1930s, he reemerged as Uncle Ned, telling bedtime stories on a series of children’s records for RCA Victor’s Bluebird label. Until his death in 1951, Hornsby also continued to work for several Atlanta radio stations, including WSB and WGST, sometimes as an on-air entertainer and at other times as an announcer and script writer.26 Despite a fairly productive recording career, Hornsby arguably made his greatest impact on American roots music as an Atlanta-based A&R man for Columbia between 1927 and 1931. Following in the footsteps of his mentor, Frank Walker, Hornsby worked closely with many hillbilly acts, including veterans such as Gid Tanner & His SkilletLickers and newcomers like the Delmore Brothers, whose first sessions he helped supervise in October 1931.27 Hornsby refined his musical talents and nurtured his creative instincts when he assumed his A&R duties for Columbia in earnest, initially as

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F I G U R E 4 . 2 . Publicity photograph of Barbecue Bob (ca. 1927), Dan Hornsby’s most significant blues discovery. Courtesy of Old Hat Records.

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a talent scout and later as an assistant recording manager at the label’s Atlanta studio. When he switched to RCA Victor in 1934, he further developed his abilities as what one newspaper described as a “hillbilly recording expert and talent scout.”28 Hornsby wrote songs for several of the artists whose sessions he handled or assisted with at Columbia. His credits included the lyrics to “Kansas City Railroad Blues,” which appeared in both the hillbilly and the race records catalogs by Jess Young’s Tennessee Band (Columbia 15431-D, retitled “The Old K-C”) and by the father-and-son blues duo Andrew and Jim Baxter (Victor 20962, as “K. C. Railroad Blues”), respectively.29 Hornsby also occasionally guested, often anonymously, as lead vocalist on recordings by such white stringbands as the Georgia Organ Grinders, Lowe Stokes & His North Georgians, and McMichen’s Melody Men, especially if he believed the quality of the singing did not match that of the musicianship. In fact, he sang lead on most Columbia releases by Jess Young’s Tennessee Band, including “The Old K-C.” In addition, Hornsby sometimes sang harmony vocals with major hillbilly recording artists such as Clayton McMichen and later, when working for RCA Victor, Wade Mainer. Occasionally, he adopted the pseudonym Tom Dorsey, as when he performed speaking roles on more than a dozen

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of the rural drama skits recorded for Columbia by Gid Tanner & His Skillet-Lickers, among them “A Night in a Blind Tiger, Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 15503-D), “Jeremiah Hopkins’ Store at Sand Mountain, Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 15598-D), “Prohibition—Yes or No, Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 15632-D), and, most famously, several installments of the fourteen-part “A Corn Licker Still in Georgia” (Columbia 15432-D, 15531-D, 15618-D, and 15703-D). Hornsby collaborated with Walker in writing many of these skits and later sang with Tanner and the reorganized Skillet-Lickers on a few recordings the band made for Bluebird in San Antonio in 1934.30 In the race records field, Hornsby demonstrated his creative flair in rather different ways. Hornsby worked extensively with several of Columbia’s African American artists, including singer-guitarist Robert Hicks, his most significant blues discovery. In a 1951 interview posthumously published in the British music trade newspaper Melody Maker, Hornsby claimed that he first spotted Hicks serenading patrons at Tidwell’s Barbecue, a drive-in restaurant in Atlanta’s Buckhead suburb, where Hicks worked as a cook or, according to some accounts, a carhop. Signed by Hornsby to a Columbia contract, Hicks made his first recordings, “Barbecue Blues” / “Cloudy Sky Blues” (Columbia 14205-D), on March 25, 1927, possibly under Hornsby’s direction. Hornsby nicknamed his new artist “Barbecue Bob,” the pseudonym by which he was identified on almost all of the fifty-plus issued sides he made for Columbia before his death in 1931. To maximize the effectiveness of this marketing moniker, Hornsby posed Hicks in a promotional photograph dressed in a white chef ’s cap and apron, holding his signature twelve-string guitar, and standing next to a barbecue pit full of roasting pork.31 Hornsby closely controlled the recording process in Columbia’s Atlanta studio to attain the particular musical sounds he wanted. Country bluesmen Rufus and Ben Quillian’s debut session for the label on April 23, 1930, demonstrated the A&R man’s protoproduction ethic, which included doing some of the same sorts of things later associated with postwar “record producers.” For this recording date, Hornsby replaced the duo’s regular guitarist, James McCrary, with the more proficient Perry Bechtel, a former member of Hornsby’s dance band whose virtuosity earned him the billing “The Man with 10,000 Fingers.” Additionally, Bechtel provided the guitar accompaniment for the Quillian brothers’ subsequent two Columbia sessions, in December 1930 and October 1931, which presumably Hornsby also supervised. This was not the first time Hornsby had employed a white studio musician to accompany African American artists on race records. Earlier, at two April 1929 sessions, Hornsby brought in Bechtel, along with another former member of Hornsby’s band, pianist Taylor Flanagan, and trumpeter Pete Underwood of Charlie Troutt’s Melody Artists, to create an all-white studio group to back singer Lillian Glinn on six vaudeville blues sides. Although the use of white studio musicians to accompany black vaudeville blues singers was relatively common in New York, it was far less so at regional recording sessions, particularly in the Jim Crow South; it was even rarer to use white musicians to back up country blues acts like the Quillians.32

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F I G U R E 4 . 3 . Publicity photograph of Nat Shilkret (ca. mid-1920s). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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Hornsby’s studio interventions at both race and hillbilly sessions embody the innovation and imagination that he brought to roots recordings at Columbia. In addition, Hornsby served as an informal music librarian at the firm’s Atlanta studio, curating its large sheet music collection and, in this capacity, worked with his artists to find suitable material, or to rediscover lost or half-remembered words of traditional and popular songs that might provide the basis for new hit records.33 Through his own compositions and his ability to find and repurpose traditional and popular music for copyrighting and recording, Hornsby helped determine which songs his acts recorded, thereby performing one of A&R officials’ key creative functions. Hornsby, of course, was not the only A&R man who made significant artistic contributions to interwar recorded roots music. The classically trained Nat Shilkret likewise juggled multiple creative roles at Victor, as recording session supervisor, musical director, arranger, composer, piano accompanist, bandleader, and recording artist in his own right. During the mid-1920s, Shilkret handled administrative and musical duties primarily for the firm’s foreign-language catalog, but also for portions of its hillbilly and race catalogs as well.34 Indeed, in 1924 he played an integral role in launching the first national hit of the then-fledgling hillbilly recording industry: “Wreck of the Old 97” / “The Prisoner’s Song.” Both songs have complicated histories, and although his

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accounts varied over the years and his precise role remains unclear, in his memoirs Shilkret recounted that he recruited freelance New York studio singer Vernon Dalhart to cover “Wreck of the Old 97” for Victor in the wake of Henry Whitter’s successful original OKeh recording. According to Shilkret, he deliberately chose the Texas-born Dalhart, who, up to this point, had specialized in recording semiclassical and popular music, because of his southern background.35 Unwilling “to depend entirely on the eight-month-old hit” to drive sales of Dalhart’s rendition for Victor, Shilkret recalled that he “asked all of the Broadway publishers to find a suitable potential hit for the B side of the record.” They offered him some thirty songs, but “all had the Broadway flavor,” he noted, “and my experience with the folk melodies of many nationalities convinced me that they would not do.” Then Dalhart suggested using an old traditional number titled “The Prisoner’s Song” that he had learned from his cousin, Guy Massey. Shilkret liked the lyrics but thought the melody “very poor,” and so, with Dalhart’s permission, he composed new music for the maudlin ballad.36 After Shilkret’s superior, Victor’s New York recording manager Eddie King, approved the song choice, Dalhart waxed the reworked number, along with “Wreck of the Old 97,” on August 13, 1924, under Shilkret’s supervision. Shilkret further contributed to the phenomenal success of “The Prisoner’s Song” by creating its unusual musical arrangement. In particular, he paired a viola (played by his concertmaster Lou Raderman)—instead of the more conventional violin—with staff musician Carson Robison’s guitar accompaniment to sculpt “a mournful sound.” Thanks in no small measure to Shilkret’s carefully managed soundscape, Dalhart’s record became a coast-to-coast sensation and sold more than one million copies within four years.37 In an ironic reversal of the familiar story of A&R men claiming unearned songwriting cut-ins, Shilkret never received credit for composing the new melody to the ballad, on either the Victor record or the equally successful 1924 sheet music published by Shapiro, Bernstein & Company. Perhaps justifiably, he remained bitter about this slight for the rest of his life, blaming Eddie King for failing to assert Victor’s claim to the melody copyright (which Shilkret believed rightly belonged to the record company since contractually his rewrite was “a work made for hire”) and, thus, secure Shilkret a composer’s credit. Even more culpable, in Shilkret’s mind, was Dalhart himself, who reportedly earned somewhere between $80,000 and $100,000 in royalties for the composition. Decades later, Shilkret referred to the singer as “that guy [who] stole [“The Prisoner’s Song”] from me.”38 As Shilkret told researcher Jim Walsh, “Neither then nor when the record became the biggest seller ever made up to that time did [Dalhart] offer to give me as much as a cigar.”39 Shilkret also helped source and select the repertoire heard on some of Victor’s other early hillbilly releases, though none was as profitable as Dalhart’s smash hit. In December 1925, following the success of “The Prisoner’s Song,” Shilkret traveled to the mountains of southwestern Virginia and southern West Virginia to collect traditional songs that might also prove to be best sellers. The cosmopolitan New Yorker

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As the careers of Dan Hornsby and Nat Shilkret suggest, interwar recording industry policies and practices varied considerably when it came to choosing the material that roots singers and musicians recorded. In 1939, when Decca’s Charlotte-based A&R scout Van H. Sills was arranging the debut recording session for hillbilly guitar-andmandolin duo Roy “Whitey” Grant and Arval Hogan, he called the musicians in and asked them to play him a range of the most popular selections in their extensive stage and radio repertoire. “He’d listen to them and choose the ones he wanted,” explained Hogan.41 As his partner Grant remembered, “It seemed that Van liked the old-time hymns and fast tunes, because just about every song that Hogan and I recorded for Decca were either old gospel hymns or fast tunes.” Despite their lack of experience, however, Decca’s laissez faire recording director Dave Kapp mostly left the duo to their own devices in the studio. He gave them few in-studio instructions and exerted little direct influence on their performance styles or arrangements. Instead, he focused on achieving the best sound and on relaxing the duo, who were newcomers to both the studio and the city. Before coming to New York for their session, Grant and Hogan had never even seen, much less ridden, an escalator. As Grant recalled, Kapp “would just come out [of the control room] and say, ‘Look, now, we’re not going to get nervous, we’re just here to make a record, so stand right there and sing normal.’ . . . He won you over to start with and made you feel at home. He says, ‘Do them just like you always do them, like back home on the radio.’ . . . And that’s exactly what we did.”42 For his part, Van Sills was actively involved in choosing which items from their songbag of traditional, pop, and original numbers Grant and Hogan should record. Things were similar in the race records field. Helen Humes—later better known as a vocalist for the Count Basie Orchestra and, later still, as a rhythm & blues singer—likewise recalled that an OKeh A&R official (most likely Tommy Rockwell) assigned her the

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later remembered this as a particularly harrowing venture, marked by meals of greasy, stomach-turning food and perilous automobile trips over treacherous, snow-packed roads. At every stop, he was besieged by grasping locals offering to sell songs for cash payments. Perpetually fearful that he might be mistaken for a revenue agent hunting for illicit stills at the height of National Prohibition, he remained ill at ease throughout the trip. Though a little worse for wear, Shilkret still managed to return with fifty-two songs, for which he had paid Clarence Obaugh, his local contact and guide, $1,040 at $20 apiece. Shilkret reckoned that more than thirty of these songs were eventually recorded by various citybilly singers. It was a good illustration of the lengths to which A&R men sometimes went to acquire marketable roots music repertoire—and, of course, Shilkret’s contributions continued into the studio, where he had a clear vision of how best to orchestrate and record those songs.40

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songs she cut at her second session, held on November 26, 1927, in New York. Although she was only fourteen years old at the time, her supervisor apparently had few misgivings about the appropriateness of allocating Humes risqué blues songs such as “If Papa Has Outside Lovin’ ” and “Do What You Did Last Night” (coupled on OKeh 8545).43 Frank Walker, architect of Columbia’s race and hillbilly catalogs, also kept close tabs on repertoire, especially when it came to the southern fiddlers and stringbands he supervised. Indeed, Walker was engaged in a protracted and very revealing struggle over style and repertory with Charlie Poole & the North Carolina Ramblers, one of his most popular recording acts, for much of the band’s later recording career. In 1927, after a series of strong-selling records, Poole tried to deviate from his trio’s commercially successful formula of fiddle-driven, old-time numbers by recording a batch of banjo solos backed by piano that were modeled on those of his idol, “classic” banjoist and recording artist Fred Van Eps. In July of that year, Walker did permit Poole to wax four numbers in that vein. Apparently, Poole was anticipating that Columbia would issue them in its 100-D popular music series instead of the 15000-D hillbilly series in which all of his previous records had appeared. “My father recorded some stuff that was too high class for ‘corn music,’ ” maintained Poole’s son, James. “He used piano accompaniment on ‘Sunset March’ and ‘Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down Medley.’ But Frank Walker, the head of the Columbia organization, told my daddy he didn’t have him listed for that class of music, see. Said he wouldn’t sell.” Ultimately, the A&R man’s commercial instincts were validated. When the first coupling, “Sunset March” / “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down Medley” (Columbia 15184-D), issued in the label’s hillbilly series, sold what was for Poole a disappointing 8,538 copies, Walker shelved the other two selections and resisted Poole’s later attempts to dabble in pop-oriented arrangements. Walker also firmly rejected Poole’s efforts to transform the North Carolina Ramblers into a larger, five-piece ensemble that, in Walker’s opinion, might have jeopardized their commercial success in the hillbilly market.44 Walker had developed a best-selling musical formula for the band, and given the disappointing sales of Poole’s unorthodox banjo-and-piano sides, he refused to tinker with that recipe. Walker likewise rebuffed the attempts of other hillbilly artists to depart from their conventional old-time music fare. Fiddler Lowe Stokes, for example, recalled that on one occasion he and Clayton McMichen, his fellow fiddler in the Skillet-Lickers, proposed waxing a few recent jazz and pop numbers at a session in New York: “If I want violinists,” Walker said, “I can just stick my head out the window and whistle. I didn’t bring you guys all the way up here from Georgia to play violin music.”45 Ever attentive to sales, Walker usually insisted that his hillbilly artists emulate their previous bestselling releases and abandon their experiments with current pop hits and novel band configurations.46 Such examples remind us that proactive A&R men such as Walker could sometimes constrain, as well as encourage, creativity and innovation. It is also apparent that performers often had rather idiosyncratic perspectives on the nature and extent of creative input by A&R managers on their recordings. Rosa

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Lee (Carson) Johnson, Fiddlin’ John Carson’s daughter and regular guitarist (usually billed as Moonshine Kate), claimed that Polk C. Brockman never told her or her father which songs and tunes to rehearse before entering the studio. As she later explained to folklorists Archie Green and Ed Kahn, however, when she and her father recorded together for OKeh and later for Bluebird between 1925 and 1934, there was no doubt that Brockman was firmly in charge of proceedings; he worked with his hillbilly and race recording artists much as he did with the Reverend J. M. Gates to craft sound and format effectively. Brockman placed Rosa Lee and her guitar directly in front of the microphone, with any other musicians seated on either side of her, carefully arranging them to achieve optimum sonic balance. When Brockman or his engineer switched on a green light, it was time to begin playing; a red light told artists that they had only ten or fifteen more seconds to wrap up a performance.47 Such technical demands often meant reconfiguring live repertoires, though. Rosa Lee remembered that she and her father always rehearsed their selections at home to ensure that their musical performances fit within the three-minute limit of one side of a standard, ten-inch 78-rpm disc. If a song ran too long, they would just lop off a chorus or omit a verse or two.48 During the mid- to late 1920s, A&R scout Dennis Taylor did much the same to prepare the artists under his personal management for the Gennett sessions he lined up for them. As their recording dates drew near, Taylor would assemble his acts to make final decisions about repertoire and rehearse their music in his home near Richmond, Kentucky. “There,” according to Charles K. Wolfe, “he would help them choose songs to be recorded, and Mrs. Taylor, who knew a good deal more about music than her husband, would help them with their time and rhythm.” As Wolfe elaborates, “Many rural musicians were used to playing long sets at country dances, where a tune would often go on for some twenty minutes, and getting them to cut their tunes down to the three-minute limit allowed by the phonograph record was sometimes a formidable task.” On occasion, this required Taylor to rehearse—and board—his acts “for as long as three weeks before he finally took them to Indiana in his car to record.”49 Not all roots artists were able to adjust to the demands of the recording industry. As Wolfe notes, some seasoned performers struggled to abandon habits they had acquired from years, even decades, of working before live audiences, when confronted by the forbidding flash of the red studio light. As discussed in the next chapter, these new standards often created peculiar problems for A&R officials and recording engineers. But some problems created opportunities. Traditional songs, particularly lengthy ballads created in the United States or transplanted from the British Isles, regularly needed pruning to fit on commercial records. New material, in contrast, was usually composed with the technical constraints of the 78-rpm format already in mind. A&R officials quickly recognized that the demand for new songs presented new possibilities.50 As roots music recordings, particularly race records, became increasingly popular, some A&R men at smaller labels organized professional songwriting auxiliaries to their scouting and recording operations. As director of Paramount’s race records operation

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in Chicago, J. Mayo Williams employed a staff of talented songwriter-arrangers, some of whom also worked for him as session musicians, to create original blues songs for artists who struggled to either write their own songs or write enough of them to keep up with consumer demand for such material. Among these songwriter-arrangers were Tiny Parham, Thomas A. Dorsey, and Alexander J. Robinson (the husband of Williams’s secretary, Aletha Dickerson). Besides composing original blues numbers, Robinson also taught recording artists the new songs he and Williams’s staff had written, and transcribed the melodies and lyrics of artists’ original songs from test pressings to prepare the lead sheets required for copyright registration. For Williams, the operation offered a second, more important advantage in regard to copyrights and mechanical royalties. As Paramount historian Alex van der Tuuk explains, “In order to satisfy the huge demand from black record buyers for ‘Race Records’ it was essential to have enough material to supply the roster of female blues artists then working for Paramount in its early days, including Monette Moore, Ida Cox and Alberta Hunter. Better still, if the material could be controlled by Williams, rather than using songs by established blues writers and publishers such as Clarence Williams or W. C. Handy.” These arrangements

F I G U R E 4 .4 . Lester Melrose flanked by several of his Chicago recording artists (ca. late 1930s). From left: Little Son Joe, Big Bill Broonzy, Melrose, Washboard Sam (below), Roosevelt Sykes, and St. Louis Jimmy. Courtesy of the Yannick and Margo Bruynoghe Collection. Used by permission.

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ensured higher profits for both Williams and Paramount’s music publishing auxiliary, the Chicago Music Publishing Company, which Williams also managed.51 During the 1930s, the highly influential and successful Chicago-based A&R man Lester Melrose organized a similar “song factory” operation, assembling a stable of artist-songwriter-arrangers to produce new material for the distinctive urban blues records he produced for ARC, RCA Victor, and later Columbia. Most of these multitalented professionals also recorded for him in various roles, as principal artists and as session musicians in his house bands. Big Bill Broonzy, his reputed stepbrother Washboard Sam, Tampa Red, Memphis Minnie, Jazz Gillum, Sonny Boy Williamson, Walter Davis, Roosevelt Sykes, and Lonnie Johnson were among his premier artists.52 “Since only a few of them had regular accompanists,” writes Chicago blues scholar Mike Rowe, “most of them would play on each other’s records and thus Melrose had a completely self-contained unit which made great sense economically, if less [so] artistically. . . . Whereas the major companies had clumsily sought to record artists who sounded like each other, the Melrose machine provided them with artists who were each other!”53 Notwithstanding the influence of men such as J. Mayo Williams and Lester Melrose, much of the country blues and hillbilly music heard on interwar roots recordings came directly from the artists themselves, whether the songs and tunes already comprised part of their live repertoires, or were located, purchased, or written by them. But material also found its way into the hands of recording artists and their A&R managers through other channels. Southern record dealers and distributors sometimes recommended material in order to meet specific local consumer requests or shifting market trends. On May 28, 1927, Paul I. Burks, the Louisville distributor who had been instrumental in arranging Doc Roberts’s first Paramount sessions, wrote to offer him some new music. “We have a party here in Louisville who is quite familiar with many of the ‘Old Time Songs’ and he has recently stated he had about four new ones that he was fairly familiar with that he would like to have recorded,” Burks explained. “This party does not play or sing either, he is just a dealer here in Louisville and wants to give these old time pieces to anybody who can play or sing them.” Burks invited Roberts to call upon him at his retail store the next time he was in Louisville, so that “we can put you in touch with this party and probably he can give us some new pointers for recording.”54 Occasionally, record companies even went straight to the source, soliciting customer opinion about which songs and tunes they would like to hear on commercial records. To take one example, the Vocalion Record Almanac of Old Time Tunes catalog of March 1930 encouraged customers to complete and return a coupon asking, “What selection, not now listed, would you like to hear by your favorite [artist] on a Vocalion Record?” In return, officials promised, “Vocalion will try to make the records you would specially like to hear.”55 While it is difficult to discern how successful these direct public appeals were, or how often record company officials acted upon such consumer input, these initiatives underscore a reciprocal relationship between A&R managers and potential record buyers in compiling roots music catalogs.

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Whatever the sources of songs and tunes, repertoire selection formed one of the core responsibilities of A&R work and was critical to determining the success of both the record companies and their A&R men. On southern recording expeditions, this decisionmaking process often took place on the spot, either at advance auditions or sometimes even during recording sessions themselves. Describing Columbia’s Atlanta field trips of the mid- to late 1920s, Frank Walker said that aspiring artists hoping to audition would arrive “perhaps three or four or five days” ahead of time. As Walker elaborated: We recorded in a little old hotel in Atlanta, and we used to put the singers up and pay a dollar a day for their food and a place to sleep in another little old hotel. And then you’d spend all the night going from one room to another, and they kept the place hopping all night in all the different rooms that they were in. They would rehearse all night long. You’d have to go from one room to the other and keep your pen working and decide “We won’t use this,” “We will use this,” and pick out the different things that they knew, you see, because you couldn’t bring songs to them because they couldn’t learn them. . . . So you had to take what you were going to record out of that which they knew.56

In contrast, repertoire selection for sessions held at record companies’ main studios often occurred several weeks in advance. In such cases, A&R managers and their staff enjoyed the luxury of reviewing, selecting, and tentatively approving the specific songs and tunes that artists would record well before their arrival. This lead time provided artists with ample opportunity to rehearse and, if necessary, rework their pieces. It also allowed recording officials plenty of time to consider suitable arrangements and instrumentation for certain songs and tunes, and to make any special preparations necessary for the recording of such numbers. Since it was difficult to evaluate the merits of a potential selection based solely on its title, repertoire selection was far from straightforward, however. On November 6, 1928, Doc Roberts sent the Gennett A&R staff a lengthy list of songs that he and his musical partners, singer Green Bailey and guitarist Asa Martin, were prepared to record during their upcoming visit to the firm’s Richmond, Indiana, studio. After reviewing the list, assistant sales manager Lee A. Butt identified twenty-six numbers that Gennett had not previously recorded and thus declared suitable for its hillbilly catalog. “Of course we will be unable to record all of these,” Butt replied, “but shall be glad to listen to them after you arrive here and select the ones we believe to be the best.” Over two days of recording, Roberts and his bandmates waxed just eight selections from the list.57 Three months later, Butt scheduled another session for Roberts and Martin, this time to cut “several instrumental numbers.” Once again, prior to that session Roberts dutifully submitted a list of proposed selections, all except one of which Butt approved. “As far as we are able to determine, we have not recorded or listed any of these in our catalog with the exception of ‘WAGGONER ,’ ” Butt informed Roberts. However, he could not give final approval because his boss, Fred D. Wiggins, or Harold M. Little,

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Gennett’s musical director, “will desire to listen to the numbers before you record them.”58 Although Butt found almost all the titles that Roberts proposed for his midMarch sessions acceptable, he nonetheless encouraged the Kentucky fiddler to develop some new material tailored to recent market demand. “We are having a large number of calls for barn dances with calls,” Butt wrote. “Could you prepare several of these and record them when you are here? We sincerely believe this would mean a lot of additional royalties for you.”59 To give him a concrete sense of just what kinds of numbers he had in mind, Butt sent Roberts three recent Gennett releases (Gennett 6273, 6351, and 6436) by Tommy Dandurand & His Gang and by Henry Whitter & G. B. Grayson, “which have been fairly good sellers for us.” “Of course we do not want recordings which would be too much like these,” Butt cautioned in a follow-up letter. “We note you have a caller in mind and we really believe it would be worth your while to record some of these old time barn dances.”60 In February 1929, Butt gestured toward a burgeoning market for rural skits by recommending that Roberts work up a moonshining sketch similar to “The Fiddlin’ Bootleggers, Parts I and II” (Champion 15633) by the Boys from Wildcat Hollow (a pseudonymous Lowe Stokes–led string trio), which appeared on Gennett’s subsidiary Champion label. To provide Roberts with a musical template, Butt mailed him a copy of the record. Whereas roots music songs, tunes, and styles had once been transmitted from performer to performer primarily through live renditions, thanks in part to A&R men, recordings themselves were rapidly becoming an influential vehicle for sharing idioms, repertoires, and arrangements among recording artists, as they joined their labels in search of winning formulas for hit records.61 This method of coaching and building repertoires for recording sessions helped artists like Roberts who could not read music. Whenever Gennett officials assigned Roberts a selection to learn for his next session, either by sending sheet music or, more often, by giving it to him at a previous recording date, the fiddler relied on his wife, who could read music, to teach him the number by picking out the notes on the family’s pump organ.62 Receiving actual recordings of the numbers he was supposed to cover, or styles he was urged to imitate, often worked much better. Roberts followed Butt’s suggestion to record barn dance pieces. On his next visit to Richmond on March 15, 1929, he and his accompanist, Asa Martin, recorded three such tunes, with dance calls supplied by Martin: “Martha Campbell” (Supertone 9397), “Waltz the Hall” (Supertone 9670), and “The Girl I Left Behind Me” (Gennett 6826, Champion 33001, and Supertone 9397).63 None of the other sides produced at this or the next day’s session was a rural drama skit, however. Over the next two months, though, Butt continued to pester Roberts about making such recordings. “Have you prepared any numbers as we suggested when you were here the last time, similar to the ‘Fiddlin’ Bootleggers’ record which we gave you?” Butt inquired in a May 14 letter. “We hope you can give us something along this line, as we feel sure it would be a tremendous seller.”64 Less than three weeks later, on June 4, the still-hopeful Butt wrote to Roberts

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to arrange another recording session and concluded with a gentle reminder: “We hope you are keeping the ‘Fiddlin’ Bootleggers’ numbers in mind and hope that you will be able to record a few of these while you are here.”65 For whatever reason, Roberts never satisfied Butt’s incessant requests to script and record a skit for Gennett. Eventually, the exasperated executive let the matter drop. Yet within six months, Gennett’s musical director Harold M. Little was also trying to influence Roberts’s repertoire and style prior to a recording date. Little asked the fiddler to submit “a list of instrumental numbers that you would like to make . . . and we will O.K. several numbers for you to make instrumentally.” But Little also told him, “I have already O.K.’d a number of vocals we wanted for our catalogue. I hope that you will be able to sing on several of these, as we are in need of vocal duets at this time.” Two weeks later, Little wrote again and encouraged Roberts to diversify his sound by altering the musical arrangements to the songs he planned to record at his sessions in mid-January. “In a number of your duets made last time,” Little stressed, “the verse was sung as a solo and the chorus as a duet. We would like for you to sing the numbers all the way through in duet form, no solos at all. We could introduce an instrumental interlude of Guitar, Violin and Harmonica for variety.”66 Just as he had declined Lee A. Butt’s invitation to make rural skits, Doc Roberts seems to have ignored Little’s entreaties to harmonize with accompanist Asa Martin on the Gennett sides he recorded in Richmond on January 13 and 14, 1930.67 Roberts’s intransigence in the face of pressure from Gennett’s A&R men reminds us that even the most proactive recording executives were never wholly in charge of repertoire or sound: performers sometimes simply refused, or were unable to comply with, their wishes. The demands of new or expanding markets likewise influenced the sounds and selections heard on discs, as Gennett officials’ letters to Roberts make clear. The best A&R men remained ever alert to shifting musical trends and changing public tastes, and, in order to meet consumer requests for in-vogue songs, often gave artists already successful songs to cover. This happened in spectacular fashion in the case of “Wreck of the Old 97.” Within eight months of its February 1924 release, sales of Henry Whitter’s original recording for OKeh had inspired seven covers for other labels, including five by Vernon Dalhart (Edison 51361, Victor 19427, Banner 1531, Pathé 032068, and Gennett 3019), who had learned the ballad directly from Whitter’s record. Nine additional versions followed on hillbilly records before 1933.68 To cite another among numerous similar examples, the Shelton Brothers’ 1935 recording “Just Because” (Decca 5100), waxed under the direction of Dave Kapp (and itself essentially a cover of a hillbilly song recorded six years earlier), generated a half-dozen covers over the next couple of years, including Cléoma Falcon’s 1936 Decca recording, titled “Jeusté Parcqué (Just Because)” (Decca 17015), which Kapp also supervised. Falcon’s rendition, sung in Acadian French, was aimed at the Cajun records market.69 A&R men helped turn covering already popular recordings into standard industry practice. In a similar vein, they encouraged roots singer-songwriters to deliver “answer

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songs” (or responses) and sequels to best-selling records—irrespective of the genre in which these hits had first appeared. RCA Victor’s Eli Oberstein was particularly interested in developing these kinds of songs in order to boost sales of the best sellers in his Bluebird catalog, while also using the original hit’s sales momentum to promote any follow-up recordings. One disc he was especially eager to exploit was J. E. Mainer’s Mountaineers’ “Maple on the Hill” (Bluebird B-6065), cut in Atlanta on August 6, 1935, at the stringband’s debut session. At least ten hillbilly versions of this old Victorian parlor ballad had preceded the Mainer’s Mountaineers recording, but their rendition proved to be the most popular. It reportedly sold almost sixty-five thousand copies within two years of its release, despite the still-depressed market for records. Meanwhile, as sales of “Maple on the Hill” climbed, Oberstein sought to capitalize on its popularity by encouraging singer-songwriter Dorsey Dixon of the Dixon Brothers duo to compose and record three responses to the song. Rather bizarrely, given the sentimental, largely irreligious plotline of the earlier songs in this cycle, the Dixon Brothers’ third and final response, “Answer to Maple on the Hill–Part 4” (Bluebird B-6867), recorded in February 1937, described the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem.70 Soon afterward, Oberstein tried to leverage the success of an even bigger hit he had overseen. The Monroe Brothers’ version of a 1911 gospel song titled “What Would You Give in Exchange?” (Bluebird B-6309) was recorded in Charlotte on February 17, 1936, at the duo’s first session. Released two months later, “What Would You Give in Exchange?” became the best-selling hillbilly record in Bluebird’s catalog, with sales eventually exceeding one hundred thousand copies. The disc also established the brothers as one of the label’s premier hillbilly acts of the Great Depression. In Charlotte on August 3, 1937, at Oberstein’s behest, the Monroe Brothers cut three sequels to their hit, “What Would You Give in Exchange?—Part 2” through “Part 4” (Bluebird B-7122, which coupled two of them, and B-7326). Convinced that the public’s infatuation with this philosophical riddle had not yet been exhausted, Oberstein prompted the everreliable Dorsey Dixon to pen yet more songs addressing this existential question. Two days later, Oberstein supervised the recording of three answer songs by the Dixon Brothers (Bluebird B-7374 and B-7263 and Montgomery Ward M-7336). At least six more covers or sequels followed on other labels, including an irreverent 1937 parody penned by former Columbia A&R man Bob Miller, titled “What Would You Give (In Exchange for Your Mother-In-Law),” which was recorded by Jake and Carl (Conqueror 8987) and the Prairie Ramblers (Vocalion 04010).71 Covers, sequels, and answer songs also proliferated in the race records field. Briskselling hits such as Bessie Smith’s “Down Hearted Blues” (Columbia A3844), Leroy Carr’s “How Long—How Long Blues” (Vocalion 1191), and Tampa Red and Georgia Tom’s “It’s Tight Like That” (Vocalion 1216), to name only a few conspicuous examples, all generated numerous cover versions by other artists on competing labels and, in the case of the latter two titles, two additional installments each by the original artists for their own labels.72 In an extreme example of a routine practice, over the course of little

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more than a year Kokomo Arnold recorded four sequels to his own 1934 hit “Milk Cow Blues” (Decca 7026), probably at the encouragement of Decca’s race records manager J. Mayo Williams; all of them (Decca 7059, 7116, and 7163) were commercially released except, inexplicably, for the final one, “Milk Cow Blues—No. 5.”73 This frenetic recording and rerecording activity illustrates how record companies wasted little time in rushing onto the market their own versions of their competitors’ hit songs. In their search for saleable material to record, A&R men sometimes needed to look no further than the catalogs of their competitors or, in some cases, those of their own firms.

J U K E B OX E S A N D H O N K Y - T O N K S

Technological and social changes, together with broad economic trends and their attendant contraction and expansion of markets, affected the music heard on roots music records in numerous ways. After National Prohibition ended in 1933, the revenue record companies derived from jukeboxes rose rapidly, and A&R officials encouraged new songwriting and recording strategies to meet the needs of that increasingly important allied industry. During the mid-1930s, the Wall Street Journal estimated, there were approximately twenty thousand automatic, coin-operated jukeboxes in the United States. By 1941, that number had risen to somewhere between three and four hundred thousand (some estimates ran as high as 550,000), generating a gross annual windfall of between $150 million and $175 million.74 In addition to bars and small clubs in northern and midwestern cities, many of these machines were located in roadhouses, crossroads stores, and cafés across the South and Southwest, where they consumed a massive number of records. “There were 750,000 records sold in the Carolinas last year,” Van H. Sills, record department manager of the Charlotte-based Southern Radio Corporation, RCA Victor’s local distributor, told a Charlotte News reporter in 1938. “The 5,000 piccolos [i.e., jukeboxes] change records weekly and they use 20 a week.”75 With typical brio, Art Satherley fondly recalled “the time when if there was [sic] 400,000 juke boxes in America, I would say that Bob Wills was on 350,000 of them!” When he issued a new Wills record, Satherley said, “We would get orders for probably—well, suppose each one of them bought ten records, and there’s 300,000. Ten times 300,000. Right there! And why did they buy ten? You see, they’re on 78s, on shellac, and those jukeboxes were not too easy on those things.” Jukebox patrons paid a nickel per play, with most records running about two and a half to three minutes. But as Satherley explained, he came under increasing pressure from shady jukebox operators to record ever-shorter songs and thereby reduce the playing time of each record, simply to encourage patrons to drop more and more coins into jukeboxes. “We had to cut down later on, of course,” he recalled, “they got us down to a minute and three quarters, which was only done by the people who owned the jukeboxes. . . . Because they wanted to get people putting more nickels in the machine.”76

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Jukebox sales even influenced the lyrical content and musical style of some recorded roots music, particularly hillbilly music. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, an oil boom in East Texas and the Southwest fostered the proliferation of working-class taverns-cum-dance halls known as “honky-tonks,” where a vibrant new strain of propulsive, highly danceable hillbilly music took hold. Honky-tonk music, as the form became known, often reflected the hardscrabble life of its core working-class audience. The genre’s gritty, uncompromising lyrics candidly addressed drinking, infidelity, and divorce—taboo topics that were generally avoided in American pop music—in quintessential numbers such as Jimmie Davis’s “It Makes No Difference Now” (Decca 5620), Ernest Tubb’s “Walking the Floor over You” (Decca 5958), Ted Daffan’s Texans’ “Born to Lose” (OKeh 6706), and Al Dexter & His Troopers’ “Pistol Packin’ Mama” (OKeh 6708), all of which became jukebox hits between 1939 and 1943.77 Dexter’s self-penned “Pistol Packin’ Mama,” recorded in Hollywood, California, on March 20, 1942, under Art Satherley’s direction, was the biggest of all honky-tonk hits in wartime America. It was Satherley who had urged Dexter to specialize in writing and recording songs in this style; the wisdom of his advice was ultimately registered in enormous commercial success. Satherley had supervised the Texas singer’s first recording session in 1936, and as historian Jeffrey J. Lange notes, “From the outset, Satherley let Dexter know that he was looking for something different and strongly suggested to the singer that he abandon his penchant for writing gospel and Jimmie Rodgers-like songs in favor of more up-tempo material.”78 Dexter acknowledged that guidance. “Art Satherley . . . told me to write honky-tonk songs. When I told him I like pretty songs, he said . . . ‘My lad, do you want to sing pretty songs or do you want to make money[?]’ I wrote ‘Honk-tonk Blues’ and ‘Jelly Roll Blues’ and after that, all they wanted from me was honky-tonk.”79 Although he sometimes felt constrained by the songwriting demands of his A&R man and his record company, Dexter, a former honky-tonk owner himself, wrote and recorded a string of hits in this vein. None was more successful than “Pistol Packin’ Mama,” which sold more than one million copies within six months of its release and soon reached #1 on Billboard’s all-inclusive roots music records chart (then based on jukebox play) as well as on the magazine’s all-genre “Best Selling Retail Records” chart.80 A genuine pop culture phenomenon, Dexter’s song became such a massive jukebox hit throughout the United States that Life magazine termed it “a national earache.” The song became even more ubiquitous when, on September 27, 1943, Decca’s A&R chief Dave Kapp prompted Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters to team up on a pop version (Decca 23277). Straddling markets and confounding easy generalizations about audiences and styles, the Crosby-Andrews Sisters collaboration, although aimed squarely at the mainstream pop market, also managed to hold down the #1 spot in Billboard’s newly created “Most Played Juke Box Folk Records” chart (which covered “Hillbilly, Race, Cowboy Songs, [and] Spirituals”) for seven consecutive weeks in early 1944.81

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On the strength of these and other honky-tonk hits, reinforced by frequent pop cover versions, hillbilly music soared to unprecedented national popularity during World War II. As southern migrants flocked to military bases and defense plants in midwestern and West Coast cities, they brought with them their regional musical predilections in a hillbilly music diaspora that quickly won many new converts. “The dominant popular music of the US today is hillbilly,” Time magazine proclaimed unequivocally in an October 1943 article, condescendingly titled “Bull Market in Corn”: By last week the flood of camp-meetin’ melody, which had been rising steadily in juke joints and on radio programs for over a year, was swamping Tin Pan Alley. Big names in the drawling art of country and cowboy balladry like Gene Autry, the Carter Family, Roy Acuff and Al Dexter were selling discs like never before. Top-flight songsters like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra were making their biggest smashes with hillbilly tunes. A homely earful of the purest Texas corn, Al Dexter’s “Pistol Packin’ Mama,” had edged its way to first place among the nation’s juke-box favorites. Even many of Tin Pan Alley’s best-sellers, such tunes as “You’ll Never Know,” “Comin’ in on a Wing and a Prayer,” [and] “There’s a Star-Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere,” were fragrant with hillbilly spirit. All this constituted the biggest revolution in US popular musical taste since the “swing” craze began in the middle ’30s.82

Art Satherley may have perfected a formula for the honky-tonk music of Al Dexter and several of his Columbia roster mates, and he was certainly a pivotal A&R figure behind the extraordinary popularity that hillbilly music enjoyed during World War II. Yet, even more than Satherley, it was perhaps Decca recording director Dave Kapp who played the decisive role in hillbilly music’s wartime breakthrough to a larger national audience. Kapp, who had managed the label’s hillbilly and race catalogs since 1934, also scouted talent and supervised sessions in the popular music field, including those of Decca’s biggest star, crooner Bing Crosby. Like Satherley, Kapp cleverly courted the lucrative jukebox market, which, according to some estimates, accounted for 40 percent of all record sales by 1936.83 With a commercial interest in just about every conceivable musical genre and market, Kapp regularly appropriated hit songs in the roots music field that he believed had latent “popular appeal,” particularly honky-tonk numbers, and gave them to his pop artists to record, turning them into national hits on America’s jukeboxes and airwaves. As Time magazine reported: What really started the corn sprouting on Broadway was a lugubrious tune by Louisiana’s Jimmie Davis called “It Makes No Difference Now.” In the late ’30s Decca’s Recording Chief David Kapp heard the Texas hit and got it on wax. Within a few months record buyers were clamoring for Decca’s later Bing Crosby version. Shrewd David Kapp barged wholesale into the hillbilly field, boomed local hits into national smashes by giving them successive recordings by bigger and bigger names. Thus, Crosby became the most popular singer of hillbilly as well as other popular music.84

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F I G U R E 4 . 5 . Dave Kapp with one of his Decca hillbilly stars, Ernest Tubb, inside a recording studio (ca. 1941). Courtesy of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

The practice of taking best-selling recordings by roots artists and cutting pop cover versions of them for what A&R managers presumed to be different audiences, segmented principally by race, class, and region, did not originate with Dave Kapp: it dates back to the advent of recorded vaudeville blues in 1920.85 Nonetheless, more than any of his counterparts at other labels, it was Kapp who really mastered the art of gentrifying and cross-marketing proven roots music material using nationally known pop singers, realizing, as he later noted, that “the records in the hill billy catalog didn’t find their way into the markets for popular artists.”86 In addition to “Pistol Packin’ Mama” and “It Makes No Difference Now” (Decca 3590), Kapp placed several other previously recorded hillbilly songs with Crosby in the early 1940s, including “New San Antonio Rose” (the flipside of “It Makes No Difference Now”), “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” (Decca 3024), “Goodbye, Little Darlin’, Goodbye” (Decca 3856), “You Are My Sunshine” (Decca

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3952), and “Walking the Floor over You” (Decca 18371).87 In 1951, Kapp summarized for interviewer John Krimsky the philosophy and market realities behind his innovative approach to maximizing the commercial potential of any hot musical property: “It is so seldom that one record can supply or can satisfy the desires of everybody who wants a song. That is why as a company there are certain popular songs we had that we made in eight different ways. We made it [by] a popular vocalist. We made it by a colored girl to appeal to the Harlem folk. We made it as a hill billy record. We made it as a rumba.”88

W R I T I N G, A R RA N G I N G, A N D I N S P I R I N G S O N G S

Despite the success Kapp achieved with pop covers of hillbilly songs, A&R managers continued to place a premium on finding and recording original material so they could exploit the financial potential of song publishing and copyright control. Although this approach opened the record-making process to greater creative input from artists and songwriters, it also encouraged some A&R officials to write or arrange their own material—and others to claim authorship of songs they neither wrote nor arranged. Dan Hornsby, Bob Miller, Nat Shilkret, Richard M. Jones, Clarence Williams, and Aletha Dickerson were among those in the interwar A&R field who had a genuine flair for songwriting and arranging that was frequently evident in the commercial recordings made under their supervision. J. B. Long probably wrote or rewrote several of the blues songs cut by Blind Boy Fuller, including “Step It Up and Go” (Vocalion 05476), while H. C. Speir claimed—and may, indeed, have had—a hand in writing at least the first iteration of Kokomo Arnold’s “Milk Cow Blues.”89 Even the cantankerous Harry Charles could turn his pen quite effectively to dashing off a recordable blues song on demand. “I could write one in ten minutes. If you know anything about nigras, you can write a blues,” he assured Gayle Dean Wardlow, recalling a St. Louis session at which he had supplied an unidentified female blues singer with eight songs in return for a daily fee and a two-cents-per-side royalty. Hyperbole and the ever-present possibility of claiming undeserved songwriting credit aside, Charles certainly copyrighted numerous commercially released blues and gospel songs as named author, among them Priscilla Stewart’s “Jefferson County” (Paramount 12402), Bo Weavil Jackson’s “Pistol Blues” (Paramount 12389), the Biddleville Quintette’s “Didn’t It Rain” (QRS R7073 and Paramount 12848), and Barefoot Bill’s “My Crime Blues” (Columbia 14510-D).90 Several songwriters and music publishers, in fact, became involved in A&R work principally as a means to get their own songs recorded and, thus, to generate potentially lucrative mechanical royalties. African American songwriter-pianist Perry “Mule” Bradford had initially secured recording sessions at OKeh for Mamie Smith in February and August 1920, primarily to promote his own compositions, “That Thing Called Love,” “You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down,” and, most famously, “Crazy Blues” (which borrowed liberally from several of his previous, published and unpublished,

Several music publishers started to produce material written expressly for the expanding vaudeville blues recording field, and some even began to manage aspiring recording artists and contract their musical services to record companies. In 1923, the Down South Music Publishing Company was organized in New York, with Fletcher Henderson, bandleader, composer, and former recording director of the by-then nearly defunct Black Swan Record Company, as its general manager. As a press release in Phonograph and Talking Machine Weekly announced, the new enterprise “will be devoted toward the publication and exploitation of ‘blues’ and other songs typical of the colored race” and “will henceforth devote itself exclusively toward the popularization of characteristic ‘blues’ novelties by foremost race artists, composers, and stage and record stars.” Despite this race-pride rhetoric, the firm was actually a subsidiary of

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As a result of this “blues” boom and demand, various Colored publishers are prospering. Perry Bradford and the Clarence Williams Music Co. are among the representative Negro music men cleaning up from mechanical royalties with the sheet music angle almost negligible and practically incidental. No attention to professional plugging is made, these publishers concentrating on the disk artists. Both have some of the Colored songstresses under contract and it is only natural that they record certain favored numbers. The white publishers are getting on to this and also entering many, many “blues” in the market, one already having cashed in on the idea because of getting the jump on the proposition several months in advance with a strong “blues” catalog.94

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blues songs). The final selection Smith cut at these sessions, “It’s Right Here for You (If You Don’t Get It ’Taint No Fault O’ Mine),” though not composed by Bradford, was copyrighted by him, with lyrics written by his wife, Marion Dickerson. That same year, Bradford opened his eponymous Perry Bradford Music Publishing Company in the Gaiety Building (also headquarters to the black-owned Pace & Handy Music Company) on Broadway in New York. Bradford continued to serve as Smith’s manager over the next ten or so months, during which time he arranged and supervised several sessions for her and for other artists that featured many more of his own songs as well as songs for which he owned the copyrights.91 Smith’s commercial success touched off an enormous demand for similar female vaudeville blues singers. By the end of 1921, competing record labels, including Arto, Cardinal, Columbia, Emerson, Gennett, Pathé, and Black Swan, had all released dozens of similar recordings.92 “One of the phonograph companies made over four million dollars on the Blues,” Metronome observed in 1922. “Now every phonograph company has a colored girl recording. Blues are here to stay.”93 Since many of these singers did not write their own material, there was a clamor in the recording industry for sophisticated vaudeville-style “blues” numbers, and sensing the lucrative opportunities this offered, Bradford and other New York–based composerpublishers, including future A&R men Clarence Williams and Joe Davis, scrambled to supply them. As the Chicago Defender reported in 1923:

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Jack Mills Inc. (later renamed Mills Music Inc.), a white-owned New York publishing concern, one of whose co-founders was future A&R man and record label executive Irving Mills. Down South Music supplied record labels with new blues songs and, as the press release noted, also provided them with “prominent singers and accompanists” to record them.95 By 1923, as the example of Down South Music indicates, many music publishers and their staffs were beginning to act as de facto A&R officials, placing a stable of singers and musicians under contract, and then farming out their services to various record labels. In a precursor to what Lester Melrose later did so effectively with the blues talent under his management in Chicago during the 1930s and 1940s, some publishing firms offered record companies what phonograph industry historian Allan Sutton calls “ready-made ‘blues’ packages,” which included new blues songs, along with singers and accompanists under their management to record them and, if necessary, the personnel to supervise those sessions. But music publishers’ involvement in these kinds of A&R arrangements was invariably driven by their attempts to capitalize on song copyrights and royalties. Indeed, in the words of biographer Bob Koester, Melrose “was a music publisher and his primary interest in promoting blues recording sessions seems to have been to enlarge the Wabash and Duchess Music catalogs he operated.”96 Joe Davis, president of both Joe Davis Music Inc. and the Triangle Music Publishing Company (and future brother-in-law of Jack and Dave Kapp), was another slick operator whose ambition in the music business was matched only by his versatility. Between 1923 and 1926, his peak years in the New York race recording scene, Davis brokered the talents of the female singers he managed—including Josie Miles, Rosa Henderson, Viola McCoy, and Monette Moore—to numerous record labels, among them Ajax, Banner, Edison, Gennett, OKeh, Pathé, and Vocalion. He often personally supervised their sessions, relying at most dates on the same back-up musicians to create recordings of Davis-published blues numbers. Davis wrote some of these songs himself, among them “Mean Daddy Blues” and “Take It Easy.” Most, however, he purchased from songwriters such as Tom Delany, Chris Hill, and Fletcher Henderson, or drew from material penned by his talented staff of arrangers and songwriters, which eventually included Fats Waller, Andy Razaf, and Spencer Williams. For organizing these recording dates, Davis usually collected a flat session contractor’s fee and, more importantly, claimed mechanical royalties on the sales of recordings of any Daviscopyrighted songs.97 Perry Bradford and Clarence Williams (especially after he went to work as an A&R man at OKeh in 1923) did much the same thing in the fields of blues and jazz. Sometimes, especially in the case of Williams, they also provided the piano accompaniment on recordings of songs they often wrote themselves or whose copyrights they owned.98 Even when they did not take a stab at songwriting themselves, A&R officials frequently influenced and sometimes dictated the kinds of songs roots recording artists wrote. Polk C. Brockman and Frank Walker were among the first A&R men to en-

The origins of “The Death of Floyd Collins” are revealing and again indicative of the creative role Polk C. Brockman played as a pioneering A&R man in the recorded roots music field. In February 1925, the plight of spelunker Floyd Collins, trapped in a Kentucky cave 125 feet underground, transfixed the nation for more than two weeks. Brockman read multiple newspaper stories detailing the desperate rescue attempts to free Collins. But, despite all efforts, Collins died a slow, excruciating death from exposure. Two months later, while on a business trip to Florida with OKeh’s sales director Ralph Peer, Brockman conceived the idea for a ballad based on this tragic episode. Aware that several previous recordings of event songs inspired by train wrecks had sold briskly, Brockman realized that this national news story might also make a compelling subject for a hit record. As he later explained, “I was sitting in the lobby of a hotel in Jacksonville, Florida, one night, and we were bringing one of these recording expeditions to Atlanta. And I just got to thinking about some of the events of the past, you know, ‘The Wreck of the [Old] 97,’ as an example. . . . I just thought, ‘Well, . . . there’s so much interest in [the Collins story] all over the country. . . . Everybody’s ears had been tuned to it and all for weeks there. Well, maybe a tragedy story, a disaster story, written around this thing might click.”101 Brockman, however, needed someone to transform his hunch into a song. He wired a telegram to the Reverend Andrew Jenkins, a gifted Atlanta songwriter and recording artist, instructing him: “Get song on Floyd Collins in Sand Cave.” Although substantially blind, Jenkins set about his task with the assistance of his stepdaughter and musical arranger, Irene Spain. “We had listened to every bit of it on the radio,” she recalled in a 1977 interview. “We were living it with the crowd

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is reported by Thomas A. Edison, Inc., for the series of records being made by Vernon Dalhart and company, representative of the type of songs apparently favored by the southern mountaineers, and which appeal to record purchasers in other localities. Such songs as “Little Rosewood Casket,” “The John T. Scopes Trial (The Old Religion’s Better After All)” 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.”100

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courage some of their talent to write and record “event songs”—topical ballads about contemporary natural disasters, train wrecks, murders, and similar headline-making events. The vogue for such songs can probably be traced to the runaway success of “Wreck of the Old 97” as popularized by Vernon Dalhart’s 1924 Victor recording. This song was the first of more than thirty different hillbilly tales of railroad disasters recorded, many of them by multiple artists, before 1943.99 Dalhart turned recording event songs into a cottage industry, waxing dozens of them, usually for five or more record companies, before his career collapsed in 1931. But it was the remarkable success of “The Death of Floyd Collins” in 1925 that clearly marked the arrival of the event song as a major subgenre in recorded roots music, especially in the hillbilly field. “A strong demand,” noted an October 1925 Talking Machine World article,

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that was trying to get Floyd out. When Mr. Brockman wired and said he believed it would make a good song, Daddy got his old faithful guitar and went and sat down on the top step of the porch.” The song, Spain suggested, almost wrote itself. “Pretty soon he called me, and I went out there with my tablet and pencil. In a little while we had the song in the mail.”102 Jenkins fulfilled what was essentially a commission, receiving $25 for a song that Brockman, who also ran a small music publishing company, first placed with Fiddlin’ John Carson, who recorded it, initially to widespread public indifference, in mid-April 1925 (OKeh 40363), less than two months after Collins’s death. Soon after, Jenkins waxed his own version titled “Floyd Collins in Sand Cave” (OKeh 40393), under the artist credit Blind “Andy.” But Brockman had also passed the song to Columbia A&R man Frank Walker in New York. On May 27, 1925, shortly before Jenkins’s recording, Walker supervised Vernon Dalhart’s rendition, which, coupled with a murder ballad, “Little Mary Phagan” (Columbia 15031-D), and pseudonymously credited to Al Craver, sold more than three hundred thousand copies, making it the single best seller of all the 782 records issued in Columbia’s “Familiar Tunes, Old and New” series. It was this phenomenally successful version that left both Walker and Brockman itching for more of the same.103 Brockman later suggested that, while Jenkins had composed “The Death of Floyd Collins” “at my suggestion,” subsequent event songs he wrote “were more or less his ideas with occasional suggestions from me.”104 Unusually for a man who rarely shied away from self-congratulation, Brockman failed to mention that those suggestions were often quite specific, directly guiding songwriting efforts and, ultimately, recorded repertoires. On December 20, 1926, Brockman wrote to Jenkins, urging him to write about the popular Old West outlaw Billy the Kid. “I have been trying to get some dope together with which to compose a song on ‘Billy, The Kid,’ ” Brockman explained. He even sent the blind songwriter and his stepdaughter some preliminary reading on the topic, a Book of the Month Club flyer for Walter Noble Burns’s recently published The Saga of Billy the Kid (1925), with the promise of more to follow, probably including a copy of the book and “some first-hand information from people out in Texas.”105 Jenkins and Irene Spain used this material to write “Billy the Kid,” which the A&R man then quickly arranged for Dalhart to record. In characteristic Dalhart fashion, between mid-February and mid-April 1927, the singer cut the ballad for four different firms (Brunswick 100 and 3469, OKeh 45102, Columbia 15135-D [as by Al Craver], and Victor 20966).106 Equally characteristically, on March 17, 1927, Brockman, having commissioned the song from Jenkins for the songwriter’s standard $25 fee, registered a transcription in his own name with the United States Copyright Office (although duly crediting the words and music to Andrew Jenkins and the arrangement to Irene Spain), thereby laying claim to the song’s mechanical royalties.107 Where Brockman led, other A&R men soon followed. For Frank Walker, the chief source of event songs was Dalhart’s long-time guitarist and duet partner, Carson J.

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Robison, who ranks as the first notable professional hillbilly songwriter. The Kansasborn Robison initiated the practice of composing traditional-sounding, folk-like ballads for the nascent hillbilly recording industry, and became so skillful and efficient that, as a 1926 wire-service newspaper article remarked, he churned out songs “almost like flivvers from a factory!”108 This invocation of “flivvers” and “factories” was a telling simile. It neatly captured a transitional moment when, even in a roots music field that traded heavily on notions of rural authenticity, creating hillbilly songs and records was becoming ever more bound up with the professionalism and mass production techniques of the modern, urban-centered music publishing and recording industries. During the mid- to late 1920s, while at Columbia, Walker relied heavily on the prolific Robison for a steady stream of topical songs, often composed at the A&R man’s instigation. “If I were down South and found some tale of a local nature down there,” Walker recounted, “I’d sit down and I’d write Carson, and I’d tell him the story of it. . . . I’d come back to New York, and twenty-four hours afterwards, Carson would be in, and say here is the story of whatever it happened to be. It would be done. We might make a few changes to make it a little more authentic, and then we would record it.”109 Again, the idea that a commercially attractive kind of authenticity could be enhanced, or even generated, by the involvement of A&R managers in the songwriting, song selection, and recording processes reflected their central role in redefining concepts of tradition during the formative years of recorded American roots music. None of this is to suggest that Robison was incapable of following the news himself, or to deny that he was extremely adept at turning accounts of recent events into songs that seemed somehow timeless—songs that redeployed and extended familiar idioms to create new “old-time” recordings. As Robison told a Collier’s magazine reporter in 1929, “First I read all the newspaper stories of, say, a disaster. Then I get to work on the old typewriter. There’s a formula, of course. You start by painting everything in gay colors—‘the folks were all happy and gay’ stuff. That’s sure fire. Then you ring in the tragedy—make it as morbid and gruesome as you can. Then you wind up with a moral.”110 While there is a subtle tension between Walker’s and Robison’s accounts when it comes to locating the initial inspiration for such event songs, Robison, the flexible, talented singer-musician-songwriter, and Walker, the forceful, single-minded A&R man, collaborated to generate a string of topical hit records for the indefatigable Dalhart, including “The John T. Scopes Trial” (Columbia 15037-D) and something of a follow-up, “William Jennings Bryan’s Last Fight” (Columbia 15039-D), both of which featured Robison’s guitar accompaniment.111 By the late 1920s, A&R men’s insatiable demand for original songs had led to the emergence of professional hillbilly songwriters such as Robison and Bob Miller—who also worked as a recording manager for Columbia and other record companies later on—to produce new material, especially in the ever-popular subgenre of topical event songs.112 Although not nearly so prevalent in the race records field, event songs were also written and recorded by blues and gospel singers, including dozens of songs inspired

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F I G U R E 4 .6 . Cover of Bob Miller’s Famous Folio Full of Song Hits (1934), one of several hillbilly song collections issued by songwriter, publisher, and A&R man Bob Miller. Authors’ collections.

by the catastrophic Mississippi River Flood of 1927. Among the many recordings dealing with this tragedy, some more explicitly than others, were Bessie Smith’s “Homeless Blues” (Columbia 14260-D), Lonnie Johnson’s “Broken Levee Blues” (OKeh 8618), Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Rising High Water Blues” (Paramount 12487), Elders McIntorsh and Edwards’s “The 1927 Flood” (OKeh 8647), Charley Patton’s two-part “High Water Everywhere” (coupled on Paramount 12909), and Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie’s “When the Levee Breaks” (Columbia 14439-D).113 At least one flood-inspired blues song

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was written and recorded expressly at the behest of an A&R man: Sippie Wallace’s “The Flood Blues” (OKeh 8470), waxed on May 6, 1927, in Chicago for OKeh. As Wallace recalled in a 1983 interview, “ ‘The Flood Blues’ was about the 1927 Mississippi floods. Now Bessie Smith had done ‘Backwater [sic] Blues’ and Mr. Peer came to my brother in Chicago and said they wanted me to do a flood blues so George and I wrote it.” “Mr. Peer” was undoubtedly Ralph Peer; but since he was no longer affiliated with OKeh by 1927, more than half a century after the events, Wallace may have confused him with the company’s then-recording manager, Tommy Rockwell.114 Ironically, yet revealingly, the most successful of all the 1927 flood blues songs, Bessie Smith’s self-penned “BackWater Blues” (Columbia 14195-D), was actually recorded in New York on February 17, 1927, two months before the flooding submerged vast expanses of the Mississippi Delta. Initially, advertisements for Smith’s record treated the song as a generic flood season blues, of which there were many; by May, however, Columbia was openly promoting the number as a heartfelt response to the catastrophe: “A real blues about the great flood that you’ll want to have,” ran the ad copy in the Chicago Defender.115 There were more than a dozen recordings of “Back-Water Blues”—and not just in the blues field. At least four hillbilly versions eventually appeared on commercial disc before World War II, beginning with Uncle Dave Macon’s (Vocalion 5164) in 1927, followed by Byrd Moore’s (Gennett 6686) and The Three Tobacco Tags’ (Champion 16674) in 1928 and 1932, respectively, and ending with Dewey & Gassie Bassett’s (Bluebird B-8682) in 1938.116 Elsewhere, the tragedy, perhaps predictably, inspired Carson J. Robison to pen a lament about the disaster titled “The Mississippi Flood”; equally predictably, Vernon Dalhart recorded Robison’s song for Victor (Victor 20611) as well as for seven other record companies.117 There was even a recorded Cajun instrumental inspired by the calamity: “L’Eau Haute (High Water Waltz)” (Victor 22562), waxed on November 9, 1929, at a New Orleans field session, by accordion-and-guitar duo Bartmon Montet and Joswell Dupuis.118 The Reverend Moses Mason, an obscure African American preacher whom H. C. Speir found in Lake Providence, Louisiana, recorded what appears to be the only sermon specifically about the 1927 Mississippi flood, “Red Cross the Disciple of Christ Today” (Paramount 12601), which praised the emergency relief efforts of the humanitarian organization named in the title. The most prolifically recorded of all the preachers, the Reverend J. M. Gates had waxed “Noah and the Flood” (OKeh 8458) on February 22, 1927, before rising floodwaters had become much of a national news story, but apparently recorded nothing in direct response to that devastating event.119 Like his fellow race and hillbilly artists, though, Gates frequently did address headline news stories on record. His “The California Kidnapping” (OKeh 8552), for instance, dealt with the same gruesome 1927 abduction, murder, and dismemberment of a prominent Los Angeles banker’s twelve-year-old daughter, as did Dalhart’s “Little Marion Parker” (Columbia 15218-D, among several others), yet another of Robison’s compositions. The Reverend Andrew Jenkins’s recording of his own song, “The Fate of Edward Hickman” (OKeh

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45197, whose flipside featured Jenkins’s version of Robison’s “Little Marion Parker”), offered another take on the same saga.120 It was no coincidence that high-profile news stories, just like common-stock tunes and traditional ballads (such as “John Henry,” “Frankie and Johnnie,” “Casey Jones,” and “The Titanic”), often found expression on commercial recordings in both the hillbilly and the race fields. They all reflected continuing musical fluidity and exchanges across the “color line,” notwithstanding how racially circumscribed musical preferences, industry recording and sales practices, and, in the South and parts of the Midwest, Jim Crow laws combined to foster an increasingly segregated approach to making and marketing roots music. Of course, like their hillbilly counterparts, some race record event songs were inspired by the individual experiences and personal muses of their composers, rather than by the promptings of A&R officials. Charley Patton’s “The Delta Murder,” for example, described the 1934 slaying of Henry Freeman by a fellow gambler nicknamed “Quicksilver.” The axe murder, which stemmed from an argument over a woman, took place at Four Mile Lake, near Belzoni, Mississippi, during a rowdy house frolic attended by Patton and his common-law wife and sometime singing partner, Bertha Lee Pate. While his recording of “The Delta Murder” went unissued, Patton crafted another song out of the incident that did appear on commercial disc. “High Sheriff Blues” (Vocalion 02680) indicted a local deputy sheriff, R. Carlos Webb, for throwing Patton and Pate in jail as he rounded up witnesses and suspects following the murder. Patton was eventually bailed out by his A&R man, W. R. Calaway, who was then desperately searching the Delta to take the errant and ailing bluesman to New York for what proved to be his final recording sessions, on January 30 and February 1, 1934.121 This was not the only time that A&R managers and scouts had to haul their talent out of jails, bars, and brothels to attend a recording date.122 On some occasions, A&R officials prompted blues and jazz artists to mine current affairs and cash in on popular personalities for material, much as they did hillbilly artists. John Hammond, for instance, asked acclaimed black novelist Richard Wright to pen lyrics for “King Joe,” a tribute to boxing’s World Heavyweight Champion Joe Louis. Singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson recorded the song in 1941 (OKeh 6475), accompanied by the orchestra of Count Basie, who composed the music.123 J. Mayo Williams and Joe Davis also commissioned recordings of topical blues. In January 1945, Williams, by this time head of his own small Chicago label, recorded James “Jack of All Trades” McCain’s “Good Mr. Roosevelt” (Chicago 103), an homage to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and, immediately after the president’s death in April, the flipside of that disc, Big Joe Williams’s “His Spirit Lives On.” Similarly, the president’s passing spurred Joe Davis to bring Champion Jack Dupree, one of the recently signed artists on his eponymous independent label, into the studio to record a similar elegy, “F.D.R. Blues” (Joe Davis 5102), which, according to the label credits, Davis himself had composed.124 Naturally, A&R officials encouraged recorded memorials to other celebrities. Blues authority Paul Swinton cynically observes that, in March 1930, after the death of Para-

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F I G U R E 4 .7. Detail from a Conqueror dealers’ release sheet (1933) advertising Gene Autry’s “The Death of Jimmie Rodgers.” Archie Green Papers (#20002), Southern Folklife Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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mount’s best-selling race recording star, someone at the label, most likely recording director Art Laibly, “commissioned a special double[-]sided tribute” to the late Blind Lemon Jefferson in an attempt to “wring the last drop of market potential from [his] name.” In a relatively rare combination of the secular and the sacred on a single disc, the record featured Washboard Walter’s blues elegy “Wasn’t It Sad about Lemon,” coupled with the Reverend Emmet Dickinson’s sermon “Death of Blind Lemon” (Paramount 12945).125 One also senses the hand of enterprising A&R men at play in some of the other memorials to fallen blues stars that appeared on race records, such as “The Death of Leroy Carr (Dedicated to the Memory of Leroy Carr)” (Decca 7098) by Bumble Bee Slim; “Life of Leroy Carr” (OKeh 05770) by Little Bill Gaither; “Death of Bessie Smith” (Bluebird B-8352) by Booker T. Washington; “Ma Rainey” (OKeh 05811) by Memphis Minnie; and “Death of Blind Boy Fuller” (OKeh 06265) by Brownie McGhee (Blind Boy Fuller #2).126 In hillbilly music, there was a similar impulse to extract profits from tragedy. On June 22, 1933, less than a month after Jimmie Rodgers died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-five, Gene Autry recorded a tribute to his singing idol, pairing “The Life of Jimmie Rodgers” with “The Death of Jimmie Rodgers” (Banner 32800, Oriole 8246, and Romeo 5246, among others). Both songs had been penned by New York music publisher and topical songwriter extraordinaire Bob Miller, former recording manager

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at Columbia’s Atlanta studio.127 Art Satherley, Autry’s A&R man at ARC, also appears to have contributed significantly to this tribute record. According to his own accounts, Satherley not only seems to have personally acquired the songs from Miller but also supervised the session at which Autry recorded them. He even claimed to have conceived the imaginative advertising for the record. As he later recalled, “I got up the idea and called Gene and said, ‘We’ve got a song called ‘The Death of Jimmie Rodgers.’ You go today and get a photograph made of yourself with your hat in your hand . . . as if you’re looking at a departed person, a grave.’ ” Satherley then submitted the photograph, along with his concept for the layout, to ARC’s advertising director, Leonard Schneider (later an executive vice president at Decca). Schneider, in turn, oversaw the creation of a dealers’ release sheet advertising the tribute song on Conqueror Records (Conqueror 8168), a Sears, Roebuck & Company label. The sheet’s artwork featured a sentimentalized drawing of Rodgers’s tombstone, with his guitar and a wreath propped up against it, and a superimposed photograph of Autry, cowboy hat in one hand and leaning against his own guitar, gazing sadly at his late idol’s grave. “We must have had 20,000 of those [dealers’ release sheets printed] . . . [and] given away to people in the country just to put . . . in their living rooms,” explained Satherley.128 Beyond answer songs and memorial tributes, A&R men often asked artists and songwriters to compose material that mimicked best-selling hit records or popular styles. Most happily obliged, especially if they were struggling to assemble enough of the “original” selections that A&R officials frequently demanded for a recording session. In 1931, for instance, Paramount’s Art Laibly prodded Skip James to compose “22-20 Blues” (Paramount 13066) by asking him to write “a song about a gun.” Five years later, Robert Johnson used James’s template for his own “32-20 Blues” (Vocalion 03445).129 This endless reworking of the same basic raw materials found on interwar blues and hillbilly records was commonplace. David Evans, who has meticulously traced the interplay between tradition and creativity and the incestuous musical and lyrical relationships among hundreds of recorded blues songs, observes, “Many singers like Kokomo Arnold, Peetie Wheatstraw, and Elmore James have composed dozens of different thematic texts to only a few melodic and instrumental patterns each.”130 In the hillbilly field, Charles K. Wolfe’s equally painstaking, year-by-year analysis of the sources for the 1,452 selections that appeared between 1925 and 1931 in Columbia’s “Familiar Tunes, Old and New” series reveals a similar pattern. Wolfe discovered that the records in this series consisted of a mixture of older traditional numbers (accounting for approximately 33 percent of all sides issued during this period), pop song covers (the proportion of which dropped from a high of 42 percent in 1926 to 22 percent in 1931), and newly composed hillbilly selections (constituting 24 percent of releases by 1931). As Wolfe suggests, however, these new compositions initially drew so heavily on traditional numbers and deeply embedded musical arrangements that they often sounded remarkably like older folksongs.131

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Some A&R men were more cautious than others in this regard, preferring to stick close to well-established musical styles and lyrical themes even as they noted and sometimes nodded toward new emerging musical trends. Between 1928 and 1930, Columbia’s Frank Walker and Brunswick’s Richard Voynow organized a series of Tennessee field-recording sessions in Johnson City and Knoxville, respectively. Although their intention was apparently to repeat the success of Ralph Peer’s 1927 Bristol Sessions for Victor, neither man actually recorded many blues yodelers or harmonizing hillbilly trios at these sessions, despite the rampant success of Peer’s newcomers Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family in those styles. Instead, Walker and Voynow focused on recording old-time stringbands and white gospel music. Thus, they continued to prioritize styles that, although they had stood the test of time in the marketplace, would soon become far less central to the hillbilly recording industry than the increasingly popular idioms pioneered by Rodgers and the Carters.132 In yet another twist in the intricate dance between tradition and innovation, and familiarity and originality that characterized interwar A&R, particular economic circumstances and technological developments meant that recording managers and talent scouts often welcomed or recycled old selections, even though these officials greatly prized original or at least previously unrecorded material. On December 27, 1930, W. R. Calaway, sales manager at the newly formed ARC, responded to an inquiry from Doc Roberts about the possibility of recording for the start-up operation. The firm had only recently created a “Country Catalog,” Calaway explained, and as a result, it contained “only a few country numbers by such as Dalhart & others. This is a new proposition and as to how it is going to pay the Company no one can tell.” But, Calaway added, “The Artist will however have the advantage of recording lots of old numbers, in other words any number that sold well on Gennett we can use it here. We would prefer such numbers.” Revealingly, by December 1932, with ARC on a firmer financial footing, Calaway had reverted to type and joined his A&R colleagues in the hunt for previously unrecorded selections. “Dig us up all the numbers you can that have not been on records,” he instructed Roberts.133 As with Calaway at the fledgling ARC, there were sometimes sound commercial reasons why A&R managers asked their artists to rerecord songs that had already proved successful. In 1934, for instance, Polk C. Brockman arranged for Fiddlin’ John Carson and Moonshine Kate to remake several of Carson’s best-selling OKeh records from a decade earlier, among them “Be Kind to a Man When He’s Down” (OK 40050) and “You Will Never Miss Your Mother Until She Is Gone” (OKeh 4994), for RCA–Victor’s Bluebird label (coupled together on Bluebird B-6022). Brockman firmly believed they would be surefire hits again.134 After the advent of electrical recording in 1925, many companies rerecorded older, strong-selling, acoustically recorded numbers using this new process. Sometimes they employed different recording artists than those who had made the original selections, but well-established performers were occasionally invited

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to revisit their own most popular songs and tunes. Before he rerecorded them for Bluebird in 1934, Fiddlin’ John Carson had already remade electrically recorded versions of “Be Kind to a Man When He’s Down” (OKeh 45301) and “You Will Never Miss Your Mother Until She Is Gone” (OKeh 45384) for OKeh in 1927 and 1929, respectively.135 Another impetus for rerecording popular songs was simply the fragility of 78-rpm discs, which, combined with the wear and tear of needles on their shellac, seriously curtailed the life expectancy of frequently spun records. Consequently, once the initial pressing of a record had sold out, if it were not re-pressed, there was a potential market for a new version of well-loved numbers, including Tin Pan Alley pop songs, which may have been popular decades earlier. “Today there is tremendous demand for old-time music,” Harry Bernstein, a Minnesota record distributor and retailer who organized Gennett’s two 1927 recording expeditions to St. Paul, told a local newspaper reporter. “Popular music of a decade or two, and even 30 years ago, is being recorded with instant appreciation. It doesn’t make much difference with time so far as popular music is concerned. If it was popular then it will again be popular and I look to see an even more tremendous revival of those songs in the next two years.”136 One manifestation of this complex, unruly pattern of creating and recycling—and, to be sure, genuine artistry was often at work in the recording and rerecording of old material—is that the discographies of interwar race and hillbilly records are chockfull of cover versions of best-selling songs, of answer songs and sequels to previously recorded selections, and of numbers that revisited well-established lyrical and musical themes, be they older and traditional, or more contemporary and popular. Sometimes this tendency to recycle ideas may have stifled invention.137 Yet most vernacular, putatively noncommercial music traditions worked in much the same way. In traditional folk music, the communal reputation of singers and musicians derived from a mixture of how faithfully they could reproduce well-known material, how well they could reimagine and place their personal stamp on that common-stock repertoire, and how effectively they could redeploy traditional musical material to inspire whole new compositions that somehow still seemed reassuringly familiar. In the new world of recorded roots music, artists joined with A&R officials to attempt much the same sort of cultural balancing act. Once more, A&R managers and scouts stood at the heart of things, helping decide what kinds of songs and sounds were most appropriate for particular performers to record in pursuit of various markets. Of course, roots musicians were not simply, and certainly not always, passive victims or reluctant participants in this process. If they were sometimes pressured by A&R men to adhere closely to proven formulas, they generally complied, not because of a lack of creativity, but likely because this is what they did in the live performances from which they derived a keen sense of audience tastes. While many played music in private as well as in public purely for fun, for professional and semiprofessional roots musicians, popularity, success, sometimes even just shelter and a good square meal, always depended on being carefully attuned to shifting audience preferences. Inside the

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recorded roots music business, no group of people was better situated to monitor those preferences, and make judgments about how to cater to them, than were A&R officials. Not that it was ever easy to decide, let alone replicate, precisely what constituted a winning musical formula, or to know how long any such formula would remain successful. Judging exactly when certain types of songs or styles were about to become passé and trying to predict, or even to influence, what new trends or idioms might take their place was one of the perennial challenges faced by A&R officials as they decided what artists to record and advised those artists about repertoire and style. That same fundamental agenda, to make decisions that would result in the creation of as many hit records as possible, also guided the work of A&R managers and their staff in the studio. Some of the same tensions surrounding innovation and tradition, notions of authenticity and artifice, and unstable concepts of stylistic and marketing categories within the roots recording industry also spilled over into the recording process itself.

The antics which the musicians must perform to produce a record rival the gymnastics of Harold Lloyd and Douglas Fairbanks. These activities, coupled with the strain of the long hours and the striving for the perfect which is necessary in the making of a record, cause the discarding of hats, coats, collars, and vests. The musicians, when they emerge from the big test, resemble the remnants of a “battle royal” instead of the group of dignified artists which the thousands of people in hearing the record will imagine. —Mary McElfresh, “Muncie Boys Find Record[ing] Far from Being Easy Job,” Muncie (IN) Evening Press, January 21, 1922

5 In the Studio CRE ATI N G A N D RECO RDI N G SO U N DS

U N D O U B T E D LY , T H E M O ST STO R I E D A N D E N D L E S S LY D I S -

cussed of all the location recordings made in the race records field occurred on Monday, November 23, 1936, in the Gunter Hotel, at 205 East Houston Street in San Antonio, Texas. It was there, in a temporary studio set up in Room 414, under the supervision of American Record Corporation (ARC) A&R man Don Law, that Robert Johnson recorded his first sides. Johnson had been driven to the session by Ernie Oertle, the firm’s New Orleans–based record salesman and sometime talent scout who, following a tip from H. C. Speir, had tracked down the blues singer-guitarist somewhere in the Mississippi Delta, most likely in or near Helena, Arkansas.1 Precisely what happened 161

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in Room 414 is impossible to reconstruct with absolute certainty. Nonetheless, if we peel away the layers of myth and misinformation that have accumulated over the decades, the session offers a fascinating window into how A&R managers could profoundly affect the sounds and sentiments that made their way onto commercial records, molding repertoires according to their perceptions of racially circumscribed markets that were increasingly fixed, though never absolutely discrete. This episode is all the more revealing because Don Law was never known for his musical creativity or production skills. “All he could play was a radio,” joked country singer Billy Walker, whom Law recorded for Columbia in Dallas, Texas, in the 1950s.2 Like most of the pioneering A&R managers who supervised recordings of American roots music, Law basically sought to document rather than actively “produce” a musical performance: a good production was one that accurately captured the live sound of singers and musicians on disc and allowed that recording to be replayed with optimum clarity. Still, Law’s studio work with Robert Johnson during the bluesman’s recording sessions in San Antonio in November 1936 and in Dallas the following June suggests that even the most laissez-faire A&R managers, who had an eagle eye trained on the potential market for who and what they were recording, could exert decisive influence. Law’s dealings with Johnson also exemplify the kinds of intricate relationships that sometimes developed between A&R men and recording artists both inside and outside the studio. In this case, it was a relationship defined largely by race, though in ways that have been frequently misunderstood, in no small measure because of a misreading of Law’s own comments about Johnson.

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The legends surrounding Johnson’s recording debut begin with producer Frank Driggs’s liner notes to Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers (Columbia CL 1654), a 1961 Columbia album that reissued some of Johnson’s best but long-neglected recordings and made them widely available to a new, mostly white audience of blues enthusiasts. As part of his research, Driggs consulted Don Law. On April 10, 1961, he wrote to the veteran A&R man, by this time a high-ranking Columbia executive, asking for some “amplification” and clarifications regarding “the story you gave me just before you left for England last month.” Law responded with scrawled observations in the margins of the original letter in which Driggs had summarized Law’s previous account of his dealings with Johnson. In his liner notes, Driggs paraphrased Law to describe how, “embarrassed and suffering from a bad case of stage fright,” the bluesman had played his guitar with his face turned toward the wall. Cue five and a half decades of passionate, sometimes heated discussion about what exactly was going on here and why.3 Some researchers argue that this odd positioning was less the result of an experienced musician like Johnson feeling nervous when placed in front of a microphone

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F I G U R E 5 .1. Frank Driggs’s two-page letter, April 10, 1961, regarding Don Law’s recollections of recording Robert Johnson, with Law’s marginal comments. Courtesy of the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.

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for the first time than of a zealous desire to guard the secrets of his prodigious guitar technique from some Mexican musicians, whom Law was also recording at these sessions and who were in the ad hoc studio when Johnson arrived to set up.4 At least one scholar interprets Johnson’s act as a possible expression of “indifference or even arrogance, which would have been consistent with some of his behavior elsewhere.”5 Others speculate that Johnson faced the wall in order to achieve a particular sound on his recordings. By playing directly into the corner of the room, they assert, he generated a kind of natural amplification, an acoustic boom that helped reduce the bass and top tones and augmented the midrange of his guitar. To Elijah Wald, arguments that this recording novice “would think he knew recording acoustics better than the ARC engineers, or that he would suspect Mexican ranchera singers of wanting to steal his licks” are far less persuasive than the argument that Johnson suffered from perfectly understandable first-session nerves.6 Other commentators have seized upon the idea that Johnson turned his back on Law as evidence of a deep-seated disdain for whites as well as an expression of black

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resistance to the racial status quo. To be sure, Johnson’s life and music embody a rich infra-politics that can and, indeed, should be read as a transcript of black resilience, pride, and self-assertion in a world of enormous racial inequality and peril. Moreover, it would be naïve to think that some of Johnson’s nervousness might not stem from having to appear before, play for, and impress ARC’s white recording staff in the Jim Crow South. This was, after all, a time and a place where African American men had good reason to be wary of white men, especially strangers, fearful lest they violate segregation laws or an elaborate racial etiquette underpinned by the ever-present threat of white violence and punishment. But even if racial tension was what triggered Johnson’s nerves, or if his decision to turn his back on Law (and, it should not be forgotten, on nonwhite Mexican musicians, too) was some kind of political gesture, it was surely not the only thing going on in that San Antonio hotel room. In the original letter yo-yoing between Driggs and Law in April 1961, and even in Driggs’s subsequent liner notes, there is nothing to indicate that Johnson ever recorded facing the wall. Law told Driggs that when he invited Johnson to show off his guitar skills to the Mexican recording artists, the blues guitarist had “reluctantly complied but sat on a chair in a corner facing the wall.” In his liner notes, Driggs paraphrases Law’s observation, writing that “Johnson turned his face to the wall, his back to the Mexican musicians. Eventually he calmed down sufficiently to play, but he never faced his audience.” Unless Driggs was referring to Law, his recording engineer Vincent Liebler, and the microphone as an “audience,” the syntax and logic here suggest that he was referring to the demonstration Johnson had grudgingly given to the assembled Mexican musicians at Law’s request, and not to the bluesman’s recording session.7 In all likelihood, neither Law nor Liebler would have been present in the improvised studio when Johnson recorded; they would probably have been monitoring the session from the adjoining Room 413, which served as a control room. Although it is possible that Johnson maintained his face-to-the-wall pose when the recording equipment was running, that is pure supposition. It also runs counter to the logic of Law’s other recollections of Johnson’s first time in the studio. In 1975, the A&R veteran implied even more strongly that Johnson had faced the wall while playing some nerve-settling tunes before his own session effectively began. “We were recording some Mexicans, and we weren’t quite through with them, and they were still in the studio, so I asked Robert to wait a little while,” Law explained. “Then we got through. We were standing around talking, and I said, ‘Robert, play something for these people.’ ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘I can’t do that.’ He was scared stiff. So I said, ‘Robert, go ahead, it’s perfectly all right.’ So he got a chair, and he set it in the corner, facing the wall, where he couldn’t see them, and started to sing.”8 The “them” here surely refers to the Mexican musicians. We will never know for sure what transpired in that San Antonio hotel room, but the fact that just about every commentator—and they are many—who has seen fit to cast an opinion on this episode seems to assume, on the basis of scant and highly ambiguous evidence, that Johnson recorded his first sides facing a hotel room wall

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is itself quite revealing. Such oddness, with its undercurrent of rebellion and refusal, has helped stoke the mystique that has come to enshroud Johnson, particularly after the release of Driggs’s 1961 LP and its 1970 sequel, Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers, Vol. 2 (Columbia C 30054), which Driggs also produced. Perpetuating the legend that Driggs had inadvertently inspired, the latter album’s front cover features an artist’s fanciful rendering of Johnson recording while seated facing the wall. The illustration on the reverse depicts Law and Liebler in the adjoining control room monitoring Johnson’s session through the window panel of a door that opens into the improvised studio.9 Yet the most compelling explanation for these events is one that both pays closer attention to the fine grain of both Law’s testimony and Driggs’s liner notes to the original album, and sets this singular scene within the context of common A&R practices and equally common nerves among roots musicians who were new to making phonograph records. It is perfectly plausible that Law encouraged Johnson to play a little for the Mexican musicians to calm himself and allow the A&R man and his recording engineer to hear the sound of the bluesman’s guitar in the improvised studio before he started to record. Permitting Johnson to sit wherever he felt most comfortable while he became acclimated to the strange setting also could have been a way to put him at ease.10 As discussed in the next section, this was a common strategy employed by conscientious A&R managers and recording engineers trying to coax an issuable performance out of novice recording artists who, while they may have been vastly experienced in live settings, sometimes froze or faltered in front of the recording horn or the microphone. Maybe Johnson did want to conceal his best guitar licks from the Mexican musicians, but it is his nervousness in the studio, more than the fact that he sat facing away from his “audience”—which Law simply presents as a manifestation of that nervousness—that is the main point of his recollections. While such trepidation simply makes Johnson more human, those kinds of frailties do not always sit well with retrospective efforts to lionize him as some kind of indomitable guitar hero or crude symbol of black resistance. This reductive hagiography has left little room for the probability that there was genuine cooperation between Law, Liebler, and Johnson in that hotel room-studio as they worked together to capture on disc the best possible performances and, thus, make the most potentially successful records they could. That shared agenda alone would have been enough for some pragmatic bonding or accommodation, however fraught and constrained by the profoundly unequal racial power dynamic. Moreover, Johnson had some cause to be grateful to Law. After all, he had given him the opportunity to make commercial recordings, which, according to several of Johnson’s musical associates, had long been one of his dreams. It also appears likely that Law had to bail Johnson out of a San Antonio jail when he was arrested on a trumped-up vagrancy charge and reportedly “beaten up” by police, perhaps on Monday, November 23, after his first day of recording.11 Law also rented him a room in a “colored” boardinghouse and gave him forty-five cents for breakfast. When Johnson decided he would rather spend that

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money on some female company, he apparently telephoned Law to subsidize his dalliance with a prostitute. “There is a lady here. She wants fifty cents and I lacks a nickel,” Law famously recalled Johnson saying.12 Of course, we only have Law’s testimony for most of these details. Although there seems to be no reason why he would have fabricated these stories—and he was remarkably consistent in retelling them over the years—oral testimony is a notoriously unreliable source, and corroborating evidence in this case is difficult to come by. Nonetheless, Law’s memories, certainly in their original 1961 iteration when he added a few handwritten lines to Driggs’s letter enquiring about the all-but-forgotten Johnson, lack the embellishment, the additional “color and drama,” that blues scholar Ted Gioia finds suspicious in the A&R man’s account of events.13 It is possible to detect a mix of racial condescension and caricature in Law’s recollections. Notice, for instance, his use of “boy,” a term regularly used by whites to demean African American men, when describing the twenty-five-year-old Johnson (“Medium height, wiry, slender, nice looking boy, beautiful hands”). Yet even this reading is complicated by the fact that Law genuinely, if mistakenly, believed the singer-guitarist to be only “around 18 years old.” The stories of jail and prostitution could be viewed as conforming to a pattern of racial stereotyping that was itself part of the apparatus of white supremacy and racial control.14 Nevertheless, casting Law in the role of “the old plantation owner spinning yarns about his irresponsible slaves,” as Gioia does, plays too fast and loose with the substance and tone of what Law actually said and wrote about Johnson.15 It also blinds us to the possibility of cooperation and accommodation, if not necessarily friendship, between the black blues singer and his white recording supervisor. Some kind of vexed collaboration seems a far more likely scenario than an encounter characterized by unmitigated racial antagonism and mistrust. This sort of relationship was even suggested by Johnson’s barely audible “I wanna go with our next one myself,” spoken just before the start of his first, unissued take of “Love in Vain,” recorded on June 20, 1937, at his second set of sessions in the Brunswick Records Building in Dallas. The grammatical disjuncture between the “I”/“myself ” and the “our” evokes both the tensions and the linkages between Johnson and Law. Here, in a single utterance, is both Johnson, the independent artist, the “I,” trying to assert control over his own material, and Johnson, the dependent, fledgling recording artist, who recognized only too well that what happened to his music in the studio, the making of “our” record, was always a collaborative venture with Law and Liebler. Don Law contributed one more important ingredient to Robert Johnson’s recordings that likewise speaks to cooperation of sorts, but that also reveals where the real power lay within the American roots recording industry. He brought very fixed views about what a southern black male blues singer-guitarist like Johnson should sound like and sing about on a commercially released record. Ultimately, it is impossible to be sure who decided what kinds of songs, let alone which particular songs, Johnson would record. Still, whether that decision lay primarily with Law, as would have been

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common in the industry at that time, or whether Johnson himself made the call, or whether, God forbid, the two men actually discussed the matter and agreed on a portfolio of songs, Johnson’s recordings reflect a shared understanding of the increasingly, if never wholly or uniformly, segmented market that existed for American roots music records by the mid-1930s. At his November 1936 and June 1937 sessions, Robert Johnson recorded a much narrower range of songs than his musical contemporaries recalled him playing for crowds at Delta house parties and juke joints, or simply for his own personal enjoyment. Rural and small-town southern roots notwithstanding, Johnson’s music and professional life were inextricably connected to the forces of modernity: artistically, he mined many deep and ancient seams, but he was no musical fossil; rather he was a product of the age of mass media and national popular music culture. Johnson “did anything that he heard over the radio. . . . When I say anything, I mean anything—popular songs, ballads, blues, anything. It didn’t make no difference what it was. If he liked it, he did it,” Johnny Shines remembered.16 This is not to deny that blues of various kinds were always at the heart of Johnson’s art. Yet that designation does scant justice to the omnivorous musical tastes and extensive talents of a man who also admired Bing Crosby and whose own songbag, performed overwhelmingly for the enjoyment of southern black audiences, included numbers such as Gene Austin’s 1925 pop sensation, “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” (Victor 19656), and the hillbilly best seller “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” a hit for Sons of the Pioneers (Decca 5047) in 1934 and for Gene Autry the following year.17 Willie Moore, who performed with Johnson around Robinsonville, Mississippi, also recalled him singing older common-stock songs such as “President McKinley,” about the 1898 assassination of the United States president.18 And as Shines remembered, Johnson always had an affinity for hillbilly music. “Jimmie Rodgers, me and Robert used to play a hell of a lot of his tunes, man,” Shines remarked. “Ragtime, pop tunes, waltz numbers, polkas. . . . Robert just picked songs out of the air.”19 Such versatility was commonplace among the black “songsters” of the 1920s and 1930s and appreciated by the black communities on whose approval they largely depended for their meager livelihoods. But under Don Law’s supervision, with or without Johnson’s express consent, there were few traces of this cross-genre diversity in the young bluesman’s recordings. Doubtless, this was largely because Johnson was most comfortable singing, composing, and reworking songs in a country blues idiom. Within that framework, he demonstrated great flexibility in terms of tempo and mood. On his recorded opus of just twenty-nine songs, Johnson effortlessly shifted through various sweet and raw vocalization styles and a dazzling array of guitar figures, using the instrument to offer rhythmic accompaniment, harmonic support, and, occasionally, harmonic counterpoint, as well as unleashing several stunning short solos. By turns witty and tortured, joyous and vengeful, boastful and haunted, Johnson’s recordings demonstrated the full range of emotions expressed in the country blues. Yet from his small corpus of recordings, perhaps only the jaunty ragtime swing of “They’re Red Hot” (Vocalion 03563, plus

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others) or the rather plaintive love song “Honeymoon Blues” (Vocalion 04002) hinted at Johnson’s or the southern black community’s jazz and pop sensibilities.20 Equally important, it is unlikely that Don Law would have allowed Johnson to record material from the non-blues portion of his repertoire even if the singer-guitarist had wanted to. It may even be that a reluctance to let Johnson wander too far toward popular and hillbilly stylings was behind Law’s decision to call for a second take of “Come On in My Kitchen,” which yielded a far more hard-driving, up-tempo, and braggadocious recording (Vocalion 03563, plus others) than the more leisurely tempo and intimate, almost hillbilly-blues-crooning vocals of the first unissued take (which was finally released in 1961).21 By the mid- to late 1930s, orthodoxies about what constituted discernibly black and white roots musical styles and markets were largely in place, if never entirely stable or unchallenged. Law was well aware of these genre boundaries: indeed, his A&R and sales work for ARC, like that of his colleagues throughout the recording industry, had helped shape and reinforce them. The association of particular races with specific kinds of material and sounds in the studio, the market place, the mass media, and the public imagination was neither a natural, nor an instantaneous, nor even an absolute phenomenon. Rather, efforts to separate American popular music along racial, ethnic, class, and regional lines constituted a complex and ambiguous process that involved A&R officials, record companies, recording artists, and consumers, but that also reflected and helped naturalize similar fault lines in American society. In short, the segmentation of the recording industry perpetuated attitudes, social divisions, and asymmetric distributions of power that were rooted deep in the social, political, and economic structures of the nation during the interwar years. The songs that Robert Johnson recorded for Don Law in 1936 and 1937 comprised exactly the sort of material that most A&R managers and their sales departments had come to believe a country bluesman ought to be singing. They were neither commercially unfathomable nor artistically risky—which would have been the case if Law and Johnson had agreed he should cover his favorite pop songs such as “My Blue Heaven,” or perhaps reimagine some of the Bing Crosby and Jimmie Rodgers tunes he enjoyed so much, or even cut one or two of the polkas and waltzes that he apparently liked to play. Instead, Johnson recorded only country blues, most of which cannibalized preexisting recorded songs and fell back on well-established lyrical themes. Coupled with the passion of his singing and the febrile intensity of his guitar playing, his blues transcended the influence of his many musical mentors, including those whose music he heard only on radio broadcasts or phonograph records, and have touched the souls of millions down through the years—if rather fewer during his lifetime, when only “Terraplane Blues” (Vocalion 03416, plus others) became anything approaching even a minor hit.22 The genre restrictions evident in Johnson’s recorded work were part of a much broader industry phenomenon. Inside the studio, A&R managers and their staff members repeatedly steered roots musicians into stylistic silos that rarely accommodated the diversity of their live performances. For example, eleven of the twelve issued sides

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of Tommy Johnson’s recording career consisted of blues songs, but this hardly reflected the full scope of a performing repertoire that also contained “church songs, dance pieces, ragtime pieces,” and what blues historian David Evans describes as “various songs for whites”—although there is no reason to believe that Johnson’s African American audiences did not enjoy them, too. Evans, one of the first scholars to examine the differences between live and recorded blues repertoires, also notes that between 1935 and 1939, the sixty-two blues releases by Mississippi-born singer-guitarist Johnny Temple gave no indication of the “polkas and Italian music” he sometimes performed for white “underworld kingpins” in Chicago.23 Like Robert Johnson, Delta bluesmen such as Charley Patton regularly included hillbilly numbers, Hollywood cowboy songs, nineteenth-century ballads, and the latest pop hits in live appearances designed to please overwhelmingly southern black audiences, although Patton, like many of his Mississippi contemporaries, also occasionally played for white dances.24 In such cases, Evans concludes, the race of the audience members or, in the case of recordings, the race of the expected consumers, was the single most important factor in determining the kind of material bluesmen performed in any given setting. At recording sessions, however, the principal figure making judgments about how best to bring artist, repertoire, and potential customers into a happy and profitable alignment was usually the supervising A&R director. At Paramount, race records manager J. Mayo Williams felt compelled to reject any request by his black artists to write or record pop ballads. “I would very quickly say: ‘Well, we can’t use it . . . write me a blues,’ ” he recalled. Personally, though, Williams believed singers like Alberta Hunter were as adept at popular numbers as at blues. Later, while working in a similar capacity at Decca in the mid- to late 1930s, Williams waged a largely unsuccessful campaign to convince label president Jack Kapp to let him record more ballads for the label’s race records catalog. In the main, however, Williams discouraged black artists and songwriters from wandering too far from conventional blues and, occasionally, jazz styles. “In doing it that way I’d save a lot of embarrassment for myself, the company, and the person,” he explained, reflecting on the growing potency of racialized musical and marketing categories within the roots recording industry.25 Similarly, despite the fact that a versatile black songster like Blind Willie McTell could perform brilliantly in a range of pop and vernacular styles, between 1927 and 1932 Ralph Peer restricted him to recording nothing but conventional blues for Victor (and later for RCA Victor), among them “Rollin’ Mama Blues” (Victor 23328) and “Lonesome Day Blues” (Victor 23353).26 Peer allowed, and indeed encouraged, some of his white hillbilly acts, including Jimmie Rodgers and the Allen Brothers, to record in an overtly blues-derived idiom and still marketed the results primarily to southern white audiences. However, Peer held much more conservative opinions about appropriate material for his black artists, especially downhome bluesmen, whom he presumed appealed exclusively, or at least overwhelmingly, to African American record buyers. Like most of his fellow A&R managers, Peer routinely assigned releases by African

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American singers and musicians to race records series; furthermore, he generally insisted that black performers conform to a much narrower set of stylistic expectations than he demanded of the white roots artists he recorded for hillbilly records series.27 There were exceptions, of course. Frank Walker seems to have had rather more faith in the musical instincts of his African American artists and a greater understanding of the eclecticism of black musical tastes, even when this challenged industry norms. When he recorded McTell for Columbia in October 1929, in the words of the artist’s biographer Michael Gray, Walker “seems to have freed McTell from the pressure he was under at Victor to offer nothing but straightforward blues—which were by no means his sole or even primary area of musical interest.”28

“ H O R N F R I G H T, ” WA L L H A N G I N G S , A N D H O O C H : S E T T L I N G N E RV E S , CA L M I N G F E A R S

Making their talent feel at ease in recording studios was part of an A&R man’s job. At Gennett, explained chief recording engineer Harold Soulé, Fred D. Wiggins or a member of his A&R staff notified him in advance of sessions about any special seating arrangements or unusual performing preferences that artists might have, especially those new to making records. In an effort to get the musicians “feeling comfortable” in the studio, Soulé recalled, he initially allowed them to sit wherever they pleased, “so that they could rehearse as they would normally play together.” Then, he explained, “We tried to get their reactions to the acoustics. After they had fooled around for a while, I would listen to them over the monitor, then I’d change them around a bit.”29 Although Soulé was referring here primarily to his work with hot jazz bands in Gennett’s permanent studio in Richmond, Indiana, this process seems analogous to what happened in Room 414 of the Gunter Hotel, with Don Law attempting to relax Robert Johnson and get a fix on how his voice and guitar would sound on the recording equipment in the temporary studio. The Delmore Brothers’ first recording session offers similar insight into how A&R managers worked as musical midwives, coaxing inexperienced artists through the birth pangs of delivering their first recorded sides. In his posthumously published memoir, Truth Is Stranger Than Publicity, Alton Delmore described how he, then only twentytwo years of age, and his fourteen-year-old brother Rabon arrived at Columbia’s Atlanta studio on the morning of October 28, 1931, after a 250-mile drive from their home in Elkmont, Alabama. “Altogether there were over three hundred musicians wanting to get a chance to make records,” Delmore recalled. “We knew we had an appointment to be heard, but after seeing this large array of people waiting, our hearts sank a little. We were still afraid and untrusting. But we were confident and determined to play the string out.”30 Dan Hornsby, Columbia’s assistant recording manager, handled their initial audition at which the guitar-and-tenor-guitar duo ran through a selection of their best songs, blissfully unaware that Hornsby was actually making a test record-

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ing. “We had been playing in front of a little stand that had something that looked like a can on top of it,” recalled Alton. “We didn’t know it was a microphone.” When Hornsby played back the test record and “we heard what we had played and sang[,] it didn’t sound real. It sounded like something far superior to what we thought we were doing. We could not believe it was us!” Hornsby was equally impressed and took the test record to his supervisor, recording manager Bob Miller, who promptly authorized a proper recording session.31 Alton Delmore’s memories of that recording session are revealing about both process and psychology as these young hillbilly singer-musicians encountered an alien creative and commercial environment with the two A&R men as their guides. The studio, Alton remembered, was “a funny-looking room which had drapes and curtains all around on the walls. It sure was a fantastic-looking place to a bunch of country boys like us.” Miller, though, tried hard to put the brothers at ease, carefully pointing out that, although he now resided in New York, “he was originally from Memphis, Tennessee. He was trying to make us comfortable as Southerners, that he also was a Southerner, and maybe we would feel more at home,” explained Delmore.32 However, as Miller and Hornsby asked the Delmores to rehearse their songs again for the purpose of timing and acoustical balance, Alton became ever more nervous, sensing for the first time in his career a loss of control over the process of making his music. The encounter with the electrical recording apparatus threatened to rob him of human agency. “Mr. Miller showed us the little red light that would come on and then we were to start singing and playing, making the recording. That was the part that made me a little more nervous. A little light, a mechanical gadget that seemed to be telling me what to do,” Delmore recalled. Miller tried to relax Alton and his brother further by producing “a gallon jug of white liquor or moonshine” and offering them a drink, which the brothers politely declined—Rabon because he was a teetotaler, and Alton because he “was afraid there might be a catch in it somewhere.”33 Eventually, Alton overcame his suspicions, and his anxieties subsided. The Columbia A&R men were able to engrave two usable masters, “Got the Kansas City Blues” and “Alabama Lullaby,” which were issued together on Columbia 15724-D in December 1931. Despite achieving only average sales, the record led to a follow-up session and, ultimately, launched the Delmore Brothers’ illustrious twenty-year radio and recording career.34 Alton Delmore’s nervousness in the face of the new technologies of the recording industry was hardly unusual: many rural and working-class singers and musicians— guided, goaded, and sometimes lubricated by attentive A&R mangers—struggled to adapt and redefine their art according to the technical and commercial demands of the recording process. Before the widespread adoption of electrical recording in the mid1920s, many in the recording industry spoke openly of the “horn fright” (also dubbed “horn fever,” “horn shyness,” and “phonograph fright”) that gripped even seasoned recording artists, including opera singers and classical musicians, when they confronted a recording device.35 As the Pittsburgh Gazette Times reported in 1919, “ ‘Horn fright’

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is a new nervous trouble recently diagnosed and named to describe the agitation that attacks singers when they are about to make a record for the sound-producing machine, says the [music magazine] Etude. The artist naturally feels some trepidation in singing into the mouth of a horn since the slightest blemish will spoil the record and make all his work of no avail.”36 Within the roots music field, freelance A&R man Harry Charles recalled that, even after the advent of electrical recording, it sometimes “took us all day to make three or four records” because the raw talent was scared, or intimidated, or simply lacked the kinds of discipline required by the recording process.37 One of his discoveries posed particular challenges. Buddy Boy Hawkins, a blues singer-guitarist whom Charles claimed he found “singing on the streets” in Birmingham, Alabama, refused to stand still during sessions and tended to roam away from the microphone. At one particular 1929 session in Gennett’s Richmond studio (which Paramount periodically leased to record its own selections at the cost of $40 per master), the problem became especially acute. But the ever-resourceful Charles solved it. “We had to tie him up to the mike,” Charles remembered. “He walked away from the mike, and I put earphones on him, and every time he started to move, I said, ‘Stand still! Stand up there!’ ”38 Even experienced recording artists could prove difficult for A&R staffs to manage. Fiddler Kirk McGee, who recorded with Grand Ole Opry star Uncle Dave Macon as part of his band the Fruit Jar Drinkers in New York in 1927, recalled that the Brunswick recording crew “had a time handling Uncle Dave, because he wouldn’t stay put.” The cantankerous, fifty-six-year-old Macon, a veteran vaudeville trouper who was used to entertaining live audiences, kept leaning closer and closer to the microphone and singing boisterously. “And the recording man said, ‘Uncle Dave, you’re not before an audience now. We’re putting this on wax. You don’t have to sing so loud to be heard.’ ” McGee also remembered that Brunswick’s recording staff encountered “a lot of trouble with Uncle Dave stomping his foot. . . . It was a wood floor, and he’d get to reeling and rocking and stomping and he’d shake the floor and vibrate the stylus and we couldn’t record. So they went and got him this pillow to put his foot on. Well, he didn’t like that. He said, ‘I don’t like that, ’cause I can’t hear my foot; that’ll ruin my rhythm.’ ”39 On another occasion, when a young recording manager offered Macon instructions about his singing, the crusty old banjoist retorted, “Now, cap, I can sing anyway I want to and still be heard. I’ve got a lot of get up and go. And I’ve got a smokehouse full of country hams and all kinds of meat to eat up there in Readyville [Tennessee]. I’ve got plenty of wood hauled up, and I don’t have to be bossed around by some New York sharpshooter just to make a few records, ’cause I’ve done my part on the record making anyway.”40 At other times, would-be recording artists refused to perform at all, as happened at the session that produced the first commercial recordings of Cajun music, “The Waltz That Carried Me to My Grave (La valce qui ma portin d ma fose)” / “Lafayette (Allon a Luafette [sic])” (Columbia 15275-D). The selections, which were waxed in New Orleans on April 27, 1928, under the supervision of Columbia’s Frank Walker, featured the

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Louisiana singer-accordionist Joseph F. “Joe” Falcon and his fiancée, guitarist Cléoma Breaux. Originally, Leon Meche was supposed to handle the vocals, but he was simply too nervous, and his friend Falcon had to step up and sing instead.41 As Falcon explained in a 1965 interview, Meche “got all ready, and he buttoned up his coat and this and that, and he was getting pale as a sheet, and he looked at me and said, ‘You better sing it yourself, I might make a mistake.’ So I took over.”42 It was a fairly typical problem as singers and musicians struggled to adapt to the demands of the recording process in an unfamiliar environment. As music historian Ryan A. Brasseaux observes, “Studios forced Cajun musicians to recontextualize their performances in a space where demanding engineers, intimidating microphones, and rigid time constraints replaced dancing farmers, kerosene lamps, and expansive arrangements. Some musicians had difficulty creating their art in austere hotel rooms hundreds of miles from Cajun music’s natural social contexts.”43 This kind of trepidation, born of dislocation and a sense of losing creative control to the twin tyrannies of A&R men and the recording process, was not restricted to rural or small-town southern singers and musicians like Robert Johnson, the Delmore Brothers, or Leon Meche. On November 27, 1933, freelance recording supervisor John Hammond arranged for eighteen-year-old Billie Holiday to record her first vocals for Columbia at its Fifth Avenue studios in Manhattan, fronting a small integrated combo led by clarinetist Benny Goodman. “When we got there,” she recalled, “and I saw this big old microphone, it scared me half to death. I’d never sung in one and I was afraid of it.” While this session would prove to be of great historical importance, since it marked the recording debut of one of the greatest American musical artists of the twentieth century, Holiday’s singing on her lone side, “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law” (Columbia 2856-D), was tentative and unconvincing. It displays little of the control and assurance that had captivated Hammond nine months earlier, when he had first heard Holiday singing in a Harlem speakeasy run by another singer, Monette Moore. Nor does it contain any of the power and edgy nuance found on her first classic sides, such as the coupling “Miss Brown to You” / “I Wished on the Moon” (Brunswick 7501), which Holiday cut with a band led by pianist Teddy Wilson some nineteen months later, on July 2, 1935. Horn and microphone fright, it seems, could take its toll on even the mightiest talents.44 One of the main tasks of A&R managers who supervised recording sessions was to find ways to help singers and musicians overcome their nerves and deliver the kinds of performances that did justice to their talents and their material—and that, hopefully, would sell. What A&R officials considered reassuring, however, was often tinged with paternalistic racism. “We treated them like we would like to be treated,” remembered Art Satherley of his years working with blues and gospel artists as Paramount’s New York recording manager between 1922 and 1928. In particular, he recalled how, in his work with the Norfolk Jubilee Quartet, he attempted to relax and prepare them for their sessions by building what he considered to be a personal rapport with them. “I didn’t just say, ‘Sing this and go out and have a drink somewhere,’ ” Satherley explained.

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I spent my time in that studio getting them ready. . . . When I spoke to those Negroes, I would talk to them, I would tell them something about my background as an immigrant. I would tell them what we had to expect. Then when I found that I had these Negroes in a feeling, I would ask, “Before we sing this spiritual . . . which one of you have [sic] lost a loved one in the last year or so?” And one would step forward. Then I would say to the fellow that had some preaching experience, “Just say a little short prayer before we start preaching.” This was not an act on my part. It was the simplicity of a simplicity [sic] to be an honest man, to give them what they wanted back. And the only way to get it back was to get what they felt in their souls. . . . It’s all a study. . . . You just have to know their life a little bit, and they have to know that you’re not going to hurt them, too.45

Simple domestic touches around the studio may have been even more successful in putting performers at ease. Columbia’s Frank Walker, for example, remembered sprucing up the improvised studios in which he recorded on southern field trips to make their cold, austere atmosphere a bit more familiar and welcoming to his artists, most of whom, he believed, “hadn’t the slightest idea of what it was all about.” When working with race and hillbilly artists, Walker’s desire to create a comfortable, homey environment meant that he “didn’t pick out any fancy spot to record in. You usually took the upstairs of some old building where it looked pretty terrible. . . . You hung some drapes or curtains around, and you also made it look and act a bit like home. . . . You tried to make them feel at home, and we felt the only way we could ever get that was in their own native habitat. You couldn’t have done it in New York.”46 Such domestic trappings also served a more practical function as sound baffles, as A&R officials sometimes worked with their engineers to reduce outside noises and improve the acoustics at recording sessions. This was especially critical in temporary studios, but it was sometimes also necessary in permanent facilities. Gennett’s studio in Richmond, Indiana, for example, was located within some fifty yards of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad’s main track and just a few feet from a spur line used by the slower-moving locomotives and freight cars that serviced the complex of factories operated by the Starr Piano Company, Gennett’s parent company. The daily traffic on these rail lines created “tremendous noise and vibration,” explain Gennett historians Rick Kennedy and Randy McNutt, and as a result, “recording sessions were frequently interrupted.” In a futile attempt to soundproof the studio and “liven it up” acoustically, three inches of Celotex was attached to the room’s walls, sawdust was packed into the gap between the interior and exterior walls, heavy drapes made from monk’s cloth were suspended from ceiling to floor, and a huge Mohawk rug commandeered from the home of company president Harry Gennett was hung on one wall.47 Freelance A&R scout H. C. Speir, who knew a great deal about acoustics from attending recording sessions, assisted with similar measures at Paramount’s new recording studio in Grafton, Wisconsin. Speir recalled that in 1930, before a session for one of the blues artists he had brought up from Mississippi, he helped recording manager Art Laibly

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F I G U R E 5 . 2 . Postcard depicting the Starr Piano Company of Richmond, Indiana, manufacturer of Gennett Records (ca. 1910). Courtesy of Jane Lyle.

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remodel the still-not-ideal facility by, among other things, installing sliding panels to reduce the size of the space and by hanging additional cloth baffles, all in an attempt to improve the studio’s sound qualities.48 A&R men made other efforts to ensure that their recording artists were as relaxed and comfortable as possible. This was particularly true at southern field sessions, which tended to take place under relatively primitive conditions. Ingenious recording engineers rigged up temporary studios in small, enclosed, hastily soundproofed rooms in hotels, warehouses, or other buildings that, as Satherley explained, usually lacked air conditioning. Since all the windows in the rooms being used had to remain closed to keep them as quiet as possible, studios like these were often stiflingly hot and humid, even at night. Satherley described a particularly sweltering set of sessions involving Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys that took place in Dallas in June 1937, probably at the Brunswick Records Building. Although the band was used to performing under similar conditions at Oklahoma and Texas dance halls, Satherley took extra measures to ease the musicians’ discomfort. “It was unbearably warm in our soundproof enclosure,” he recalled, “and to make it of some comfort, I had four large bath tubs put in this enclosure and filled with large blocks of ice and also brought in large fans, blowing on the ice

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tubs which by the way were loaded with bottled beer for the boys.” Unfortunately, this improvised air-conditioning failed to keep Wills and his band cool, so they resorted to more extreme measures. “All present were working in their underwear. It was quite the thing to do under the circumstances,” Satherley remembered.49 If folksy banter, window dressing, and ice-filled bathtubs failed, A&R staff regularly plied jittery artists with a shot or two (or sometimes more) of nerve-calming liquor, as Alton Delmore attested. The tactic was widespread in the recording industry even at the height of National Prohibition. “You brought in a little of the ‘mountain dew’ to take care of the colds or any hoarseness that might happen,” Frank Walker coyly explained, “and to remove a little of their fears of strangers doing this sort of work.”50 At his first recording session for Columbia, in Atlanta in November 1926, Kentucky banjoist Richard D. Burnett recalled that his fiddler Leonard Rutherford had become “as nervous as he could be.” According to Burnett, when Walker’s assistant, Wilford “Bill” Brown, noticed Rutherford’s anxiety, he said, “ ‘I got to fix him up a little,’ and he went and got him a dram glass full of whiskey and made him take two or three swallows. And that steadied Leonard’s nerves and he went out and put that record on [i.e., made the recordings].”51 Satherley was also quick to break out a bottle. In 1928, Satherley, then recording manager at QRS, invited St. Louis blues pianist-singer James “Stump” Johnson to a New York session arranged by Johnson’s talent-scouting brother Jesse, owner of the De Luxe Music Shoppe. That December, Stump Johnson traveled to New York with his sister-in-law Edith North Johnson, herself a blues singer, who also made her debut record, cutting “You Ain’t No Good Blues” / “You Know That Ain’t Right” (QRS R7048), on this same trip. Ill-equipped for the winter weather, they had spent the previous day sightseeing and the night sleeping poorly before arriving at QRS’s Long Island studio, hoarse and on edge. As Stump Johnson later explained, the recording staff members “thought that all blues singers liked to drink which I was one that never did.” To relax the Johnsons and warm their vocal chords, “they gave us two or three fifths of whisky. . . . I taken a drink and with that the drink went to my head and I was high.” Near the end of his session, which produced four sides, most notably the vaguely risqué “The Duck-Yas-Yas-Yas” (QRS R7049), an inebriated Johnson shouted out, “Well give me another drink of that whisky then!” According to Johnson, QRS engineers captured his outburst “on their outfit before switchin’ it off.”52 At Paramount, efforts to lubricate blues larynxes were equally commonplace. Recalling his first 1927–1928 Chicago sessions for the label, Big Bill Broonzy remembered that he and his guitarist partner, John Thomas, were instructed “to play like we would if we was at home or at a party, and they kept telling us to relax and giving us moonshine whisky to drink—and I got drunk.” Broonzy claimed that afterward, while he was still intoxicated, Paramount’s race records manager J. Mayo Williams seized the opportunity to dupe him into signing away the rights to the songs he had just recorded.53 In May 1930, a couple of years after Williams’s departure, singer-guitarist Son House recorded

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for the first time at a Paramount session in the label’s newly opened studio in Grafton, Wisconsin, under the supervision of Art Laibly. House arrived from Mississippi in the company of fellow blues artists Charley Patton, Willie Brown, and Louise Johnson, who had made the 700-mile trip at Paramount’s expense in an old Buick sedan. As Rick Kennedy and Randy McNutt describe it, the trip was a wild and wooly adventure, “marked by arguments, bootleg whiskey, and House’s sexual liaison with Johnson.”54 Although the eight sides issued from House’s debut sessions produced no hits and he would not record again until his “rediscovery” in 1964, the experience of being “as high as Georgia pines” in the recording studio was indelibly etched into his memory: “When we recorded for Paramount, A. C. Laibly, he had a girl there just like she was a waitress or something and anytime you ended a piece she gave you a cup of whiskey.” Moreover, House said, “The girl who brought the drinks around was white”—a situation virtually unimaginable in the Jim Crow South.55 The decision to open a bottle of booze for roots recording artists in the studio was often predicated on assumptions about class, regional, and occupational proclivities, as well as racial ones: working-class southern musicians drank, so ran a stereotype—and there were enough hangovers and bloodshot eyes to establish its basis in fermented fact. H. C. Speir believed that the Mississippi blues singer-guitarists he scouted and worked with “couldn’t even make one song if they didn’t have emotional feelings,” and, in order to achieve the proper mood, “they either gonna take a drink, a little whisky or take dope, one or the other.”56 At Gennett, assistant sales manager and occasional A&R man Clayton “Jack” Jackson relied on one of his subordinates, Charlie Yeager (himself “an habitual drinker,” according to Jackson), to “hunt the hillbillies and the negroes out of the North End,” a seedy, mixed-race neighborhood of Richmond, Indiana, known locally as “Goose Town.” The area was home to several whorehouses and bootlegging joints and, for a night or two at least, to many of the visiting singers and musicians Jackson was supposed to be recording. While allowing that white as well as black talent sometimes went missing in the North End, Jackson clearly thought that carousing, whoring, and general dissolution were vices more typical of black artists than white ones: “You took them down to the North End and turned them loose and it would be maybe three days before you’d see them again! . . . You’d make an appointment with them [to record] in the morning and half the time you’d haveta go down there and hunt them up. They’d be so damned drunk,” Jackson explained. Yeager “was my man to send to the North End after these niggers when they didn’t show up. . . . He knew every ‘house’ in the North End that sold whiskey, bootleg, mountaindew or what. He knew where to look for ’em. He knew those niggers by their first name. He could go down there after these people without any trouble. If anybody else went down there, it was pretty dangerous.”57 Jackson’s reminiscences embody the kinds of racist attitudes that often informed white A&R officials’ interactions with black recording artists. Yet the vision of Jack Jackson dispatching Charlie Yeager to Goose Town to retrieve wayward artists also suggests some of the many pastoral, out-of-the-studio duties those same A&R men undertook

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on behalf of singers and musicians of all races and ethnicities simply to ensure they made it to their recording sessions, and sometimes even to their live shows, on time, in tolerably good humor, and in good enough shape to perform. In 1934, W. R. Calaway got Charley Patton released from jail in Belzoni, Mississippi, just as Don Law rescued Robert Johnson in San Antonio two years later. Although they sometimes furnished money for performers to get laid, or get drunk, or even get high—thereby potentially creating even more problems for them to solve—A&R men often operated as more benign minders and, occasionally, even benefactors. As Art Satherley recounted, whenever Bob Wills’s tour bus “went into the ditch, which it did quite a few times, I would receive a telephone call or a wire: ‘Mr. Satherley, can you let me have $3,000? I’m in the ditch. We have to make this place and I’ve got to get there.’ . . . I would immediately send him—or make it possible through the banks or otherwise, that he could go there and collect three thousand or four thousand [dollars] on the name of Art Satherley. To be honest with you, many is the time I’ve carried five thousand in my briefcase . . . in case of things like that.”58 An incident involving John Hammond and the Count Basie Orchestra illustrates the more serious kinds of talent-minding that A&R officials sometimes performed. In February 1937, a member of Basie’s magnificent swing band apparently became royally unhinged during a three-week engagement at the Chatterbox Room of the William Penn Hotel in Pittsburgh. One night after the orchestra’s performance, the musician, anonymized in Hammond’s recollections of the episode as only “X,” “created a violent scene” at a local nightclub and then “knocked out” two of the policemen who had tried to arrest him, at which point he was subdued, straightjacketed, and taken to nearby Mayview Asylum for the Criminally Insane. As soon as he received word of the situation, a distressed Hammond—who had done much to promote Basie’s orchestra via his Down Beat columns and eventually brought it from Kansas City, Missouri, to Chicago to record in October 1936—rushed over by car from New York. Hammond tracked down the deranged jazzman’s mother and pregnant wife and took the latter to visit her husband at the asylum. Meanwhile, he personally arranged for the musician’s transfer to the Neurological Institute of New York, a facility that did not normally accept African American patients but where he was friends with one of its staff, the jazz-loving psychiatrist Dr. Arthur Clinco. Hammond personally drove the musician, whose breakdown was likely caused by the abuse of marijuana, alcohol, and possibly other drugs, coupled with the stresses and strain of a touring jazzman’s life, all the way to New York from Pittsburgh. After three weeks of therapy, X was back on the bandstand with Basie’s orchestra at Harlem’s Apollo Theater. Hammond had helped a musician in need; perhaps just as important, he protected Basie and his outfit from unwelcome negative publicity by quietly taking the matter in hand.59 These kinds of actions, of course, were not purely altruistic. The livelihoods and reputations of A&R officials were often dependent on getting talent to sessions and shows, and making sure that they were in the right frame of mind to deliver their best

By most accounts, Count Basie trusted John Hammond implicitly. In general terms, this was because Basie recognized that, although his patrician attitude could sometimes grate, the independently wealthy Hammond genuinely loved jazz music and, unlike most of his A&R colleagues, was not in the business primarily to make money for himself. Basie also appreciated how Hammond had exposed the bandleader’s particularly exploitative contract with Decca and helped him secure regular American Federation of Musicians union rates for his orchestra from label president Jack Kapp. Indeed, in the mid-1930s, the politically radical Hammond had placed Decca’s scandalous agreement with Basie into context in a pair of scathing columns for the left-wing journal New Masses. Using the pseudonym Henry Johnson, Hammond denounced the recording industry’s exploitative contracts, copyright scams, and poor working conditions at its record manufacturing plants.60 The extent of Hammond’s influence over changes in the Count Basie Orchestra’s personnel during the late 1930s has been much debated. The consensus is that he did play a significant role in Basie’s decision—and it was always, ultimately, the bandleader’s call—to replace guitarist Claude Williams with Freddie Green, lead alto saxophonist Caughey Roberts with Earle Warrant, and trumpet duo Joe Keyes and Carl Smith with Ed Lewis and Bobby Moore. In Hammond’s mind, which, once set, rarely brooked correction, these alterations were necessary to elevate the already formidable swing band to new artistic heights, which, in turn, would increase both the popularity of its live shows and the success of its recordings. The logic, shared by Basie and many other contemporary bandleaders, was that if their orchestras were as good as they could possibly be, then the records they made would also be superlative.61 Paradoxically, one corollary to this kind of preemptive A&R work was that the amount of artistic direction or production required of Hammond on his recordings of great jazz was minimal. Hammond focused his energies on assembling the right combinations of musicians and getting them into the studio in the proper physical and mental state to work their magic.62 Hammond’s documentary approach to studio work was par for the course for many, if not most, A&R managers involved in interwar recorded roots music. As Eli

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CHOOSING MUSICIANS AND SCULPTING SOUNDS

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performances. Once that was done, however, some went a step further by exerting a more direct creative influence on the content and sound of the sides being waxed inside the recording studio. Beyond finding material, recording department managers and their staffs sometimes selected the accompanying musicians or even substituted different vocalists for bands’ regular vocalists. Several A&R officials acted as arrangers and even as performers, while others began to fulfill the sort of functions that would later become associated with “record producers.” Individually and collectively, these in-studio contributions helped sculpt the very sound of recorded American roots music in ways that have been largely ignored or undervalued.

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F I G U R E 5 . 3 . John Hammond in Columbia Records offices, New York (ca. 1939). Courtesy of the Driggs Collection at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Oberstein told a Charlotte News reporter in 1938 with reference to the hillbilly acts he was then recording for RCA Victor, “We don’t coach ’em much. Want ’em to be natural.”63 Yet the boundaries between the comprehensive, detailed approach that would later become a hallmark of the “record producer” and the careful personnel and session management that enabled the documentary-style recording favored by Hammond, Oberstein, and many others were far from clearly defined in this age of experimentation. One important A&R official whose approach to pre–World War II studio work straddled these two modes of operation was Helen Oakley Dance. Decades after leaving the recording industry, Dance reflected on her approach to working with recording artists at Master Records Inc. during the late 1930s. When jazz musician and composer Monk Rowe interviewed her in 1998, she self-identified as a “jazz producer.” “I was the first woman producer,” she told him. “But I always just looked on it from the start ’till now as you are just a channel. I don’t think of producing it, I think of it being produced through you. . . . And of course you can be helpful, but the main thing is that you are a channel, I think.”64 Nevertheless, Dance’s respect for the creative autonomy of the swing musicians she recorded, and her desire to facilitate, rather than manipulate, the work of artists whom she genuinely admired and often adored, sometimes sat uneasily alongside a far more interventionist streak. Dance liked to ensure that the performances she facilitated generated the recordings she wanted. Reviewing some of her studio sessions for Variety Records with Duke Ellington and his small combos, Dance claimed a major role in defining the relationship of recording

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artists to repertoire that ultimately determined the sound of the records she produced. “I hired the guys and told them what I wanted them to play, and stood in the control room, and decided whether it was happening or not,” she frankly told jazz historian Mark Tucker in 1987. “And if it wasn’t happening, I’d have a good idea why it wasn’t, and what we should do.” In this scenario, she selected the material and personnel, and even helped decide arrangements in an ongoing dialogue with Ellington and his band members. “I knew who I thought should . . . be featured,” she recalled. “I mean, I’ve always been that way. I always—as far as possible I used to throw my weight around, to try to get the people that should be featured featured, because very often they weren’t.” According to Dance, Ellington, “a gentleman at all times,” was happy enough to take suggestions, while never exactly surrendering artistic control. “Duke was, you know, he was very sweet like that,” she said. “I’d say, ‘Why can’t we hear Cootie?’ [referring to trumpeter Cootie Williams]. And then maybe we would, you know, and it would be good.”65 Helen Oakley Dance could claim, with some justification and more humility than many of her peers, credit for molding both the repertoire and the sounds she captured in the studio. Yet the very recording procedures developed by A&R personnel, together with the peculiar demands of the industry they were helping build, often prevented much creative management at recording sessions. In fact, many recording officials were not even present in the studio when singers and musicians were recording. Rather, they tended to position themselves in the control room, alongside their recording engineers, as seems to have been the case when Don Law and Vincent Liebler first recorded Robert Johnson in San Antonio in 1936, and monitored the recorded takes through a pair of headphones or a loudspeaker. Similarly, during Brunswick’s 1930 field session in Knoxville, a reporter for the Knoxville News-Sentinel observed that, in the temporary studio set up in WNOX’s radio station in the St. James Hotel, recording supervisor Richard Voynow sat in a small control room adjoining the studio, where “he watches thru the [sound-proof] window, and listens by means of a loud-speaker for any musical error. If he hears one, he immediately stops the piece, and it is played over again, while the faulty recording is discarded.” The article did point out, however, that Voynow’s assistant Bill Brown “sits near the artist while the recording is going on, giving suggestions and making changes.”66 On his southern recording expeditions for Decca between 1935 and 1942, Dave Kapp often booked two hotel rooms next door to or across the hall from one another: one served as a recording studio, the other as a control room. “Of course, I never saw the people who recorded,” he explained. “We had a system of lights and I’d just listen. There was no such thing as guidance during a recording, where you could point to someone and tell him to move back or slow up or anything. We’d just listen. That’s the way we used to record.”67 In the improvised studios rigged up at southern field sessions, A&R men and their recording crews worked in such primitive conditions and on such tight schedules that

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there was often little time for more than the most basic, documentary style of recording. By the mid- to late 1930s, field sessions were increasingly organized on a highly regimented, assembly-line model, with record companies such as RCA Victor and Decca regularly cutting two dozen or more selections in a single day.68 In September 1938, for example, during six days of sessions at the Andrew Jackson Hotel in Rock Hill, South Carolina, RCA Victor’s Eli Oberstein and his two-man engineering crew recorded some two hundred masters, an average of thirty-three per day.69 Reflecting on his southern recording trips for Decca, Dave Kapp proudly asserted that, in just two and a half days during a March 1936 visit to New Orleans, he oversaw the recording of forty-nine titles by the pioneering western swing band Milton Brown & His Brownies. In total, Kapp claimed to have come away from this field session with “350 selections” in the span of only “fifteen days of recording.” Recording expeditions he undertook to other southern cities produced similar results. “Of course, the reason is very simple—at least for me,” Kapp explained. “You get into a place like Dallas. What are you going to do? So, you start recording in the morning; and you have lunch; and you record—because the whole idea was to get the things finished and get back [to Chicago]. You couldn’t try to arrange a schedule like they do in a studio here, where you do one date a day. We used to do five dates a day.”70 The speed with which A&R men and their recording crews were often compelled to work at field sessions in the mid- to late 1930s was largely a function of the belttightening measures adopted in response to the period’s economic crisis. During the 1920s, record companies had, as standard practice, recorded at least two to three master takes of a selection to ensure a satisfactory version for release. When the Great Depression sent record sales plummeting, companies reduced the number of takes to cut costs. In a June 1931 directive, for example, RCA Victor’s chief recording engineer Raymond Sooy notified his staff that henceforth “only one wax [was] to be processed, unless wax becomes defective.” As a result, in an effort to hold down production costs while still securing as many useable masters as possible, Oberstein rarely allowed his blues and hillbilly artists to cut more than one master of each selection. But this practice often resulted in inferior or flawed recordings that, despite garbled lyrics, flubbed musical passages, out-of-tune instruments, and other artistic and technical defects, still saw commercial release.71 In addition to saving costs, the assembly-line production of race and hillbilly discs reflected condescending attitudes toward roots music that were endemic throughout the industry. There was a widespread belief that hot jazz, blues, gospel, and hillbilly music did not merit or require the same kind of careful attention to acoustic quality and technical details as did mainstream pop or classical music. As Ralph Peer admitted, his superiors at Victor approved his southern recording expeditions, even though “they were never satisfied with the general results” of previous efforts to record on location, because he convinced them that “the hillbilly recording didn’t need to have the same quality as [a] Caruso [recording].”72 As Peer’s onetime protégé Oberstein liked to say of

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his own often-slapdash efforts to churn out usable recordings, “Good enough for jazz.”73 While such efficiency-oriented practices led to an enormous stockpile of masters, they tended to reduce the opportunities for A&R managers to make creative contributions, for example, by manipulating elements of a performance or encouraging alternative arrangements of a selection. Other, more cultural, factors could also discourage active studio participation by A&R managers and their staff members. Several of the men who oversaw their companies’ ethnic music catalogs during the 1920s, Anton Heindl, Hans Kubies, and Albert Thallmayer among them, spoke several languages fluently or at least passably. However, most A&R officials did not, and thus required the services of an interpreter when working with artists who did not speak English well or at all. In 1928, when the then-twelve-year-old Lydia Mendoza made her first commercial recordings with her family’s band, Cuerteto Carta Blanca, in San Antonio, the OKeh recording supervisor and his crew communicated with the Mendozas through an interpreter. Later, after she began her solo career with RCA Victor’s Bluebird label, she remembered that, during the mid- to late 1930s, Eli Oberstein employed Beatriz Morín, a sales clerk at a local San Antonio music shop, to serve as his “interpreter to deal with all of the Spanishspeaking artistas who were going to record.”74 Many A&R men had little understanding of the native languages spoken by ethnic roots artists, much less the music they recorded. So, except for offering minor technical and artistic corrections, recording officials often delegated studio supervision of such singers and musicians to the talent scouts who had recommended them. These scouts were usually record dealers who worked in the artists’ local communities. Alvin Sajewski, a part-time A&R scout who clerked in his immigrant father’s music store in a Polish neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side, believed that “the record companies didn’t care who [the artists] were; all they wanted to know was how many [records] we could sell. They didn’t care what language it was or how it sounded. They left it up to who was in the control room. As a rule it would be somebody who was selling those records, because the company representative didn’t know what it was all about.”75 Cajun singer-accordionist Dewey Segura agreed that language barriers could sometimes render A&R managers and recording engineers unwilling or unable to contribute to the recording process. In 1929, when he and guitarist Didier Herbert recorded at a New Orleans field session, Columbia’s engineers apparently gave him only one instruction about the French-Acadian songs he and his partner were preparing to record. “We don’t know what you’re singing,” Segura remembered the engineers telling him, “[and] we ask just one thing: don’t sing anything dirty.”76 Of course, even in working with southern race and hillbilly artists who spoke English, A&R managers and their assistants were often forced to negotiate cultural differences without a firm understanding of the music that their artists were recording. Notwithstanding these important caveats and impediments to creative input, some A&R managers clearly made a variety of artistic and technical contributions to recorded

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roots music, even if some of these were quite modest. Son House described how, at his debut May 28, 1931, session in Grafton, Wisconsin, Paramount’s Art Laibly guided him by using the warning-light system almost as a conductor might use a baton. “Then he tell you about the lights, just like traffic lights. Red light and green light and when he put the green light on he wanted you to start,” House said. “Then you get a little busy and if he don’t like it then he switched it off and pressed the red one on, indicating you to stop. But if he likes it then he don’t push the red one on. You go on and he had a little buzzer, wanted you to jazz out.”77 If such production required little more than the ability to watch a clock and press a button, at the same series of sessions Laibly gave House’s fellow singer-guitarist Skip James clear directives on the kinds of blues he should write and record. On four numbers, Laibly modified the bluesman’s sound by placing a board underneath James’s feet and setting a microphone near them to amplify his time-keeping stomp. Some four years earlier, Paramount’s recording staff had done the same to capture Blind Lemon Jefferson’s rhythmic foot-patting on “Hot Dogs” (Paramount 12493), which bore the label credit “Blind Lemon Jefferson and His Feet.”78 More often, though, A&R men spent their time trying to muffle the sounds of such vigorous foot-tapping that, as with Uncle Dave Macon, could easily ruin a recording. Frank Walker observed that at some New Orleans jazz sessions he supervised for Columbia, the musicians stomped their feet so hard when playing that “the walls and floor would be shaking and the microphones would rock. So we’d take out the cardboard pads from the record boxes and spread them on the floor. When that didn’t work, we’d have the musicians take off their shoes. Now, there would always be some that didn’t have any stockings, and so there they would be a band playing the wildest kind of natural jazz in their bare and stockinged feet.”79 Art Satherley worked hard in the studio to generate and record performances that demonstrated, in his words, “emotional depth,” “sincerity,” and “an indigenous genuineness of dialect and twang.” These were the essential qualities he searched for in a potential hillbilly recording, especially in much-sought-after ballads and event songs. “The person who listens to mountain music wants to hear a story,” Satherley told Maurice Zolotow of the Saturday Evening Post in 1944, explaining how he strove to convey this idea to singers in the studio: My singers must get the picture of the words. I’ve got to instill into them a picture of what they are singing about. If they’re singing about a dead person, I impress on them that their best friend is lying dead and “you’ll never see him again.” I tell them, “Sing it in the extreme.” In folk music, we don’t care about trick ways of phrasing or hot licks; we concentrate on the emotions. The country people, these so-called hillbillies, are tremendously sensitive people, with deep emotions. Whereas the sophisticated city person likes these humbug boy-girl love songs, with everything pretty-pretty, the mountaineer is a realist. His songs deal with loneliness, misery, death, murder.80

Beyond these relatively low-grade efforts to inspire strong, confident, sincere performances; muffle or accentuate rhythmic foot-tapping; offer lyrical prompts; and

As Shores recollected, A&R men and their artists usually had the benefit of listening to test records, particularly at sessions held in permanent studios. This allowed them to detect and correct any errors in the musical performance itself or in the placement and sonic balance of the various instruments before recording the standard two or three takes of a selection, as was customary during the 1920s. At Gennett, chief recording engineer Harold Soulé always began sessions by carefully situating the performers in the studio. After they had rehearsed a while, he said, “I’d make a test recording and let them listen to it. We’d cut perhaps as many as six of these test records, until they felt they had done their best. I would move them in and out, closer or farther away from the mike to get a better balance.”82 Similarly, David Evans reports that, when H.C. Speir attended sessions with his blues singer-guitarists at Paramount’s Grafton studio, he “would make suggestions as to whether the singer should be louder or softer,” and that, due to “his familiarity with the singer’s music,” he occasionally “would be able to anticipate a high note” and “would turn the recording level down for it” in order to avoid creating a “blast” that would spoil the wax master. More disturbingly, Speir alleged that some unethical A&R managers—never Speir, himself, naturally—secretly recorded unsuspecting singers and musicians during their in-studio rehearsals and then released such test recordings commercially under a pseudonymous artist credit, without the artist’s knowledge or permission.83 By the 1930s, recording sessions held in New York and Chicago were organized on much the same regimented basis as southern field recordings. However, the state-ofthe-art equipment and superior acoustical qualities of their permanent facilities allowed

IN THE STUDIO

You went in a soundproof room with a sound tunnel back to the recorder and you’d play a trial and then the recording director, he’d say, “Well, that’s not right, let’s move this instrument over here, move this one back,” you know, to balance up the sound. There was no electronic equipment, they recorded on an old wax record and they played it back and if it didn’t sound right he’d shift you around, and you might have to play the darn thing a dozen times before you’d get it like he wanted it.81

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provide modest tweaks to lyrics and musical arrangements, there were plenty of A&R officials who, despite the limitations of settings and technologies, worked closely with recording engineers and artists to maximize the audio quality of the recordings they supervised. Some even began to encourage or engender particular moods, ambience, and “feel” on records. Often there was a good deal of trial and error involved, especially with the older, more primitive method of acoustical recording. Altering the distance between performers and a recording horn, or later, under the electrical recording process, adjusting the recording levels of a microphone, helped achieve the optimal sonic balance; such modifications ensured that none of the instruments drowned out the others or overwhelmed the vocals. Georgia fiddler Bill Shores, who recorded with Dupree’s Rome Boys and several other stringbands between 1926 and 1929, had vivid memories of this kind of studio management:

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A&R men to craft records much more carefully than was possible in the temporary, ersatz studios typically used on busy recording trips. Whitey Grant, of the hillbilly guitar-and-mandolin act Whitey and Hogan, marveled at the consistently clean sound that Dave Kapp and his staff managed to achieve on the sixteen sides the duo recorded at Decca’s main studios in New York during their 1939 debut session: We would stand right in front of one microphone, and it seemed that that microphone would pick up everything that happened. Everything was well balanced. I don’t know how they did it. . . . You know, nowadays when you make a record, each voice has a microphone, each instrument has a microphone, and there’s microphones to pick up booms and sounds and echoes. But with one microphone, I have never seen anything to compare with some of the recordings that we made, Hogan and I. . . . I’ve never seen anything to compare with the quality that we got from it back in those days. And how they did it is still a mystery to me, using one microphone . . . how they could get such wonderful quality where you could hear every instrument.84

Columbia’s Frank Walker was always sensitive to the acoustic qualities of the various rooms he used as studios during his southern recording expeditions, but he also

F I G U R E 5 .4 . Portrait of Cléoma Breaux and Joseph Falcon taken at the Barnett Studio in Crowley, Louisiana, soon after their debut 1928 recording session for Columbia. Courtesy of Wade Falcon and the Loula Falcon Langlinais Photo Collection.

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responded to the peculiar challenges posed by different artists and genres. In April 1928, when he first heard Joe Falcon and Cléoma Breaux recording in a New Orleans hotel room, he was astonished by the sheer volume generated by this accordion-and-guitar duo. At subsequent sessions with them, Walker made certain that his engineers were careful to move the microphone much farther away from the performers, achieving a less saturated and slight echoey sound that became a hallmark of much of the commercially recorded Cajun music before World War II.85 Whether working in temporary, makeshift facilities or in permanent, dedicated studios, these kinds of mediations edged A&R men such as Walker ever closer to the functions that would later be associated with “record producers.” An even better example of Walker’s importance to this evolving side of A&R management involves his cultivation of the nascent recording potential of the extraordinary vaudeville blues singer Bessie Smith. In February 1923, some five years before he inaugurated the commercial recording of Cajun music with Falcon and Breaux, Walker had supervised Smith’s first issued sides. In an October 1923 interview with Sheet Music News, his superior at Columbia, W. G. Monroe, described how Walker had made those recordings possible. Monroe stated baldly that “Mr. Walker discovered her.” This was a gross simplification given the roles of both Smith’s pianist-manager Clarence Williams, who had assisted Walker in bringing the seasoned entertainer into Columbia studios, and Walker’s fellow A&R man, Fred Hager—who, the month before Walker auditioned her, had recruited Smith to make a test recording for rival OKeh, only to subsequently reject her. Although Walker apparently subscribed to the prevailing belief that “colored singers from the South only can properly render ‘blues’ numbers,” Monroe insisted that Smith’s “first few recordings [for Columbia] were terrible, for her voice was absolutely uncultured.” Recognizing, however, that she “had a deep, powerful voice,” it was at this point, according to Monroe, that Walker intervened to help Smith develop a vocal technique more appropriate for recording the blues-pop-jazz blends that characterized her imperious and phenomenally successful vaudeville blues. “Mr. Walker, realizing that she possessed talent, put her through a course of training,” explained Monroe. “She finally came through in splendid style and her rendition of ‘Gulf Coast Blues,’ ‘Downhearted [sic] Blues’ and several other numbers helped to make them big sellers on the Columbia records.”86 Simplifications and self-serving distortions aside, Monroe attributed to Walker the main characteristics of the interwar A&R man turned fledgling record producer: find talent, sign talent, develop talent to make it suitable for recording, record that talent as faithfully as possible, then select, release, and promote those sides that showed the most promise of becoming hits. Smith’s spectacular success as a recording artist, partially enabled by Walker’s efforts to assist her in tailoring her style to the demands of the studio and the marketplace, helped consolidate the polished yet heartfelt sound that became a signature of the most popular female vaudeville blues artist in the 1920s.

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An equally significant illustration of how A&R managers’ decisions could dramatically affect the sounds of recorded American roots music occurred in 1924, this time in what would soon become known as hillbilly music. Early that year, Vocalion signed George Reneau, a blind guitarist-harmonica player whom local talent scout Gus Nennstiel had recommended to the label after discovering him playing on the streets of Knoxville. In April, Reneau recorded his first twelve sides for Vocalion at its New York studios, among them several cover versions of songs already out on competing labels, including “The Wreck on the Southern 97” (Vocalion 14809) and “You Will Never Miss Your Mother Until She Is Gone” (Vocalion 14811). Over the next eighteen months, he made more than forty additional recordings for the label.87 Although most of his Vocalion releases bore the artist credit “Sung & Played by George Reneau—The Blind Musician of the Smoky Mountains,” this was not strictly true, as those listeners who wondered how, on some releases, he had managed to sing and simultaneously play the harmonica may have suspected. Cliff Hess, Vocalion’s A&R man, had either decided that Reneau’s singing was too ill-disciplined (Hess felt Reneau “lacked a sense of timing”) or that it was impossible to capture his voice adequately on the acoustic recording equipment then still in use. Either way, Hess exercised his creative and aesthetic judgment—and his authority in the studio—by recruiting a “ghost singer” to handle the vocals on Reneau’s first thirty or so recordings. The artist Hess chose was up-and-coming vaudeville singer-songwriter Gene Austin who, with hits such as Robert Johnson’s favorites, “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” (Victor 19656) and “My Blue Heaven” (Victor 20964), subsequently became one of the decade’s best-selling pop vocalists.88 Hess’s decision to use the southern-born Austin, with his smooth, yet sufficiently twangy proto-crooning singing style, helped alter the sound of early recorded hillbilly music. Austin, who also supplied the vocals on a couple of Vocalion sides by fiddler Uncle Am Stuart, was one in a long parade of professional New York studio singers and musicians who, collectively, contributed to about one-third of all the hillbilly records released in the United States between 1924 and 1932. Sometimes, the shift toward a smoother, more clearly enunciated singing style that A&R men such as Cliff Hess encouraged appeared at odds with advertising strategies that emphasized hillbilly music’s rustic authenticity—a provenance expressed most audibly through the kinds of vernacular vocalizations that supposedly indicated a lifetime spent in mountains, fields, and prairies. A good example of this tension involves Fiddlin’ Powers & Family, the first Appalachian family stringband to record commercially. On August 18 and 19, 1924, at their first sessions, the group waxed seventeen selections, chiefly instrumentals, for Victor at its New York studios. Eight of those sides, along with a studio portrait of the five-member band, were featured prominently in Victor’s Olde Time Fiddlin’ Tunes brochure, the first record industry catalog devoted exclusively to hillbilly music. “Fiddlin’ Powers and His Family come from the mountains of Tennessee with some records of old-time American music,” the brochure announced. “The fiddle leads the music, the banjo, ukulele, mandolin and guitar keeping up the swing

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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.”89 Unbeknownst to record buyers, however, the singing on these infectious records was actually supplied by a ghost singer—one born some seven hundred miles away from the mountains of Southern Appalachia, in the rolling plains of southeastern Kansas. On the four sides that featured singing, an unidentified Victor A&R man (probably Nat Shilkret) had employed the ubiquitous and multitalented Carson Robison, then under contract to the label, to supply tenor vocals instead of the band’s regular singer, banjo player Charles Powers. Although Robison may have sung in a more polished and accessible style, thereby expanding the potential market for these records, the in-studio switch infuriated the members of the Powers family. As Charles’s younger sister Ada Powers, the band’s ukulele player, later complained, Robison “just didn’t have that Appalachian twang in his voice, and anyone could hear that he wasn’t a real mountain singer.”90 As this episode suggests, A&R managers and their staffs remained ever-sensitive to the relationship between commerciality and authenticity within the recorded roots music field, although the latter usually only proved important insofar as it contributed to the former. These priorities, and the complications they could generate, were clearly evident in Buell Kazee’s memories of his first experiences inside a recording studio. Kazee had perfect credentials for an “authentic” hillbilly performer: the singer-banjo player was born and raised on a mountain farm in Magoffin County, Kentucky. But Kazee bucked the stereotypes regarding such musicians by formally studying voice at Georgetown College and later with a private instructor. Kazee had even taught voice at his own studio in Ashland, Kentucky, for a year before making his debut recordings for Brunswick in April 1927. However, at those sessions, which were held in New York over the course of three days, assistant recording manager Jimmy O’Keefe and his engineers encouraged Kazee to revert to singing in his natural or “untrained” voice, because they believed that the mountain songs and ballads he was recording sounded inauthentic when sung in his “good,” or formally trained, concert voice. “They’d say, ‘Buell, that’s fine but it won’t ring on a cash register.’ I’d ask, ‘Well, what do you want?’ ‘Well, that vibrato and resonance, if you can cut that out.’ ” Kazee, though, struggled to accommodate their requests and sing in his “country” voice. Some selections, he later joked, he had to record “seven or eight times to get it bad enough to sell.”91 While Kazee’s experience, with O’Keefe urging him to revert to a rougher, more parochial vocal style, was somewhat anomalous, it reveals that the A&R managers and recording companies involved with roots music were engaged in efforts to create and market notions of musical authenticity that sometimes produced quite contradictory musical results. Far more indicative of the general trend toward more sophisticated vocals and greater musical precision were the instructions given by ARC’s A&R staff

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to Doc Roberts in late 1932. On December 29, W. R. Calaway wrote to Roberts as he and his musical partners were preparing material for their next recording session. “We may take 3 or 4 good Blue Fiddle Blues,” Calaway explained, “but the balance should be duets by James [Roberts] and Asa [Martin], numbers that are of the higher type with clean, clear voices. You see what I mean[,] Doc, the old crude mountain-type of playing and singing has about passed out. We must work along more modern ideas with cleaner voices and better instrumentation.”92 Along with the likes of Vernon Dalhart, Arthur Fields, Bob Miller, and Frank Luther, Austin and Robison typified those “citybilly” singers whose voices, pushed to the fore by A&R men such as Cliff Hess and Nat Shilkret, helped redefine the musical parameters of recorded hillbilly music and greatly expand its mass appeal among the nation’s record buyers.93 Prior to the mid-1920s, hillbilly recordings typically featured fiddlers, banjo players, fiddle-and-guitar duos, and a few stringbands performing chiefly instrumental tunes drawn from the southern dance music tradition. Little singing was heard on such records, but when it was, as on some discs by Fiddlin’ John Carson or Charlie Poole & the North Carolina Ramblers, vocals were often rendered in a thickly accented, clipped style that sometimes made the lyrics almost unintelligible. In contrast, citybilly singers sang in a clearly articulated, polished, and accessible vocal style, in front of fairly sedate pop orchestrations (usually supplied by studio musicians) that showcased the vocals and the lyrics rather than the melody or the instrumental performances. In concert with A&R managers, these studio singers transformed recorded hillbilly music from a principally instrumental genre that focused on dance tunes to a primarily vocal one that emphasized lyrics. In doing so, they laid the groundwork for the subsequent emergence of such hillbilly singing stars as Jimmie Rodgers, Gene Autry, and Jimmie Davis.94 Posterity, however, has not been kind to these citybilly singers. They have routinely been dismissed as inferior, “inauthentic” poseurs who produced vacuous facsimiles of the “real” hillbilly music recorded by amateur and semiprofessional southern artists. In a 1955 letter to Variety, Ralph Peer loftily characterized the immensely popular Dalhart as a “pseudo-hillbilly” and “a profitable substitute for a real hillbilly,” setting the tone for decades of criticism and invective, including music journalist William Ruhlmann’s memorable description of Dalhart as a “musical carpetbagger” and then-Country Music Foundation director Bill Ivey’s equally biting assessment of him as “the John Denver of old-time music.”95 The disdain of such critics usually hinges on their belief that formal musical training and the absence of suitably rural, often poor or working class, and usually southern backgrounds disqualifies citybillies from being considered a genuine part of the early history of commercially recorded country music. Gene Austin, for example, recorded nearly fifty sides for the fledgling hillbilly recording industry, but country music histories rarely mention him—and when they do, he is invariably relegated to mere footnote fodder. For scholars, his later career as an archetypal Jazz Age pop crooner puts to rest any idea that he should be considered an “authentic” hillbilly

At field sessions in southern cities, A&R managers and their recording staffs often spent much of their time grappling with a host of acoustical and technical challenges that threatened their ability to generate sufficient usable takes in a sorely limited time

IN THE STUDIO

I N - H O U S E S T Y L E A N D E A R LY S U P E R G R O U P S

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recording artist, even though he was born in Gainesville, Texas, and raised in Minden, Louisiana. As Charles K. Wolfe dismissively asserts, Austin “was anything but a country vocalist” and “he went on to become the Bing Crosby of the 1920s.”96 It is worth bearing in mind, however, that these freelance studio singers and their commercial records were enormously popular throughout the nation during their heyday between 1924 and 1929. That success alone suggests that they struck a chord with record buyers far less preoccupied with matters of supposed authenticity than with the power of the music to move hearts, minds, and sometimes dancing bodies. Some have found an analogous process of gentrification in the way that A&R managers such as Frank Walker and songwriters such as Perry Bradford and Clarence Williams (who both doubled as A&R men) transformed precommercial rural blues forms into vaudeville blues by adding relatively sweet jazz and pop orchestrations and smoothing out coarser rural vocal stylings on the recordings they supervised and, in the case of the latter two, in the songs they also composed.97 By contrast, few critics have ever suggested that the artistic integrity and quite possibly the commercial appeal of a Charley Patton or a Robert Johnson may have been compromised by the refusal of A&R men to allow them to record the pop or other non-blues material that they enjoyed and regularly performed outside of recording studios. Nor have many questioned the folk credentials of a Charlie Poole or a Clayton McMichen on the grounds of their appreciation of and numerous, if frequently thwarted, efforts to record Tin Pan Alley fare. Rather than caricaturing the dynamic transformation of vernacular music in the interwar recording industry as a tragic dilution of once inviolable, unmediated folk traditions by cynical A&R officials and greedy record companies, it is far more accurate to see citybilly artists and vaudeville blues singers, as well as jazz musicians, gospel performers, country blues singer-guitarists, hillbilly fiddlers and stringbands, Cajun duos, Mexican ranchera singers, pop vocalists, and a whole parade of A&R representatives, as integral to the evolution of commercially recorded American roots music. They all participated in a messy but tremendously fertile period of experimentation from which popular new musical styles and marketing categories emerged. Those styles all had their own claims to “authenticity,” even though they were often fashioned not in the romanticized rural communities of the Mississippi Delta or Southern Appalachia but in the heart of a multimillion-dollar recording and entertainment industry headquartered in New York and inextricably linked to increasingly corporate business practices, modern technologies, and vast commercial networks.

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period. By contrast, inside their fully equipped, state-of-the-art studios in the New York area and Chicago, they were usually in far greater control of the recording process. One of the most important ways that recording department officials capitalized on this control was by assembling hand-picked groups of studio musicians to provide the accompaniment for roots recordings, in order to create a particular mood, sound, or groove. For example, the backing group for Mamie Smith’s first record for OKeh, “That Thing Called Love” / “You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down,” waxed in February 1920, was identified on some of the discs’ labels as the Rega Orchestra. This was a white studio band, assembled and probably led by the session’s supervisor, Fred Hager, who served as the label’s recording manager and musical director. On her second release, “Crazy Blues” / “It’s Right Here for You (If You Don’t Get It ’Taint No Fault O’ Mine),” recorded some six months later, Smith was supported by another studio group, an all-black combo billed as Her Jazz Hounds, reportedly organized by her personal manager Perry “Mule” Bradford, who co-supervised the session.98 This was a more common arrangement. During the early to mid-1920s, recording department managers usually employed African American jazz musicians to accompany African American female singers on recordings of vaudeville blues, among them such jazz luminaries as Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Coleman Hawkins, Jelly Roll Morton, Joe “King” Oliver, and Thomas “Fats” Waller. But A&R men did occasionally call on white accompanists, including Eddie Lang, Roy Smeck, Phil Napoleon, Harry Reser, Mezz Mezzrow, Miff Mole, Benny Goodman, and Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, to name only a handful of the New York–based popular and jazz musicians who played on vaudeville blues recordings by African American vocalists.99 Some studio musicians worked under exclusive contracts for particular record companies; others freelanced for several firms. Although they usually worked anonymously, such musicians were enormously talented professionals, fully capable of negotiating the rigorous demands of the recording studio and proficient across a wide range of styles that included popular, classical, ethnic, and roots music. In the hillbilly records field, A&R managers routinely employed veteran studio musicians to accompany citybilly singers. But, in another affront to conventional notions of authenticity, they occasionally used those professionals to back southern hillbilly artists brought north to record in New York studios.100 Carson Robison, for instance, not only ghost sang on Fiddlin’ Powers & Family’s Victor records but also provided guitar accompaniment and whistling on several of the hillbilly records by both Kelly Harrell and Buell Kazee.101 Driven by a mix of creativity, curiosity, and commercial instincts that kept them alert to trending musical vogues, A&R managers were usually willing to experiment with sonic novelties that might produce hit records. Consequently, they sometimes employed studio musicians who played instruments seldom found in southern vernacular traditions, including the viola, clarinet, trumpet, xylophone, tuba, and saxophone.102 In 1931, for example, jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman accompanied hillbilly singer Bernard “Slim” Smith on his Columbia recording of “My Little A-1 Brownie,” which Tony

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Russell describes as “probably the only hillbilly song about cameras.” Benny Nawahi, a Honolulu-born stringed instrument virtuoso, also provided musical support, as he did on a number of other sides recorded by Smith and, under a variety of pseudonyms, by Bob Miller. In fact, Miller, then manager of Columbia’s hillbilly catalog, probably supervised Smith’s session at which he recorded “My Little A-1 Brownie.” As Russell notes, the versatile Nawahi was actually enlisted to perform a series of “hot solos on four instruments—Hawaiian guitar, standard guitar, mandolin, and harmonica”—playing one instrument and then setting it aside to grab another, all on a single take.103 This attempt to capitalize on the interwar popularity of the Hawaiian guitar tapped into the tradition of instrumental virtuosity that endured within hillbilly music and, more specifically, paved the way for the spellbinding steel-guitar playing of western swing trailblazers such as Bob Dunn, of Milton Brown & His Brownies, and Leon McAuliffe, of Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys. On other recordings, A&R managers even called upon studio musicians to provide sound effects, such as train whistles, bird calls, or hammering, in order to enhance the verisimilitude of a record.104 This helped invoke a profound and highly appealing sense of space and place on some records, acoustically transporting listeners to quite specific locales, often those associated with the classic rural and railroad tropes of much of hillbilly music.105 In sum, between 1922 and 1932, New York studio musicians accompanied southern hillbilly artists on more than 350 master recordings, which, in turn, appeared on more than 660 issued sides. By the late 1920s, A&R managers were also employing studio musicians to provide accompaniment on race and hillbilly recordings at permanent studios in Chicago, Hollywood, and, as in the case of Dan Hornsby, even Atlanta.106 The regular collaborations between roots artists and professional studio musicians arranged by recording studio staffs reveal the constructed nature of hillbilly music as a popular genre; they complicate perceptions of this music as simply a commercialized form of traditional, essentially white, largely southern-based folk music. Thanks in no small part to the efforts of A&R officials, recorded hillbilly music was always a modern, fundamentally hybrid, regionally fluid, and sometimes even biracial commercial enterprise, as well as a protean form of American popular culture. It had roots in, and carried echoes of, a folk past, to be sure. But “authentic” hillbilly music was forged by an alliance of artists and record company A&R men working in modern America and its recording studios. Other examples of in-studio creativity by A&R managers occurred when they assembled what, in a later era, would be called “supergroups.” These ensembles consisted of already successful recording artists (albeit some more successful than others) and were organized solely for the purpose of recording music. At Brunswick’s New York studios in April 1927, Jimmy O’Keefe created a vocal duo, the Blue Ridge Gospel Singers, to record sacred numbers for the label’s hillbilly catalog by pairing together his younger brother, pop recording artist-songwriter Lester O’Keefe, and Buell Kazee. The duo was accompanied by professional studio musicians, including violinist Bert Hirsch and

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pianist Bill Wirges. Some three months earlier, O’Keefe had recruited Vernon Dalhart and popular singer Wilfred Glenn, along with the blind Tennessee harmony duo of Lester McFarland and Robert A. Gardner (who, as Mac and Bob, went on to become longtime stars of WLS’s National Barn Dance), to form a hillbilly vocal quartet billed as the Old Southern Sacred Singers. Between 1926 and 1929, the group waxed twentysix issued sides, with Lester O’Keefe replacing Dalhart on a few of them.107 On other occasions, Jimmy O’Keefe, a formally trained singer-pianist, contributed musically to the sessions he supervised. He provided the piano accompaniment on at least one hillbilly recording: Al Hopkins & His Buckle Busters’ “Echoes of the Chimes” (Brunswick 180), recorded in May 1927. In April of the following year, he sang a duet with citybilly singer Al Bernard on “Times Am Gittin’ Hard” (Brunswick 260), which was attributed to the Wiggins Brothers.108 In the race records field, A&R managers formed similar studio groups. In 1930, at the dawn of his long, successful career as a Chicago-based music publisher, talent scout, and session supervisor, Lester Melrose assembled the Famous Hokum Boys. Built around the prodigious talents of singer-pianist Georgia Tom Dorsey and singer-guitarist Big Bill Broonzy, among other revolving members from his stable of recording artists, the group recorded twenty-three titles for ARC.109 Perhaps more than any other A&R man working in the roots recording industry, Melrose blazed the trail for postwar record production, consistently using the same musicians to create a discernible house-style for the hugely popular, relatively smooth, often jukebox- and dance-oriented, jazztinged urbane blues he recorded with Broonzy, Lonnie Johnson, Roosevelt Sykes, and dozens of others. Melrose’s chief A&R rival in the race records field of the 1930s, Decca’s J. Mayo Williams, organized his own studio group called the Harlem Hamfats. Despite its name, the ensemble was a Chicago-based, jazz-oriented blues unit that specialized in danceable, up-tempo selections. Singer-guitarist Kansas Joe McCoy and his younger brother, singer-mandolin player Charlie McCoy, comprised the central members of the band, augmented by, among others, trumpeter Herb “Kid” Morand, clarinetist Odell Rand, pianist Horace Malcolm, and drummer Fred Flynn. The Harlem Hamfats waxed more than 115 sides under Williams’s supervision between 1936 and 1939, and enjoyed tremendous popularity with hits such as “Oh! Red” (Decca 7182) and “Let’s Get Drunk and Truck” (Decca 7205). But Williams also used the group to back some of his Decca vocalists, including Rosetta Howard, Frankie “Half-Pint” Jaxon, and Johnnie Temple. The success of the Famous Hokum Boys and the Harlem Hamfats inspired the formation of similar studio groups, among them Tampa Red & the Chicago Five as well as Big Bill & the Memphis Five.110 In other cases, A&R managers and their staffs arranged multipart ensemble recordings featuring some of their labels’ biggest roots music stars. At Paramount, recording director Art Laibly probably conceived and supervised the blues “sampler” record credited in some of its catalogs to the Paramount All Stars. According to the record labels, this release, a two-sided “descriptive novelty” titled “Hometown Skiffle, Parts I

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and II” (Paramount 12886), featured a stellar line-up of “Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Will Ezell, Charlie Spand, The Hokum Boys, [and] Papa Charlie Jackson,” each performing snippets from some of their previously recorded numbers, interspersed with occasional dialogue. The fourth edition of Blues and Gospel Records offers only a vague “c. October 1929” date for the session that produced this record, although some blues scholars and record collectors assert that Jefferson, then Paramount’s biggest star, did not participate in this session and that it actually occurred a couple months later, perhaps in January 1930. By that time, however, Jefferson was already dead (he died on December 19, 1929), raising the possibility that it may have been Blind Blake mimicking Jefferson’s guitar playing on side two of “Hometown Skiffle.” If that was the case, this represented a literal example of a musician “ghosting” for another on an American roots music record, with the entrepreneurial Laibly in the role of musical medium.111 Even more ambitious was “The Medicine Show—Acts I–VI” (OKeh 45380, 45391, and 45413), a three-disc, six-act recreation of the traveling entertainment and medicinepeddling shows referred to in the title. Released in OKeh’s hillbilly catalog, the multipart skit was recorded in Atlanta on September 24 and 25, 1929, and featured Emmett Miller, W. T. Narmour & S. W. Smith, Fiddlin’ John Carson, Moonshine Kate, Bud Blue, the Black Brothers, Frank Hutchison, and Martin Malloy, several of whom were themselves onetime medicine show entertainers.112 Presumably, this all-star series was the brainchild of OKeh’s recording manager Tommy Rockwell or possibly, given where it was recorded, Polk C. Brockman. As “The Medicine Show” indicates, even at southern location recording sessions A&R officials imaginatively combined available talent to produce special records.113 Ralph Peer seems to have been particularly adept at such creative orchestrations. Perhaps the most fascinating of the unique combinations Peer assembled from among the artists in attendance at his spate of 1927 to 1932 field sessions were those that tested, however temporarily or accidentally, the racialized segmentation of American musicmaking and record marketing, which, paradoxically, he had done much to create. During those years while an A&R manager at Victor and its successor, RCA Victor, Peer organized at least a dozen racially integrated recording dates. On July 28, 1927, at what appears to be the first of these sessions, the Johnson Brothers waxed six selections under his supervision in a studio rigged up in a vacant State Street warehouse in Bristol, Tennessee. On four of them, the white hillbilly guitar-and-steel-guitar duo was joined by El Watson, the lone African American to record at the now-legendary 1927 Bristol Sessions. Watson blew the harmonica on one of the Johnson Brothers’ recordings, while on the other three he rattled the bones, a percussion instrument long associated with minstrel and medicine shows. Later that day, again probably at Peer’s prompting, Charles Johnson reciprocated, supplying the guitar accompaniment for Watson’s harmonica instrumental, “Pot Licker Blues” (Victor 20951).114 A couple of weeks later in Charlotte, on the second stop of his three-city southern recording expedition, Peer organized another impromptu racially integrated session.

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On August 9, 1927, the Georgia Yellow Hammers recorded seven selections. On the last, an instrumental titled “G Rag” (Victor 21195), Andrew Baxter sat in for the white stringband’s regular fiddler. Baxter, who also recorded at the Charlotte sessions with his singer-guitarist son Jim, was a black neighbor who sometimes performed with members of the Georgia Yellow Hammers at social gatherings back home in their native Gordon County, Georgia. Their in-studio collaboration, however, appears to have occurred expressly at Peer’s suggestion.115 Like these 1927 recording sessions, Peer also organized several sessions at which Jimmie Rodgers, a white Mississippi native who was deeply influenced by blues and jazz, recorded with African American accompanists. On July 16, 1930, in one of the most remarkable recording sessions in the history of American popular music, Peer arranged for Rodgers to record his now-classic “Blue Yodel No. 9” (Victor 23580) at RCA Victor’s newly completed studios in Hollywood, backed by the brilliant black jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong, who was then headlining shows at the New Cotton Club in the nearby suburb of Culver City. Playing the piano on the recording was Armstrong’s second wife, Lillian Hardin Armstrong, who had traveled to California in one final and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to save their failing marriage.116 Country music and jazz scholars alike have long celebrated this singular event at which Peer united two of the twentieth century’s musical giants. The fact that “Blue Yodel No. 9” is listed in the current editions of both Brian Rust’s Jazz and Ragtime Records (1897–1942) and Robert M. W. Dixon, John Godrich, and Howard Rye’s Blues and Gospel Records, 1890–1943, as well as Tony Russell’s Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921–1942, speaks to the transcendent, genre-defying character of this session and the resulting recording.117 Extraordinary though these talents and this event were, however, at one level the collaboration between Rodgers and the Armstrongs was indicative of the perennially porous divisions between musical genres and the promiscuous patterns of influence, inspiration, and imitation at work across racial lines: there was, during the formative interwar period of the commercial roots recording industry, a messy pattern of interracial musical exchange that operated within a profoundly unequal and highly segregated world in defiance of racially determined marketing strategies and assumptions about genre. Peer was also the likely architect of Rodgers’s two racially integrated sessions that took place during a 1931 RCA Victor recording expedition to Louisville. On June 11, Rodgers recorded an unissued take of the bawdy “Let Me Be Your Side Track,” with St. Louis blues guitarist Clifford Gibson supplying the accompaniment. Five days later, Rodgers waxed “My Good Gal’s Gone Blues” (Bluebird B-5942), backed by the Dixieland Jug Blowers (credited on the record as the Louisville Jug Band), a local, all-black, five-man group led by jug blower Earl McDonald and fiddler Clifford Hayes.118 On June 10, 1931, during the same Louisville trip, Peer also arranged for Rodgers and Sara Carter of the Carter Family to record a pair of vocal duets, “Why There’s a Tear in My Eye” (Bluebird B-6698) and “The Wonderful City” (Bluebird B-6810), accompanied

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by Maybelle Carter, the guitarist of that celebrated family stringband. 119 Two days later, in an even more unusual collaboration, Peer supervised the recording of two corny skits that he and Rodgers had hastily pieced together. “Jimmie Rodgers Visits the Carter Family” (Victor 23574) and “The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers in Texas” (Bluebird B-6762) united Peer’s two most famous and best-selling hillbilly acts.120 For other sessions, in other locations, Peer seems to have arranged for an eclectic assortment of popular, jazz, and Hawaiian musicians to accompany Rodgers. Bob Sawyer’s Jazz Band and Lani McIntire’s Hawaiians, for example, both recorded with Rodgers in Hollywood on June 30, 1930, a little more than two weeks before he collaborated with the Armstrongs on “Blue Yodel No. 9.”121 In bringing together talented recording artists working in different roots music idioms, Peer was willing to test the boundaries of record company–defined musical genres and diversify the sounds his artists created on commercial records, all in pursuit of a hit record. As he explained in a 1959 interview, “See, my policy was always to try to expand each artist by adding accompaniment, or by adding a vocalist, or what have you.”122 Peer’s commercially driven creativity influenced the sound and scope of American roots music, helping define how contemporary record buyers and, decades later, music historians understood this music. This was particularly true in the case of Jimmie Rodgers, the so-called Father of Country Music, whose musical tastes and talents ran deep and wide and whose studio collaborators, thanks to Peer, were equally eclectic. Peer’s unusual recording assemblages signified how Rodgers, an archetypal hillbilly recording artist, flourished amid the wild musical experimentation and frenetic exchanges of the evolving recording industry. Rodgers was never simply the custodian of some pristine, old-time, and preternaturally white southern musical tradition; as a recording star, he was a product of modern American media and culture. Ralph Peer was not the only A&R manager to organize racially integrated hillbilly recording sessions. Between 1927 and 1932, A&R officials presided over no fewer than twenty-two such dates, including those Peer arranged for Rodgers as well as for another of his artists, Jimmie Davis. In total, forty-nine African American singers and musicians performed on at least 178 released sides—nearly three-quarters of which resulted from these racially integrated sessions—that were either issued in hillbilly records series or otherwise aimed directly at that nominally white, but in reality somewhat more racially diverse, market.123 Moreover, while A&R managers oversaw far greater black involvement in hillbilly recordings than was once believed, their recruitment of white musicians to play on race records, especially on vaudeville blues sides, was even more extensive.124 In February 1923, at a Paramount session in New York probably supervised by Art Satherley, the white Original Memphis Five accompanied Alberta Hunter on “Tain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness” (Paramount 12016), “If You Want to Keep Your Daddy Home” (Paramount 12016), and “Bleeding Hearted Blues” (Paramount 12021). In an interesting departure from the usual jazz-pop accompaniment for most female vaudeville blues singers, Maggie Jones’s 1925 Columbia release, “Dangerous Blues” /

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“Suicide Blues” (Columbia 14070-D), produced in New York under Frank Walker’s direction, featured a plangent country-blues accompaniment by hillbilly guitarist Doc Miller, masquerading as Alabama Joe. Under Dan Hornsby’s supervision, Lillian Glinn recorded a half dozen blues in April 1929 at Columbia’s Atlanta studio, backed by a group of white musicians, including trumpeter Pete Underwood, pianist Taylor Flanagan, and guitarist-banjo player Perry Bechtel. The next year, Bechtel also played on some mildly bawdy sides by harmonizing country blues duo Rufus and Ben Quillian, including “Satisfaction Blues” / “It’s Dirty But Good” (Columbia 14616-D).125 On November 24, 1933, at the final session of her career, Bessie Smith was backed by Buck & His Band, an integrated studio group of jazzmen specially assembled by John Hammond that included tenor saxophonist Chu Berry, clarinetist Benny Goodman, and trombonist Jack Teagarden.126 This session occurred slightly more than a decade after what is generally, though arguably, considered the first racially integrated recording in jazz history.127 On July 17, 1923, New Orleans black Creole pianist-composer Jelly Roll Morton accompanied the all-white New Orleans Rhythm Kings on several sides at the Starr Piano Company’s studio in Richmond, Indiana.128 By the mid-1930s, biracial collaborations in the studio and even on stage or in after-hours jam sessions were not uncommon among jazz players, and were encouraged in northern cities such as New York and Chicago by A&R figures-cum-fans such as John Hammond, Helen Oakley Dance, and Milt Gabler.129 As was probably the case whenever the racial segregation of the recording industry and of American society more generally was tested, there was sometimes initial skepticism from artists of both races about the wisdom of these kinds of interracial sessions. There was also often incomprehension and resistance from record company executives wedded to the industry’s basic commitment to a racially segregated market for roots music. Nevertheless, ambitious A&R managers and their staffs continued to put together occasional integrated sessions because they believed they could generate records that, irrespective of whether they personally liked or loathed the music, might be hits.

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Many A&R managers were trained, sometimes classically trained, musicians who made recordings in their own right before and sometimes even during their tenure as record company officials. More importantly here, many of them also played on some of the roots music recordings they oversaw. Nat Shilkret, for example, provided the piano accompaniment on several hillbilly recordings, including some by Vernon Dalhart, Carson Robison, and, most famously, Eck Robertson, whom he assisted on four fiddle solos in July 1922, including “Sallie Johnson and Billy in the Low Ground” / “Done Gone” (Victor 19372).130 One recording by Shilkret’s own studio band, the International Novelty Orchestra’s “modern fox trot” treatment of “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’ ” (Victor 19421), appeared in Victor’s Olde Time Fiddlin’ Tunes brochure of

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1924, again indicating the fluid definition of hillbilly music during its earliest years on commercial records.131 Other A&R officials also made musical or spoken contributions to some of the hillbilly recordings they supervised. A partial list includes Dan Hornsby, Frank Walker, Adrian Schubert, Jack Kapp, Eli Oberstein, Leonard Joy, Bob Miller, Jimmy O’Keefe, Harry Charles, and Bill Brown.132 Even Don Law got into the act, playing the washboard on most, possibly all, of the sixteen Shelly Lee Alley & His Alley Cats sides he supervised for ARC in San Antonio on November 4 and 5, 1937.133 Similar musical interventions occurred on race records. Pianist Fletcher Henderson accompanied more than a dozen of the vaudeville blues singers whose sessions he presided over as the recording manager and musical director at Black Swan between 1921 and 1923, among them Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter, Katie Crippen, Josie Miles, and Trixie Smith.134 Several of his A&R contemporaries at other labels also played the piano on some of the recordings they supervised, including Richard M. Jones, OKeh’s race records manager in Chicago, and Aletha Dickerson, his Paramount counterpart across town.135 The prolific Clarence Williams was in a class by himself, however. As a New York–based A&R man and studio musician primarily for OKeh, he accompanied some forty-five musical acts at recording sessions—among them “Texas” Alexander, Butterbeans and Susie, the Great Day New Orleans Singers, Alberta Hunter, Lonnie Johnson, Bessie Smith, Victoria Spivey, and Ethel Waters—on everything from the piano, reed organ, and washboard to the kazoo, woodblocks, gourd, and jug. Remarkably, Williams also found time to cut more than three hundred jazz and blues sides under his own name during a recording career that spanned twenty years.136 Unlike the multitalented Williams, Winston Holmes apparently played no musical instrument. Yet he still managed to contribute musically to sessions he organized and supervised for Gennett as a Kansas City–based freelance A&R man and scout. On August 21, 1928, for example, he sang a few duets with Lottie Kimbrough and provided sundry vocal effects, notably on “Wayward Girl Blues” (Gennett 6607, Champion 15755, Supertone 9286, and Superior 2717), on which he performed spoken parts, bird calls, whistling, and even yodels. Quite unusually, Holmes’s efforts actually earned him a billing on the resulting releases, which were credited to both Kimbrough and himself.137 More commonly, A&R officials’ musical and vocal contributions to the recordings they oversaw went unacknowledged on disc and in advertising materials. That was certainly the case for what appears to be the sole in-studio intercession by Ralph Lembo, a Sicilian-born furniture store owner and talent scout from Itta Bena, Mississippi, who offered only a single spoken interjection (“Who you tellin’? Tell ’im!”) on “Ham Hound Crave” (Paramount 12629), a 1928 recording by his blues singer-guitarist discovery Rube Lacy.138 Other A&R men contributed in more significant ways to the sessions they oversaw. Homer Rodeheaver was a nationally known white gospel singer-trombonist-songwriter who owned an eponymous sacred music publishing company and a specialist religious record label called Rainbow Records. Moonlighting as an A&R man for Paramount,

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Rodeheaver sang on at least one spiritual and offered the spoken introduction to another among the sixteen selections by the Wiseman Sextette, an African American acapella group whose sessions he supervised, probably at his own studio in Chicago, in July 1923.139 The versatile Harry Charles, a Paramount talent scout and occasional session supervisor, performed double duty, singing on at least one side by a hillbilly stringband he discovered (Hugh Gibbs String Band’s “Lord I’m Coming Home” [Paramount 3002]). Charles claimed that he also sometimes appeared on recordings by his blues singers and gospel groups, including an occasion when he sang with an unidentified black quartet after one of its members became too nervous in front of the microphone.140 He even recorded in his own right, in the guise of Harry Nelson on a series of vocal duets with two, possibly three other artists, at sessions he organized and oversaw for QRS in April 1929 at Gennett’s studios in Long Island, New York.141 The roll call of A&R representatives who sang, played, or spoke on interwar roots music records could be greatly extended. In short, though, this kind of musical participation happened far more frequently than most scholars and fans have appreciated, and formed part of a range of creative input by A&R officials at the recording sessions they supervised. These ambitious, resourceful, and inventive men and women made vital artistic and technical interventions inside the studios, some permanent, others temporary, where American roots music was commercially recorded between the two world wars. Ultimately, the decisions they made affected the range of sounds, styles, and subject matter that roots artists committed to disc. However, if those decisions are scrutinized carefully, it is clear that A&R officials constantly attempted to navigate between the demands of market rationalization, which generally pulled them toward increasingly segregated audiences for clearly delineated musical forms, and the more mercurial demands of artists, consumers, and musical idioms, which regularly confounded such neat categorizations. Some of the studio contributions by A&R managers and their assistants suggest that many were acutely aware of just how artificial, fluid, and permeable those classifications were; some were even complicit in producing music that defied or breached those hardening musical and marketing distinctions. Indeed, even after usable recordings had been waxed, many A&R officials found themselves negotiating the same competing imperatives, as they contemplated which selections to issue, on which labels, and in which series—and then, after those decisions had been made, how best to advertise, market, and sell those records to very different audiences.

We had records by all foreign groups. German records, Swedish records, Polish records, but we were afraid to advertise Negro records. So I listed them in the catalogue as “race” records and they are still known as that. —Ralph Peer, quoted in Collier’s, April 30, 1938

6 Post-Production D E FI N I N G A N D D E F YI N G G E N RE BO U N DA RI ES

I N D E C E M B E R 1 9 2 7 , C O L U M B I A A & R M A N F R A N K WA L K E R

issued the Allen Brothers’ second release, “Laughin’ and Cryin’ Blues” / “Chattanooga Blues” (Columbia 14266-D), in Columbia’s 14000-D race records series. This was an odd decision: the Allen Brothers were a white tenor-banjo-and-guitar duo from Chattanooga, and their first disc—released a month earlier, also presumably under Walker’s direction—was enjoying strong sales in the label’s 15000-D hillbilly records series.1 Cue a $250,000 lawsuit for defamation against Columbia by the brothers, who, to put it mildly, disagreed with the series assignment for their second record. To the Allens, white Tennesseans in the Jim Crow South, Columbia had compounded 201

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F I G U R E 6 .1. Advertisement for Austin and Lee Allen’s “Laughin’ and Cryin’ Blues,” Chicago Defender, January 7, 1928. Authors’ collections.

Walker’s initial error by promoting the disc in the Chicago Defender with an elaborately illustrated advertisement that featured two identical black caricatures, one of them laughing and the other crying. “What a laugh you will get out of this sobbing, weeping, laughing, howlingly funny record by Austin and Lee Allen,” the ad promised.2 The Allen Brothers, however, saw nothing to laugh about. Walker’s decision to assign the disc to Columbia’s race series made sense stylistically, since the duo’s two songs echoed blues by the likes of Papa Charlie Jackson, Joe Evans and Arthur McClain, and Gus Cannon. “They sang it in a colored style, you see. And I thought that’s where it

First and foremost, A&R managers and their staffs had to transform an enormous number of master recordings into smaller, coherently organized, and commercially attractive catalogs and lists—a considerable logistical and bureaucratic challenge.5

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belonged,” Walker later explained.3 Yet it contravened all manner of Southern racial conventions—especially since, at the time, the Allen Brothers were desperately trying to break into vaudeville. In an ironic twist highlighting the special challenges faced by African American artists, the Allens feared that their hopes would be dashed if theater managers and ticket buyers believed they were black. “You had to be very careful about it,” Walker elaborated, recognizing the power of racial conventions. “For instance, if I recorded . . . a colored group and yet it was of a hillbilly nature, see, I couldn’t put that on my little [advertising] folders that I got out on hillbilly music or vice versa.”4 Walker’s contentious classification of the Allen Brothers’ second release represents just one example of the many important post-production decisions made by recording managers and their staffs. Much of the scant scholarship devoted to interwar A&R work in the American roots music field focuses on talent-scouting and recording activities, notably during the golden age of southern field-recording trips in the 1920s. Yet just as significant as signing up talent, arranging and supervising sessions, or generally contributing to the technical and artistic aspects of the recording process were postproduction decisions about a multitude of issues, including take selection and coupling sides and series assignments, to name only a few. The choices A&R officials made in these matters profoundly shaped American roots music and the recording industry generally for decades to come. Notwithstanding the lack of scholarly attention they have received, these routine post-production tasks often consumed more time and energy for A&R managers and their assistants than did the scouting, selection, and recording of artists and repertoire. Of course, scouting, recording, and post-production activities were inextricably linked. More often than not, decisions about which musicians and material to record affected decisions about which sides to release, how to classify them, and which audiences to target. But this was still an uncertain business in which commercial and creative calculations were notoriously inexact. As a consequence, sometimes by choice, sometimes by accident, A&R officials also helped preserve vestiges of an earlier, less rigidly segmented scene that, paradoxically, their commercial instincts and business practices were steadily undermining. Whenever A&R staffs organized integrated recording sessions, potential alternatives to the growing racial and ethnic segregation of the roots music recording industry came fleetingly into view. Partial, invariably commercially driven challenges to racially circumscribed genre distinctions also appeared whenever recording managers decided to release African American blues sides in hillbilly series or, as with the Allen Brothers’ second disc, issued hillbilly selections in race series.

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Initially, each master underwent a complicated, multistep plating procedure that produced a “stamper” (sometimes also known as a “shell”), from which several test records were then pressed.6 Recording department managers and their assistants auditioned these test records in order to evaluate their technical and aesthetic qualities, and then decide which, if any, version (or “take”) of a particular selection warranted commercial release. Once a take was selected and approved for release, they also had to choose which other number, whether by the same artist or a different one, it should be coupled with to make a double-sided 78-rpm disc. All of this was especially daunting and time-consuming work, especially when it involved master recordings gathered on recording expeditions to the American South. Depending on the duration and success of a trip, there were often hundreds of masters to review and evaluate. As Frank Walker recalled of the Columbia field sessions he headed up during the 1920s, “We felt that we’d had a rather bad time of it if we recorded less than two hundred masters on each trip. Now, not all of those found the market because we weeded them out after we got back rather carefully.”7 Before the Great Depression, when A&R men routinely required their artists to record two or three successive takes of each selection, the task was particularly complex in terms of not only qualitative judgments but also in terms of volume and logistics. According to recording director Art Laibly, Paramount shipped each of the masters of a particular number separately, in different containers, from its New York and Chicago studios to its Grafton, Wisconsin, headquarters in order to avoid potential loss of, or damage to, all of them.8 Later, during the mid- to late 1930s, recording department staff still had to sift through vast numbers of recordings. While Depression-induced cost-cutting measures forced many A&R men to record just one usable take of each selection, this was offset by the fact that their recording expeditions, though fewer in number, yielded a larger number of masters, perhaps as many as 500 to 750 for an extended, two- to three-city trip.9 Because they rarely called for additional takes, A&R managers were able to streamline the recording process so much that they could cut a dozen or more selections by a single artist or band during a two-hour session, or hustle a succession of artists through the studio more quickly than in the previous decade.10 By the mid-1920s, industry giants such as Victor and Columbia simultaneously operated multiple permanent studios scattered throughout the nation, each of which maintained a full recording schedule. The large number of masters produced every week at these firms required the employment of several A&R managers, some of whom were charged with responsibility for one or perhaps more roots music catalogs. As manager of Victor’s foreign-language series from around the late 1910s to the mid-1920s, Nat Shilkret explained his job as “listening to masters and picking the best rendition” of each selection and then “translating the title and write-ups for the catalogues.”11 Shilkret’s duties were complicated by the fact that throughout much of this period, Victor produced recordings for some thirty different nationalities and ethnic groups, each with its own discrete record series.12 Adding to the challenges of his work was the firm’s “Artists and

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Repertoire Committee,” a group of officials from various departments that appears to have exercised final approval on all Victor releases.13 Smaller independent labels such as Paramount and Gennett operated under a more streamlined process, with post-production decisions handled by a single company executive or, sometimes, a two- or three-member ad hoc committee. After Paramount’s Grafton studio opened in 1929, Art Laibly and another company executive, Henry Stephany, conferred on the selection and approval of commercial releases. As Laibly explained, “He and I would sit down on Monday mornings and go over the records that came out of the plant.”14 Occasionally, regional A&R scouts were also involved in decision-making at the end of a process they had often initiated by recommending talent to record companies. Harry Charles claimed that he regularly evaluated test pressings for Paramount during the mid-1920s. His work in this capacity began when, while employed by the firm as a full-time traveling salesman, he offered Paramount officials an unsolicited suggestion about how to improve a sample record of a blues song that he had happened to hear. “I wired ’em that the record was wrong, that it was a hit, but add piano to it, a lotta piano. And they added it, and it was a sensational hit,” Charles bragged, although he failed to identify this recording. After that, Laibly shipped him weekly batches of test pressings to evaluate for their commercial potential. “I’d wire ’em back to change some things,” Charles explained, though his judgment in these matters, as he himself acknowledged, was far from flawless. On one occasion, he felt that the piano playing on a blues recording was “real soft,” and he advised Laibly to rerecord the selection (which he again failed to identify) with more prominent piano accompaniment. But, as Charles conceded, “That ruined it. I wired ’em back again after I heard that [second] sample: ‘Take it off the market and use the first one.’” That second bit of advice, he claimed, also resulted in a best-selling record, with stores “sellin’ ’em just in stacks.”15 Gennett appears to have operated much like Paramount. It did not, however, maintain an informal committee or designate a single official to choose and approve releases, although Fred D. Wiggins appears to have been integral to the process.16 In 1924, Starr Piano Company executives recalled Wiggins, manager of its Chicago branch store, to the firm’s headquarters in Richmond, Indiana, to serve as the sales manager and recording director of its Gennett Records Division. Back in Richmond, Wiggins played a major role in selecting and approving sides for commercial release, though seldom in isolation.17 In fact, Wiggins sometimes consulted his recording artists about possible releases. For example, Gennett officials sent Doc Roberts test pressings of many of the recordings he made for the label between 1927 and 1930. Although he seems to have genuinely valued Roberts’s input, Wiggins and his staff made the final decision about which recordings (and which takes of those recordings) to issue. Indeed, Gennett’s recording contracts, like those of most other companies, stipulated that the firm reserved the right to judge the suitability of recorded selections for release. The May 10, 1928, agreement that Roberts signed with Starr Piano, for instance, called for fourteen new sides but specified that the firm “may require each number to be repeated until

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a record satisfactory to [Starr] and fit for its purpose is produced.” This effectively meant that Wiggins and his A&R team, notably his assistant sales managers Clayton “Jack” Jackson and Lee A. Butt, were to be “be sole judge whether any recording made is acceptable for the catalogue.”18 “Judging by the structure of most of the operation of the record division,” John MacKenzie concludes, “it would be a safe bet to assume that everyone had a hand in deciding which of the recordings would be issued and which would not, secretaries, accountants, and office boys included!”19 While MacKenzie exaggerates, he identifies an important pattern at Gennett that was replicated at most small independent labels, which also relied on a range of employees and sometimes even nonemployees to choose recordings for commercial release. The selection and approval of masters was an inherently muddled process, with aesthetic and commercial evaluations informed by multiple company personnel, only some of whom may have actually been affiliated with the firm’s A&R department. Adding to the complexity at Starr Piano, Wiggins and his staff selected release takes from among the recorded masters made at not only the company’s main studio in Richmond but also its Manhattan studio on East 37th Street, which maintained a much busier recording schedule.20 To be sure, the New York recording staff usually made preliminary judgments about the best takes of each particular selection and then shipped them, along with at least one alternate, via railroad express to Richmond, but Wiggins and his staff were the final arbiters in approving recordings for release.21 Regardless of which A&R officials had the final say at any particular record company, test pressings were rigorously screened to determine which, if any, take of a particular selection was most suitable for the catalog. This process was never an exact science. As a 1919 Talking Machine World article pointed out, given all the mechanical and musical variables, including the spatial arrangement of singers and musicians in the studio and their distance from the recording horn, no two masters were exactly alike.22 As long as they did not contain mechanical or artistic flaws, alternate masters of a vaudeville blues or hillbilly number did not usually differ dramatically from one another. But it was not quite the same on jazz recordings, on which improvisation sometimes yielded significant differences between takes of the same material. The same could also be true of some country blues recordings, whose songs often consisted of fleeting, evershifting stanzas drawn from an extensive oral blues tradition set to equally fluid tunes. As freelance Chicago A&R man Lester Melrose, who oversaw hundreds of sessions for RCA Victor and the American Record Corporation (ARC) during the 1930s, explained, “Some of the artists who could not read or write made it very difficult to record them. Every time they would record a number they could never repeat the same verses. The result would be to record the number about four times and select the one with the best verses. I have rehearsed some of them at least six times on four selections and when we reached the studios, they would sing two or three different verses for each song. Of course,” Melrose added, “this was only a small percentage of the artists.”23 Still, the

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existence of wildly different renditions of a song could muddy the process of identifying the best or most appealing take for commercial release. During the evaluation and selection process, any number of mechanical or musical flaws could result in a take being rejected, as revealed in Gennett’s surviving studio ledgers. Fred D. Wiggins’s handwritten comments indicate that he vetoed masters for a range of mechanical defects, including what he called “blasts,” “pops,” or other sonic distortions; weak volume or poor sound transfer; unusual “speed changes” in the recording; or the presence of “foreign noise.” However, contrary to the claims of several scholars, A&R managers such as Wiggins also rejected tracks for aesthetic reasons.24 Flubbed starts and endings, forgotten lyrics, musical mistakes, and improperly tuned instruments were among the reasons Wiggins gave for discarding certain masters. He rejected R. C. Sutphin’s 1928 instrumental, “Medley of Old Time Songs,” with the curt explanation: “Zither Out of Tune.”25 Four years earlier, a disgusted Wiggins savaged the P. J. McNamara Trio’s recording of “The Cowlin; The Lament–Ancient Irish Classic’s” on technical, artistic, and even grammatical grounds. Wiggins’s comment on the Irish band’s effort read: “REJECT! By God that apostrophe wasn’t my idea; musically and mechanically bad!”26 If no takes of a particular selection were deemed suitable, but the number seemed to have potential, A&R managers might ask the artist to rerecord it. On October 8, 1929, for example, Gennett assistant sales manager Lee A. Butt informed Doc Roberts that the label’s A&R staff “have already released two records” from the fiddler’s recent sessions and “have O.K.ed all of them for release with exception of—‘an Old Fashioned Picture of Mother’—which was not up to the catalogue standard which we try to maintain. This is a very good tune however,” Butt believed, “and we would like for you to remake it at some future time.” Eventually, on April 24, 1930, after another failed attempt, Roberts and his guitarist Asa Martin successfully rerecorded a version that was released on Gennett and several other labels (Gennett 7242, Champion 16049 and 33060, and Supertone 9774, among others).27 Several of Roberts’s less-practiced contemporaries were not so fortunate. In the field of what Gennett catalogs referred to as “Old Time Singin’ ” and “Old Time Playin,’ ” studio ledgers reveal that Green Bailey’s 1929 recording of a murder ballad, “The Hanging of Edward Hawkins,” failed to impress the firm’s A&R officials for a variety of aesthetic failings: “Poor Diction; Tiresome; Too H.B. [i.e., “Hill Billy”].” Lloyd Burdette’s performances of three songs at his 1931 session—“When I’m Gone You’ll Soon Forget,” “Coney Island,” and “The Boarding House Blues”—were rejected as “Too B.W. [i.e., “Back Woods”] for tunes.” Harvey Powell’s sides, “It’s Hard to Love and Can’t Be Loved” and “Three Perished in the Snow,” also recorded in 1931, were similarly rejected as “Too Much Back Woods.” The following year, Bill Shepherd’s “Coon Jine My Lover,” “Going Back On Board Again,” and “I Wonder Where My Father Is Gone,” remained unissued because they were deemed “too hillbilly.”28

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F I G U R E 6 . 2 . Cover of Gennett Records of Old Time Tunes catalog (1928). Authors’ collections.

One of Wiggins’s most common rationales for discarding a take was that it was simply not of sufficient musical quality or interest: “Not up to Cat[alog] Standard,” “Not too good,” “Not so hot,” or “Nothing to recording.” In all these cases, he and his assistants were simultaneously exercising critical judgment about the musical qualities and the potential appeal of the selections. In some cases, takes were provisionally approved, with an accompanying note, “Not too hot—Use in pinch.” Still others went unissued because officials discovered that a particular title already appeared in Gennett’s catalog and there was no obvious demand for a second version.29 Of course, commercial considerations were also decisive in framing aesthetic deliberations. Wiggins responded to “Ezra’s Experience at the Recording Laboratory”—a

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1928 rural skit about making phonograph records waxed by the West Virginia Mountaineers, a group organized by talent scout W. R. Calaway—with the unanswerable condemnation, “Don’t Think Commercial.” Two years later, he turned down “I Told You That I Would Never Forget You,” by that stringband’s singer-guitarist, the prolific Frank Welling, commenting simply “Don’t Think Will Sell.”30 Deciding which two sides were to be matched to form a double-sided release also reflected a combination of commercial and aesthetic considerations. Basic economics dictated that a company could wring greater profits out of its catalog if only one number on a double-sided record was a hit.31 Thus, A&R officials deliberately paired what they perceived to be the most commercially promising sides with what they deemed to be, in artistic and commercial rather than mechanical terms, second-rate material. J. Mayo Williams, Paramount’s race records manager, elaborated: “We would throw anything on the B side; we didn’t want two hits on a record.”32 Industry jargon reflected this approach, at least at Gennett, where chief recording engineer Harold Soulé explained that the in-house term for the “A” side of a record was the “puller,” while, tellingly, the “B” side was referred to as the “dog.”33 At Gennett, Wiggins sometimes handled the “mating” or coupling of sides himself, but during the mid- to late 1920s, Jack Jackson tended to assume that duty.34 “I did most of the mating,” Jackson recalled. “I had a room up at 1226 E. Main. I would take boxes full of the test pressings home with me in the evening. That was my evening work. I had testing turntables up there and I would take these test records and mate them and make up the catalog.”35 A tricky task to begin with, the process was further complicated by the fact that Wiggins and his staff did not always pair the same couplings on concurrent releases on Gennett and its budget-priced subsidiary label, Champion. The brainchild of Fred Gennett, Starr Piano’s company secretary who oversaw the Gennett Record Division, Champion drew upon Gennett masters and were sold, three for a dollar, in the firm’s retail outlets, as well as in department stores and five-and-dimes, especially in the American South. Starr Piano later added another cheap, low-quality line of records called, without apparent irony, Superior. In addition, the company pressed similar records from its Gennett masters for a host of “stencil” labels for independent record companies and department stores, most notably the Conqueror, Silvertone, and Supertone labels sold by Sears, Roebuck & Company.36 Roots idioms, especially those of white vernacular traditions, constituted a major part of the music marketed on Gennett and its subsidiary and stencil labels. By 1928, for example, hillbilly and white sacred music accounted for almost 40 percent of the Gennett label’s catalog. 37 “All the Gennetts were interested in was hillbilly music,” recalled recording engineer Joe Geier, referring—with some exaggeration—to the three brothers who owned the company. “That’s where they made their money because the Gennetts catered to Sears, and Sears catered to the hillbillies.”38 This business model created an interesting challenge for Gennett’s A&R personnel. Whenever selections were co-issued on more than one of the company’s labels,

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Wiggins, Jackson, and their colleagues had to dream up pseudonymous artist credits for sides on the cheaper Champion releases in order to avoid direct competition with the same selections on the premium, seventy-five-cent Gennett label.39 “When you mated a couple of recordings together for Champion records,” Jackson explained, “you needed a name. So you did it right then and there. Telephone books were handy references, and city directories. Most of the ones I mated, I got out of the city directory and the telephone book. Anything you could find that you didn’t already have. What worried you was duplicating, getting too many Howard Williamses, or something like that.’ ”40 At Gennett, creating nom de disques became something of an art form. Jackson and other officials piled pseudonyms upon pseudonyms, occasionally even using them to hide the fictional identities of already pseudonymous artists. This game of concealment produced evermore outlandishly named artists and bands, although many of the aliases were still designed to conjure up potent images of place and belonging, mostly rural and southern. Among the acts on Champion’s hillbilly releases were the Boys from Wildcat Hollow, the Coon Hollow Boys, the Virginia Possum Tamers, and the West Virginia Rail Splitter.41 Champion’s race records received similar treatment. “In a downward shift from the amusing to the ridiculous,” writes historian Rick Kennedy, “a black Indiana jazz trio known on Gennett as Syd Valentine & His Patent Leather Kids became Skillet Dick & His Frying Pans on Champion. In the blues arena, Gennett artists Thomas A. Dorsey and Jaybird Coleman became on the Champion label Smokehouse Charlie and Rabbit Foot Williams respectively, though not respectfully.”42 Gennett’s determination to squeeze every cent of profit from its horde of master recordings, and the fact that its customer base was strongest among rural and smalltown fans of roots music who could seldom afford the finest phonographs, meant that making the best quality, high-fidelity recordings mattered little to its A&R staff.43 Decades later, Harold Soulé, former chief recording engineer at Gennett’s Richmond studio, recalled how Wiggins “used to reject most of my stuff ” after having listened to test pressings on “an old wind-up phonograph” he kept in his office for this purpose. As Soulé explained: It was about as lousy a piece of equipment as you could ask for. I couldn’t understand why the test pressings had to be played back on this old style rig. Being a kid in those days, I wouldn’t see the reason, of course. I can see his viewpoint now. They sold so many records to hillbillies and farmers and people that just had an ordinary old crank machine. Most of the nice machines were high priced. I thought my recordings were beautiful, lots of nice high frequencies, full range recording. Of course when the frequencies were high, the thickness of the walls between the grooves was quite thin. When Wiggins’ old phonograph got hold of those walls, it’d bust right through them and make a horrible sound. And Wiggins would reject it. It used to make me mad as hell.44

As John MacKenzie concludes, “Wiggins’ method was serviceable, if nothing else. If his cheap machine produced distortion . . . then the cheap machines owned buy [sic]

Propriety was another factor that could influence decisions about whether or not to issue a particular selection. When A&R officials worried about issues of decency on the records their labels commercially released, they were usually thinking about inappropriate sexual content or profanity. Sometimes, however, their concerns focused on broader issues of taste and decorum. On very rare occasions, A&R managers regretted their decisions to issue particular recordings so much that they scrambled to remove the offending, and potentially offensive, discs from circulation. One such instance occurred in November 1925, apparently at the instigation of Eddie King, manager of Victor’s New York recording studios. That month, Victor halted production and distribution of Vernon Dalhart’s “Wreck of the Shenandoah” (Victor 19779) after only a few weeks on the market, even though initial sales were strong. In withdrawing the record, which commemorated an airship disaster in southeastern Ohio that had killed the captain and thirteen crew members just two months previously, Victor officials conceded they were guilty of a lack of taste and judgment in releasing the disc so soon after the tragedy. A typically skillful bit of publicity spin managed to turn what might have been a highly embarrassing situation into a public relations triumph. Talking Machine World reported that Victor “has received much favorable comment on its recent action,” which “aroused much interest because of its unusual character and in the trade particularly because of the frankness of the letter announcing the withdrawal of the record.” In that letter to distributors and dealers, an unidentified Victor official stressed that the company’s extraordinary action was taken “out of deference to the family of Commander Lansdowne,” and promised that the selection “listed on the other side will be re-issued, doubled with some other appropriate number.” The letter continued: We feel certain that you will agree with us that it would be unseemly to give the appearance of wishing to capitalize on a national disaster. We think it is our duty, and we feel sure you will concur in the thought, not to in any way bring distress upon the survivors or those who have been bereaved by such occurrences as the loss of the Shenandoah. Whenever an error in judgment has been made in regard to so delicate a matter as this, we are quite sure that the common decencies demand an acknowledgement of the error, and also that an effort be made to counteract whatever harm may have ensued. We sincerely trust that we will have your co-operation in spreading this idea in your communities.46

True to their word, Victor officials soon reissued the selection on the flipside of the recalled record—“Death of Floyd Collins”—on a different disc, Victor 19821, on which

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the typical buyer of the Gennett family of labels would produce the same effect.” Thus, Wiggins selected recordings and approved commercial releases based, in part, on how they would sound to his principal customers.45

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F I G U R E 6 . 3 . Sheet music cover of “The Wreck of the Shenandoah” (1925), with words and music by Maggie Andrews, one of Carson Robison’s many songwriting pseudonyms. Authors’ collections.

it was coupled with Dalhart’s rendition of “Dream of a Miner’s Child,” another maudlin, though quite generic, topical ballad written by the Reverend Andrew Jenkins and copyrighted by Polk C. Brockman.47 There appears to have been some intricate, possibly inscrutable, moral and commercial calculus in play here: morbid curiosity and the exploitation of individual tragedy seemed to be perfectly acceptable, as in the case of “Death of Floyd Collins,” but instant responses to multiple deaths seemed more problematic—or at least it was more troubling for Victor executives on this particular occasion.

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None of the other seven companies for which Dalhart also recorded “Wreck of the Shenandoah” felt the same prick of conscience: certainly not Gennett, where, some three years after the dirigible crashed, Fred D. Wiggins approved a second, electrically recorded version by Dalhart for release on Champion (15048) and two of the stencil labels produced for Sears, Roebuck & Company (Silvertone 8142 and Supertone 9239). In another example of his catalog management, Wiggins intended this new version to replace Dalhart’s older, acoustical recording, waxed in October 1925, which Wiggins had originally issued closer to the time of the disaster (Gennett 3158, Champion 15048, Silvertone 3812, and Challenge 506).48 Wiggins’s single-minded focus on sales meant that he was rarely squeamish about issuing gruesome ballads chronicling catastrophes and murders. Sometimes, however, he was sensitive to material that might offend potential consumers in other ways. In 1928, for example, he refused to issue Oscar L. Coffey’s “The Bold Knights of Labor,” ostensibly an anthem celebrating that virulently xenophobic, but by then nearly defunct, labor organization, because he perceived it as “Anti Chinese.” Indeed, as Wiggins noted in his ledger, the “correct title” of the song was “The Heathen Chinese.”49 A far more common rationale for shelving a recording was because Wiggins deemed it too lewd or crude. In the ledger entry for Ivy Smith’s 1930 rendition of “She Knows How to Sell That Stuff,” Wiggins observed: “Too Much Dirt; Singing Terrible; Should Not Use; Reject.”50 “The Levee Blues,” cut that same year by Big Bill Broonzy masquerading as Big Bill Johnson, was shelved on “Account [of] Swearing.” Wiggins canned Willie “The Scarecrow” Owens’s “The World’s Gone Crazy ’Bout My Black Bottom”—waxed on August 30, 1930, and ostensibly a paean to the popular Jazz Age dance mentioned in its title—for “Too Much Dirt.” Three months earlier, Owens had insisted on recording “I’m Going to Show You My Black Bottom” and “Everybody Wants to See My Black Bottom,” but Wiggins also turned down both of these. Owens did manage to cut four sides at his August 1930 session that met with approval and saw commercial release, among them “That Black Bottom Dance” (Champion 16194), which had been retitled by Wiggins or one of his assistants to avoid giving offense to the general public. Owen’s original title for the song had been “Come On and Show Me Your Black Bottom.”51 Wiggins was typical of A&R managers who sometimes rejected or withdrew selections whose lyrics they deemed to be too sexually suggestive or which contained curse words. In 1936, three days after the release of Lil Johnson’s titillating “Get ’Em from the Peanut Man (Hot Nuts),” an ARC official, possibly Art Satherley, had second thoughts and decided to withdraw the recording as issued on the Banner, Melotone, Oriole, Perfect, and Romeo cluster of labels (all numbered 6-05-58), ostensibly on the grounds that it was too overtly sexual. Oddly, Satherley allowed the Vocalion release of this same selection (Vocalion 03199) to remain on store shelves and within a few months released a sequel, “Get ’Em from the Peanut Man (The New Hot Nuts)” (Vocalion 03241), recorded at the same March 4, 1936, session as the original.52

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For some artists, like Mississippi bluesman Bo Carter, this kind of bawdy material became a trademark. Carter recorded dozens of lascivious blues between 1928 and 1940, under the supervision of, among others, Jack Kapp, Polk C. Brockman, and Eli Oberstein. A master of sexual metaphor, Carter garnished many of his double-entendre numbers with culinary-inspired humor. “She’s Your Cook But She Burns My Bread Sometimes” (OKeh 8870), “Banana in Your Fruit Basket” (Columbia 14661-D), “Please Warm My Weiner” (Bluebird B-6058), and “Your Biscuits Are Big Enough for Me” (Bluebird B-8159) were just a few of his raunchiest titles. Although only ten of Carter’s 118 recorded sides went unissued, Paul Oliver notes that many of those that did reach the market “could feasibly have been withheld on grounds of obscenity.”53 Similarly, between 1935 and 1940, Art Satherley oversaw scads of “party blues” recorded by Carter’s contemporary, Blind Boy Fuller, for ARC and then Columbia. According to Samuel Charters, Fuller “seemed to have a taste for vulgarity that gave his recordings a kind of leering fascination,” and “his imagery was so thinly disguised that the titles themselves were very nearly pornographic.”54 Nonetheless, all 130 of Fuller’s recorded titles were released, including “Sweet Honey Hole” (Vocalion 03254 and Conqueror 8847, among others), “She’s a Truckin’ Little Baby” (Vocalion 04603 and Conqueror 9202), and “I Want Some of Your Pie” (Vocalion 05030 and Conqueror 9310), all of which Charters may have had in mind in drawing his conclusions.55 As the examples of Carter and Fuller suggest, when A&R officials were pondering which sides to issue, money and sales invariably trumped propriety. The uneven responses to sexually risqué material within the interwar roots recording industry may explain why scholars have disagreed about the extent to which record companies either encouraged or censored this kind of raunchy repertoire. In his analysis of such material in Screening the Blues: Aspects of the Blues Tradition (1968), Paul Oliver finds no “evidence of a consistent standard having been applied as grounds for censorship.”56 He does believe that “fear of federal action, prompted by the dispatch of obscene matter in the US mail” may have encouraged A&R men to be “doubly cautious” when it came to matters of sexual propriety. Ultimately, Oliver concludes, record company officials seem to have responded to market forces by operating under “a double standard in which they accepted, and may have invited, sexually suggestive material but suppressed direct speech which might be interpreted as obscene. Their success in applying this compromising standard was variable, with the total expurgation of songs at one extreme and the admission of moderately bawdy items at the other.”57 Such pragmatic inconsistency in their approach to censorship actually served A&R men quite well; by self-consciously turning a deaf ear, they were able to publish some of the more sexually suggestive songs that eventually became hits. But they may also have approved other risqué material simply because they did not understand it. H. C. Speir, for example, later acknowledged that there was a secret “code” in the blues that he failed to appreciate at the time, let alone crack.58

Similarly, in 1929, Dr. Herbert A. Turner, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Chicago branch, encouraged black consumers to boycott the manufacturers of offensive phonograph records. As an Associated Negro Press correspondent reported, Turner “had observed for several years a developing tendency on the part of some companies that make records which are calculated to appeal to Negro purchasers to use an appeal which has vulgar names, language and sentiment as a bait, and, in some cases, goes so far as to employ devices which ought to be deliberately offensive to self-respecting Negroes.”61 Turner was equally outraged by many of the newspaper ads for race records, citing the one for “Mysterious Coon” (Columbia 14378-D), by Alec Johnson & His Band, as a particularly offensive example. Headlined “ ‘Mysterious Coon,’ What’s His Racket?,” the ad featured a ridiculously flamboyant figure sporting a top hat, cane, and cigar. “Just came to town—dressed like a million bucks,” read the copy. “Spends money like water—has all the brownskin babies makin’ goo-goo eyes. Nobody knows where this solemn lookin’ coon comes from or what he does. But let Alec Johnson and his band spread the story in their mean, insinuatin’ way.” Turner charged, Such titles are not only belittling to the Negro’s sense of pride, but they give other persons who read colored newspapers and such obnoxious advertisements a poor opinion of the

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White people . . . feel and believe that we are a “child race” and that they can get us to buy records portraying fanaticism, fear, superstition and ignorance. When they tire of that they use licentious and degrading selections hoping to appeal to the brute sides of our nature. The Paramount records are doing us as much harm as Thomas Dixon’s book, “The Klansman,” and are spreading a deadly propaganda against us through the world of music. Sooner or later we will decry the evil genius of such concerns and view them as they are— cold blooded exploiters who play on our delicate emotions and tender sensibilities.60

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Prevailing racist stereotypes of hypersexual African Americans led some white A&R men to assume that most blues songs were, in essence, about sex—which, of course, many of them were. As an unidentified Brunswick official, summarizing a test recording of a 1928 vaudeville blues number, noted, “Typical Negro blues song sung with all the sex appeal possible of imagination.”59 In the midst of such widespread stereotypes about black sexuality, many African American newspaper editors, ministers, and civil rights leaders sharply criticized specific blues records and the companies that produced them for encouraging offensive and demeaning characterizations of “the race.” In 1925, Joseph D. Bibb, editor of the Chicago Whip, denounced Paramount, which, he charged, “each week insult[s] the members of the black race with their dirty and groveling records.” As proof, Bibb singled out one of the firm’s latest releases, Ida Cox’s “Graveyard Bound Blues” (Paramount 12251), “a record that is calculated to appeal to ignorant, superstitious and southern traditions.” He continued:

FI G U R E 6 .4 . Advertisement for Alec Johnson & His Band’s “Mysterious Coon,” Chicago Defender, December 29, 1928. Authors’ collections.

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A&R officials at leading companies like Columbia took notice of bad publicity that could turn a potential hit into a flop. Their counterparts at smaller labels, especially ones whose race records divisions constituted a major portion of their business, had to tread even more carefully. Jack Kapp, though, saw an opportunity in the increasing outcry from the African American intelligentsia and community activists against demeaning representations of “the race.” In 1926, as manager of Vocalions’s new race records department, Kapp launched an advertising campaign that promised “Better and Cleaner Race Records.” A press release explained that the slogan was part of a novel approach whose “main purpose is to give to the colored people records made by artists of their own race which are absolutely above reproach insofar as the theme and manner of presentation are concerned. The firm is endeavoring to place its race records on a high plane and therefore has adopted the slogan given above.”63 As the Chicago Defender enthused, “After making a very close study of the Race record field, the officials of the company saw a great need for better and cleaner records. They felt that our people would welcome a brand of records that would give them better music, whether it be instrumental, vocal or spiritual, recorded in a clean way by the best Race artists procurable.”64 Over the next two years, Vocalion’s slogan figured prominently in the label’s weekly race record ads in the Chicago Defender, until it was abandoned, for unknown reasons, in May 1928.65 More generally, concerns about too-“blue” blues continued to influence A&R operations at record companies throughout the entire interwar period. When Milt Gabler joined Decca Records in 1941, for instance, one of his first responsibilities in the race records division, then under the management of J. Mayo Williams, was to screen the lyrics of the label’s race records to ensure “they weren’t too blue for air play” on the handful of southern stations then broadcasting such fare aimed at African American listeners.66 And yet, whatever their anxieties about running afoul of obscenity laws or offending particular audiences, record companies issued dozens of recordings in several genres containing double-entendre and sexually suggestive lyrics, simply because they often sold very well. In the hillbilly field, for example, Fiddlin’ John Carson & His Virginia Reelers’ 1924 release “Sugar in the Gourd” (OKeh 7003) featured explicit couplets describing how the singer met a woman “on the road and I laid her on a board,” before tuning up his fiddle to “give her sugar in the gourd.”67 Indeed, some of Carson’s lyrics were so “truly vulgar” that, when Irene Spain was transcribing the lyrics from discs for copyright purposes, she claimed she had to close the windows and doors because she, along with her father, the Reverend Andrew Jenkins, and her husband, who was also

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taste of the race, its habits and the quality of its thought. We cannot afford to be blackguarded before the world for the sake of a few white men who choose to make money at the expense of our racial pride and integrity. The most effective way for Negroes to combat this evil practice is to cease to purchase such records.62

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a minister, “were quite ashamed to be playing such records in our house.”68 Among the many other well-known hillbilly performers who recorded decidedly spicy songs between the world wars were Jimmie Rodgers (“Blue Yodel No. 8 [Mule Skinner Blues],” Victor 23503), Jimmie Davis (“Sewing Machine Blues,” Victor 23703; “Tom Cat and Pussy Blues” / “Organ-Grinder Blues,” Victor 23763), and Roy Acuff (who, with his Crazy Tennesseans, recorded the ribald common-stock song “Bang Bang Lulu” as “When Lulu’s Gone,” in 1936, billed as the Bang Boys [Vocalion / OKeh 03372 and Conqueror 9123]).69 As country music historian Rebecca Thomas puts it, “A healthy vein of lust ran uninhibited in country music well into the 1930s, as white men produced some of the era’s most explicit music.”70

C ATA L O G S I N B L A C K A N D W H I T E

Of all the post-production decisions made by A&R officials, perhaps the most important was helping establish and then police the boundaries among diverse musical genres by selecting takes and assigning them to specific catalogs and series. In making those calculations, they once more found themselves juggling competing impulses. Personal preferences and familiarity with particular artists and idioms sometimes conflicted with a desire to record songs in as many genres and styles as possible in order to appeal to the maximum number of potential record buyers. Both of those agendas collided with the growing industry consensus that economic efficiency, underscored by racial, ethnic, class, and demographic realities, required the compartmentalization of styles and artists into increasingly distinct recording categories and related marketing strategies. In American roots music, this industry wisdom was reflected most obviously in the broad distinction between “race” and “hillbilly” music, descriptive terms that were first applied in 1922 and 1925, respectively.71 When firms first recorded and marketed southern roots music during the 1920s, they began to commercialize grassroots sounds that had long been heard at country dances, fiddlers’ contests, medicine shows, religious revivals, and other community events. Developing out of centuries of exchange, theft, and parody back and forth across the color line, southern roots music had become fundamentally multiracial. Nonetheless, in order to streamline their marketing efforts, record companies increasingly, if never absolutely, separated that protean music into discrete “race” and “hillbilly” categories.72 But as some A&R men sought to be more creative and flexible, they found themselves boxed in by the very categories they had helped create. According to sociologist William G. Roy, “rarely has the racial coding” within popular music “been so overt” as it was in the development of “race” and “hillbilly” categories.73 Roy concludes that the most important element in the emergence of these marketing categories was the “straight-forward business logic” of the recording industry, which in turn reflected underlying patterns in American society. After all, phonograph

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records were generally sold in segregated retail outlets, whether music shops, department stores, or, more commonly in the 1920s, furniture stores, which chiefly stocked records to stimulate phonograph sales. With comparatively few such businesses catering to a racially mixed clientele, especially in the roots music heartland of the American South, it made sense for record company officials to organize their catalogs in ways that mirrored prevailing social and commercial structures. It certainly made life easier for record retailers and the wholesale distributors who supplied them, all of whom could stock and organize the kinds of music that seemed most appealing to their customers, notwithstanding examples of purchases made across genre and racial divides.74 Record company executives and recording managers assumed, as folklorist Bill Ivey puts it, that “consumers select music based upon race” and that “musical style and race are inextricably linked.”75 Originally conceived as convenient marketing categories, “race” and “hillbilly” developed into actual musical genres; these descriptors would remain the industry’s preferred terms for the nominally “black” and “white” strains of roots music until “rhythm & blues” and “country & western” began to supplant them in the late 1940s.76 The contemporary eugenics movement and racism reinforced these distinctions. The federal anti-immigration legislation of the 1920s, a slew of state anti-miscegenation rulings, and the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan all reflected a desire on the part of white, often Protestant and Anglo-Saxon, Americans to quarantine themselves and the American culture to which they laid claim from the supposedly corrupting influences of racial and ethnic minorities. It was against this social, cultural, and ideological backdrop that record companies published and distributed separate record catalogs and monthly supplements that imbued race and hillbilly records with meanings that were grounded in the alleged realities of race and immutable racial difference.77 In a 1938 Collier’s magazine article, Ralph Peer, the self-proclaimed architect of these industry divisions, explained that the nascent race and hillbilly recording business had simply applied many of the same strategies that had been employed to sell foreign-language records to immigrants since the turn of the century.78 Perhaps most important was the policy of separating a company’s entire catalog of records into discrete numerical series intended to appeal to specific ethnic or language groups. Record companies also created separate sales booklets, supplements, advertisements, and a host of other marketing literature to promote these series.79 Over time, these commercially created distinctions between what Peer later crudely referred to as “hillbilly and nigger” recording categories, assumed the appearance of natural phenomena based on indelible social, especially racial, realities.80 Before these categories became rigidly defined, however, there was considerable flexibility, particularly in the early 1920s. The sensational popularity of Mamie Smith’s 1920 hit, “Crazy Blues,” forever altered the landscape of the recording industry by revealing, above all else, the phenomenal market for vaudeville blues records by African American artists. As the Chicago Defender observed in 1923, “Colored singing and

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playing artists are riding to fame and fortune with the current popular demand for ‘blues’ disc recordings and because of the recognized fact that only a Negro can do justice to the native indigo ditties[,] such artists are in great demand. . . . As a result, practically every record making firm from the Victor [Company] down has augmented its catalog with special ‘blues’ recordings by Colored artists.”81 What was especially striking, though, was that these records proved so popular among white record buyers. A 1921 ad for OKeh, for example, announced new releases by the Norfolk Jazz Quartette, among them “Preacher Man Blues” (OKeh 4366), “Monday Morning Blues” (OKeh 4345), and “Jelly Roll Blues” (OKeh 4318), proudly noting the last selection’s appeal to a biracial audience. According to the ad copy, “Jelly Roll Blues” had already accumulated sales “four times greater than any popular hit” in OKeh’s latest listings. “You may be interested to know,” the ad explained, “that it isn’t the colored race which is responsible for this jump in record sales. The big demand comes from the white people.”82 The following year, Variety acknowledged the same regionally and racially diverse audience for vaudeville blues when reviewing “Birmingham Blues” / “Wicked Blues” (Columbia A3558) by Edith Wilson & the Original Jazz Hounds. The trade journal, using unapologetically racist language, predicted that Wilson’s latest record would appeal to “that part of her race around 135th street and Lenox avenue, New York, and below the Mason-Dixon line who purchase these disks, as well as the fair Caucasian percentage that dote on barbaric wails of the indigo order.”83 It was, perhaps, testament to the power of racial conventions in the United States that, despite ample evidence of biracial tastes and consumerism, A&R men still tended to see this kind of crossover as anomalous, random, possibly even unseemly, and most definitely unamenable to systematic commercial exploitation. Consequently, they were architects of marketing strategies that generated increasingly discrete record series for different audiences, even as recordings and audiences often continued to resist such easy classifications. The first vaudeville blues and gospel records by Mamie Smith and her African American label mates appeared in OKeh’s 4000 popular records series, usually with no indication of the performers’ race.84 In 1921, however, drawing inspiration from OKeh’s assorted foreign-language records catalogs, Ralph Peer inaugurated the label’s 8000 race records series (initially referred to as the “Colored Catalog”). Similar race series quickly appeared at Paramount (12000 series) in 1922 and at Columbia (originally, the 13000-D series, but soon replaced by the 14000-D series) the following year, with Vocalion (1000 series) and Brunswick (7000 series) launching separate race records series in 1926 and 1927, respectively. Victor belatedly established its first such series in 1929, but, in an unusual industry practice, separated hot jazz records (which were assigned to its V-38000 series) from blues and gospel releases (which appeared in its V-38500 series). When the label replaced these series the next year, it maintained this same genre division. Victor’s new 23000 series, begun in September 1930, was reserved exclusively for jazz while its 23250 series, launched the following month, was dedicated

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to blues and gospel music.85 Eventually, all these race series came to encompass a wide range of musical idioms, including vaudeville and country blues, jazz, gospel numbers, and sermons, all of which catered chiefly to the perceived musical tastes of African American consumers—although one of the major stories of this period was the extent to which white audiences continued to purchase this music as well. In a similar development, while the earliest records of white southern fiddlers, banjo-and-guitar duets, and stringbands were classified in company catalogs as popular or “novelty” selections, firms soon began to develop special numerical series dedicated to white southern roots music. In late 1924, Columbia’s Frank Walker established the industry’s first exclusive “hillbilly” line, the label’s 15000-D series. Originally called “Old Familiar Tunes,” it served as the counterpart to the firm’s 14000-D race records series. Like Peer’s race series at OKeh, Walker’s innovation was soon emulated by other labels: OKeh (45000 “Old Time Tunes” series) in 1925; Brunswick (100 “Songs from Dixie” series) and its subsidiary Vocalion (5000 “Old Southern Tunes” series), both in 1927; Paramount (3000 “Olde Time Tunes” series), also in 1927; and, a little later, Victor (V-40000 “Native American Melodies” series) in 1929 (replaced in 1931, though, by the 23500 “Old Familiar Tunes & Novelties” series). Each of these series was primarily directed toward rural and small-town white consumers, particularly in the American South, although southern migrants scattered throughout the nation quickly formed another important and sometimes more affluent target.86 Prior to the mid-1930s, virtually all leading roots music labels released race and hillbilly records in specially designated numerical series. The notable exception was Gennett, which between 1926 and 1930 interspersed blues and hillbilly records with those of popular, jazz, Hawaiian, and other genres on its flagship “Gennett Electrobeam” 6000 series.87 During the Great Depression, as record sales fell sharply, these racially defined series were all discontinued. The last to fold was OKeh’s 8000 series, which had survived three changes in ownership since its inception in 1921, but finally fell under the axe of the American Record Corporation in 1935, after 967 releases.88 By then, the economic crisis had forced companies to adopt a number of different approaches to classifying roots music records. Among the most interesting experiments took place at RCA Victor’s budget-priced Bluebird label, launched in 1932 under the management of Eli Oberstein. Bluebird initially bucked industry trends by courting a biracial market for its race and hillbilly selections. Its B-5000 series interspersed blues, gospel, and hillbilly numbers with popular and jazz releases. From late 1938, though, popular records were shifted to a different series, and the B-5000 list was reserved for only race and hillbilly releases until its demise in 1942.89 Bluebird was clearly something of an anomaly in its willingness to include all kinds of roots music in a single series, regardless of racial provenance. As the industry struggled to regain its pre-Depression footing, most of the newly created discount labels launched during the 1930s reverted to racially segmented catalogs. At Decca, Jack Kapp simply replicated the classification system he had previously used at Brunswick and

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FI G U R E 6 . 5 . Cover of Decca Hill Billy Records catalog (1938). Authors’ collections.

Vocalion by founding the 5000 hillbilly series and its 7000 race counterpart. Unusually, the 5000 series was promoted under the name “Hill Billy,” a somewhat controversial label most companies had previously avoided in their advertising and marketing literature.90 Kapp and his younger brother Dave, Decca’s recording manager for these two lists, also inaugurated several other roots records series, including a 10000 Mexican series and a 17000 Cajun series. In addition, the Kapps created separate lines for race records (50000 series) and hillbilly discs (45000 series) on Decca’s short-lived subsidiary, the revitalized Champion label, which was active between August 1935 and April 1936.91 By World War II, Peer, Walker, the Kapps, and their A&R contemporaries had helped standardize musical and marketing distinctions that reflected their economic, managerial, and aesthetic calculations. Although those distinctions were neither natu-

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FI G U R E 6 .6 . Cover of Decca Race Records catalog (1940). Authors’ collections.

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ral, in the sense that they ignored the historic hybridity of much of America’s vernacular music traditions, nor fixed, nor even unchallenged, they still had enormous implications for the development of commercially recorded roots music between the world wars.

D E F Y I N G G E N R E A N D M A R K E T I N G B O U N DA R I E S

Although the recording industry’s growing tendency to organize itself around racial difference disrupted historic patterns of exchange, borrowing, and theft across racial and ethnic lines, the hybrid nature of American musical culture survived. Indeed, in some ways it was intensified—and certainly complicated—by the dramatic growth of mass media and mass culture in the early twentieth century. Thanks to the spread

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of phonographs, radios, jukeboxes, and, after 1926, talking—and, more importantly, singing—motion pictures, urban and rural dwellers of all races, ethnicities, classes, and genders took great pleasure in their expanded access to an ever-widening range of musical genres. Moreover, there was already a vast reserve of minstrel stage songs, church hymns, vaudeville numbers, and Tin Pan Alley pop standards, as well as “traditional” songs and tunes of convoluted racial and regional origin, which had provided a common repertoire and shared source of inspiration for both black and white roots musicians since the dawn of the American recording industry in the 1890s.92 Before the blues craze of the 1920s, black and white artists frequently performed the same common-stock pieces that drew from traditional fiddle tunes (such as “Turkey in the Straw” and “Sourwood Mountain”), ballads (“Casey Jones” and “John Henry”), blues ballads (“Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down” and “Salty Dog”), and turn-of-thecentury popular songs (“Bully of the Town” and “At the Darktown Strutters’ Ball”).93 Gradually, however, roots music singers and musicians had little choice but to comply with the classifications created by A&R officials if they wanted a chance at commercial success, much less a chance even to make recordings. “Young musicians learned to sound like records and were routed into the categories by recording companies,” William G. Roy explains. “People who did not fit neatly into an idiom were less likely to be signed than those who unambiguously fit a category.”94 For most A&R men, Karl Hagstrom Miller writes, by the end of the 1920s “the label ‘race record’ did not identify a musical sound or style; rather, it defined the race of a musician.”95 Consequently, by the 1930s, aspiring black roots recording artists thought increasingly, if never exclusively, in terms of jazz, blues, and gospel music, while their white counterparts thought mostly in terms of hillbilly, perhaps white gospel, or maybe pop music: those were the categories within which A&R officials, the key decision makers on what music would be recorded and released by certain artists, generally thought and operated. Nevertheless, although record companies’ race and hillbilly catalogs were largely divided on the basis of the artists’ race, the artists themselves sometimes nodded obliquely toward the interracial exchanges that actually underpinned much of the roots music they recorded. Under the heading “Negro Spirituals,” Victor’s 1924 Olde Time Fiddlin’ Tunes brochure offered a pair of recordings, “Pharaoh’s Army Got Drownded” / “Brother Noah Built an Ark” (Victor 19451), by Ex-Governor Alf Taylor & His Old Limber Quartet. According to the brochure, this ensemble performed “these wonderful old Negro Spirituals . . . exactly as they took [them] from the lips of the old Negro master of the hounds.” That the accompanying portrait of the former Tennessee governor and his tuxedoed quartet unabashedly revealed that these were white interpretations of black sacred songs indicates Victor’s confidence that consumers would find this record appealing.96 As this Victor brochure suggests, the racial economy of early recorded hillbilly music was complicated for artists, audiences, and A&R officials alike. Over the years, Jimmie Rodgers, Dock Boggs, Gene Autry, Jimmie Davis, Bob Wills, and dozens of other

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southern white singers and musicians who first came to prominence between the wars declared their appreciation for blues, jazz, and other African American musical forms, and sought, in varying degrees, to incorporate those influences into their own recorded work.97 Sometimes this indebtedness was explicit, as when the Chattanooga hillbilly duo, the Allen Brothers, reworked country blues pioneer Papa Charlie Jackson’s “Salty Dog Blues” (Paramount 12236) for Columbia (Columbia 15175-D), or when the white Atlanta singer-guitarist Riley Puckett transformed the folk-blues staple “John Henry” into the old-time instrumental “The Darkey’s Wail” (Columbia 15163-D). With a typical mix of sentimentality, casual racism, and genuine admiration, Puckett introduced the recording by explaining, “I’m gonna play for you this time a little piece which an old southern darky I heard play, comin’ down Decatur Street the other day, ’cause his good gal done throwed ’im down.”98 On occasion, as with Frank Walker and the Allen Brothers, A&R managers felt it was in the best interest of their companies to trespass across the very racial boundaries they had helped create. OKeh’s “Old Time Tunes” series, established by Ralph Peer, reached far beyond the conventionally understood definition of white hillbilly music to include seventy-three “blues” titles between 1925 and 1931.99 Brunswick’s “Songs from Dixie” series also courted predominantly white record buyers; yet it still accommodated among its nearly five hundred record releases an eclectic mix of music by Cajun acts, African American and French-Canadian harmonica players, a Connecticut radio stringband, a Nova Scotian violinist, a blackface minstrel team, two Minnesota polka bands, and even a Creole Haitian singer.100 “Songs from Dixie” also featured five double-sided records by white Cajun fiddler Dennis McGee and black Creole singeraccordionist Amédé Ardoin, whose interracial musical collaborations challenged both law and custom in their native Louisiana. In his quest for a hit record, however, Polk C. Brockman was willing to overlook such realities when he supervised the duo’s first recordings for Columbia’s 40500-F “Acadian-French” series at a 1929 New Orleans field session. It was a classic example of how A&R men complied with segregation in some instances, but conveniently defied it when it served their commercial needs.101 Prior to 1933, A&R managers and their staffs masterminded the recording and release of at least forty-three sides in their hillbilly series by fourteen exclusively African American acts, including DeFord Bailey, Lonnie Johnson, and the Mississippi Sheiks. During the same period, A&R men also supervised at least twenty-two integrated recording sessions at which white and black musicians collaborated to produce sixtynine masters, issued on more than 130 sides, for the hillbilly records market or, in the case of six of these masters, for Cajun series.102 In addition, company ledgers and files clearly expose the subjectivity and arbitrariness surrounding some of the A&R decisions regarding series assignments. For instance, as in the case of Mississippi John Hurt’s first recordings, A&R officials occasionally switched forthcoming releases from “race” to “hillbilly” series or vice versa. To cite another example, when white singer-guitarist “Big Road” Webster Taylor (The Mississippi Mule Skinner) waxed “World in a Jug” and

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“Sunny Southern Blues” (Vocalion 1271) at Brunswick’s Chicago studios in 1929, Jack Kapp initially assigned this coupling to subsidiary Vocalion’s 5000 hillbilly series, but at some point, he reconsidered and released it instead in that label’s 1000 race series.103 Some of this racial cross-listing may have been due to a host of misperceptions or mistakes, including unfamiliarity with certain forms of southern roots music and even simple clerical errors on the part of record company officials who accidentally assigned recordings to the “wrong” series. In most cases, however, this kind of cross-listing was the result of careful consideration by A&R managers who fully appreciated that, in issuing releases by black artists in hillbilly series and releases by hillbilly artists in race series, they were testing industry norms. Next to the ledger entry for white banjoist G. C. Osborne’s 1928 recording “Token In Blues,” Gennett’s Fred D. Wiggins or one of his assistants scratched out the assignment “Old Time Playin’ ” and added a note recommending “Use as Race inst[ead].”104 A slightly more cryptic message was scribbled next to “Separation Blues,” waxed by white West Virginia singer-guitarist Jess Johnston in 1931: “Can Use Race Another Name.” Presumably, the implication was that company officials should either release the side for the race records market under a pseudonym, or issue it simultaneously for both the hillbilly and race records markets using a pseudonym for the latter. In the end, though, Johnston’s recording went unissued.105 A final illustration involves DeFord Bailey’s instrumental blues recording “John Henry.” The African American harmonica wizard, who regularly performed alongside white hillbilly stars on WSM’s Grand Ole Opry, recorded the number in October 1928 for Victor at a Nashville field session organized by Ralph Peer. Peer, however, did not release the side until June 1932, when it appeared in Victor’s race records series (Victor 23336), coupled with another harmonica instrumental, “Like I Want to Be,” by African American Noah Lewis, a member of the Memphis Jug Band. In September 1933, Peer decided to reissue Bailey’s side in the label’s hillbilly records series (Victor 23831), this time paired with yet another harmonica solo, “Chester Blues,” by an obscure white South Carolinian named B. H. “Bert” Bilbro.106 Peer’s decision to pitch Bailey’s “John Henry” to both black and white audiences made commercial sense, especially during the depths of the Depression when RCA Victor temporarily suspended its southern recording expeditions and thus reduced the amount of new material available for release in both its race and hillbilly lists. Issuing Bailey’s recording in two separate series effectively allowed the company to reach two markets for the cost of producing a single selection.107 That it took Peer so long to release Bailey’s “John Henry” at all also reminds us that the standards applied by A&R officials when evaluating takes shifted with the economic climate. Recordings that A&R managers and their staff members rejected during flush times could seem perfectly acceptable in leaner times, even in the form of multiple releases in multiple series aimed at multiple audiences.108 In organizing occasional racially integrated sessions, or by releasing sides in racially “inappropriate” series, A&R managers were seldom interested in questioning, let alone

Just as race and hillbilly records were occasionally cross-listed in different series, foreign-language releases were also sometimes cross-listed in hillbilly records series and vice versa, with appropriately translated artist credits and titles.110 In fact, this particular kind of inter-ethnic, rather than interracial, catalog mixing may have been even more common. Jimmy O’Keefe was probably responsible for issuing more than a dozen instrumentals from Brunswick’s and Vocalion’s hillbilly catalogs on subsidiary labels aimed at the French-Canadian market.111At RCA Victor, Bluebird’s wily recording manager Eli Oberstein included several hillbilly recordings in the label’s Mexican catalog, but he topped this feat by releasing “Driftwood” and “Mountain Goat,” a pair of 1936 instrumentals recorded by Jack Pierce & the Oklahoma Cowboys, in Bluebird’s Mexican series as “Lena Acarreada por al Agua” / “Cabra” (Bluebird B-3186) by the Violinistas, as well as in Victor’s Ukrainian series as “Dobra Horilka (Fine Brandy)” / “Nad Richkoju (At the River)” (Victor V-21139), credited to the Wijskowa Orkestra.112 Oberstein’s counterpart at Decca, Dave Kapp, did much the same with sides from his firm’s 5000 “Hill Billy” series. As discographer Cary Ginell notes, “Tex Ritter and Bradley Kincaid records were co-issued in the Irish 12000 series and Milton Brown and Cliff Bruner instrumentals found their way onto Mexican 10000 issues, with the artists cunningly disguised as ‘Meliton Y Sus Rancheros’ and ‘Bruno Y Sus Rancheros’ respectively.”113 Conversely, foreign-language records were sometimes released in hillbilly series. At Victor, it was probably Ralph Peer who decided to reissue a 1928 Spanish series coupling by Columbian string trio Hermanos Hernández, “Cuando Tu Yo Eramos Jóvenes” / “Serenata” (Victor 46058), in the label’s 40000 “Old Familiar Tunes” series, where it became “When You and I Were Young, Maggie” / “Serenade” (Victor V-40081) by the Hernandez Brothers.114 The same kind of opportunism could be found in the foreign-language divisions of many recording companies, especially when it involved instrumentals such as polkas and waltzes, which could appeal to record buyers of diverse national origins.115 The ever-resourceful Oberstein distributed a batch of recordings made by Mexican accordionist Narciso Martínez in San Antonio on September 13, 1937, across more than a half-dozen general and ethnic series. For instance, he cross-listed “Delfo,” one of Martinez’s waltzes from Bluebird’s Mexican series (Bluebird B-3073), in the label’s “Acadian French” series, where it was retitled “Delta” (Bluebird B-2032) and credited to Louisiana Pete; the same recording also appeared as “Wdowka” (Victor V-16403) by Polskie Kwartet Instrumentalny in Victor’s Polish Series.116

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dismantling the prevailing racial order—although John Hammond and Helen Oakley Dance were exceptions of sorts. Most A&R officials were simply trying to secure as many hit records as possible and were willing to ignore inconvenient social conventions and even some laws to achieve that goal.109

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Nat Shilkret found that by employing Victor studio musicians, whom he sometimes joined on clarinet, he could record and issue instrumentals in multiple series among the thirty-two nationalities and ethnic groups to which the label catered. “We could record dances like the polka with a clarinet and an accordion, if the melody was catchy, and place the recording in a different nationality catalogue with a translated title,” Shilkret wrote in his autobiography.117 Although he occasionally tried a similar ploy with songs, it proved more problematic to cross-list, for example, vocal selections sung in a Jugoslav dialect to Serbians or vice versa because “the natives . . . could detect the flaws in their pronunciation.” In 1921, John Danko, a Chicago phonograph and record dealer, complained to Talking Machine World that many of the Slovak records on the market were inferior because they were “either not sung or played by our people, or they have too many mistakes in music and in grammar.”118 The development of special records series and marketing strategies for Cajun music offers another insight into the mercurial, genre-bending world of A&R post-production decision-making between the wars. In 1928, when Columbia’s Frank Walker supervised the first commercial recordings of Louisiana French-Acadian music, Joseph F. Falcon’s “The Waltz That Carried Me to My Grave (La valce qui ma portin d ma fose)” / “Lafayette (Allon a Luafette [sic]),” the disc was issued in the firm’s “Familiar Tunes, Old and New” 15000-D series. Soon after, though, Walker created a special numerical series for Cajun selections: Columbia’s 40500-F “Acadian-French” series. OKeh, which became a Columbia subsidiary in 1926, eventually created a comparable 90000 series, which reissued records from Columbia’s 40500-F series. During the mid-1930s, Bluebird and Decca adopted a similar strategy, each inaugurating its own Cajun series, the B-2000 and 17000 series, respectively.119 Other labels, in contrast, never bothered to create a special numerical series for their French-Acadian releases. Brunswick issued such material in its 100 “Songs from Dixie” series, whereas Paramount assigned the label’s handful of Cajun records to its 12000 race records series. These divergent opinions about how best to classify and market Cajun records reveal that interwar A&R officials, under constant pressure both to expand their racially segmented race and hillbilly catalogs and to produce records that would appeal to specific consumer markets, were actually constructing their catalogs without a coherent, fixed vision of what fully developed race, hillbilly, and Cajun series would actually look like. Nor, at times, did they seem to have a clear sense of who the audiences for these respective series were.120 The chaos and confusion surrounding the “correct” classification of Cajun recordings epitomized how definitions of race and hillbilly music evolved fitfully and unevenly between the wars. With each series assignment and successive release, A&R managers and their assistants drew and redrew, again and again, the boundaries of musical and marketing categories. The story of the litigious Allen Brothers, who dropped their lawsuit against Columbia and switched to Victor, exemplified the tensions inherent in this move toward increasing segmentation. At Victor (soon to become RCA Victor), the

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duo recorded nearly fifty issued sides between 1928 and 1932, all of which appeared in the company’s hillbilly catalog. But Ralph Peer, the Allen Brothers’ new A&R manager, still encouraged them to focus on blues-based numbers.121 Peer “wouldn’t accept some [songs] that we wanted to do, if we got away from our old blues numbers,” Lee Allen recounted. “He wanted us to stay in the blues all the time, and when we got away from that he would object to having it recorded. He recorded a lot of our pieces that wasn’t in the blues—he wouldn’t condemn it, he just said that if you stay in that one line, he believed that you’ll do better.”122 There were deep ironies in Peer’s insistence that a hillbilly act like the Allen Brothers should cleave close to the sound of the blues, even as he unequivocally assigned their records to Victor’s hillbilly series targeted mainly at white southern consumers. Meanwhile, Frank Walker, who had spotted the possibility that the Allen Brothers might actually find a black audience and sought to maximize that potential by trying one of their releases in Columbia’s race series, continued to dabble with intergenre musical experiments. He always seemed to have been genuinely intrigued by the artistic, as well as the commercial, possibilities of defying the hardening divisions between racially discreet musical styles and audiences. Within months of establishing Columbia’s “Old Familiar Tunes” in late 1924, Walker released three records by African American artists in this series aimed squarely at white record buyers. Among the first twentyfive couplings he allocated to the series were “Lonesome John” / “Fisher’s Hornpipe” (Columbia 15011-D) by Stove Pipe No. 1 (Sam Jones); “Wheel in a Wheel” / “Oh! Yes!” (Columbia 15021-D) by the Wheat Street Female Quartet; and “Who Was Job? Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 15023-D) by the Reverend C. D. Montgomery. In making these assignments, Walker must have believed that these selections, which ran the gamut from common-stock tunes to spirituals and sermons, were a legitimate part of the emerging hillbilly genre, or at least that they were marketable to hillbilly’s presumed core audi ence of rural and small-town white Southerners.123 Walker also occasionally listed his black vaudeville blues stars in Columbia’s popular domestic A1 and 1-D series, or conversely, though more rarely, placed white dance orchestras in the label’s 14000-D race records series. As Walker later told Mike Seeger, perhaps a little self-servingly, “I had to prove a point because in those days I had colored artists like Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith, and I used to put them on the regular [i.e., popular] list. Or Ted Lewis, if he did some kind of blues, I put him over on the colored list because it was their type of music done by him. What difference does it make? I felt that it’s a little integration of music that is done naturally, not legally.”124 In addition to periodically cross-listing records, Walker supervised the recording of musical mélanges such as the Lone Star Cowboys’ “Crawdad Song” (Bluebird B-6052) from 1933, which he described as “a very definite combination of country music and Cajun music.” To Walker, who had joined Bluebird’s parent company RCA Victor in January 1933, nominally as director of its radio program division, the song embodied the same fusion of Cajun and hillbilly music that Hank Williams would subsequently

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explore with even greater success in 1952 on “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)” (MGM 11283). Walker was then president and general manager of MGM Records, the label on which “Jambalaya” appeared. It was just another illustration of Walker’s openness to the notion of trying to get hits across conventional stylistic, social, and marketing divides. “We can drag a ‘Jambalaya’ over into the country field, and from the country field into the pop field even,” he observed. “Then the first thing you know you’ve got a country song going back over with the Cajuns. That’s the interchange of ideas.”125 In this spirit, and apparently undeterred by his clash with the Allen Brothers and their lawyer, Walker continued to record and release the occasional disc simultaneously for both black and white markets. In 1928, for example, he assigned two novelty instrumentals, “Mama Blues” / “Train Imitations and the Fox Chase” by the black Dallas harmonica virtuoso William McCoy, to both Columbia’s race (Columbia 14302-D) and hillbilly (Columbia 15269-D) series. It is possible that Walker felt that the uniqueness of these recorded sides and the absence of racially identifiable vocals, together with the prominence of the harmonica—an instrument then equally popular with black and white audiences—gave him particular scope to pursue a biracial market for McCoy’s selections.126 While the very existence of separate race and hillbilly records series at Columbia obviously reflected the increasingly routine segregation of sounds and markets, talents and tastes, Walker’s concurrent double release of McCoy’s recordings indicated that, in the battle for hits and publishing royalties, prohibitions against musical miscegenation and racial cross-marketing were never absolute. Art Satherley and J. Mayo Williams were among the many other A&R managers who were similarly willing to defy genre and marketing conventions whenever greater profits beckoned. In 1927, Williams reissued hillbilly recordings leased from Gennett, including Vernon Dalhart’s “Mississippi Flood” / “Sad Lover” (Black Patti 8027) and Carson Robison’s “My Blue Ridge Mountain Home” / “Barbara Allen” (Black Patti 8028), on his short-lived Black Patti label, an enterprise oriented overwhelmingly toward black consumers.127 Satherley, by contrast, felt that some of his race recording artists, including singer-guitarists such as Blind Willie McTell, Josh White, and Brownie McGhee, might appeal to white audiences. In 1940, Satherley, by then at Columbia, even paired McGhee’s risqué “Picking My Tomatoes” on Conqueror 9563 with “Worried Mind” by one of his most popular hillbilly acts of the period, Ted Daffan’s Texans.128

S WA N S O N G

There was a similar tension between experimentation and convention at the Black Swan label, manufactured by the Pace Phonograph Corporation (later renamed the Black Swan Record Company). Active from 1921 to 1924, the short-lived, black-owned label was founded and presided over by Harry Pace, and employed influential bandleader and arranger Fletcher Henderson as the first African American to manage an A&R operation.129 Pace was a protégé of W. E. B. DuBois, the eminent, Harvard-trained

POST-PRODUCTION

FI G U R E 6 .7. “Passing for Colored.” Advertisement for the Black Swan Phonograph Company from the December 1922 issue of the Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Authors’ collections.

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African American scholar-activist, who sat on the company’s board of directors. Pace was captivated by DuBois’s call for the “Talented Tenth” of African Americans to spearhead racial progress. Operating within that tradition of elite-led racial uplift, though with a healthy admiration for the black business and entrepreneurial agendas promoted most forcefully by DuBois’s great rival Booker T. Washington, Pace formed Black Swan “for the purpose of making phonograph records, using exclusively the voices and talent of colored people.”130 “There are over twelve million Colored people in the United States,” Pace explained in a trade announcement shortly after the label began operations, “and in that number there is hid away a wonderful amount of musical ability. The Race is naturally musical, but it has never been given a fair chance. We

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propose to spare no expense in the search for and developing of the best singers and musicians among this twelve million.”131 From the beginning, Pace insisted that Black Swan produce an eclectic range of records, presenting everything from classical music and grand opera to various blues, jazz, gospel, and popular tunes, in order to promote “race pride” and “elevate” African American tastes. Black Swan’s ads boasted that it produced “the only records made using exclusively Colored Singers and Musicians” and coined the slogan, “The Only Genuine Colored Record. Others Are Only Passing for Colored.”132 Despite such claims, roughly a third of the titles in Black Swan’s catalog actually consisted of reissues by white pop singers and dance orchestras drawn from the company’s subsidiary Olympic label as well as others. The identities of those white artists were disguised behind pseudonyms. Mamie Jones, for instance, was really Aileen Stanley, a white vaudeville entertainer, while in an extreme example of standard industry practice, at least six different white bands, including the Tivoli Dance Orchestra and Sam Lanin’s Roseland Orchestra, had material reissued on Black Swan as the Laurel Dance Orchestra.133 A firm believer in the politics of respectability as a means to achieve black civil and political rights, Pace was determined to show off the range of black musical tastes and talents that were too readily reduced to the one-dimensional stereotypes prevalent in America generally and in the recording industry more specifically. Still, prevailing racial and class dynamics meant that recording manager Fletcher Henderson felt compelled to record a singer like Ethel Waters performing only blues, although he did this very successfully with releases such as “Oh Daddy” / “Down Home Blues” (Black Swan 2010), a hit across racial lines on which Henderson himself supplied the piano accompaniment.134 Waters, like Blind Willie McTell, Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, and many other black recording artists, was perfectly comfortable performing in a variety of styles beyond blues. She attributed her circumscribed role and Henderson’s refusal to let her explore the full range of her interests and talents, even on a label supposedly dedicated to showcasing the diversity of black musical artistry and preferences, to the intraracial class divisions then rife within Harlem. Waters, who described herself as a product of “low-down Tenth Avenue,” complained that Pace and Henderson only allowed those black artists who fit the middle-class profile of the “Park Avenue crowd” to sing the “classier” songs of cultural improvement—the classical pieces and concertized spirituals and folk tunes that the two executives ultimately believed would help improve the image of the race. “I found Fletcher Henderson sitting behind a desk and looking prissy and very important,” Waters recalled of her first visit to Black Swan’s Manhattan studio. Henderson “wasn’t sure it would be dignified enough for him . . . to be the piano player for a girl who sang the blues in a cellar.” Although Waters wanted to experiment with other musical forms, at Black Swan she was left to sing nothing but the blues.135 Waters’s plight was all too common. Although there were exceptions to prove the rule, versatile black recording artists and songwriters regularly found themselves con-

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fronted by A&R managers who tried to pigeonhole their musical talents into racially predetermined stylistic and marketing categories. This process began long before anything was ever committed to disc, when A&R managers and their staffs determined the artists and the repertoire to be recorded, but it also affected post-production decisions. In a September 1924 memo, Thomas A. Edison rejected a test pressing of a brand-new Tin Pan Alley ballad, “Little Moth Keep Away from the Flame,” sung by a tenor he believed to be African American, remarking to Walter Miller, manager of Edison’s New York recording studios, “We want negroes only for Blues.” Nor would the inventor brook white artists singing blues songs. The following month, he responded to a test recording of “I’m All Broken Up Over You,” a pseudo-blues number sung by a white mezzo-soprano, with the stark decree: “No—don’t want white people on negro blues. GET THAT?”136

The object of the recording man is twofold: number one is buying, and number two is selling. You have to buy the artists, you have to buy the songs, but the objective must always be to sell records. —Art Satherley

7

The Bottom Line S ELLI N G RECO RDS

ONCE

A

R ECO R D E D

SIDE

WAS

A P P ROV E D ,

PA I R E D

WI T H

another, assigned to a series, and scheduled for release, A&R managers and their assistants shifted their attention to promoting those records, particularly through national and regional newspaper advertising campaigns and by nurturing networks of distributors and retailers who could give their products a vital push. In this way, A&R officials directly advanced a mass consumer culture that, driven by the growth of an advertising industry that tripled its expenditures during the 1920s, helped define American life after World War I. As the increasingly professionalized ad agencies of

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Madison Avenue assumed ever-greater prominence in the national psyche and economy, advertising stimulated demand for new goods, new modes of leisure and entertainment, and new forms of credit to pay for them. The recording industry was part of this booming consumer culture—not least because in the 1920s about 80 percent of phonographs were bought on credit.1 A&R managers worked with their staffs, along with ad-men both from inside their own organizations and in external advertising agencies, as well as with their regional retailers and distributors, to satisfy the public’s demand for recorded music; they enthusiastically touted the release of their new discs as the latest, the most original, and, by default, the most captivating music available on shellac. Even the obsession with securing publishing rights to new compositions reflected the recording industry’s complicity in the fetish for novelty and innovation that advertising fueled. “When short, chorus-oriented songs were easier to sell,” historian David Suisman observes, “longer narrative ballads became outmoded and rare. When the value of publishing rights made new songs more lucrative than old ones, the industry promoted a system of continual novelty and steered performers away from traditional material.”2 And yet, paradoxically, within the world of recorded roots music, what the ads for those new records, like much of the music itself, were often selling was nostalgia: romantic visions of older, more reassuring, less volatile times, places, and values. This was particularly true when it came to promoting releases in the hillbilly records field, where literature prepared by record companies had to navigate negative stereotypes of the American South and its inhabitants that were in wide circulation in the 1920s and 1930s. Poor white Southerners, particularly those living in rural and, even more especially, mountainous regions, were regularly demonized by eugenics advocates and unfavorably depicted in some of the best-selling literature of the era, such as Erskine Caldwell’s novels Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre, which helped popularize their ideas.3 Too much inbreeding, endemic disease, and cultural isolation had, according to eugenic theory and common stereotypes, produced a class of degenerate Southerners whose poor mental and physical health made them a threat to white racial purity and, consequently, to the moral, economic, and social well-being of the nation.4 By contrast, the images projected by the hillbilly recording industry offered far more positive and sympathetic depictions of southern whites and their culture. These Southerners were characterized not by a dangerous dysfunctionality, but by a laudable love of God, place, the land, family, history, and tradition. Although not above resorting to stock tropes of southern laziness, stupidity, drunkenness, violence, and poverty, often for nominally comic effect, hillbilly artists and their A&R men repeatedly emphasized the refreshing simplicity, honesty, and communal spirit of southern white culture.5 Notwithstanding the music’s convoluted racial lineage, catalogs and advertising copy presented the fiddle, stringband, and gospel music heard on interwar hillbilly discs as authentic folk expressions of white Southerners, miraculously unsullied

As a result of this sort of sentimentalized advertising, by World War II certain kinds of roots music were popularly understood as organically and exclusively tied to certain kinds of artists and audiences. In theory, this increased the effectiveness of highly focused advertising campaigns. Initially, however, some record company executives were unconvinced about the value of elaborate marketing for race and hillbilly records. A&R men like Frank Walker and Ralph Peer regularly bemoaned their meager advertising budgets.7 Leading firms such as Columbia and Victor preferred to focus on their more lucrative and prestigious classical and popular music lines, while smaller companies often simply lacked the funds for major promotional activities. One conspicuous and important exception was found in the race record ads that appeared in the African American press, notably the Chicago Defender, which boasted a national circulation of a quarter-million readers during the 1920s.8 Most of the time, though, record companies spent relatively little money advertising their roots music records directly to consumers, and instead largely relegated that task to individual distributors and dealers in their home markets. Companies did, however, assist those distributors and dealers by providing them with an impressive and often highly imaginative array of advertising literature. This material included separate race and hillbilly record catalogs, monthly supplements, special folders, brochures, and flyers, as well as window banners, wall hangers, and counter cards intended for in-store display to announce the latest releases, all crucial instruments in establishing the putative parameters of these two racially based records categories. Because so much of this promotional work was aimed at industry insiders, record company A&R officials were especially well placed for this task. They often worked with those same distributors and retailers to find local talent and to gauge shifting consumer tastes, and they then parlayed those relationships into greater opportunities to push their recordings. As a result, the contacts and expertise of A&R staff members meant that they were consistently at or near the center of efforts to promote and sell roots music records to American consumers.

T H E B OT TO M L I N E

The only True American Folk Songs . . . are the songs of the Southern Mountaineers. Like the minstrels of old, the modern Bards of our southern mountains go about singing the simple songs of the people’s own making, relating the gruesome details of a local murder, the latest scandal of the community, the horror of a train wreck, the sorrow of unrequited love, etc. The simplest of accompaniments are used, generally a guitar, a fiddle, a banjo or a harmonica and the voices of the singers are untrained except in the school of “singing songs.”6

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by craven commercial forces or contaminated by foreign, nonwhite influences. This music was promoted as a cherished musical repository of old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon Protestant values and racial integrity at a time when both seemed threatened. As the 1928 Brunswick Record Edition of American Folk Songs explained—with a nod to the importance of event songs:

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When race and hillbilly records were first introduced to the market in the early to mid-1920s, these as-yet-undefined categories of roots music required explanation, particularly for record dealers and consumers, before they could be effectively promoted. The economic logic of the industry encouraged companies to try to group diverse, messily interconnected assortments of musical traditions and styles into coherent, distinct genres of American roots music, complete with their own unique identities, histories, and imagery. This carefully constructed coherence would, it was believed, make separate musical idioms recognizable, distinctive, and commercially appealing.9 As a 1927 Brunswick supplement explained with regard to its hillbilly records: We call them “The Songs from Dixie.” They are recordings of songs and tunes that were born in the hills of Kentucky, the railroad towns of West Virginia, or . . . in all of the less populated section[s] below the “Mason-Dixon Line.” Most of these songs are the recitation of some actual event sung in rhyme and few have been published. They have been carried down from generation to generation by word of mouth and are closer to what may be called American Folk Music than anything in the United States. They are recorded not by imitators, but by people who have been born and raised in the sections of the country where they are popular and the obvious sincerity of their efforts will make them interesting to everyone. Many of the numbers recorded have been heard by all of us at some time or other in our lives and their simplicity offers a pleasant change from the elaborate syncopations of the present day dance orchestra.10

A & R M A N AG E R S AS A D - M E N

A&R managers and their assistants frequently played an indispensable role in the creation and production of such advertisements and other promotional material. Often they worked alongside staff members of in-house advertising departments or external advertising agencies. During the 1920s, for example, the General Phonograph Corporation and its successor, the OKeh Phonograph Corporation, employed a succession of advertising managers, including John A. “Jack” Sieber and, unusual for the era, a woman named Arbutus M. “A. M.” Kennard, who devised and oversaw the aggressive sales campaigns for OKeh’s pioneering blues and hillbilly releases.11 But OKeh also farmed out some of its early advertising work to the New York–based agency of Barton, Durstine, & Osborn, co-founded by Bruce Barton, later a United States congressman and author of one of the best-selling books of the 1920s, The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus.12 Whether working alone or with internal or external colleagues, A&R officials were regularly involved in planning marketing initiatives and, at smaller firms, sometimes took responsibility for designing, writing, and placing newspaper ads. Apparently, Paramount’s general manager Maurice Supper and later another executive, Henry Stephany, wrote much of the copy for dozens of the label’s race record ads that appeared in the Chicago Defender between 1921 and 1930.13 Although Art Satherley, who

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worked for Paramount during much of this period, later claimed that it was his idea to advertise its race records in the Defender and other prominent African American newspapers such as the Baltimore Afro-American, Norfolk Journal and Guide, and Pittsburgh Courier, Supper probably deserves credit for this pathbreaking initiative.14 It was just one example of Supper’s many contributions to Paramount’s success in the recorded roots music field. Like so many of his A&R contemporaries, Supper had no particular musical training or talent. Born in Madison, Indiana, in 1890, the son of German immigrants, he grew up in Indianapolis, where he worked as a draftsman at an automobile factory and reportedly demonstrated talent as a racing driver on local speedways. Around 1915, he settled in Port Washington, Wisconsin, where he initially found employment with the Wisconsin Chair Company and, soon after, with its newly organized phonograph and record manufacturing subsidiary, the New York Recording Laboratories (NYRL). When NYRL launched Paramount Records in 1917, Supper became its first sales manager.15 The next year, he was promoted to general manager of the company and, in this capacity, exerted enormous influence over the direction and development of the fledgling Paramount label. A mechanical engineer and draftsman by training, Supper designed both NYRL’s first New York studio, located at Broadway and 27th Street in Manhattan, and Paramount’s trademark image of an eagle clutching a globe in its talons.16 Supper also served as the first recording director of that studio, although this may have been a nominal managerial position, since he maintained his office and residence in Port Washington. In any event, he appears to have delegated much of the label’s early recording activities to others, including Art Satherley beginning in 1922.17 As general manager during most of NYRL’s formative years, Supper also helped establish distribution channels for its phonographs and records through a national network of wholesalers and retailers. This was no small feat for an upstart independent company competing with much larger and better financed giants such as Victor and Columbia.18 Even so, NYRL struggled to distinguish itself in the crowded field of post–World War I record manufacturing until, in 1922, Supper transformed Paramount from a general label to one specializing in race records. Although the long-term viability of the race records market was still largely unproven and the gambit was risky, Supper’s initiative almost certainly saved Paramount from bankruptcy.19 In July 1922, just one year after OKeh launched its 8000 race records series, Supper created a rival at Paramount: the now-fabled 12000 series. By the time it ended in mid-1932, the series had issued 1,157 records, making it the single largest race records catalog of the era.20 What’s more, a good deal of Paramount’s success was due to the innovative advertising campaigns Supper devised. In August 1922, he placed Paramount’s first race records ad in the Chicago Defender, promoting Alberta Hunter’s “Don’t Pan Me” / “Daddy Blues” (Paramount 12001), along with four other releases. The ad encouraged readers to “Send for These Sensational Blues Records,” all of which could be purchased together for the

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special price of only $3.21 Supper handled much of this kind of advertising himself. He wrote copy for the ads, arranged contracts for their layout and design, and negotiated their price, placement, and sequencing with the newspapers. By December 1923, announcements in the African American press proudly touted Paramount discs as “The Popular Race Record,” a slogan that figured prominently in all the label’s print ads over the next seven years.22 Additionally, Supper was probably responsible for the conception and creation of The Paramount Book of the Blues, a forty-eight-page booklet released in March 1924 and given away to customers. A second, thirty-page edition followed a couple of months later. More a catalog than anything else, it featured biographies and portraits of the label’s most popular recording artists, including Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, Trixie Smith, Alberta Hunter, and King Oliver’s Jazz Band, alongside listings of their latest releases.23 It was, Paramount ads boasted with some justification, “the greatest collection of Blues Hits, Sacred Records and other Race Music ever published.”24 Sometime around the fall of 1924, Supper resigned as general manager of NYRL.25 He was replaced as sales manager and recording director by Art Laibly, although several of Supper’s former marketing duties fell to another executive, Henry Stephany. In addition to serving with Laibly on the unofficial records committee that evaluated, selected, and coupled Paramount sides for commercial release, Stephany generally handled all advertising for the label and its Broadway and Puritan subsidiaries during the mid- to late 1920s.26 Like Supper before him, Stephany wrote much of the copy for Paramount’s ads that regularly ran in the black press, hiring a Milwaukee advertising agency to prepare the layout and design, as well as the eye-catching, pen-and-ink artwork.27 Although the ads appeared to be successful, the only African American on Paramount’s A&R staff, J. Mayo Williams, was critical of them, especially of what he considered to be the poorly conceived copy penned by Supper and Stephany. “You never saw any language in those ads that was typically Negroid,” Williams later complained. “They could have used a lot more Negro slang expressions than they did. They wrote the ads definitely from a white man’s point of view.”28 Williams had a point. The dearth of black executives at NYRL and other white-owned record companies meant that white executives invariably drafted the advertising copy aimed at African American audiences. Most of these ads reflected their authors’ racist perceptions and patronizing attitudes; as a result, such ads risked alienating the very audiences they were meant to attract. Indeed, as in Columbia’s promotion of “Mysterious Coon,” some of these ads drew intense criticism from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other racial uplift groups for their demeaning imagery and exaggerated dialect. Clearly, racism restricted black opportunities to become A&R officials, while racist stereotyping frequently disfigured the representations of African Americans that white A&R managers and their colleagues in advertising departments deployed in ads for blues and gospel records. Yet, offensive and condescending though some of their campaigns were, A&R men still made an enormous contribution to the advertising and

T H E B OT TO M L I N E

FI G U R E 7.1. Publicity photograph of the Kentucky Thoroughbreds taken at the Theatrical Studio in Chicago during the trio’s April 1927 visit to that city to record for Paramount. From left: Doc Roberts, Ted Chestnut, and Dick Parman. Archie Green Papers (#20002), Southern Folklife Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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marketing of roots music recordings.29 They skillfully courted, even as they shaped, emerging markets for this music by orchestrating direct appeals to potential customers via key print media outlets and by exploiting their close personal ties to artists, theater owners, and record dealers to promote their recordings. This was innovative work that not only helped sell discs to specific local markets but also defined the cultural impact of the American roots recording industry. Insofar as the ads represented, both visually and

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textually, ideas of what different kinds of roots music “meant” or connoted, who they were made by, and who they were supposed to appeal to, A&R managers and their staffs critically determined the cultural as well as economic significance of their recordings. Another illustration of how promotional efforts by A&R men helped establish the social valence and cultural resonances of different kinds of roots music was through the creation of publicity photographs of their musical talent. At Paramount, J. Mayo Williams sometimes set up photographic sessions for the firm’s marketing materials, calling on his friend Dan Burley, a cub reporter for the Chicago Defender who also played boogie-woogie piano at house rent parties, to shoot portraits of Paramount’s recording artists.30 Similarly, in 1927, during a two-day recording session in Chicago, Art Laibly arranged for a local photographer at the Theatrical Studio to photograph Kentucky fiddler Doc Roberts and his two bandmates, singer-guitarist Dick Parman and singer Ted Chestnut, for Paramount’s “Olde Time Tunes” promotional literature. The portrait was used in announcements for the string trio’s first records, issued under the names of the Kentucky Thoroughbreds and the Quadrillers, both pseudonyms that Laibly himself probably created.31 Art Laibly did not merely schedule the photographic session for Roberts and his bandmates. He took an active role in shaping the group’s visual image. The Paramount A&R veteran instructed the artists to wear matching uniforms consisting of starched white shirts and slacks, set off by black bowties—costuming that left them looking more like a group of milkmen than a hillbilly stringband.32 It was a somewhat anomalous sartorial decision that cut against the grain of the pastoral or rustic imagery that was usually deployed to promote hillbilly music in the 1920s. Roberts was certainly unimpressed by this gesture toward gentrification. “We look like a [sic] orchestra bunch, that plays popular music,” he later complained. “We should have had on our overalls.”33 In organizing sales and marketing campaigns at Paramount, Laibly and his A&R staff members regularly cooperated with their colleagues in the company’s advertising and sales departments. But they also relied upon their recording artists to help stimulate record sales, especially in grassroots sales campaigns in their home territories. On April 30, 1927, two weeks after the Kentucky Thoroughbreds made their debut recordings for the label, Laibly mailed Doc Roberts several test records from the session, encouraging him and his bandmates to promote the sale of their forthcoming releases in their hometowns in east-central Kentucky. “Wish you would get right back of the numbers in your territory and have the other two boys do their utmost,” Laibly wrote, “and we expect that each of you will be responsible for selling at least 1000 of each of your numbers.”34 In a follow-up letter written that same day, Laibly asked Roberts and his colleagues to send the names of their local newspapers and estimates for the cost of advertising in them: “Please get in touch with Ches[t]nut and Par[m]an at their respective towns and have them advise me the name of the newspaper that they would like us to advertise your records in. Also advise the cost of advertising in these newspapers. We would furnish your picture (electrotype) and the paper would have

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to set up the rest of the ad. The size depends upon the cost. Wish you would get this same information for Richmond.”35 To help the Kentucky Thoroughbreds in their promotion efforts, Laibly sent Roberts copies of Paramount’s newly published Olde Time Tunes brochure, which introduced the label’s hillbilly series and listed five of the trio’s records. “Inclosed [sic] find a folder which we have just put out,” Laibly wrote on May 27, 1927. “If you wish [we] will be glad to send you a number of these for stores which you call on. Also we have a large hanger and dealers [sic] order blank, copy also of which we inclose [sic]. You might send some of this information to Chestnut and Parman. . . . We will send you cuts with authority to advertise in your Richmond paper shortly.”36 Soon after, Paramount mailed Roberts the promised electrotype photograph, along with money to pay for local newspaper ads. This ad hoc, yet by no means uncommon, marketing exercise appears to have paid off. On June 3, a delighted Laibly informed Roberts that the Kentucky Thoroughbreds’ records occupied Paramount’s top three spots “in sales for the month of May”; another of their discs ranked in the top fifteen of the label’s best sellers.37 Heartened by this initial success, Paramount officials continued to support the Kentucky Thoroughbreds’ homespun marketing initiative. As Henry Stephany explained to Roberts in August 1927, “The $10.00 which was sent to you for advertising purposes, we feel that you know best how to make the most advantage of. Use this money in your local papers and feature the records that you have recorded.” Stephany also offered a specific advertising recommendation. “One suggestion you might use,” he wrote, “would be to put a heading in the paper ‘HEAR DOC ROBERT’S [sic] LATEST PARAMOUNT RECORDS .’ Then place your cut in with this ad and list the selections that you have recorded.”38 Such local promotional activities occasionally resulted in the acquisition of new dealers, which was particularly important for smaller record companies. At Gennett, which advertised comparatively little, A&R managers and their department staff were especially dependent on their recording talent to help promote and sell records. On October 9, 1928, for example, Gennett’s assistant sales manager, Lee A. Butt, sent a letter of appreciation to Doc Roberts, who had recently resumed recording for that label and was out promoting his newest releases for that label, just as he had for Paramount the year before. “We wish to thank you for your co-operation in the way of securing us several new dealers in the past few weeks,” Butt wrote. “We are glad to note you have introduced the ELECTROBEAM GENNETT records in several towns where they had not been previously sold or advertised. Your plugging will result to our mutual benefit.”39 These kinds of collaborations between A&R officials and their artists obviously helped plug roots music recordings, but they also helped fashion emerging popular understandings about the provenance and character of the different strains of roots music contained in the grooves of those discs. More generally, advertising campaigns, often orchestrated by the same A&R men who had supervised the recording and release of that music, critically influenced public perceptions of roots musicians. Sometimes these campaigns highlighted the “discovery” of these performers in ways that

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embellished or distorted the facts. Ralph Peer’s hand can perhaps be perceived in the earliest ads and press releases for OKeh’s hillbilly records. In November 1923, following the success of Fiddlin’ John Carson’s debut record, Peer invited him to New York to wax additional sides at OKeh’s main studios. The following month, the label issued a press release touting the Atlanta fiddler’s traditional musical background and the popularity of his initial releases. “This backwoods virtuoso has played his violin in thirty-two States of the Union in addition to radio broadcasting,” it explained. “His first Okeh records have been very successful, particularly in the South, and Okeh dealers have evinced keen interest in his new recordings.” Playing up his rural credentials as the “champion fiddler of Georgia,” the press release emphasized the discomfort Carson supposedly felt during his recent week-long stay in Manhattan. “This was Fiddlin’ John’s first visit to the metropolis,” the announcement explained, “and, according to his comment, there were several things that did not meet with his approval. There was too much city and not enough ‘country’ to suit his taste and he was glad to return to the sunny South.” Given that Peer was then working in OKeh’s sales department, it is difficult to imagine that this release was created without his input. If he did not actually draft the text himself, he almost certainly supplied many of its particulars, as exaggerated as some of them were—most conspicuously the careful representation of Carson, a long-time resident of Atlanta, one of the New South’s most rapidly expanding metropolises, as a hayseed rube befuddled and adrift in the big city.40 A&R men not only contributed to many advertisements and press releases, but they also occasionally served as the subject of such promotional literature. Most commonly, this took the form of company announcements and trade reports that boasted of these officials’ extraordinary efforts to locate and sign the nation’s best and most “authentic” roots musicians. In 1921, for example, when OKeh announced a series of new race records by the Virginia Female Jubilee Singers in Talking Machine World, the press release noted, “For months the company’s representatives had been touring the South in search of artists who were capable of interpreting realistically the old-fashioned negro spirituals and they recently discovered this quartet of singers in the country regions of Virginia and engaged them for the Okeh library. . . . A permanent demand for these Okeh spirituals is anticipated, and considerable care and attention were devoted to the records.”41 Three years later, another OKeh advertisement extended this theme when it introduced its latest potential race records star, Edward Andrews—probably a Polk C. Brockman discovery who Ralph Peer recorded in Atlanta in early 1924—as another triumph for the label’s talent-spotting operations. “Right where blues songs were born,” explained the Chicago Defender ad, “is where Ed. Andrews was singing ’em and playing ’em when the special OKeh Recording Expedition discovered him. Why, man alive, he was just scattering happiness all around, wherever he appeared. And now, on his first OKeh record, ‘Time Ain’t Gonna Make Me Stay,’ this boy is certainly up-holding his good reputation.”42 As a result of that 78-rpm record (OKeh 8137), the only one

A&R officials frequently combined responsibilities for sales, scouting, and setting up sessions. In 1924, Talking Machine World chronicled OKeh “director of record production” Ralph Peer’s month-long June trip to the West Coast, where he secured a statewide distribution deal for the firm’s OKeh and Odeon labels through a San Francisco wholesaler. Peer also visited wholesalers in Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver for the purposes of “arranging for an intensive sales campaign for the coming Fall.”44 Four months later, now identified as “director of Okeh record sales,” Peer made similar sales trips to confer with distributors in “a number of important trade centers, including Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, New Orleans and Atlanta.”45 The following April, he visited dealers in Florida, along with Polk C. Brockman, sales manager of James K. Polk Inc., OKeh’s Atlanta distributor. Both men, Talking Machine World reported in its characteristically upbeat, boosterish language, “were highly gratified to find that Okeh records had achieved considerable popularity throughout this State, and they offered important sales suggestions to Okeh dealers that will undoubtedly be reflected in the retailers’ activities during the next few months.”46 Another example of A&R officials offering dealers marketing advice and assistance involves Don Law, who in 1931 was record sales manager of the Brunswick Radio Distributing Company Inc. of Dallas, whose wholesaling operations served record retailers in Texas and the Southwest. In June, Law wrote to the Brunswick and Vocalion dealers in his territory to plug a recent release, “Howling Wolf Blues—No. 1 and 2” (Vocalion 1558) by the Texas blues singer-guitarist “Funny Paper” Smith (J. T. Smith). “Every once in a while there comes to the fore a record which is so unusual in its sales appeal that its sales make record history. . . . It has been some considerable time since we have had a record which is really in this class, but in ‘Howling Wolf Blues’ we have a record that will long be remembered for its phenomenal sales. If you are not getting your share of this business,” Law urged dealers to order a few copies of the record and “see what happens. It is true that this is a Race Record and you might think therefore that its sales would be confined to your colored trade. Not so. You will be surprised how many white folk will buy it.” For the convenience of his dealers, Law enclosed an order form, along with a list of Brunswick records scheduled for release on June 18, before closing his letter with the hyperbolic reminder, “Remember, ‘Howling Wolf Blues’ is the biggest selling record on the market today.”47 Since A&R men were often instrumental in establishing distribution outlets for their firm’s records, they were especially well placed to work with those distributors on marketing campaigns. During the 1920s, major companies such as Victor, Columbia,

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he ever waxed, Andrews is generally acclaimed the first country blues singer to make commercial recordings at a southern field session.43

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and Brunswick distributed their records via a network of regional branches strategically located in the nation’s major trade centers. In 1925, for example, Columbia maintained eighteen such regional offices throughout the nation.48 One A&R manager who was particularly energetic and innovative in this regard was Jack Kapp at Vocalion. The label had first entered the race records market in 1923, when it was owned by the Aeolian Company. Three years later, in March 1926, its new parent company, Brunswick-BalkeCollender, decided to expand its activities in the field and appointed twenty-fouryear-old Kapp, former record sales manager at Columbia’s Chicago branch, to head Vocalion’s recently formed race records division. As a press release explained, Kapp was to “devote to the sale of the new recordings the results of his experience in securing talent and record sales promotion exclusively.”49 The next month, Kapp unveiled “a very comprehensive promotional program outlined for the distribution of Vocalion [race] records,” including regular weekly advertisements in the Chicago Defender, along with “ample advertising material” consisting of “special hangers and supplements.” As part of his effort “to take every possible advantage of this potential field,” Kapp also “organized a special department for the producing of the race record catalog.” The star of Vocalion’s new race records roster would be King Oliver’s jazz band, but like Harry Pace at Black Swan, Kapp aimed to appeal to a broad market of black record buyers by including among his monthly releases “types of standard music for which the colored buyers have been anxiously awaiting,” including records of “Negro glee clubs, organ records by colored artists and sacred music.”50 In June 1926, Kapp released his first batch of Vocalion race records. As promised, it offered an eclectic array of jazz, blues, and spirituals, including selections by King Oliver & His Dixie Syncopators, Jelly Roll Morton, the Cotton Belt Quartet, Ada Brown, Teddy Peters, the Umbrian Glee Club, Irene Scruggs, Edmonia Henderson, and Rosa Henderson. As the trade announcement for these releases noted, Kapp was still juggling his scouting and marketing duties. Kapp was reportedly “combing the country to secure the services of prominent colored artists and no effort will be spared to give the race the type of music that is most appealing”; meanwhile, in conjunction with his new sales campaign, he and his staff had also “prepared special window hangers, folders, catalogs, cuts, prepared dealer advertisements and other sales promotional material which will aid in its presentation.”51 Within six months, despite a roster of mostly second-rate acts, Kapp’s marketing and sales campaign was reaping impressive rewards. In January 1927, Talking Machine World reported that Vocalion’s race records division had made “steady progress . . . in securing talent, and sales have consistently increased month by month.” In one month alone, the article noted, Vocalion sold fifty thousand copies of King Oliver & His Dixie Syncopators’ “Some Day, Sweetheart” / “Dead Man Blues” (Vocalion 1059). “A major portion of the credit for this success,” Talking Machine World pointed out, “belongs to Mr. Kapp, who has visited every important trade center in the United States, calling personally upon the dealers, and pointing out ways to increase record sales volume

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through the stocking of race records. Nor are sales confined alone to the colored population,” the article added, echoing a common industry theme, “for the dealers have found that a demand is growing among their regular customers for hits recorded by colored artists.”52 In March 1927, Variety reported that, under Kapp’s management, Vocalion “has jumped about 500 per cent in sales the past few months, the hill-billy, colored and ‘hot’ recordings being strongly responsible. Royalty returns from some of these records exceed income on a hit on the Brunswick [label], sometimes.”53 Brunswick’s senior executives were delighted with Kapp’s performance and, in January 1928, promoted him to sales manager and recording director of the entire Vocalion line. In his new post, he continued to be involved in most aspects of the label’s business. “Mr. Kapp will direct the supervision of releasing, development of talent, directing of recording, merchandising of records and the planning of sales campaigns,” explained Talking Machine World. In particular, Kapp planned “a complete change in the development of the Vocalion line” that was “designed to meet existing conditions in the recording industry.” One of those changes involved the marketing of records in “special classes.” Following the industry trend, Kapp decided to separate “the race records, the old-time tunes and the popular records into individual classes. These records will be released separately and special dealer helps and merchandising literature will be prepared for each individual class. In that way the dealer whose business is concentrated on any one or two of these classes can devote his activity to the type of records which he finds to be in greatest demand.” Kapp also reorganized the label’s distribution and marketing, scheduling only “one monthly release of individual groups of records,” and, unlike at Brunswick, distributing records exclusively through a network of regional wholesalers or “jobbers.” By 1928, with the aid of his assistant Charles Biesel, Kapp had secured an “imposing list of jobbers” in fifteen major trade centers across much of the eastern and midwestern United States, including Atlanta, Birmingham, Cincinnati, El Paso, Dallas, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Memphis, St. Louis, and St. Paul, and had plans for many more.54 As Kapp’s status rose, Variety stressed his well-honed acumen as a merchandiser, noting that his “promotion follows a concrete survey of the country’s musical tastes, particularly in the southern and midwestern demands for ‘hill-billy’ and ‘race’ records. These two departments have been chiefly developed by Kapp and have contributed to Vocalion’s financial success.” In particular, the entertainment trade magazine observed, “It was Kapp who taught the mountaineer music dealers to capitalize [on] the hill-billy folks’ penchant for purchasing from six to 15 copies of the same record. The mountain people don’t come down into the valley towns for months at a time, and their chief amusement is the constant repetition of their favorite record, wearing one out and playing a new one.”55 While labels like Vocalion could boast extensive distribution networks and relatively well-funded marketing campaigns, smaller independent labels were less fortunate. As a result, it was even more imperative that A&R managers and their staffs devise

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effective new strategies, in cooperation with their colleagues in sales departments and their regional distributors and retailers, to set their recordings before the record-buying public in the most efficient and attractive ways. For example, at Paramount, Maurice Supper spearheaded the cultivation of the label’s network of southern wholesalers. In March 1924, Talking Machine Journal reported, “Mr. Supper and Mr. A. E. Satherley, New York manager, recently returned from a tour of the South where they had been invest[igat]ing distribution and appointing new jobbers.”56 This was no easy matter since, by the time Paramount launched its race records series in 1922, many of the nation’s estimated eight thousand record dealers were already locked into exclusive franchises with Victor or Columbia and, therefore, prohibited from stocking records by Paramount or other competing labels.57 Racism in the Jim Crow South posed another obstacle. Many white furniture and music dealers in the region were reluctant to adopt Paramount’s race records line because they did not want to attract black patrons to their stores. They also balked at the additional expense that would be incurred, since state and municipal Jim Crow laws sometimes required separate listening booths for black and white customers.58 Despite such challenges, Supper did broker deals with a number of southern and midwestern distributors, including E. E. Forbes & Sons Piano Company of Birmingham, where soon-to-be A&R scout Harry Charles managed the music department, and the Artophone Corporation of St. Louis, which, with branch offices in Kansas City, Memphis, New Orleans, and Dallas, ranked as Paramount’s leading wholesaler during the mid-1920s.59 Still, Paramount never achieved the level of nationwide distribution enjoyed by Columbia, Brunswick, OKeh, and other firms involved in the race records market. Given these constraints, Supper was forced to develop alternative channels to reach the record-buying public.60 One method was to solicit direct, mail-order purchases from customers. Using notices placed at the bottom of its ads in the black press, the label informed readers that, if their local dealer “can’t supply genuine Paramount Records,” they could “order direct from the factory.”61 Under this offer, customers could purchase records through the mail, C.O.D., at seventy-five cents each, originally postpaid, although later a nominal postage charge was added. Supper’s innovative sales strategy enabled Paramount to target consumers in places where it had no distributors or retailers. In theory, it also maximized company profits by dispensing with the services of these intermediaries, who routinely took a slice of sales revenue. Paramount compiled a mailing list of more than ten thousand potential customers, hoping to cut out the distributors and retailers, and attract business through direct advertising. In practice, however, these efforts met with limited success because, as Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow learned from J. Mayo Williams, “most of the company’s customers . . . were illiterate, and therefore immune to such overtures.”62 Besides encouraging direct, mail-order sales, Supper also sought to improve the distribution of Paramount product by recruiting new dealers, agents, and door-to-door salesmen through newspaper ads.63 “Hundreds of men and women are making more

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money than ever before by taking orders from friends and neighbors for Paramount Records,” read one such appeal in the August 18, 1923, issue of the Chicago Defender. “You, too, can develop a profitable business of your own. . . . It’s easy, pleasant work—full or part time. There are thousands of openings in localities where we have no dealers. Write for agent’s proposition now.”64 Often such notices cleverly employed the names of Paramount stars to make personal appeals. “Alberta [Hunter] Wants Agents and Dealers” declared one such announcement, while another encouraged readers, “Be Ida [Cox]’s Agent.”65 Readers were assured “You can easily make $20 to $60 a month in your spare time.”66 “Anybody could become an agent,” Art Satherley recalled. Paramount agents purchased batches of ten or more records from the label through the mail, C.O.D., for the wholesale price of forty-five cents each and then sold them for seventy-five cents or, in some cases, as much as $3 or $4 apiece.67 Pullman porters, in particular, enjoyed a profitable sideline selling Paramount records on their train runs to southern cities. As Williams explained, “They’d come to Chicago, see, Chicago was a railroad headquarters then. . . . They had orders for ’em and would pay for ’em, the wholesale price. . . . Then they’d sell ’em sometimes for a dollar apiece, as much as the traffic would bear. . . . The stores in those small places, the people in those small places, were all hard up for records.”68 Within twelve months, according to Satherley, Paramount boasted a thousand dealers throughout much of the nation. “That is how we got in and could compete with Victor and Columbia.”69 At the fledgling Pace Phonograph Corporation, manufacturer of Black Swan Records, Harry Pace also used the black press to solicit agents and representatives to handle the label’s records as a lucrative sideline.70 This approach proved so successful that by October 1921, just nine months after the firm’s incorporation, Pace’s company claimed to have signed up a thousand dealers and agents.71 “We Want Live Agents Everywhere!” declared one of Black Swan’s 1923 ads, appealing for “music stores, drug stores, furniture dealers, news stands, cigar stores, manicuring and hairdressing parlors, confectionary stores, shoe shining parlors, delicatessen shops and all other places of business catering to retail trade.”72 Elsewhere, ads promised, “Black Swan Agents Are Making from $25 to $75 Weekly in localities where we have no dealers. Let us tell you how to make extra money in your spare time.”73 Small labels such as Paramount and Black Swan scrambled to recruit new sales representatives and dealers, but, unlike their larger competitors, they struggled to maintain extensive and stable networks of regional wholesalers. One consequence was that, at these smaller, understaffed companies, many A&R men often doubled as traveling salesmen, sometimes pushing records in the same territories they scoured for talent and songs. Art Satherley managed Paramount’s recording studio in New York between 1922 and 1928, but enjoyed some of his greatest sales success peddling records at county fairs and similar gatherings in the American South.74 “It was so new for the people of America, both black and white, to be able to buy what they understood and

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what they wanted, that we quickly had several thousand people buying records daily,” he recalled.75 Satherley personally recruited and assisted new dealers during his sales trips. He recounted how he signed up several Paramount agents in South Philadelphia, where, as a result of the Great Migration, “there was a tremendous black population coming from the South.”76 Satherley made weekly visits to Philadelphia to meet with these retailers, and eventually, he claimed, they came to place complete trust in his judgment about the sales potential of forthcoming releases. “I simply told them what samples were coming in of the different singers,” he remarked, “and they would say ‘send me 600 [copies], send me 1,000, send me 500.’ The dealers said, ‘Art, if you think that’s it, that’s it.’ I sold hundreds of thousands of these records to all those stores there. Sight unseen, I just called from New York, because at that time I was jobbing and recording for Paramount as well as selling from Nova Scotia to Florida. That was my territory.”77 Many other A&R men also turned their hand to selling the records they helped produce. Art Laibly, for instance, combined talent-scouting expeditions with selling Paramount product. Twice a year he scouted for prospective recording artists in cities such as Birmingham, Vicksburg, and New Orleans, and throughout much of the Mississippi Delta, often accompanied by H. C. Speir. On these trips, Laibly not only attempted to drum up blues and hillbilly acts for Paramount but also tried to secure new accounts with retailers and distributors in those locations.78 He traveled even more regularly to Chicago and other midwestern cities. As Laibly recalled, “I use[d] to leave home on Monday morning, generally, and not get back [until] Thursday night or Friday morning. And I was out in the territory all the time, practically all the time in those years. With the jobbers, with their salesmen looking at talent, getting the sales on, you know, hits on records.”79 Similarly, Ralph Peer toured extensively for Victor (and later for RCA Victor) and his Southern Music Publishing Company. Sometimes accompanied by his recording artists from the area and usually by his assistant Bob Gilmore, Peer peddled copies of phonograph records and sheet music to the crowds that gathered to see and hear his acts perform outside of furniture stores and music shops in southern cities.80 Frank Walker likewise took to the road to promote Columbia’s race and hillbilly records, assist the firm’s licensed record dealers, and establish new retail accounts with other local dealers. Such trips enabled him to keep in touch with retailers throughout much of the southeastern United States who, in turn, might pass along recommendations about promising local singers and musicians. In addition, Walker’s trips allowed him to gather valuable information about how new Columbia releases were selling in particular trade centers, and to gain a sense of grassroots musical tastes and trends. Ever creative, Walker sometimes relied on what would now be described as “consumer focus groups” to gauge the commercial potential of the label’s products in local markets. He vividly remembered staging one such event in Corbin, Kentucky, probably during the late 1920s:

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FI G U R E 7. 2 . Studio portrait of Frank Walker (ca. 1942). Courtesy of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

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I went over to a store . . . a sort of a general store around the place. But [the storekeeper] did sell some phonograph records now, and he had a machine in there, an old-type machine. . . . So I went in and I talked to him about it. I said, “You know, let’s try something out. If you don’t get enough people coming into your store, then, if they come in, one fellow wants to buy a phonograph record, he may buy something else in the store. Or if he wants to buy something else in the store, like sugar, he may buy a phonograph record, but you got to let him know about it.” “Well, how do you go about doing that?” I said, “Well, let’s put up some seats here in the back. It won’t take much. We take some plank and so forth, and we’ll make little rising seats like they do at ball games. We’ll put the phonograph out in the front, and then we’ll make some signs, and we’ll put them on the window, and we’ll invite the folks to come in on Saturday afternoon to listen to new phonograph records.” He said, “I like the idea.”81

On the day of the event, Walker played several new Columbia releases on the store’s old wind-up phonograph for a packed audience: We filled the seats, and they all stood around, and we had the appropriate little box with the sawdust in it, so that we didn’t get too much tobacco juice on the floor. And I started and played two or three records that I’m sure that they knew about already. And then I put on this new record and played it all the way through. One that nobody had ever heard before, a new release that I had . . . coming out, but I just wanted to try it out.

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So I played it, and then I said, “How many of you people would like to own this record, have it for yourself?” Everybody held their hands up. Now, I said, “How many of you would like to buy this record, seventy-five cents, you know? How many of you would like to buy it?” And I would say out of the maybe 125 or 130 people there that maybe twenty or twenty-five held their hand up. I said, “What’s the matter with the rest of you, don’t you like it?” They said: “Yes, [but] we ain’t got no money.” Which was the story. They all wanted it, they all liked it, you see. . . . But they didn’t have the money. So the result is that you then, to be nice about it, . . . give them one because you found exactly what you wanted to know. You were going to sell it to the extent of the amount of money that people had to spend.82

Walker claimed he turned the use of such focus groups into a common practice. “I started going around the country and gathering people off the street by giving them a slip of paper telling them we wanted their opinion on a certain phonograph record, if they would be at such a place at a certain time in the afternoon. We would bring all the people up—from the bank president to the street cleaner.” Just as he did in Corbin, Walker would play an assortment of the latest Columbia releases for the assembled group and register their responses. “You watched the expression on their face,” he explained, adding—with more than a little misty-eyed romanticism—“We were able to judge then because you were playing to America.”83

S A L E S C A M PA I G N C R E AT I V I T Y

In addition to securing distribution and retail channels, A&R managers and their department staffs concocted marketing and sales gimmicks to stimulate record sales. This was especially important during the 1920s as record labels attempted to establish and differentiate their new lines of race records in an increasingly crowded marketplace. In 1924, for example, under the imaginative leadership of Maurice Supper, Paramount produced “ ‘Ma’ Rainey’s Souvenir Record” (Para-mount 12098), which featured a special, three-color portrait label bearing her likeness.84 The label took out a halfpage advertisement in the Chicago Defender to announce the record’s release. “Nothing Like It Ever Made Before!” the ad proclaimed. “ ‘Ma’ Rainey wants you all to have a souvenir record, with her picture on the record. The famous Mother of the Blues doesn’t want you to ever forget her—that’s how much she loves her friends! So we put her picture on her newest record, ‘Dream Blues.’ On the other side is ‘Lost Wandering Blues’ by ‘Ma.’ Accompaniment by [the] Pruit[t] Twins, on those guitars that made Kansas City famous.”85 The ad went on to declare, “This is the first time, to our knowledge, that any artist’s picture has ever appeared on a record,” boasting “Paramount is always first with the features!”86

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FI G U R E 7. 3 . Advertisement for Ma Rainey’s “Mystery Record,” featuring the official contest rules, Chicago Defender, May 31, 1924. Authors’ collections.

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Supper was probably responsible for other sales gimmicks as well, including a special contest staged to promote “Ma Rainey’s Mystery Record,” which appeared, coupled with “Honey Where You Been So Long?” on Paramount 12200.87 According to Paramount ads, the “Mystery Record” proved “so good” and “so unusual” that perplexed label officials failed to come up with an appropriate title. “Then ‘Ma’ suggested that we let the public name it.”88 Paramount ran a full-page ad in the May 31, 1924, edition of the Chicago Defender to announce its “Mystery Record” contest, claiming in an accompanying press release that this was “the largest and greatest contest of the kind ever staged.”89 In a savvy attempt to enhance the reputation of the white-owned Paramount, or at least its

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race records division, as a respectfully black-oriented operation, the contest was open to “any member of the Race” who cared to suggest a suitable title for the disc.90 In a follow-up ad two weeks later, Paramount added an invitation from Rainey herself to enter this rather literal game of “name-that-tune,” shrewdly exploiting and intensifying the bond between their artist and the customers who bought her records: “Ma Rainey wants you to Name Her Great, New Paramount ‘Mystery Record.’ ”91 One hundred prizes were offered, including three upright console phonographs, several batches of phonograph records, and ninety photographs of Rainey, “suitable for framing.”92 To judge the contest and extend the label’s careful courtship of the primarily black audiences for Rainey’s recordings, Paramount enlisted two “prominent, unbiased members of the Race,” J. Mayo Williams and Harry Pace.93 Three and a half months later, Paramount announced that Ella McGill, of Jeffersonville, Indiana, had won the firstplace prize, a $200 “console phonograph” of “Roman design,” for her entry, “Lawd, I’m Down wid the Blues.”94 The winning submission simply copied the first line of the song, but creativity really was beside the point for Supper and his staff.95 Paramount’s “Mystery Record” contest, boasted a press release, “has proven to be the most successful of its kind in Race record history.” At the time, as blues historian Ronald C. Foreman Jr. wryly notes, “It also had been the only one of its kind.”96 It would not be the last, however. Where Maurice Supper led, Art Laibly and Henry Stephany appear to have followed, sharing Supper’s enthusiasm for promotional gimmicks. In 1927, Stephany authorized Laibly’s plan to release a second portrait label record, this one devoted to the Reverend J. O. Hanes, a white Birmingham fundamentalist preacher recruited by Harry Charles for Paramount’s new 3000 “Olde Time Tunes” series. The record featured a pair of recorded sermons, accompanied by a male choir: “A Symphony of Calls” / “Abounding Sin and Abounding Grace” (Paramount 3057).97 The next year, Laibly released another portrait label record billed as “Blind Lemon’s Birthday Record” (Paramount 12650), coupling “Piney Woods Money Mama” and “Low Down Mojo Blues,” to honor country bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson, who had replaced Ma Rainey as the label’s best-selling race recording star.98 In September 1929, Laibly was probably the architect of another Paramount race records contest, centered on Charley Patton’s third release, “Mississippi Boweavil Blues” / “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues” (Paramount 12805).99 Unlike “Ma Rainey’s Mystery Record,” this time the selections carried titles, but bore only the mysterious artist credit: The Masked Marvel. Contestants were asked to guess the identity of the singerguitarist. To give them a clue, Paramount officials commissioned a pen-and-ink sketch that appeared in newspaper ads and on dealers’ posters, depicting a masked artist in a tuxedo who only vaguely resembled Patton. Contestants who correctly identified the artist won “a brand-new Paramount Record absolutely free—your choice of any record in the Paramount catalog.”100 This innovative bit of hucksterism again appears to have met with success. The Masked Marvel record sold out of its initial pressing of ten

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thousand copies, and, shortly after the contest closed on October 15, 1927, Paramount re-pressed the disc, this time credited to Patton.101 The marketing of American roots music records was sometimes accomplished through promotional tours, concerts, and, in the field of “hot” jazz, even jam sessions. Once more, A&R managers could often be found close to the action. They helped advertise stage performances by their recording artists and encouraged local dealers to, in the terminology of the industry, “tie up” with such appearances, hoping, ultimately, to boost record sales. A&R men at Columbia, OKeh, Paramount, and other record companies regularly collaborated with the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA) to promote their race recording artists who toured on this segregated, all-black vaudeville circuit. For example, in a 1925 Pittsburgh Courier article, TOBA president Milton Starr announced that, in cooperation with Frank Walker of Columbia, the association had produced “a very attractive line of lithographs of the two stellar Columbia favorites, Bessie Smith and Clara Smith.” These lithographs were distributed, free of charge, to all TOBA venues that booked these blues stars to be given away to ticket buyers.102 On some occasions, record companies staged their own tours. Harry Pace, seems to have conceived the idea of a major tour by the Black Swan Troubadours, a vaudeville revue that performed throughout much of the eastern half of the United States and as far west as Texas to promote Black Swan discs. The label’s leading star, Ethel Waters & Her Jazz Masters, headlined the highly publicized tour, with Fletcher Henderson, Black Swan’s recording manager and musical director, serving as bandleader and pianist. Lester A. Walton, a prominent New York World columnist and future United States minister to Liberia, served as road manager and advance publicity agent for this enormously successful tour, which played engagements in fifty-four cities across twenty-one states between November 1921 and July 1922.103 En route, Waters appeared on radio station WVG in New Orleans, probably the first African American to perform on the new mass medium that would soon have a major influence on the promotion and development of recorded roots music.104 Polk C. Brockman likewise recognized the value of live appearances to help sell records. In July 1923, one of his earliest marketing stunts involved taking his shipment of five hundred copies of Fiddlin’ John Carson’s historic debut record, “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” / “The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster’s Going to Crow,” to a small fiddlers’ contest hosted in Atlanta’s Cable Piano Company Building as part of the entertainment for the Elks’ annual national convention. Brockman’s masterstroke was to have Carson appear on stage, where he spun both sides of his OKeh record for the audience on “an old German phonograph with a big morning glory horn.”105 “We sold the records right up there in that hall,” Brockman recalled. “We sold ’em just like hotcakes.” Although he did not sell all five hundred, Brockman noted that he “sold enough to give the thing some kick and momentum. Then, of course, people heard it, and they started calling upon the record store.”106

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The following November, Brockman staged a series of concerts in conjunction with James K. Polk Inc.’s exhibit of phonographs and records at Atlanta’s annual Southeastern Fair, a month-long event that regularly drew more than a half-million visitors. According to an Atlanta trade report, “Considerable interest in OKeh records was developed by concerts given at the booth by OKeh artists who reside in the Southeastern territory; in particular, Fiddlin’ John Carson, king of the mountaineer musicians and an exclusive OKeh artist.”107 These concerts attracted crowds to the exhibit and undoubtedly stimulated demand for records by the artists who performed. The next month, Talking Machine World directly attributed the continuing strong sales of OKeh products to these live appearances. “The interest aroused through the Polk exhibit at the Southeastern Fair was the cause for an unusual demand for Okeh records as special concerts were given by Okeh artists, in particular Fiddlin’ John Carson. Although the Fair was held more than a month ago, the demand for these records is still felt.”108 As a result of his aggressive marketing campaigns and innovative promotional efforts, the trade press heralded Brockman as a “keen student of merchandising and well posted on business conditions throughout his territory.”109 By its fourth anniversary in 1925, Brockman’s wholesale record business had grown into what the General Phonograph Corporation described, in a full-page congratulatory notice in Talking Machine World, as “the largest Record Distributor for Okeh in the Southeastern section of the United States.”110 By 1929, Brockman had expanded his company across the American South and into the Midwest, establishing branches in Richmond, Dallas, Memphis, Cincinnati, and New Orleans that, along with its Atlanta headquarters, amassed combined annual sales of $2 million.111 While Brockman parlayed his A&R experience and merchandising know-how into a major business enterprise, many other A&R managers and talent scouts worked with similar energy, ambition, and ingenuity to sell as many copies as possible of the records they personally helped usher into existence. On at least one occasion, for example, Jesse Johnson, a freelance talent scout who operated out of his De Luxe Music Shoppe in St. Louis, hired a local airplane pilot to drop leaflets plugging the latest race record releases on crowds of spectators attending baseball games.112 H. C. Speir also revealed a talent for innovative record promotion. In contrast to many of his fellow white southern dealers, Speir avidly courted African American customers at his Speir Phonograph Company on North Farish Street in Jackson, Mississippi’s black commercial district. Before making a purchase at his store, customers could listen to new releases in one of his four listening booths, two for white patrons and two for black patrons. Despite this parity, Speir estimated that his black customers spent fifty times what his white customers spent on phonograph records.113 He did a particularly brisk trade in race records on busy Saturdays, especially, he recalled, after the fall cotton harvest, when local farm tenants and sharecroppers were relatively flush with spending money. On some Saturdays, Speir reckoned, he might sell as many as six hundred records.114

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In a commonly used ploy, Speir attracted customers to his store by broadcasting the latest records over a loudspeaker rigged up outside, though he was soon forced to stop after nearby business owners complained about the noise.115 More ingeniously, he devised an attention-grabbing gimmick to sell Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Black Snake Moan” (OKeh 8455).116 According to blues scholar David Evans, “When the record came out, Speir fixed a rubber black snake to a phonograph turntable and put it in the display window so that when it turned, the snake would jump out at the customers. Every time it would jump out, the Negroes would jump back, and he attributed good sales to this device.”117 In one day, Speir recalled, he sold “several hundred copies” of Jefferson’s record.118 Other local distributors and retailers who doubled as A&R scouts also developed imaginative strategies to boost record sales, including arranging in-store personal appearances and autograph sessions by recording stars. One with a special knack for such promotions was Jason “Jake” Therrell, an occasional talent scout who worked

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FI G U R E 7.4 . Advertisement for the Speir Phonograph Company of Jackson, Mississippi, with inset of its owner and manager, H. C. Speir. Daily Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, Mississippi), May 15, 1929. Authors’ collections.

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FI G U R E 7. 5 . Harry Charles and wife (1923). Courtesy of Harry Charles Jr. and the Alex van der Tuuk Collection.

as a salesman and later, during World War II, as record department manager for the Southern Radio Corporation, RCA Victor’s Charlotte-based distributor for the Carolinas. Therrell “did promotion work, promoting artists,” his colleague Thomas Jamison recalled, “and if an artist would come into Charlotte, for instance, he would get a local dealer to have an autograph session and run an ad in the paper that would say [for example] Bill Monroe was going to be in town and he would sign records for the customers. They’d come in and buy a record and take it over and let Bill Monroe sign it. . . . They’d have people lined up outside the door to get in there to buy his records so that he could autograph it for ’em.”119 Another A&R scout who hustled records especially aggressively and effectively was the flamboyant Harry Charles. Around 1925, Charles resigned from his position as the music department manager at E. E. Forbes & Sons Piano Company, Paramount’s Birmingham distributor, to join the label as a full-time traveling salesman, covering a territory that included much of the southeastern United States, plus Louisiana. “In the course of making sales calls,” Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow write, “Charles logged 2,000 miles a week and wore out a new car every three months.”120 Sometimes he arranged for Paramount recording artists touring in the area to perform at local deal-

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ers’ stores. Once he even persuaded Ma Rainey to appear at an Atlanta ten-cent store, where she treated patrons to an hour-long concert, during which, Charles remembered, “they’re sellin’ them records there fast as she could hand ’em out.”121 Charles combined scouting activities for Paramount and occasional supervision of blues and hillbilly recording sessions with his work as a traveling salesman, regularly employing what he called “tricks” to secure new retail accounts and to increase record sales. In Chattanooga, he persuaded a reluctant dealer to adopt the label’s records by hiring a half-dozen or so black laborers to enter the store en masse and request particular Paramount titles. As a result of this scam, he claimed the store owner bought a few hundred records. “You got to be rough in this business line,” Charles later boasted.122 With a keen sense of the financial bottom line, Charles focused much of his sales energy on department stores in Atlanta and other major southern cities where up to $6,000 worth of records could be sold in a single week.123 “At these stores he would lease a prefabricated record counter and collect 40 percent of their monthly gross,” Calt and Wardlow recount. “The stores would in turn attract black shoppers by blaring the records over loudspeakers.”124 At one point during the 1920s, Charles operated a chain of twenty-one retail record shops in Atlanta, Richmond, Birmingham, Jacksonville, and other southeastern cities. Around 1926, he also secured his own Paramount distributorship in Charlotte, though it failed when he could not recover the money from retailers who had bought records on credit.125 Charles later managed a more successful Paramount distributorship in Atlanta before moving back to his adopted hometown of Birmingham around 1932.126 Perhaps no A&R man epitomized a Barnum-esque flair for promotion and ballyhoo in the interwar recording industry better than Elmer Aaron “E. A.” Fearn. President and founder of the Consolidated Talking Machine Company, OKeh’s Chicago distributor, Fearn also scouted talent and occasionally supervised local sessions during the early to mid-1920s, including those at which Louis Armstrong & His Hot Five made their first recordings.127 Fearn enthusiastically promoted the label through his regional distributorship, including not only sponsoring but also managing “The OKeh Record Football Team,” a semiprofessional squad whose official mascot was “a mammoth Okeh record.”128 In August 1923, as part of a massive, thirty-thousand-person “gala procession” marking the annual black Elks convention in Chicago, he arranged to have two local OKeh recording acts, King Oliver’s Jazz Band and Erskine Tate & His Vendome Orchestra, ride in the parade on flatbed trucks. The sides of the trucks were emblazoned with banners announcing their latest releases, including “Dipper Mouth Blues” (OKeh 4918) and “Chinaman Blues” (OKeh 4907), respectively. In addition, Fearn enlisted his staff to placard the entire parade route on Chicago’s South Side with posters featuring OKeh race record stars. Talking Machine World reported that Fearn “personally supervised” and “spared no expense in this work,” which resulted in an estimated 250,000 people, including fifty thousand visiting Elks, having “their attention called to the colored catalog of the General Phonograph Corp.”129

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Undoubtedly, Fearn’s most elaborate promotional events were two entertainment extravaganzas featuring OKeh blues and jazz stars at the Chicago Coliseum on South Wabash Avenue. On Saturday night, February 27, 1926, he staged the “OKeh Race Record Artists’ Night” with co-sponsorship from a local black Elks lodge.130 “Mr. Fearn, in advertising the carnival, effected a splendid tie-up with the leading music stores of the South Side colored district, where sixteen of the Okeh dealers exhibited specially dressed windows featuring race records,” a Chicago correspondent for Talking Machine World wrote. Fearn himself served as master of ceremonies. After former mayor William Hale Thompson’s welcoming address, the main program began, featuring performances by Bertha “Chippie” Hill, Hersal Thomas, Sippie Wallace, Perry Bradford, Clarence Williams, Richard M. Jones, and others. As one of the evening’s attractions, Fearn arranged for guitarist Lonnie Johnson, along with Louis Armstrong & His Hot Five, to make recordings onstage under the supervision of OKeh’s chief engineer Charles Hibbard. Fearn wanted to introduce the assembled audience to the mysterious process of commercial recording, hoping that it would make them fall deeper in love with the medium. Hibbard then played the recordings for “the thousands of music lovers who were present.”131 A Charleston dance contest followed, after which crowds “danced to the music of Cooke’s Dreamland Orchestra” into the early hours of the morning. An estimated fourteen thousand spectators attended the event, including a contingent of General Phonograph Corporation executives from its New York headquarters, among them president and founder Otto Heineman and vice president and general sales manager Allan Fritzsche.132 Local radio station WGN, owned and operated by the Chicago Tribune, broadcast Fearn’s show for the benefit of fans that were unable to attend.133 Even more spectacular was Fearn’s “OKeh Cabaret and Style Show,” staged three and a half months later, on Saturday, June 12. This program drew an estimated eighteen thousand paid spectators and, like its predecessor, was intended “to popularize and sell Okeh records.” All proceeds, however, benefited the building fund for Chicago’s black Musicians’ Union Local 208. Advance ticket sales were handled through thirty-three OKeh records dealers on the South and West Sides of Chicago. A succession of fifteen OKeh recording acts, including Louis Armstrong & His Hot Five, entertained the crowd between 9:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. A women’s fashion show began at 2:00 a.m., followed an hour later by a Charleston dance contest. Fearn’s no-holds-barred approach to promotion prompted a Talking Machine World article to highlight his “Barnumism” as a “producer of negro shows de luxe.”134 “The tremendous amount of money expended in advertising and publicity, in advance of this affair,” the article observed, “was indicative of Mr. Fearn’s confidence of the success of the venture.” It continued: Every conceivable manner and means of letting the public know of this event was utilized, for example, a newspaper campaign of thirty days’ duration divided among four of the leading negro publications played a most important role in this respect, over sixty-five thousand pieces of literature printed in the form of pluggers, handbills, posters, theatrical

All in all, the article declared the carnival “another milestone in the very successful career of E. A. Fearn” and “one of the outstanding trade events of the year.”136 Irving Mills operated primarily beyond the blues and hillbilly records fields, but like Fearn, he revealed himself to be a skilled promotional man, especially when publicizing his company, Master Records Inc., and its twin labels, Master and Variety. On Friday, March 12, 1937, a few weeks before releasing his first batch of jazz records, Mills organized “a housewarming party” at his new recording studios on Broadway in Midtown Manhattan. Some five hundred recording and entertainment industry insiders attended,

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one-sheets, dodgers, etc. . . . All moving picture theatres on Chicago’s South Side ran slides announcing the affair and over one hundred negro taxicabs carried stickers announcing that they were the official means of transportation to and from the affair. For one solid week preceding the show band wagons, floats and a unique Crystal Wagon were employed to traverse the streets of Chicago’s Black Belt, in the proverbial circus style, and this means of publicity was climaxed on the day of the affair when a parade was held of the entire membership of the Musician’s [sic] Union, who were the principal benefactors financially, augmented by decorated floats, automobiles, band wagons, and other publicity stunts.135

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FI G U R E 7.6 . Full-page advertisement for E. A. Fearn’s “OKeh Cabaret and Style Show,” Chicago Defender, June 12, 1926. Authors’ collections.

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including Master Records’ star attraction, Duke Ellington.137 Two days later, with the assistance of, among others, John Hammond, Milt Gabler, and Helen Oakley, who had successfully organized similar events for the Chicago Rhythm Club, Mills hosted a star-studded Sunday afternoon jam session at his studios for four hundred guests. The event attracted considerable publicity in the jazz and mainstream press, including a photographic essay in Life magazine. Among the jazz musicians who performed at this racially integrated function were Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Lester Young, and Mezz Mezzrow, while the highlight was a jam session featuring Ellington, Chick Webb, and Artie Shaw.138 In addition to such promotional extravaganzas, Mills was actively engaged in the marketing of his Master and Variety releases, not only in the United States but also in Europe. On June 23, 1937, he sailed for London to negotiate the European distribution of his new labels. “Mills’ surprise decision to enter the foreign market as an independent producer and distributor was undoubtedly influenced by the rapid success and unexpected selling power of Master and Variety labels in the US,” a Tempo correspondent reported.139 Before going abroad, Mills had arranged for another promotional gimmick to take place during his absence. In late June, a Paramount Pictures crew shot a short film demonstrating the various stages involved in the production of 78-rpm phonograph records, including scenes in Masters Records’ studios of vocalist Ivie Anderson and Duke Ellington & His Orchestra cutting a song, “Oh, Babe! Maybe Someday,” ostensibly destined for the Variety label. The five-minute film was titled Record Making with Duke Ellington and His Orchestra and, as Jim Prohaska notes, “should have caught the theatergoers’ attention, and brought some attractive publicity to the Variety label.” Unfortunately, by the time the film reached theaters in September 1937, Mills had discontinued the Master label; Variety folded the following month, and the AndersonEllington Orchestra recording was never released.140 John Hammond offered a shrewd analysis of the failure of Mills’s once-promising endeavor in the November 1937 issue of Down Beat: A new record venture actually requires an enormous amount of capital, as well as recording originality, an aggressive sales force, and a couple of really big artists appealing both to the retail and automatic nickel phonograph [i.e., jukebox] trade. Mills was forced to depend on the sales organization of the American-Brunswick-Columbia combination for sales, which was having a difficult enough time selling its own competing Brunswick and Vocalion lines in a field where there is unheard of competition already from the two RCAVictor and the highly potent Decca products. Outside of the Raymond Scott unit, Mills introduced no new bands to the trade with sufficient originality to appeal to record buyers, and of his own artists only Duke Ellington has much of a record following and Duke’s is so expensive a band that it is often difficult to clear expenses with him on discs.141

In enumerating the problems that often plagued start-up ventures in the recording industry, Hammond had identified the crucial importance of post-production practices.

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As he knew from personal experience, record companies’ commercial success was not just determined by the ability of their A&R staffs to find, secure, and record appealing talent and material. Those firms were, above everything else, in the business of marketing and selling records, with all the challenges that entailed. They flourished or failed according to their ability to persuade customers to buy their records. Not surprising, then, that so many A&R managers, whose lives and livelihoods were inextricably bound up with these commercial realities, regularly turned their energies, their fertile imaginations, and their myriad contacts among dealers and distributors to promoting and selling the records they had supervised and issued, adding yet another dimension to the significance of A&R officials. In this regard, as in so many others, A&R managers and their department staffs were simultaneously the principal architects of key industry protocols and of important musical developments in recorded roots music between the wars. Through their multiple contributions, before, during, and after recording sessions, they helped lay the foundations for a major new commercial and cultural feature on the domestic and the global musical landscape. When the period around World War II brought dramatic new technological, economic, social, and cultural changes to that landscape, A&R officials were still there, working to make and promote records and turn a profit in a new era of roots music recording.

Once the almighty oligarch of the pop disk industry, the a&r men have gone into a slow but relentless eclipse over the past couple of years coincidental with the rise of a new music biz phenomenon— the independent record producer. — Herm Schoenfeld, “A&R Men Near Total Eclipse,” Variety, November 30, 1960

8

Nowhere Near Total Eclipse A&R WO RK AF TE R WO RLD WA R II

I N J U N E 1 94 8 , E L I O B E R S T E I N L E F T R CA V I C TO R F O R T H E

third time in his long and highly controversial career.1 In the years between 1939, when after a decade of service he was peremptorily fired as that company’s A&R manager, and the end of his third stint in that post that had started in 1945, this indefatigable seeker of talent, hits, and profit had been busy.2 Moreover, as befitted an old-school A&R man of endless resourcefulness, limited scruples, and a convenient myopia when it came to legal details, Oberstein had remained active on many different fronts. “Thru the years,” explained Billboard music editor Joe Carlton, “Oberstein has amassed holdings and properties whose exact extent has been a popular gossip 265

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subject for music publishers, songwriters and rival record execs for years. It is known that he holds interests in several pressing plants, an album and sleeve manufacturing factory with a ‘paper’ outlet, property in up-State [sic] New York, several theaters thru New York, New Jersey, etc. He has acted as consultant for various indie labels, has written songs under various nom de plumes and withal has sized up as one of the most powerfully rated record men in the biz.”3 Writing in 1948, Carlton could only hint at the extent of Oberstein’s eventual contribution to the recording industry, which continued to multiply right up until his death, at the age of fifty-nine, in June 1960.4 During the 1940s and 1950s, Oberstein added a mind-boggling range of activities and responsibilities to his prewar résumé, working across the fields of roots, popular, and classical music in A&R, record manufacturing, song publishing, songwriting, distribution, and sales. His triumphs and trials (literal as well as figurative) during this period offer a useful introduction to the enormous changes that occurred within the postwar recording industry, many of them linked to the rise of the “record producer” as a distinct, if at first loosely defined, category of employment and to the proliferation of dynamic new independent record companies. These industry-wide developments reconfigured the work of A&R representatives in all genres, but nowhere more so than within the world of commercially recorded American roots music. Yet, even in this new environment, the sheer resilience of important prewar A&R officials such as Oberstein indicated that not everything and certainly not everybody had changed. In the postwar roots recording business, the break with the past, though significant and irreversible, was not absolute: A&R departments and their staffs endured at labels both big and small. Although those officials’ artists and repertoire duties were often recalibrated, as in so many phases during the history of A&R work, major new trends were regularly complicated by significant countertrends. Innovation coexisted with a commitment to following or modifying older practices. Indeed, in many ways, the entire postwar roots recording industry was built squarely on the foundations laid by the pioneering A&R managers of the interwar years. One revealing example of this kind of retooling came on June 25, 1949, when Billboard officially reclassified its weekly best-selling “hillbilly” records list as the “Folk (Country & Western)” chart, following several years of experimentation with “folk,” “rustic,” “cowboy,” and other designations. At the same time, it renamed its best-selling “race” records list as the “Rhythm & Blues” chart. These were new developments, yet the notion of segregated musical and marketing categories had been created and embedded in the industry and in popular consciousness by the likes of Ralph Peer and Frank Walker decades earlier. Those distinctions remained central to the ethos and procedures of the recording and broadcasting industries until the rock & roll explosion of the mid- to late 1950s exposed just how much interaction persisted across those powerful musical, social, and racial boundaries.5 Another sign of continuity amid epochal change was the rise of a new generation of A&R men—and they remained overwhelmingly men—who had cut their professional

As Berle Adams appreciated, one of the most significant transitional figures in A&R work was Eli Oberstein. After RCA Victor fired him in 1939, due to a catalog of misdeeds revolving mostly around conflicts of interest and creative accounting practices, Oberstein set up the US Record Corporation, serving as vice president, with Charles Hemenway, of the investment firm Paine Webber & Company, as president. In 1940, when that venture floundered, Oberstein launched the Imperial Record Company, which he soon merged with the Classic Record Company of Pittsburgh to oversee an expanding complex of independent labels.8 Over the next decade or so, those labels came to include Royale, Elite (for which hot jazz trumpeter Bunny Berigan cut his last sides), and Top Hat (purveyor of salacious “party records”). In order to cut costs, all of these labels regularly released records that featured an older selection on the flipside, drawn from Oberstein’s considerable back catalog, with altered artist credits. Arguably, the most important of his new start-up labels were Varsity and HIT, the latter of which enjoyed a smash in 1944 with Louis Prima & His Orchestra’s “Angelina” (HIT 7106). Always wheeling and usually double-dealing, Oberstein made most of

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teeth, along with their first recordings, before World War II. Others were mentored by older A&R pioneers and carried the influence and inspiration of these trailblazers into the new era. “He was a genius, that Ralph Peer, and he was an angel to me,” recalled Don Pierce, who worked with and for Peer in the early 1950s before becoming an important figure in the country music recording industry as an independent record label owner (4 Star and Starday), song publisher, salesman, A&R manager, and sometime record producer. “For some reason [Peer] liked me because I would get in my car and go coast to coast and work with distributors and listen to disk jockeys and get to the one-stops. That reminded him of when he was on the road for RCA [Victor] and how he picked up Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family and others,” Pierce remembered.6 “Eli Oberstein was a clever record man; he understood the business. He knew how to pick tunes, he knew how to pick talent, and he knew how to pick orchestras, too,” observed Berle Adams (born Beryl Adasky), who got his first job at Targ & Dinner, the Chicago distributor for Varsity, one of Oberstein’s many independent record labels. Adams, who enjoyed a high-profile career as co-founder of Mercury Records and later as a senior executive at MCA, learned much from Oberstein, not least an appreciation of the most basic function fulfilled by A&R men, even if he couched it in rather more romantic language than his hard-boiled mentor usually managed: “That’s the magic of the record business, to be able to find good talent and find the right material for them to record.”7 As these testimonials suggest, the A&R torch was passed to a new generation during the 1940s and 1950s, but the A&R past was not simply discarded, even amid the structural, technological, economic, and social changes that transformed the postwar recording industry.

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his money at Varsity from cheap reissues of old Crown, Gennett, and Paramount recordings that he apparently transferred directly from already available commercial releases rather than from the original masters, the appropriate licensing rights to which he may not have bothered to secure.9 Habitually testing legal and ethical limits, Oberstein’s reissue policy allowed him to circumvent a wartime ban on new recordings that was imposed between 1942 and 1944 by James C. Petrillo, president of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM). As Billboard noted in January 1943, Oberstein was at least putting much-needed merchandise into the empty record bins at “Gimbel’s and Macy’s department stores, two of the largest [New York] retailers,” and at “smaller marts, distressed by skimpy shipments from major companies.”10 More controversially, Oberstein also issued new sides that he claimed had been recorded and pressed in Mexico, releasing them under an array of artist pseudonyms—a familiar A&R ploy that, in this case, also protected performers from accusations of strikebreaking. Some industry insiders, including officials at AFM’s New York Local 802, which summoned Oberstein before its Trial Board for questioning, suspected that the whole Mexican recording story was an elaborate ruse and that, in defiance of the union ban, Oberstein was secretly cutting new material with a mix of amateurs and anonymized professionals in New York hotel rooms.11 The furor came to a climax when Oberstein announced his intention to release recordings of “Der Fuhrer’s Face” by Arthur Fields & His Orchestra (HIT 7043) and “I Had the Craziest Dream” by Johnny Jones & His Orchestra (HIT 7024), despite apparently having failed to secure copyright clearance for these songs from their New York publishers, Ralph Peer’s Southern Music Publishing Company and Bregman, Vocco & Conn Inc., respectively. The sessions also flagrantly flouted the AFM ban.12 In any event, in May 1943 Oberstein was hauled in for further AFM questioning and soon thrown out of Local 802.13 Such opprobrium and censure might have stopped less brazen men in their tracks, but Oberstein hardly missed a beat. With the single-minded ambition and entrepreneurial zeal that typified his generation of tenacious A&R officials, he quickly found other outlets for his talents, and other talents to boost his income. Two of his most lucrative undertakings were songwriting and copyright acquisition, longtime staples of A&R. In January 1944, Oberstein co-founded Ford Music with Sam Wigler, formerly of the prominent Tin Pan Alley song publishers M. Witmark & Sons. Oberstein and Wigler registered their new firm with Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI), a relatively new performance rights licensing organization set up by American broadcasters in October 1939 to challenge what they saw as the stranglehold of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) over licensing agreements. For years, ASCAP had largely controlled what music was played on radio and at what cost. BMI’s policy toward songwriters and publishers working in minority and specialized music genres was far more open than that of its rival, and the new organization was destined to play a major role in the growth of postwar roots music and the advent of rock & roll.14 Throughout his career, Oberstein had, by his own estimate, “written a hundred

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FI G U R E 8 .1. Studio portrait of Eli Oberstein (ca. 1955). Courtesy of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

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songs under various nom de plumes.” Often these were probably “cut-ins,” or unearned songwriting credits. However, in 1946, when Oberstein, masquerading as Patrick Lewis, claimed co-authorship with Sunny Skylar of several recently recorded songs, Billboard expressed the surprise felt among most industry insiders who were habitually “given to looking for larceny” wherever Oberstein was concerned, but conceded that he may have actually had a hand in writing songs such as “Whatta Ya Gonna Do” and “Wherever There’s Me There’s You.” The magazine did point out, however, that, among several versions on other labels, both songs had been recorded for RCA Victor—the former by Louis Armstrong & His Orchestra (RCA Victor 20-1891), the latter by actress-big band singer Betty Hutton, with Joe Lilley & His Orchestra and the Four Hits (RCA Victor 20-1915)—at a time when Oberstein, then the label’s popular music A&R chief, happened to wield a great deal of influence over company decisions about which artists and songs to record, and what to release.15 Under Oberstein’s direction, Varsity reissued older recordings, many of unidentified provenance, along with cover versions of the latest hits rerecorded by artists known, unknown, and incognito. Again, this was an extension of prewar practices, when A&R officials had spent many hours perusing the catalogs of competitors, looking for

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potential hits to reissue or rerecord, and recruiting—or sometimes poaching—established artists to add to their own rosters. In July 1948, soon after his third and final departure from RCA Victor, Oberstein instigated a new sales plan for Varsity. According to Billboard, the plan was modeled on the old American Record Corporation (ARC) sales formula, but, like his whole infatuation with budget-priced labels, Oberstein also drew on his experience managing his former employer’s cheap Bluebird line before the war. At Varsity, the strategy was to bypass distributors and sell directly to chain stores, jukebox operators, and independent retailers. Varsity initially depended largely on the back catalog Oberstein had acquired from Crown, Gennett, and Paramount, enhanced by the purchase of 250 masters from the defunct Sonora Records. In June 1949, he further expanded Varsity’s holdings by acquiring two hundred masters from the Majestic Radio Company.16 As it happened, the ubiquitous Oberstein had briefly worked for that firm, too. In early 1945, just before he was rehired by RCA Victor and apparently in need of quick cash, possibly to meet some legal fees or extra-legal financial commitments, Oberstein had sold his pressing plant and recorded masters for $500,000 to Majestic, which wanted to break into record manufacturing. To help fulfill those ambitions, in March of that year, the company even hired Oberstein as an executive vice president, reportedly at an annual salary of around $50,000. By May 1945, however, Oberstein was already on his way back to RCA Victor, where he remained until his sudden exit three years later, all the while holding down numerous other jobs and consultancies, and running several other full-fledged record enterprises.17 By 1949, Varsity’s releases were being distributed independently by yet another Oberstein firm: Wright Records. That June, Oberstein brokered an unusual “co-operative” arrangement with Columbia Records, whereby Wright Records would distribute Columbia’s line of budget-priced Harmony records. Perhaps predictably, given his track record, the deal soon soured. Columbia sued Oberstein for $60,000 for failing to pay for any of the Harmony releases it had supplied to Wright Records for distribution. This prompted a $75,000 countersuit from the feisty Oberstein, who claimed that Columbia had defaulted on agreed-upon delivery deadlines and record quotas. He also alleged that the company had transferred popular jazz-blues vocalist Pearl Bailey’s releases from its Harmony label to its flagship Columbia label and thereby deprived Oberstein of the revenue he had anticipated he would earn from distributing her records.18 In early 1951, Oberstein’s Varsity-Wright operations collapsed. Varsity, it seems, was not equipped to cope with new ceilings on retail record prices imposed by the United States Office of Price Stabilization during the Korean War.19 It took Oberstein precisely ten days to replace Wright Records with another cheap label, a reactivated and rebranded Royale, which he announced would reissue much of the Varsity catalog, although he was now also scouring England for new material to rerecord for the American market. If this was farther afield than he had tended to travel in search of roots music talent and compositions before World War II, it was all part of Oberstein’s ceaseless effort to find lucrative properties—human and musical, new and old—to

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release and market for profit. At the time, Billboard suggested that his launch of “the Royale venture finally dispels the recurring, persistent rumors that Oberstein would return to artist and repertoire work with any of several permanent diskeries.”20 Strictly speaking, this was correct. But Billboard failed to recognize that Oberstein’s creation of an endless string of new independent labels, along with his various publishing firms, distribution companies, and pressing plants, served as a vehicle for much the same ambition and required much the same kind of work as when he had been an A&R manager at RCA Victor during the 1930s. The crucial difference was that Oberstein was now the boss of at least some of the firms for which he worked—not that the peripatetic entrepreneur ever worked exclusively for any one organization. In October 1951, while still running his various labels, he departed on a “two week talent trek” to the West Coast “in his guise as pop recording boss for King Records.” This was part of a generally ill-fated attempt by Syd Nathan’s Cincinnati-based King Records Company, already emerging as a major force in country music and rhythm & blues (R&B), to break into the popular records market with promising acts such as Dick Brown, Mary Small, and the Leslie Brothers, all now long since forgotten.21 Oberstein’s dalliance with King, which also extended to a messy agreement to share classical recording masters, was neither his first nor his last collaboration with upand-coming independent record companies. In 1944, he had acted as a silent—in fact, initially, as a secret—financial partner in the Los Angeles–based Juke Box Records, recently founded by Art Rupe and Ben Siegert. Rupe (born Arthur Goldberg) was destined to become arguably the most important A&R man and record producer in gospel music during the decade after World War II, with Alex Bradford, the Pilgrim Travelers, Sister Wynona Carr, the Soul Stirrers, and the Swan Silvertones among his credits. He had briefly been a partner at another West Coast start-up, Atlas Records, which had contrived to sign Frankie Laine, Nat King Cole, and Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers without managing to score a hit record with any of them. It was a chastening lesson in the vagaries of the recording business. At Juke Box, following a couple of decent-selling R&B releases with the Sepia Tones’s “Boogie #1” (Juke Box UR-100) and the Blues Woman’s “Voo-it! Voo-it” (Juke Box JB502), and a nationwide smash with Roy Milton and His Solid Senders’ “R. M. Blues,” (Juke Box JB504), Rupe found himself being courted by several potential partners and investors. Among them was the aptly named Al Middleman, co-owner of HIT with Eli Oberstein. Rupe apparently signed a deal whereby he and Middleman became partners in both Middleman’s Sterling Records and Rupe’s Juke Box label. By August 1946, though, the relationship had ended. Mostly, this was because Rupe could not get access to Sterling’s accounts. But it did not help matters when Rupe discovered that Oberstein, by this time back at RCA Victor though clearly unperturbed by any possible conflict of interest between his role at that major company and his involvement in multiple competing firms, was still co-owner of Sterling. According to the terms of the agreement Rupe had signed with Middleman, it also made Oberstein a partner in Juke Box. Rupe walked away

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from Juke Box, keeping the label’s masters, many of which he reissued on his new label, Specialty. Launched in September 1946, Specialty soon became an important “indie” with exceptional gospel performers such as Brother Joe May, the Soul Stirrers, and the Swan Silvertones; popular R&B acts such as Percy Mayfield, Roy Milton, John Lee Hooker, and Jimmy Liggins; as well as breakout rock & rollers Larry Williams, Little Richard, and Lloyd Price. Rupe even found time to cut records with Zydeco pioneer Clifton Chenier; to issue some passable, though largely passed-over country sides by Shot Jackson, Claude King & His Hillbilly Ramblers, and Johnny Tyler; and, later, to record some riotous rockabilly with Roddy Jackson.22 Art Rupe always maintained that he had little stomach for the business side of running a record label. He regarded the grunt work, “the distribution contacts, the record promotion,” as “all things I had to do to get my kicks being in the studio, recording.” He did his fair share of traditional A&R work on behalf of his label: scouting talent, signing contracts with performers and songwriters, promoting his artists and their releases in the press and on radio, urging retailers and jukebox operators to use his records, and setting up Venice Music (BMI) and the seldom-used Greenwich Music (ASCAP) as Specialty’s publishing arms. Yet Rupe was happiest and probably most influential in the studio. Years later, he described accompanying Oberstein to some postwar RCA Victor recording sessions. Despite his relative inexperience, Rupe already had a clear sense of what he wanted his own records to sound like and what was needed to make a hit. “I’d say, ‘Mister Oberstein (I called him ‘mister’), you gotta bring out the guitar more,’—and he did it! I was just a kid.” Rupe, like many others of this new generation of label owners-cum-A&R men, began to fulfill far more creative roles than had most of his predecessors and mentors, which for him, despite the awkwardness around the Juke Box deal, included Oberstein.23 In 1947, Rupe even entered into another partnership with Oberstein, this time a little more knowingly, when the veteran A&R man purchased the Los Angeles–based United Record pressing plant. Rupe bought into United, one of the dozens of independent record-pressing facilities that enabled the exponential growth of postwar indie labels, and a company that Oberstein had somewhat mysteriously acquired, according to Billboard, “in lieu of a debt owed by Al Middleman’s Sterling Record firm with which he had business dealings at one time.”24 Rupe’s first love, however, remained scouting and recording artists who, for all their individual gifts, matched his vision for Specialty. Along with a crack team of versatile A&R men, among them Harold Battiste, Sonny Bono, Bumps Blackwell, and Johnny Vincent, Rupe developed the kind of studio-craft that would be increasingly, though never exclusively, associated with full-fledged independent producers working outside A&R departments. Another of Eli Oberstein’s close associates from the world of postwar R&B indie labels was Harold Lubinsky, who founded Savoy Records in November 1942. Oberstein and Lubinsky were kindred spirits, with equally ruthless approaches to the business of making both records and money. As he did with King, Oberstein regularly shared

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masters with Savoy, making it hard for contemporary accountants to follow the trail of royalties payable to artists and songwriters, and for subsequent discographers to follow the provenance of some recordings. In August 1948, Oberstein and Lubinsky formally went into business together, setting up a new label called Franklin with Donald Gabor, president of Continental Records. Yet another budget-priced label, Franklin released one pop and one race record each week, drawing upon a mixture of older masters that Lubinsky had stockpiled and some new recordings. The label offered dealers an attractive “cash on delivery” price of twenty-two and a half cents a disc that, at a retail list price of thirty-seven and a half cents, established Franklin as the maker of “the cheapest 10-inch records on the market.”25 Personally tutored in the darker arts of the recording business by Oberstein, Lubinsky himself hired a remarkable crew of gifted A&R men, among them Ralph Bass, Ozzie Cadena, Lee Magid, Fred Mendlesohn, Buck Ram, and Teddy Reig, all of whom would become significant figures in postwar jazz and R&B. Together they turned Savoy into a jazz powerhouse with major established artists such as Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins, and the new Turks of bebop, Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon. The label also recruited and recorded smooth black vocal groups such as the Four Buddies; rocking R&B acts including Nappy Brown, Big Maybelle, Varetta Dillard, Big Jay McNeely, and Billy Wright; and gospel performers like the Original Kings of Harmony. Savoy even recorded some country sides with Teddy Tucker’s Band & the Hilltoppers, whose “She Didn’t Lay That Pistol Down” (Savoy 119), waxed in 1942, was a response to Al Dexter’s hugely popular and much-covered wartime hit, “Pistol Packin’ Mama.”26 Here, then, was more evidence that those who ran the new postwar indies, like their prewar A&R predecessors, were never entirely trapped within the conventional genre and marketing divisions that still dominated the roots recording industry and that symbolized and helped perpetuate far deeper racial divisions in the United States. Oberstein had always displayed an eclectic spirit whenever opportunity beckoned. After World War II, he even diversified into classical music. In November 1952, he purchased the bankrupt Allegro Records at auction for $75,000 and used the label as an outlet for classical recordings that had been made during the war and immediately afterward by sundry Russian, Czech, and German orchestras.27 Oberstein had already secured forty-three of those “long hair masters” in Vienna and Berlin during “a two week junket in Europe” in 1951 while hunting material for Royale; other masters had been made for, or at least came to reside in the vaults of, East German radio stations.28 Oberstein often simply fabricated the origins of the recordings and the identities of the artists and orchestras he issued on Allegro. His classical adventures eventually ran afoul of the law in 1954 when he issued an unauthorized, unattributed, nineteen-LP set of opera star Regina Resnik performing Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (Allegro 3125-3143) that retailed for a steep $56. Although the albums were billed as recordings of a concert at the Dresden State Opera House, under the baton of a fictitious conductor named Fritz Schreiber, they had actually been recorded at the Bayreuth Festival in West Germany.29

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That same year, Oberstein also bought out a Chicago independent record company, Rondo, which, along with subsidiaries Acorn, Evon, and Venus, joined the ever-expanding stable of Oberstein-owned or co-owned labels that he now corralled together as the Record Corporation of America, based in Union, New Jersey.30 Oberstein mischievously chose the new name for his umbrella organization because he hoped it would create confusion, maybe even a little unearned publicity, by association with the name of his former employer, the RCA Victor Division of the Radio Corporation of America.31 Until his death in 1960, Oberstein continued technical experiments at Rondo with simulated stereo, real stereo, colored vinyl, lurid sleeve designs, and the new microgroove twelve-inch album, while issuing and reissuing a range of music that defied easy categorization. In Rondo’s catalog, recordings of Caribbean steel bands jostled with albums of railroad sound effects; Mardi Gras jazz jams from New Orleans appeared alongside records, possibly bootlegged, of works by Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, and Schubert; albums of music drawn from popular musicals such as Oklahoma! and South Pacific competed for attention and sales with musical travelogues from Spain and Puerto Rico. Much the same was true of the musical offerings heard on Oberstein’s companion label Rondo-lette.32 Revealingly, in a December 1958 Billboard notice about the latest batch of Rondo-lette releases, the industry’s premier trade journal once more referred to the label boss as a “colorful a.&.r exec.” It was right with both descriptive terms. “Obie” was nothing if not colorful; nothing if not always an A&R man, irrespective of what his official title may have been at any moment and at any of the firms he owned or for which he worked.33

NEW A&R, OLD A&R: ENTER THE RECORD PRODUCER

There are always dangers in casting any individual as the embodiment of any role or trend. When that individual is as idiosyncratic as Eli Oberstein, those perils are amplified. Nevertheless, Oberstein’s hectic, multifaceted career in the 1940s and 1950s, with its pattern of constant retrenchment and reinvention, exemplified the mixture of continuity and change that characterized the postwar recording industry. Oberstein’s professional longevity proved that there was still life left in some of the old dogs of interwar A&R, even if others fell by the wayside when they failed to master the new tricks appropriate to the postwar era. Many important A&R figures of that earlier period, such as Polk C. Brockman, W. R. Calaway, Harry Charles, Aletha Dickerson, Art Laibly, J. B. Long, Helen Oakley Dance, and H. C. Speir, had already made their best and most enduring contributions to the roots recording industry by the outbreak of World War II. Nevertheless, some remained active in and around the music business. Dance, for example, continued to write regularly about jazz and blues after the war. Most, however, withdrew from the business, only to be rediscovered and interviewed during the 1960s and 1970s by music enthusiasts and scholars, who sought to chronicle and understand the roles of A&R veterans in prewar roots recording.

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Like Oberstein, several A&R pioneers hung in and even prospered after the war’s end. At Columbia, Art Satherley was active in the industry until his retirement in 1952, and Don Law, his longtime assistant and eventual successor, remained on staff until 1967 and later produced independently. In the early postwar years, both A&R men traversed the nation trying to locate new, mostly country performers and songwriters, with Satherley working the territory west of El Paso, Law everything to the east. Lefty Frizzell, Carl Smith, Little Jimmy Dickens, and Marty Robbins were among the many acts they signed. By the time Satherley retired, having supervised the recording of an estimated twenty-seven thousand masters (twenty-two thousand of which, he reckoned, had been issued), he had risen to the position of vice president of Columbia in charge of its country music A&R department—a position to which Law promptly ascended and from which he helped place Nashville on the map as the nation’s country music recording and song publishing capital.34 Elsewhere, prewar A&R pioneers Jack and Dave Kapp oversaw Decca’s development as a major player in the roots, popular, and classical recording fields. After his brother Jack’s death in 1949, Dave continued to work at Decca Records as vice president in charge of recording. In 1951, after a seventeen-year association with the company, he resigned and went to work as A&R director of popular music at RCA Victor, where he signed and helped launch the recording careers of Harry Belafonte and Eartha Kitt, among others. Two years later, Kapp left to form his own independent company, Kapp Records. At the helm of his own label, he notoriously shunned rock & roll in favor of more “middle-of-the-road” pop fare, including Brian Hyland’s chart-topping 1960 novelty song, “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” (Kapp K-342, but originally released on Leader, a Kapp subsidiary, as Leader 805). But Kapp also continued to trade, just as he had done during his prewar years at Decca, in a wide range of musical genres, including jazz, R&B, and country music. Perhaps most famously, Kapp’s label scored a #1 hit in 1964 with sixty-three-year-old Louis Armstrong’s “Hello, Dolly!” (Kapp 573), Under Kapp’s stewardship, Kapp Records also released albums by several new postwar country singers, among them Mel Tillis, Cal Smith, and Leroy Van Dyke, as well as by aging prewar giants such as Bob Wills, who made the last recordings of his career for the label, and Maybelle Carter, whom Kapp had recorded for Decca between 1936 and 1938 as a member of the Carter Family.35 Like the Kapp brothers, Frank Walker also continued to make important contributions to postwar American roots music. In 1943, on a tip from his friend, Fred Forster, a Chicago music publisher, Walker brought to RCA Victor rising Grand Ole Opry star Eddy Arnold, who went on to become one of the best-selling country music artists of the late 1940s and 1950s. In 1945, Walker left that firm to become the first president and general manager of MGM’s records division—a job that Oberstein also coveted. Before he retired in 1959, Walker had helped put the movie company’s new enterprise on a sound footing, not least by signing Hank Williams and developing the movie soundtrack album as a powerful moneymaker. The genial Dan Hornsby followed his

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former mentor Walker to MGM Records but died prematurely in 1951, at the age of only fifty-one.36 Ralph Peer, the most influential of all first-generation roots music A&R men, maintained his phenomenally successful career after World War II, albeit principally as a music publisher, a role he had initially developed to augment his early A&R work at Victor and its successor RCA Victor between 1926 and 1934. He expanded and diversified his Peer-Southern publishing firms to include popular music and a variety of American roots-based styles, as well as a vast catalog of Latin American and Caribbean material. Eventually, he extended his publishing business into Canada, Great Britain, continental Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Africa. By the time of his death, in January 1960 (less than five months before his old nemesis Eli Oberstein passed), Peer had created the basic structure of the mighty peermusic corporation that endures into the twenty-first century as a family-owned international enterprise. His company’s postwar global prosperity was founded on his recognition during the interwar years that owning the rights to best-selling songs offered the best chance of long-term profits for savvy A&R men and music publishers who, as with Peer, were often the same individuals.37 The under-appreciated continuity between pre- and postwar A&R personnel and their work, however, should not obscure the highly significant changes already underway by the late 1940s. Nor should it diminish the extent to which industry insiders perceived the postwar years as an era of profound and, at times, troubling upheaval. This was certainly the case at RCA Victor, whose history embodies broader efforts among major labels to negotiate a time of new challenges as well as new opportunities. When Eli Oberstein suddenly resigned in 1948, RCA Victor reorganized its A&R operations. It placed Jack Hallstrom, veteran manager of the firm’s general merchandising department, in charge of an eight-man committee consisting chiefly of five traditional A&R staff members from RCA Victor’s various regional divisions and record lines. These included Charlie Grean, who had responsibility for hot jazz and specialty recordings; his supervisor Steve Sholes, a Frank Walker protégé who directed the firm’s race and hillbilly operations; and Walter Heebner, who handled “popular, hillbilly, race, hot jazz, international and other specialties” on the West Coast. The other three committee members, according to Billboard’s editor-in-chief Joe Csida (who soon became head of A&R at RCA Victor and later, in 1960, at Capitol), were “primarily sales and merchandising experts, rather than artist and rep[ertoire] men.” Casting this as nothing short of an “A&R ‘revolution,’ ” Csida asserted that the new committee represented “a drastic departure in basic concept and purposes” from the way that A&R had worked previously at RCA Victor and throughout much of the recording industry. “The emphasis in a. and r. is being removed almost entirely (except by group action) from close contact with the creative end of the music-record business (publishers, artists, etc.) and is being placed upon the merchandising and sales aspects of the diskeries operation,” Csida explained.38

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This was a fascinating analysis. Csida emphasized how RCA Victor’s restructuring threatened to undermine the previously close links among A&R staff members, recording artists, and songwriters—bonds that were real enough, but which were often problematic and frequently, from the perspective of artists and songwriters, highly exploitative. Even more intriguingly, Csida placed old-style A&R officials firmly on the creative side of the recording business, clearly differentiating them from sales and merchandising staff. But commercial agendas—the whole business of making records that might sell and then marketing them effectively—was never too far from the minds of even the most artistically engaged and creative A&R men. Financial calculations consistently shaped their decisions about recruiting talent and about the content, sound, release, and marketing of their records. Csida’s characterization of interwar A&R work was somewhat romantic. Yet he was surely correct in identifying the postwar period as one of turmoil and recalibration within the industry. Less than a year after restructuring its A&R operations, RCA Victor dissolved its new eight-man committee. In April 1949, the company announced that Jack Hallstrom would henceforth be the “sole arbiter of artist and repertoire at RCA Victor.”39 In some respects, this was less a revolution than a counterrevolution; it restored enormous power and discretion to a single individual, just as Oberstein and other interwar A&R giants had once seemed to wield almost complete personal authority over recording and releasing records. Nevertheless, Hallstrom’s promotion also symbolized the tendency to associate A&R more closely with sales and marketing than with creative activities, however loosely defined. Moreover, the changes in RCA Victor’s A&R hierarchy occurred within the context of far more wide-ranging and enduring shifts that radically altered how A&R managers and their staffs functioned within broader industry structures. By November 1960, just five months after Oberstein died, Variety music editor Herman “Herm” Schoenfeld dramatically, if rather too simplistically, declared, “The artists & repertoire chief has come to the end of his era.”40 In fact, A&R managers were busy reinventing themselves and their roles. Significantly, every one of the new generation of executives Schoenfeld mentioned in his premature eulogy for old-style A&R had started their careers before the end of World War II, and all had solid credentials in roots music recording. Steve Sholes, who purchased Elvis Presley’s contract from Sun Records in 1955 for the unprecedented sum of $35,000, served as A&R manager of RCA Victor’s hillbilly and race division between 1945 and 1957, before shifting into the firm’s pop music operations. He had joined the firm’s recording department in 1936 and worked closely with Eli Oberstein and later Frank Walker, even supervising some prewar hillbilly and hot jazz sessions himself.41 Columbia’s Frank De Vol entered the industry via his role as a studio arranger for jazz luminaries Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, and Sarah Vaughan, while in the early 1940s, Decca’s Milt Gabler had worked with J. Mayo Williams to jump-start the career of jive master Louis Jordan.42 It was not so much that A&R managers no longer mattered; it was more that many of their traditional roles had changed, with other kinds of industry

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officials assuming some of their former responsibilities. In particular, the advent of the record producer changed the dynamic for A&R managers who had supervised recording sessions and who, amid other kinds of creative contributions, had effectively produced those sessions. As Schoenfeld explained, there was now a new breed of A&R chiefs who were no longer primarily responsible for “mating the right artist with the right tune,” and who now “could more accurately be [called] supervisors of producers.”43 The emergence of the modern record producer that Schoenfeld observed was largely predicated on the development of magnetic tape, which, with its adoption in the American recording industry after World War II, allowed for far greater manipulation of recorded sound, both during and after recording sessions.44 Sometimes independent freelancers, sometimes record company employees, these new industry figures increasingly influenced creative aspects of the recording process that had once been the preserve of more actively engaged A&R managers, although the shift from prewar to postwar conventions was neither smooth nor uniform. In November 1950, Joe Csida identified a “sometime imperceptible, but nevertheless growing trend” for record companies to look to their own staff for artists and songs instead of relying on “outside sources.” Citing Decca’s Dave Kapp and Milt Gabler, among others, Csida suggested that, in contrast to the sales and merchandizing staff that had comprised much of RCA Victor’s A&R committee before its recent dissolution, some executives were apparently playing more influential artistic roles in making records. At the same time, he acknowledged that this was less a radical new departure than an intensification of an older, prewar tradition among certain officials, albeit one in which crude exploitation, he thought, was at least as common as any creative contribution. “Actually, the practice of having a. and r. men write tunes, or even record them, is not new,” Csida noted. “In earlier days, however, as often as not the name (either real or disguised) of an a. and r. man on a song merely meant that he was cut in, not that he had a hand in writing it. And staff men, such as Leonard Joy in his Victor days, would occasionally front a house ork [i.e., orchestra] for a singer’s date. The trend has, however, according to all competent observers, reached a point never previously equalled.”45 Csida’s apparently contradictory accounts of the rise—or it could be the decline?—of A&R managers’ influence in the recording process resulted from a definitional minefield surrounding the concept of “production.” Initially, “record production” usually referred to the manufacturing of the discs themselves. It was more an industrial term associated with record-pressing plants than a creative one associated with recording studios.46 As with the gradual adoption of “A&R” to describe functions that had long existed within the recording industry, so it also took a while to settle on the term “record producer” to describe the official who actively supervised recording sessions, advised on and sometimes dictated repertoire, and, in collaboration with artists and engineers, assumed responsibility for determining the feel and sonic “presence” of the recordings. Although the term “record producer,” used in this modern sense, had appeared in Billboard at least as early as 1953, it was not widely adopted until the following decade.47

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Meanwhile, A&R managers, newcomers and veterans alike, continued to fulfill those functions, alongside personnel identified more specifically as “record producers,” a job title that often appeared in conjunction with the words “indie” or “independent.” In 1960, for example, Variety’s Herm Schoenfeld opined, “Probably the most successful indie producing team in the business is Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller, the young rock ’n’ roll writing team who also turn out disks by other writers for Atlantic Records,” before giving honorable mentions to the production teams of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman and Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore.48 The kind of studio work that postwar record producers such as Leiber and Stoller did, proactively directing performances and helping sculpt the sounds that singers and musicians committed to tape, may not have been exactly what Eli Oberstein had in mind when, upon his departure from RCA Victor in May 1948, he announced, “I am a record man and I want to record.”49 Nevertheless, although he was hardly the most musically creative of prewar A&R men, even Oberstein had always taken a keen interest in what went on during the sessions he supervised. He certainly backed his own judgment when it came to determining which artists and selections, performed in which styles, had the greatest hit potential. Oberstein displayed this confidence on February 17, 1936, during an RCA Victor recording expedition to Charlotte, when he interrupted a session with the Arthur Smith Trio in order to cut ten sides, all of which Oberstein subsequently issued on Bluebird, with a new act he was really excited about. The Monroe Brothers, featuring bluegrass pioneers Charlie and Bill Monroe, were passing through Charlotte on the way to a concert date and had no time to wait in line, so Oberstein obliged the duo.50 A year later, for better or, more likely, for worse, he not only asked Texas hillbilly musician Bob Kendrick to change his name to Bob Skyles, but he also transformed Bob Skyles & His Skyrockets from an innovative western swing band, replete with its leader’s riffing tenor saxophone, into something of a novelty act on disc. From their first session in San Antonio in February 1937, Oberstein directed Skyles and his sidemen to embellish their enormously popular Bluebird recordings with a bizarre assortment of instruments such as the Solovox, bazooka, vibraphone, musical saw, tuba, slide whistle, and cowbells.51 Following World War II, Oberstein continued to produce recordings after a fashion. Art Rupe observed him handling RCA Victor sessions in the mid-1940s, and before Oberstein’s racist remarks about Duke Ellington’s music ended his involvement with that famous orchestra, he also influenced some of Ellington’s postwar pop-oriented experiments.52 Oberstein even took advantage of the creative possibilities inherent in magnetic tape that had, in a technological sense, facilitated the arrival of the modern record producer. In 1954, Allegro-Royale issued an execrable, if ambitious, two-LP set of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera The Mikado (Allegro Royale 15774/15775). Oberstein produced the records by ingeniously splicing together two tape recordings. The first, probably made by Oberstein in New York, possibly in England, featured three principal vocalists (Martyn Green, Karl Brock, and James Pease), plus a piano accompanist. The

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second was of a German orchestra, chorus, and other singers, probably recorded in Hamburg, with Paul Lazare producing and Edward Korn conducting while listening to a playback of the Oberstein-produced vocal-piano track through headphones. Keen to extract every cent of sales potential from his handiwork, Oberstein reissued these patchwork recordings at least three times on his various labels (Royale 1882, Allegro 1681, and Rondo-lette A22).53 Several other pioneering A&R managers made much more significant transitions to postwar record production, sometimes doubling as independent label owners. J. Mayo Williams left Decca shortly before the end of World War II to launch his own Chicago and Harlem labels. In 1947, when “Stick” McGhee & His Buddies waxed the original version of “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” (Harlem 1018), Williams honored another venerable A&R tradition by claiming an unearned composer credit for a song that, in a rerecorded 1949 version by McGhee and his jump-blues group (Atlantic 873), would be among the first hits for Atlantic Records, the most important of all the new independent R&B labels to appear after the war. For Williams, other label ventures followed, among them Southern and Ebony. But he likewise found work, if relatively little commercial success, as an independent producer. Williams recorded material that appeared on a variety of labels, including Apex and 20th Century, in which he may have had some financial involvement and for whom he produced Muddy Waters’s first commercial recording, “Mean Red Spider,” credited to James “Sweet Lucy” Carter & His Orchestra (20th Century 20-51). Williams also produced sessions for Queen Records and its better-known parent company, King Records, which issued Jimmie Gordon’s Bip Bop Band’s “Fast Life” / “Jumpin’ at the Club Blue Flame” (King 4191), while rejecting several other Williams-produced sides. Another of Williams’s postwar productions even came out on his former employer’s Decca label: Grant Jones with Brown’s Blues Blowers’ “I’d Rather Drink Muddy Water (And Sleep in a Hollow Log)” / “When the Deal Goes Down” (Decca 48192). By the time this release appeared in 1949, however, Williams’s glory days were behind him.54 John Hammond, too, became a postwar record producer of sorts. Ever the principled maverick, Hammond returned to work at Columbia immediately following his discharge from the army. While there, he diversified into producing classical music recordings, only to resign in July 1946 when the company objected to his simultaneously holding a position on the board of Keynote Records, a fledgling New York jazz label where he subsequently became president. In a sign of the changing times, Hammond worked briefly as a semi-independent producer for Majestic, making records with Mildred Bailey and Jane Morgan, and remained with Keynote, which had been bought by Mercury, until 1952. That was long enough for him to suggest putting an ambitious young oboist turned A&R man named Mitch Miller in charge of Mercury’s popular music recordings in New York. Miller soon struck gold with country-pop crossover hits by singers such as Patti Page and Frankie Laine and, after moving to Columbia, earned a reputation as the most significant of all 1950s A&R men. In the meantime,

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Hammond reconnected with his jazz roots during a short spell that combined record production and A&R duties at Vanguard Records, where he reconvened most of the classic prewar Count Basie rhythm section, including Jo Jones, Freddie Green, and Walter Page, for a series of recordings.55 Throughout Hammond’s pre- and postwar career, the precise extent and nature of his technical and creative studio contributions remain unclear. According to his biographer Dunstan Prial, Ahmet Ertegun, a Turkish immigrant who founded Atlantic Records in 1947 with his brother Nesuhi, “recalled often bumping into Hammond inside various Manhattan studios during the 1950s . . . finding him, time and again, seated in a corner quietly reading The New York Times while the musicians he had gathered made their music.” Hammond proudly contrasted his minimalist production style, which still largely depended on securing the right environment for recording the superlative musicians he assembled, with what he saw as increasingly fussy productions that either detracted from the excellence of good music or sought to conceal the banality of mediocre music behind a veil of sonic gimmickry. In 1954, as he prepared for a Vanguard session with a jazz combo at a Masonic temple in Brooklyn, Hammond marveled at the hall’s “marvellous [sic] natural acoustics, thanks to perfect proportions and a wonderful wood floor,” and complained to a New Yorker columnist that “all the record companies have been knocking themselves out to achieve phony effects. Fun for the sound engineers, maybe, but tough on the musicians.” Hammond blamed this recent trend on producers such as Mitch Miller, whom, he claimed, around 1948 had “started playing tricks with sound—making those horrible echo-chamber recordings.” Hammond, in contrast, was committed to “fighting all that electronic fakery.”56 Even in the postwar era, Hammond’s forte was finding terrific talent, getting them to record in combinations and settings that encouraged their creativity and artistry, and then capturing those moments with as much fidelity and “warmth” as possible. In other words, he managed to fuse the old-fashioned A&R work of scouting for new talent and redeploying proven talent with a cautious interest in the sort of studio-craft and acoustic-management techniques that might help him showcase those performers most effectively on disc. In 1959, having worked on and off for Columbia as a freelance producer for the previous couple of years, the prodigal Hammond was placed back onto the company payroll, employed as both a producer and a talent scout for a company that now had Mitch Miller at the A&R helm and its eyes fixed firmly on mass commercial success. Meanwhile, Hammond’s eyes strayed back toward various kinds of roots music. Among his first signings at Columbia were jazz bandleader-pianist Ray Bryant, whose eponymous combo had a sizeable R&B-pop hit in 1960 with the Hammond-produced dance tune “The Madison Time, Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia CL 4-41628); well-established folk singer-activist Pete Seeger; an up-and-coming new folk singer named Bob Dylan; and the daughter of a Detroit preacher, Aretha Franklin.57 The sheer diversity of Hammond’s discoveries and the mix of new and veteran talent that he brought to Columbia harked back to one of A&R work’s original tenets, despite

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continuing attempts to rationalize and compartmentalize the industry by genre and race: if an act is good and might sell records, sign and record it, regardless of genre or style. It was a mantra Hammond continued to live by until his death in 1987, by which time he could also claim at least some credit for advancing the recording careers of Columbia artists Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, among many others.58 More than either Williams or Hammond, though, it was prewar A&R pioneer Lester Melrose who set the template for the postwar independent record producer, while still retaining an interest in all of A&R’s older, established roles: talent-spotting, artist management, session supervision, and music publishing. By the mid-1930s, Melrose had already earned a reputation as a consistent hit-making A&R man. To be sure, he had honed the basic formula for his distinctive “Bluebird Beat”—the sound named by blues historian Samuel Charters after the RCA Victor subsidiary for which Melrose, acting as a freelance A&R man, produced hundreds of race recordings.59 Many of those sides featured artists whom he or his proxies, including musicians such as Big Joe Williams, Walter Davis, and Big Bill Broonzy, had recruited on talent-finding forays to “clubs, taverns and booze joints in and around Chicago,” or to the American South.60 In 1934, just as the repeal of National Prohibition was rejuvenating legal nightlife and the demand for jukebox fodder subsequently rose, the hustling Melrose wrote to every major label involved in the race records field, informing them that he could find and record all the blues artists they needed. Although Decca rejected his offer, Melrose later boasted that, between March 1934 and February 1951, he “recorded at least 90 percent of all rhythm-and-blues talent for RCA Victor and Columbia Records.”61 In a world where the boasts of A&R officials often rang hollow, Melrose’s claim holds up better than most.62 From his base in Chicago, Melrose continued to manage and scout singers and musicians, and, like so many other ambitious and savvy A&R men, he filed copyrights for the songs he recorded. In Melrose’s case, that amounted to several thousand copyrights. “I took my chances on some of the tunes I recorded being hits, and I wouldn’t record anybody unless he signed all his rights in those tunes over to me,” he told Alan Lomax.63 Most significantly for the development of the modern record producer, Melrose relied on the same pool of musicians for most of his sessions to generate a signature production sound and, with it, a remarkable string of commercial hits, both before and after World War II.64 Generally smoothing out some of the rougher edges of country blues and borrowing extensively from swing, boogie-woogie, and popular music styles, Melrose and his musicians produced a jazz-inflected, eminently danceable, urban and urbane blues groove for a whole host of artists, among them Big Bill Broonzy, Arthur Crudup, Lonnie Johnson, Memphis Minnie, Roosevelt Sykes, and Sonny Boy Williamson. All the while, Melrose’s Duchess and Wabash music publishing companies raked in substantial royalties. By the time he sold the Wabash catalog to Hill & Range Songs in 1955, a grittier, more highly amplified blues sound, characterized by keening

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electric guitars, strident harmonicas, and sometimes driving horn sections, had become increasingly popular among black audiences, alongside many shades of jazz, rhythm & blues, and rock & roll. By then, though, Melrose’s heyday as a record producer was long over, and he had retired from the music business.65 By setting himself up as an independent producer with ongoing interests in publishing, talent scouting, and artist management, and by creating a recognizable and highly successful house sound, Melrose established creative and business precedents that were widely adopted by both independent record companies and independent record producers in the postwar era. Not least among the latter was Willie Dixon, a formidable bassist and songwriter who had learned much about business and studiocraft directly from Melrose, with whom he recorded as part of the Big Three Trio before becoming one of Melrose’s regular session players. In the 1950s and 1960s, the prolific Dixon produced sessions and wrote songs for Chess Records and other labels, effectively becoming, in the words of Chicago blues authority Mike Rowe, “the Melrose of the postwar years.”66 Elsewhere in the urban Midwest, Berry Gordy’s Detroit-based Motown Records Corporation followed many of Melrose’s precepts, while further demonstrating that definitions of A&R remained somewhat imprecise during the immediate postwar period. Shortly after he founded his first label, Anna, in 1959, Gordy hired William “Mickey” Stevenson as his A&R director. “I didn’t think he knew what an A&R man was—I wasn’t so sure myself,” Gordy wrote in his autobiography. “All I knew was that it stood for Artists and Repertoire and that every record company had one.” As he recalled, “It turned out that while A&R director might mean something different at other record companies, at ours it meant somebody in charge of all the creative activities of producing a record.” Motown recruited a considerable part of the roster that made it the most successful singles company of the 1960s from aspiring young black performers who came directly to the label’s studios to audition (the Temptations), or who were brought there by other artists already on the label (Ronnie White of the Miracles brought in Little Stevie Wonder), or who were already working for the company in another capacity (Martha Reeves was Stevenson’s secretary). In the spirit of Lester Melrose, these traditional methods were especially important when it came to recruiting the studio musicians who would help give many of the label’s recordings a distinctive, instantly recognizable “Motown Sound”—even if that sound was less uniform than many critics later claimed. “Right at the start,” Gordy remembered, Stevenson “went on the lookout for great musicians, combing even the seediest of bars and hangouts. If they could play, Mickey would bring ’em in, putting together the greatest house band that anyone could ever want. They called themselves the Funk Brothers.” With its impeccable studio band, a powerful publishing arm (Jobete Music Inc.), a string of subsidiary labels (Tamla, Miracle [later renamed Gordy], Divinity, Mel-O-Dy, and VIP), and a spectacular roster of performing and songwriting talent all locked into none-too-generous contracts and managed by Gordy’s own International Talent Management Inc., Motown seemed to

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embody many of the best, or at least the most profitable, practices pioneered by the legends of prewar A&R.67 Motown may seem somewhat removed from roots music as commonly understood and defined in this book. Yet for all its bright pop sheen, the Motown Sound was always firmly grounded in R&B, jazz, and gospel. And while it was not exactly the Supremes’ or Motown’s finest artistic venture, the 1965 album The Supremes Sing Country, Western & Pop (Motown M625) proved that the barriers dividing different kinds of American roots and popular music forms, as well as their respective presumed markets, remained surprisingly permeable. Such barriers were certainly no obstacle for an opportunistic A&R man or label owner. Since at least 1962, with the phenomenal success of the album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (ABC-Paramount 410) by Ray Charles—the R&B colossus who had grown up loving the Grand Ole Opry and once played in an otherwise all-white hillbilly band called the Florida Playboys—some of the greatest and most popular soul music recorded, largely in the American South, by the likes of Arthur Alexander, Solomon Burke, James Carr, Otis Redding, Joe Simon, Percy Sledge, Candi Staton, and Joe Tex, was built on a fusion of country, R&B, and gospel stylings.68 By the dawn of the 1960s, Mickey Stevenson’s combination of A&R and production responsibilities bucked the trend toward specialist record producers that, in turn, meant a steady shift of creative responsibilities away from A&R departments and their staffs. As a consequence, some A&R men who wanted to be more heavily involved with studio production often sought new venues for their talents. In 1957, for example, Billboard reported that Joe Leahy, A&R chief at the minor jazz label RKO-Unique, and Buddy Friedlander, its promotion manager, had both resigned. Leahy had film scoring projects lined up, but in addition he planned to “become an independent operator, taking over the entire studio facilities of [RKO-]Unique.” The trade magazine reported that Friedlander, a relative newcomer at the label after a “long stay at Mercury Records,” also intended to “[set] up shop shortly as an independent record producer.”69 Leahy and Friedlander were just two among many who transitioned from A&R duties into independent production, contributing to the increasingly rapid turnover of record companies’ A&R staffs that became a hallmark of the postwar recording industry. Prewar A&R managers and scouts had hardly been reluctant to leave their employers, or simply to moonlight for other companies, in search of more lucrative opportunities. After World War II, however, there was an almost feverish mobility, linked to the dramatic proliferation of independent record companies, which saw many A&R officials regularly switching labels in search of better deals or running away from especially bad ones. One high-profile defector from the newer style of A&R department, with its emphasis on sales and marketing, was Mitch Miller. In 1960, Miller resigned as head of A&R at Columbia to become an independent record producer. According to Variety’s Herm Schoenfeld, Miller was “the man most responsible for creating the image of the powerful A&R chief and glamorizing it for public consumption” during his de-

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cade in charge at Columbia in the 1950s. Miller, as John Broven observes, had figured prominently in “reintroducing country music into the pop mainstream in the 1950s after the initial wartime flurry” of nationwide interest in hillbilly music. To be sure, it was the power and influence of men like Miller that helped establish the conventional wisdom that the heyday of A&R activities in the recording industry occurred during the 1950s and early 1960s. But that understanding must be qualified by recognizing the enormous importance of A&R officials in recording roots music before World War II and the partial erosion of their creative input in the recording process during the postwar era, when independent producers and even recording artists assumed more of those production duties. Miller certainly felt an increasing tension between his A&R responsibilities at Columbia and his desire—and plentiful opportunities—to produce records for several different labels.70 In 1961, on the heels of Miller’s Columbia departure, Don Costa, pop A&R chief at ABC-Paramount and United Artists Records, similarly announced his intention to create his own production company. A gifted guitarist, conductor, arranger, and recording artist in his own right (he played on Vaughn Monroe & His Orchestra’s “Riders in the Sky (A Cowboy Legend)” [RCA-Victor 20-3411]—better known as “Ghost Riders in the Sky”—one of the biggest hit singles of 1949), Costa produced, in the postwar sense of that word, records across a vast swath of American popular and roots styles, including sides by R&B singer Lloyd Price and country music singer George Hamilton IV. Even so, by October 1961, Variety reported Costa’s fear that “the a&r man is losing his identity because of the increasing practice on the part of recording companies of purchasing independently produced masters.” As an independent producer, Costa believed, he would enjoy greater opportunities to develop and record new talent, functions that had once comprised the heart of A&R work.71 In 1968, with ever more independent producers and self-producing artists dominating production duties throughout the industry, Billboard’s Mike Gross looked back almost nostalgically to “the days when A&R men like Mitch Miller ruled the roost at his label (Columbia), picking material for his artists and the producers to record them without dissent from any quarter. The situation has now developed to such an extent that the artist has virtually taken over the production power once held by the company A&R man.” Some industry observers no longer saw the point of larger record companies maintaining A&R departments, since so much new talent was being discovered by independent labels, many of which were also actively engaged in that other traditional A&R activity of finding potentially lucrative, older or hard-to-locate recordings to license and reissue. “I still can’t see why major companies have their own a&r staff,” said Artie Mogull, president of Tetragrammaton Records, a short-lived label co-owned by comedian Bill Cosby that initially found a niche releasing American versions of British rock albums, but that also dabbled in roots music of sorts, with original albums by country singer-comedian Biff Rose (The Thorn in Mrs. Rose’s Side [Tetragrammaton T103]) and folk veterans the Kingston Trio (Once Upon a Time [Tetragrammaton TD-5101]).72

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THE RISE OF THE INDEPENDENT LABELS

Closely related to the rise of the independent record producers who helped transform the role of A&R managers was the remarkable proliferation of independent record labels that challenged the ascendency of the nation’s four major record companies: Columbia, Decca, RCA Victor, and the ambitious relative newcomer, Capitol. The indies provided new contexts, trials, and opportunities for fulfilling familiar A&R functions such as finding and signing talent, securing musical copyrights, and matching songs with performers and with revolutionary new record formats, especially the 33 1/3-rpm long-playing (LP) album and the 45-rpm single. Research into both of these formats was underway during the war years. In 1948, Columbia debuted its twelve-inch, 33 1/3rpm album, and the following year, RCA Victor introduced the seven-inch, 45-rpm single. Both platforms remained central to the recording industry until compact discs came into vogue during the 1980s. Ultimately, the staggering growth of independent labels also dispersed the kind of personal power once held by a relatively small cohort of successful prewar A&R managers who, especially during the Great Depression, had worked for an oligarchy of major record companies or for their specialized subsidiaries and affiliates. Put another way, while the core functions of many A&R departments, particularly those related to studio work, seemed to change during the decade or so after World War II, in the industry as a whole, the sheer volume of A&R activity expanded dramatically to meet the insatiable demand for both artists and songs at both new and established labels.73 Underpinning the explosion of independent labels in the 1940s and 1950s was the economic recovery that ended the Great Depression. In 1941, the recording industry enjoyed its best year since 1921, with 130 million discs sold. The boom gathered momentum during World War II and into the Cold War era—another period of generally high employment, widespread, if hardly universal affluence, and lingering dread, this time yoked to the specter of Communist expansion and nuclear annihilation. In 1946, record companies sold 350 million records, generating $89 million in revenue. The four major record companies accounted for nearly 86 percent of those sales, but 50 million records were already being sold by assorted independent labels. The following year, total record sales increased to 375 million, but significantly, the proportion claimed by the four majors shrank; their combined sales remained static at the 1946 figure of 300 million, while independent labels, many of them highly active in roots music recording, sold 75 million records.74 Other industry-wide trends encouraged the growth of independent labels, affecting how some roots-oriented A&R men conceived of and discharged their duties after World War II. Many new independent record-pressing plants were formed, such as the United facility Eli Oberstein co-owned with Art Rupe in Los Angeles. Farther up the California coast, in San Francisco, a manufacturing plant run by label owner Bob Geddins, a multitalented African American musician, songwriter, talent scout, and

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record producer, pressed the majority of Bay Area blues and R&B records into the mid-1950s. Among many other important facilities were Cincinnati’s Royal Plastics, established by King Records president Syd Nathan; the Shelly Products Pressing Plant on Long Island, owned by Clark Galehouse; and Jim Bulleit’s Bullet Plastics, located just outside Nashville.75 New independent distributors also flourished, delivering records to one-stop local and regional distributors who carried discs recorded in a multitude of styles and issued by numerous labels, rather than being tied to one record company’s products. Distribution firms, such as Jerry Blaine’s Cosnat in New York, Pan American in Detroit, Davis Sales in Denver, Modern in Los Angeles, and black-owned United in Chicago, helped diversify the array of phonograph records available to local retailers and jukebox operators. These new pressing plants and distribution networks were especially important for independent record labels that primarily issued R&B, jazz, and Latin American records, since in the postwar era, the majors retained greater control over the manufacture and distribution of country records than they did those in these other roots music genres.76 Similarly important was the continued expansion of the jukebox trade, whose four hundred thousand coin-operated machines were devouring forty-six million records a year by 1950. This presented opportunities that A&R staffs at both majors and independents eagerly exploited. Shelby Singleton, a key A&R man and producer at Mercury Records and later a host of other enterprises, started his colorful music industry career in the 1950s as a field promotion man under the tutelage of Don Pierce and Harold “Pappy” Daily at Starday Records. Singleton maintained that “jukebox operators were probably the best A&R men around, because they could listen to a record and tell if it was going to make them any money. Pappy Daily was an old jukebox operator, and Finley Duncan down at Minaret Records [in Florida], he was a jukebox operator. Quite a few of the record men developed through that.”77 This was really no different from how record retailers like Polk C. Brockman, H. C. Speir, R. T. Ashford, Jesse Johnson, and dozens of others had become potent forces in prewar grassroots A&R, precisely because of their direct connection to customers and their understanding of what those customers would pay to hear, whether on home phonographs or on jukeboxes. In this respect, Singleton sounded much like Ralph Peer, Art Laibly, Don Law, Art Satherley, or any of the other A&R pioneers who had cultivated networks of local record retailers, jukebox operators, and radio broadcasters in order to gauge, and perhaps occasionally to influence, the tastes of potential record buyers. Throughout the first couple of postwar decades, the number of radio stations in the United States grew exponentially, from approximately 948 outlets in 1946 to 2,824 in 1954. Growth was especially significant among small, two hundred- to one thousandwatt stations, which witnessed a 500 percent increase between 1946 and 1951.78 Many of the new broadcasters deliberately courted minority and younger audiences that had long been underrepresented by the powerful national radio networks and now were virtually ignored in the programming schedules of the new medium of television. This

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shift, together with radio’s increasing reliance on records and the rapid decline in the proportion of AM radio stations that were network affiliates (from 97 percent in 1947 to just 30 percent eight years later), created attractive new opportunities for record companies that specialized in presenting various kinds of roots music for the pleasure of racially and ethnically diverse audiences whose disposable income was on the rise.79 Moreover, many new radio stations offered decidedly mixed programming that reflected their understanding of local demographics and further expanded airplay for roots music recordings. On the West Coast, KOWL-Santa Monica, a station jointly owned by cowboy singing sensation Gene Autry and Irish-born impresario Arthur Krogan, targeted African American listeners with a program hosted by Joe Adams and also aired a “foreign language show in Jewish [sic], in Japanese, Serbian, and half a dozen other tongues.” It also broadcast “programs beamed toward the large Mexican-American segment of the Southern California populace,” often hosted by Lionel “Chico” Sesma, a prominent bandleader and sometime record producer in the Latin music field.80 As media historian Susan Douglas summarizes, “The geography of sound began to change as music played on many radio stations reflected more local, grassroots influences.”81 These developments enlarged markets for labels that recorded roots music—and for the song publishing firms that mushroomed alongside them during the 1940s and 1950s, many of them affiliated with the broadcaster-led performance rights organization, BMI. Black-oriented programming, in particular, enjoyed an extraordinary growth that was directly linked, as both cause and effect, to the burgeoning independent record labels specializing in jazz, gospel, and R&B. Both phenomena reflected the increasing influence of African American consumers, whose overall purchases totaled an estimated $15 billion in 1953. Although average per capita income among black adults remained severely depressed relative to that of their white counterparts, it was actually rising more rapidly, increasing some 192 percent between 1940 and 1953.82 Following the pathbreaking adoption of all-black programming formats by WDIA-Memphis and WOOK-Washington, DC, in 1947, the number of exclusively black-oriented radio stations in the United States rose to twenty-eight by 1956, with an additional thirtysix stations explicitly devoting more than thirty hours a week to programs aimed at African American audiences; many others regularly scheduled significant offerings of black musical fare.83 With record labels eager for the publicity, royalties, and hopefully sales that airplay promised, postwar A&R staffs were often charged with the familiar task of trying to get their company’s records onto as many jukeboxes and radio station playlists as possible, whether by fair means or foul. In 1960, operating costs for new recording ventures remained relatively low—for about $1,000 it was possible to hire a studio, usually at around $50 an hour, book musicians, pay dues to the AFM, cut a master tape, and press five hundred singles at roughly eleven cents per copy. Small wonder, then, that there were some three thousand record labels in business. These ranged from the four majors and their many subsidiaries to established and durable regional and national independents to tiny, local start-ups, all

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of them competing in the stampede for artists, songs, and sales.84 Within the industry, this expansion constituted a seismic shift, with aftershocks felt everywhere, especially in the booming black-oriented market sector. By 1953, the field’s seven leading independent labels (Aladdin, Atlantic, Chess, King, Modern, Savoy, and Specialty) already accounted for nearly two-thirds of the nation’s best-selling blues and R&B singles, which were sold to predominantly African American consumers. Growing numbers of white teenage fans were also beginning to listen to and buy these records, once again testing the always brittle barriers between genres and laying the groundwork for the emergence of rock & roll in the mid- to late 1950s, with its mix of black and white sounds, performers, and audiences.85 Although traditionally portrayed as heroic industry outsiders, boldly challenging the might of the major record companies to reinvigorate American popular music with energizing infusions of roots music, most independents of the 1940s and 1950s were actually launched by industry insiders with backgrounds in record sales or manufacturing; nightclub or theater ownership, or concert promotion; music journalism or, occasionally, performance; or music publishing, songwriting, or arranging. Some of the newer labels were founded by A&R pioneers such as Eli Oberstein and J. Mayo Williams, or led by prewar A&R legends such as Jack Kapp at Decca and Frank Walker at MGM. Other labels were founded by a rising generation of music entrepreneurs, among them Ike and Bess Berman at Apollo, the Bihari brothers (Lester, Jules, Saul, and Joe) at Modern, Leonard Chess at Chess, Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun at Atlantic, Syd Nathan at King, Art Rupe at Specialty, Herman Lubinsky at Savoy, Armando Marroquín at Ideal, and Sidney Siegel at Seeco, who in an earlier era might well have sought outlets for their gifts and energies within the specialist A&R departments at major record companies. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, however, it became increasingly attractive to do A&R work for an independent label, maybe even at one’s own label, rather than to wait for one of the few A&R jobs at the major companies to open up.86 One of these eager entrepreneurs was Lew Chudd, who, along with Max Fiertag, formed the Los Angeles–based Imperial Records in 1946. Chudd’s story again demonstrates the persistence of prewar A&R innovations and practices into the late 1940s and beyond, even among men who were no longer formally identified as A&R officials. In the late 1930s, Chudd had been employed in radio advertising, selling airtime during broadcasts by swing era stalwarts such as Xavier Cugat and Benny Goodman. Chudd returned from wartime military service with a passion for finding and recording talent of his own. Following an unsuccessful New York–based venture called Crown, he set up Imperial. The company was initially aimed at consumers of foreign-language folk recordings, particularly Latin American music, another booming minority market where many independent labels prospered, among them George Goldner’s Tico, Ralph Perez’s Ansonia, Al Santiago’s Alegre, and Sidney Siegal’s Seeco.87 Although its reputation and revenue would later depend mainly on R&B, under Chudd’s catholic direction, Imperial also recorded country music by polka-loving western-swing

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innovator Adolph Hofner, major pop-country crossover hits with Slim Whitman, and rockabilly by Bob Luman. In addition, it released a series of nationwide pop hits by white rock & roll teen idol Ricky Nelson.88 Although he was the proud owner of a record company, in time-honored A&R fashion Lew Chudd could still be found racking up the miles in the South and the Southwest, even in Mexico, searching for artists and songs to record. Among the most significant of those he found was trumpeter and bandleader Dave Bartholomew, whom Chudd saw playing in Houston at the Peacock Nightclub owned by Don Robey in 1947. Another postwar label impresario, the African American Robey ran Peacock Records and later Duke Records with an iron, somewhat sinister, fist that, if he did not have his gun at hand to assist with negotiations, he was apparently not afraid to use on his recording artists and business partners. Chudd immediately tried to enlist Bartholomew as both a recording artist and a talent scout in his native New Orleans. Although it was nearly another two years before the deal was formalized—and even then Chudd unwittingly signed the street-savvy Bartholomew while the artist was still under exclusive contract to Syd Nathan’s DeLuxe Records—it was a propitious arrangement. Through Bartholomew, Chudd and Imperial found their finest act, the great R&B singer-pianist and rock & roll pioneer Fats Domino, who scored his first big hit with the Bartholomew-produced “The Fat Man” (Imperial 5058) in 1950. Thus, Chudd and Bartholomew continued the long-standing A&R practice of using artists as talent scouts that had been so productive for many recording directors between the world wars. Equally important, Chudd found in Bartholomew an excellent bandleader and arranger who also functioned essentially as an independent producer. Bartholomew gave many Imperial recordings a recognizable house sound, especially on driving, horn-laced tracks cut with Domino and other New Orleans acts such as Shirley & Lee, Smiley Lewis, and Frankie Ford.89

CO U N T RY M U S I C A & R A N D T H E R I S E O F N AS H V I L L E

The macroeconomic and technological changes that occurred within the postwar recording and broadcasting industries nurtured independent record producers and fostered a glut of indie record companies, and, as a result, they profoundly influenced A&R work in every branch of roots music. The recording industry was not homogenous, however, and that impact was felt differently in country & western music—itself a convenient, yet ultimately inadequate, catch-all term for a variety of postwar styles, among them western swing, honky-tonk, bluegrass, rockabilly, and the country-pop Nashville Sound. Across all these idioms, the major record labels generally maintained a tighter grip on the market than they did in R&B, jazz, and Mexican and other ethnic music fields. In no small measure, this continued hegemony resulted from the efforts of those labels’ A&R men.

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At Decca, country music A&R manager Paul Cohen led the way in 1947 by establishing a permanent administrative base in Nashville, a move that came hard on the heels of local music publisher Fred Rose’s appointment as MGM record division’s on-the-scene producer without a portfolio. Rose recorded Hank Williams and other MGM acts without charge, for the financially rewarding privilege of choosing most of the songs from his own publishing catalogs. For Nashville, these were important first steps along the path to becoming the epicenter of the country music recording and song publishing industry and earning the title “Music City, USA.”90 Over the next several years, Cohen periodically returned to the city for sessions with the likes of Red Foley, Ernest Tubb, and Kitty Wells, many of them held at the Castle Recording Laboratory. Despite its rather grand appellation, derived from WSM’s promotional moniker as “Air Castle of the South,” Castle Studio was essentially a space on the mezzanine level of Nashville’s Tulane Hotel that had been converted and equipped by three moonlighting WSM engineers: Aaron Shelton, Carl Jenkins, and George Reynolds. It was a typical halfway house between the improvised studios rigged up in hotels, warehouses, and radio stations by prewar A&R men for location recordings and the purpose-built facilities that would become critical to postwar record producers. Castle had several important advantages in achieving better sound quality: Shelton’s skill in microphone placement, Ampex tape machines, and the engineers’ experience in recording and broadcasting WSM’s programs, including its long-running Grand Ole Opry show. Castle served as the city’s first and most important permanent recording facility until it closed its doors in 1955, after WSM management halted its employees’ extracurricular activities.91 A veteran of many Castle sessions and one of Cohen’s closest allies at Decca was WSM bandleader-pianist Owen Bradley, who joined the record company in 1947 when Cohen had put him in charge of Decca’s Nashville office. As an A&R representative, Bradley quickly began to take on production duties. Thanks largely to the efforts of Cohen and Bradley, roughly half of all Decca’s pop singles in 1951 were “rooted in country music,” according to music business historians Russell Sanjek and David Sanjek. They also claim that as much as one-third of all America’s popular music sales during that decade were in country music, broadly construed.92 In 1955, Owen Bradley and his brother Harold set up Bradley Studios, a new independent recording facility, in a converted house on Nashville’s 16th Avenue South. Soon afterward, the duo relocated their recording activities to a surplus Quonset hut attached to the back of the house. Bradley Studios effectively filled the void left by Castle Studio’s closure, and convinced Cohen to maintain Decca’s country operations in Nashville instead of transferring them, as he was considering, to Dallas. Three years later, Owen Bradley succeeded Cohen as Decca’s chief of country A&R. Using a regular retinue of session musicians, often headed by his guitarist brother Harold, he produced hundreds of classic country-pop sides, not just for Decca but also for several other labels. Bradley was another example

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FI G U R E 8 . 2 . Owen Bradley (left) with Patsy Cline and Paul Cohen, Decca’s A&R man in charge of its country department, at Bradley Studios in Nashville (1957). Courtesy of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

of a postwar A&R man who flourished as an independent producer by both assembling a crack crew of musicians he trusted to deliver a particular sound and finding the right location in which to record them. In Bradley’s case, after the demise of Castle Studio, that venue was often the so-called Quonset Hut Studio behind the original recording facility that he and his brother had set up. Columbia eventually bought the premises in 1962 for more than $300,000. At Don Law’s insistence, the old quirky Quonset Hut was incorporated wholesale into Columbia’s new Nashville facility, so as not to disturb the hit-making magic that Cohen, the Bradleys, their engineers, and Nashville’s growing cadre of ace studio musicians had created there. “They wanted to tear the old Quonset hut down, and I said, ‘No, over my dead body you’ll do that,’ ” Law later explained, “because we got a wonderful sound in that old Quonset hut.”93 Columbia’s purchase of the Quonset Hut and construction of a permanent facility in Nashville was merely the latest phase in the company’s steady transfer of its country operations to the city. Art Satherley and then his fellow A&R veteran, Don Law, led the firm’s postwar country music recording operations, adding the likes of Little Jimmy

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FI G U R E 8 . 3 . Don Law with Johnny Cash, probably at Bradley Studios in Nashville (ca. 1960). Courtesy of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

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Dickens, Flatt & Scruggs, Lefty Frizzell, Bill Monroe, Ray Price, Marty Robbins, Carl Smith, the Stanley Brothers, and Johnny Cash to a roster that also included stellar prewar signings such as Gene Autry, Roy Acuff, and Bob Wills. By 1951, country music accounted for around 40 percent of Columbia’s total sales of 78-rpm records.94 Satherley had started recording in Nashville as early as December 1947, and after Satherley’s retirement, Law focused even more on making Nashville the center of Columbia’s country music operations. Having previously recorded mainly at Jim Beck’s independent studio in Dallas, he made increasingly regular commutes to the Tennessee capital from his home in Westport, Connecticut, to supervise sessions at Castle Studio and then at the Quonset Hut before permanently relocating to Nashville. Perhaps even more than John Hammond, Law personified a laissez-faire approach to production duties that may actually have been more prevalent among A&R managers working in country idioms than those working in other genres of roots music. Jeremy

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Tepper, founder of Diesel Only Records—surely the only label catering exclusively to fans of trucking songs—argued that there remained more vestiges of old-style A&R supervision, as opposed to newer, hands-on approaches to record production, in country music studios than elsewhere in the recording industry. “Even before there was a term ‘producer,’ the producer was the A&R guy who brought the material to the session,” explained Tepper, conveniently summarizing one of the main contentions of this book. “There’d be an engineer, but the producer was sort of an executive scout who selected the material, unlike in rock where the producer is, generally, coming from more of an engineering direction; he creates sounds. The term ‘to produce’ in Nashville is more to select the material and match it with the artist.”95 Although somewhat reductive in the sense that there clearly were hands-on producers in country music, Tepper’s characterization actually fits figures such as Don Law quite well. In Nashville, where he worked closely with the Bradleys and crack session guitarist Grady Martin, Law generally came into the studio with an artist and some songs. Then he waited for the musicians to conjure the magic that might generate a hit. As Harold Bradley recalled, “Don Law was a very laid-back producer” who “basically let Grady Martin, a great guitar player and a leader on his sessions, run the sessions. Unless there was something he heard that he didn’t like . . . he didn’t come into the studio. He wasn’t hands-on, but he allowed it to happen. He captured it. Don was a wonderful guy to work for, because he let musicians create. It was just a different way of producing.”96 Meanwhile, Capitol, the newest of the major labels, developed a potent country music division, expertly marshalled by new A&R wheeler-dealers such as Lee Gillette, Ken Nelson, and Cliffie Stone. Since its inception in 1942, the label had done well recording hillbilly talent from among the migrant Southerners who had relocated to California during the Great Depression and then, during the war years, to West Coast military bases and defense factories. Among the leading stars on Capitol’s country roster were Spade Cooley, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Tex Ritter, Hank Thompson, and Merle Travis.97 In August 1950, when Lee Gillette became head of the label’s pop division, Ken Nelson took over country recording. Earlier, in February of that year, however, Capitol transferred Walter “Dee” Kilpatrick, manager of its Atlanta branch, to Nashville to “serve as a. and r. rep and supervise sales in that area.” Billboard reported that the “move is believed to make Cap[itol] the first major label to headquarter its Western-hillbilly chief at Nashville, altho other diskeries’ folk toppers spend a considerable portion of their time in the mountain music mecca.” After Gillette’s promotion, Nelson continued to oversee Capitol’s West Coast country music recording activities, but Kilpatrick’s tenure as the label’s representative in Nashville lasted only a year. Still, Capitol’s reorganization helped ensure that the center of gravity within the country music business continued to move inexorably toward Nashville. By 1950, the city was already being called the “hub of the nation’s folk music.”98

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Along with Owen Bradley, the other principal architect of the slick and hugely successful “Nashville Sound”—which dominated mainstream country music airwaves and record charts, and frequently penetrated the pop charts, from the mid-1950s until the 1970s—was Chester “Chet” Atkins. A guitarist who worked for RCA Victor, initially under the direction of A&R manager Steve Sholes, Atkins helped cement that firm’s powerful presence in the country music market by producing quintessential lush country-pop hits. In the process, Atkins also contributed to Nashville’s consolidation as the center of the country music recording industry.99 Like Cohen at Decca, Sholes had been coming to Nashville from his New York headquarters to record an increasingly urbane brand of country music since the mid-1940s. In April 1950, for example, Billboard reported, “Steve Sholes, RCA folk and blues a. and r. head, is back from Nashville, where he cut 42 country sides in a week.”100 By the end of the decade, he, like many other country music A&R executives, not only visited Nashville ever more regularly, but their labels, along with a galaxy of important song publishers and talent management agencies, had also established a permanent presence there. Since 1952, Sholes had relied on Chet Atkins to organize RCA Victor sessions in Nashville. Three years later, Atkins began managing the label’s first permanent recording studio there, in a space on McGavock Street leased from the Methodist Church’s Television, Radio, and Film Commission. In 1957, Sholes installed Atkins as head of RCA Victor’s entire Nashville operations. That same year, largely on the strength of the unprecedented success of his most famous signing, Elvis Presley, Sholes persuaded RCA Victor to lease a newly built studio in Nashville at 17th Avenue South and Hawkins Street. RCA Victor’s new facilities, eventually known as Studio B, was the city’s first recording studio built at a major label’s request and made available for long-term lease. It was there that Atkins, assisted by highly accomplished recording engineers such as Bob Ferguson and Bill Porter, produced thousands of sessions for the likes of Eddy Arnold, Don Gibson, Jim Reeves, and Hank Snow, and even for some of the younger upstarts he introduced to the label, among them Bobby Bare, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson.101 Like his friendly competitor Owen Bradley, Atkins struggled to maintain his remarkable hit-making streak through the 1960s, but together they forged the basic ingredients of the “Nashville Sound.” That “sound” was neither as ubiquitous, nor as homogenous, nor as unremittingly bland as some of its most vociferous critics have contended. “I don’t know if there is such a thing as the Nashville Sound,” Atkins once told an interviewer. “The Nashville Sound is just a sales tag,” he explained, defaulting to the bottom line for just about all A&R men, regardless of idiom or era: “What we did was, we tried to make hit records. We wanted to keep our jobs.”102 Nevertheless, the preference for lush string arrangements, delicate piano fills, drums, electrified instruments (notably guitar and bass), behind relatively mannered, clearly articulated lead vocals with sweet choral accompaniments, not to mention the extensive use of echo and reverb production techniques, meant that

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Bradley and Atkins helped move this commercially dominant strain of modern country music farther and farther away from its prewar hillbilly roots. “We took the twang out of it, Owen Bradley and I,” Atkins admitted. “In my case, it went more uptown.”103 Thus, postwar recorded country music, which even from its formative days as “hillbilly” music had represented a creative fusion of old and new, continued to engage with and reflect the changing dynamics of contemporary American society and culture. The Nashville Sound was the sound of an upwardly mobile, more prosperous, and more technologically connected United States, enjoyed by increasingly sophisticated consumers. Ultimately, Atkins, along with Bradley, Cohen, Law, Sholes, and many of their colleagues who straddled the A&R manager-record producer borders, did not just create a popular new sound, they transformed how A&R staffs worked in the country music recording field. Early on, A&R men had searched for talented singers and musicians to record. Most of those they found, particularly before 1933, were amateurs or semiprofessionals who usually played in acoustic, often stringband-derived traditions and who sang, joyously and without inhibition, in thick, sometimes indecipherable, regional dialects, often displaying only a passing acquaintance with conventional notions of good pitch. Most were destined to record at only a single session, perhaps two if one of their discs racked up sales of, say, ten thousand copies or more. By contrast, in the postwar era, a new level of professionalization and rationalization characterized the country music industry, in both musical and managerial terms. The country recording industry steadily consolidated, financially, organizationally, and creatively, in cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and especially Nashville. This trend accelerated the demise of field-recording expeditions to other regional musical centers, which had been such a conspicuous feature of prewar A&R efforts in American roots music. Together, these developments seriously curtailed opportunities for amateur or semiprofessional singers, musicians, and songwriters to make an impression in an industry that was increasingly policed by a powerful country music establishment concentrated in a few major cities and, above all, in Nashville.104

I N D I E CO U N T RY : A & R M E N A N D T H E R I S E O F T H E A L BU M

After World War II, the country music industry was increasingly dominated by four major record companies, their song publishing arms, and a handful of independent music publishers. Yet the consolidation of power was far from uniform or absolute. While the majors largely controlled country record sales, new independent labels of various size, scope, longevity, and significance did appear on the scene, together with independent, or semi-independent, record producers. These indie labels and producers were important in their own right, but they also influenced major-label A&R men, who were forced to adapt and raise their game as the competition for artists and songs grew fiercer. As RCA Victor’s Steve Sholes noted in 1954, “Ten years ago there were only a few labels marketing country and western records with not many important

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artists on each. Today not only all of the majors but also many independents derive a substantial portion of their income from country and western music.” Sholes explained how, paradoxically, the proliferation of independent labels had simultaneously made traditional A&R activities—finding talent and material to record—both more necessary and more demanding. “Practically every label has one or more outstanding artists. Therefore the individual a&r man’s lot is more difficult, since the weekly best seller charts no longer feature several records by three or four top names. Today there are 20 or more artists who consistently appear in the charts with newcomers hopping [sic] up with a record much more frequently than a few years ago.”105 One of the most significant new labels on which those newcomers appeared was Starday, whose story also provides telling insight into the mix of continuity and change, transformation and consolidation, that characterized postwar A&R in the country music field. Starday really had two points of origin: one was in Houston, with record shop owner, jukebox distributor, and sometime A&R man Harold “Pappy” Daily; the other was in Los Angeles, with 4 Star, an independent label founded by Dick Nelson in 1945, in which enterprising young record salesman Don Pierce secured a 25 percent share. In the late 1940s, thanks in no small measure to Pierce’s relentless promotion, 4 Star enjoyed a string of country hits with “T” Texas Tyler, culminating in his hugely popular “Deck of Cards” (4 Star 1228), a recording that Pierce himself supervised. As had many prewar recording managers and talent scouts before him, Pierce learned about the recording business and the demands of A&R work from the hard slog of sales and marketing. “A lot of times I would fly to Detroit,” Pierce said, “pick up a Ford, and go on into New York and then work all the way back down through the South. I called on radio stations, I called on jukebox operators, I got acquainted with the distributors. I looked for talent, I looked for songs, and did the whole thing. It’s a great way to learn the business.”106 Pierce believed his willingness to get on the road in pursuit of sales and talent endeared him to Ralph Peer, who in the early 1950s hired Pierce as a “song scout.” Pierce’s responsibility was to furnish Peer with the international publishing rights to songs that Pierce’s own Starrite Publishing Company had copyrighted in the United States and Canada.107 Although such endeavors were no longer as central to A&R work as in the prewar era, Pierce’s time on the road, like the postwar talent-scouting trips and recording expeditions conducted by Lew Chudd, Eli Oberstein, Art Rupe, and Steve Sholes, reveals that they had not entirely disappeared from roots music recording. Eager to build up its catalog of stars, songs, and records quickly, fledgling Capitol Records was particularly enterprising in this respect. In March 1949, it seemed just like old times as Lee Gillette, described in Billboard as “Capitol a. and. r. folk music chief,” headed “down South scouting and cutting new talent for the label.”108 The following July, the trade journal reported, “Dave Dexter, head of Capitol’s rhythm and blues department, is launching an all-out drive for sacred singers. Dexter is currently beating the bushes in the Midwest and South for new talent and recording those artists already under

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contract. One of Cap’s best-sellers in this field remains the St. Paul Church [Choir] of Los Angeles, headed by the Rev. John Branham.”109 Other labels were also stepping up their efforts. In December 1950, Billboard noted that Mercury’s new West Coast A&R chief for R&B, Austin McCoy, had made a trip from the label’s office in Hollywood to San Francisco hoping “to secure additional talent for Mercury’s blues roster. McCoy last week cut sides with Allen Greene, first talent signed under ex-Modern a. and r. rep’s guidance. Mercury is going all out to dent the r. and b. field and will sign at least half a dozen virtually unknown artists.”110 Five months later, the trade journal reported, “Hy Grill, the new h. b. and Western a. and r. man with Coral, is scouting talent in the South and Southwest. Coral plans to add considerable country talent to its roster.”111 One of Don Pierce’s regular contacts was the Houston-based Pappy Daily, who, in time-honored fashion, passed on promising local talent tips to labels such as 4 Star. Daily also co-owned the Starday label, based in Beaumont, Texas, with local businessman and nightclub owner Jack Starnes as his partner. In September 1953, Pierce invested $333 for a one-third share in Starday, which in 1955 he increased to a 50 percent share when Starnes sold out. The label, which Pierce initially ran out of an office in Los Angeles while Daily recorded in Texas, focused heavily on country music. It clung fairly closely to the rawer sounds of honky-tonk, bluegrass, and white gospel, and generally resisted the slicker Nashville Sound favored by many of the majors as they sought to expand country’s mass appeal in the face of challenges posed by the rock & roll explosion. Starday also generated income by offering custom pressing facilities to other individuals and companies. Pierce and Daily made sure that their Starrite Publishing Company owned a share of the copyrights for any original music that appeared on the records pressed at their plants, regardless of the client. Like so many of their predecessors, such as Polk C. Brockman, W. R. Calaway, and, of course, Ralph Peer, Pierce and Daily recognized that copyright ownership was paramount. In terms of A&R history, much seemed remarkably familiar at Starday. Pierce and Daily mixed old-style A&R duties centered around artist recruitment, contracts, copyright, marketing, and sales, with, mainly in Daily’s case, a growing understanding of new studio production technologies and, in Pierce’s case, an early appreciation of the commercial possibilities of the new long-playing album format. At Starday, again following in the footsteps of many A&R pioneers, Pierce and Daily blew the cobwebs off some venerable older talent they thought might still make commercially viable recordings, including Cowboy Copas and Minnie Pearl, while simultaneously courting new talent and hunting original songs. None of those new finds was more significant or successful than Daily’s protégé George Jones, whose first release, the self-penned “No Money in This Deal,” coupled with “You’re in My Heart” (Starday 130), appeared in 1954. That first disc was supposedly recorded in Jack Starnes’s living room with minimal production—a reminder that many of those who eventually became skilled producers acquired and honed those skills through a process of experimentation.

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Daily’s growing reputation as a producer owed much to Bill Quinn, owner of Gold Star Records and Gold Star Studios in Houston, where Daily worked extensively and where Jones’s first hit, “Why Baby Why” (Starday 202), was recorded in 1955. Although the details about its recording remain contested, “Why Baby Why” inarguably demonstrated Daily’s growing studio-craft. On the recording, Jones sang harmony with himself: a feat made possible only because somebody, maybe Bill Quinn, possibly Pappy Daily, rigged up a speaker in the studio that allowed Jones to hear the original take, complete with his lead vocal; he then added his vocal accompaniment, with both the original recording and the new live harmony captured together on a new tape. In the days before recording artists could routinely listen to and join in with studio playback over headphones, before multitracking, and before punch-ins of small segments of music or vocals were possible, this kind of crude, on-the-fly innovation to create a double-tracked vocal represented a portent of studio innovations to come. Daily’s “Why Baby Why” may have sounded a good deal better than Eli Oberstein’s recording of The Mikado, but the two A&R men were linked by a common desire to test the potential of new recording technologies to produce records that might sell.112 In 1956, following its success with George Jones, Starday entered into a complex, but short-lived, arrangement with Mercury Records. When that deal went into effect the next year, Pierce moved Starday’s headquarters from Los Angeles to the Nashville suburb of Madison. Daily continued to run its A&R operations, with some help from Pierce, while still working as an independent producer in Houston. The agreement stipulated that all of George Jones’s records and any other especially promising sides Daily produced for Starday would be leased to Mercury, and the larger label would use its superior marketing power to create national hits, issuing the discs as part of a specially created Mercury-Starday “Country Series.”113 In another illustration of how easily postwar A&R men juggled multiple roles as label owners and producers, one of the indie companies for which Daily produced records at Gold Star was his own startup: D Records. Launched in 1958, the D label quickly chalked up a timeless rock & roll hit with “Chantilly Lace” (D 45-1008) by the Big Bopper, with the lucrative publishing rights handled by Daily’s Glad Music Company. Meanwhile, Daily produced a torrent of feverish rockabilly numbers for Starday in the late 1950s by the likes of Sonny Burns, Rudy “Tutti” Grayzell, and Thumper Jones, the last a pseudonym for George Jones lest his more traditional country fans might be alienated by his ferocious “Rock It” (Starday 240). Using pseudonyms to avoid contractual obligations or public disgrace and controversy represented another A&R tradition that had survived the war intact.114 In 1959, even as the personal and professional relationship between Pierce and Daily began to fray, Starday started construction of its own state-of-the-art recording studio, designed principally as Daily’s playground. It was not so much that Pierce never supervised recording sessions. Rather, it was more that his production style adhered closely to Jeremy Tepper’s generalization that much of what passed for producing in postwar country music consisted of core A&R duties (choosing material and musicians,

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booking a suitable venue) writ large and undertaken inside a studio. Pierce conceded that his musical and technical contributions remained relatively modest and unobtrusive, but they proved far from insignificant. Pierce was another example of the kind of “self-effacing producer,” to use Michael Jarrett’s words, who facilitated many of the best and most creative country and jazz recordings. Pierce’s production work may have drawn more comparisons to, say, Polk C. Brockman, Art Satherley, or especially Don Law, than to younger producers like Chet Atkins or Owen Bradley, yet somehow he bridged the two generations. “We did sound checks, and we’d experiment until we got the right balance. I was always a stickler for getting the vocalist isolated to the point where the feed in music didn’t make the lyrics hard to understand. That was always frustrating to me, not being able to understand the lyrics to a song,” Pierce said of an approach that made a lot of sense in an idiom where storylines were often crucial. “But other than that I was more concerned with song selection and getting an acceptable recording,” he continued, candidly admitting that his other main, even more prosaic

FI G U R E 8 .4 . Don Pierce (left) and Charlie Lamb, publisher of the Music Reporter, a music industry trade magazine, in front of the Mercury-Starday Records offices in Madison, Tennessee (probably 1957). Courtesy of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

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preoccupation in the studio was “getting the maximum number of tunes in during the amount of time given us by the union so that we could avoid the time-and-a-half cost of overruns.”115 As with most A&R men and record producers, regardless of era, Pierce’s creative instincts always remained tethered to, and tempered by, these kinds of economic calculations. Both strains of his professional DNA were evident when he began to develop a line of strikingly packaged Starday albums that attracted the attention of shoppers and sold briskly. With some acuity, Pierce had determined that putting out long-playing records would ultimately be a more consistently profitable undertaking for Starday than simply pursuing hard-to-predict, perennially elusive hit singles. He was especially interested in the potential for reissues and greatest hits packages that, because Starday had already paid for the songs, performances, and masters, came at no additional expense to the label beyond manufacturing and marketing costs. Again, this was a variant of the kind of endless recycling of previously issued material that Eli Oberstein had undertaken at Varsity when he plundered the back catalogs of Gennett, Paramount, and Majestic for new releases, or at Rondo where he cobbled together all kinds of concept albums. Indeed, it was a modern version of one of the key responsibilities of many prewar A&R officials who, while eager to snare new talent and new songs, had always remained alert to the possibilities of rerecording or simply reissuing proven material. The rise of the long-playing record held important implications for postwar A&R, while A&R departments helped define and harness the commercial and creative potential of that new audio format. After World War II, some A&R staffs aggressively explored the possibilities albums opened up for endlessly repackaging and recombining solid fan favorites from the past as well as previously unissued or hard-to-find recordings. This was especially apparent at RCA Victor, where Steve Sholes and his Charlotte-based salesman-cum-A&R representative-cum-jazz record producer, Brad McCuen, spent a lot of time both searching for best-selling roots music records issued on rival labels that they might cover with their own artists and pondering creative ways to exploit their own back catalog.116 In March 1952, for example, Sholes and McCuen engaged in a three-way conversation with RCA Victor executive Elmer Eades about whether to reissue some prewar Gid Tanner & His Skillet-Lickers records from the vaults and, if so, which ones. In a report to Dave Kapp, who only a few months earlier had joined RCA Victor’s A&R staff as head of its pop music division, McCuen recommended reissuing an old Skillet-Lickers’ “breakdown” record in RCA Victor’s “Treasure Series”: one side would contain a tune with dance calls, the other without (a sort of square-dance caller’s karaoke track). As usual, McCuen took his cues about what might sell from his network of record retailers and jukebox operators, reporting that “scarcely a week goes by without some dealer or coin operator requesting a TANNER reissue.”117 Sholes, however, remained unconvinced. RCA Victor still retained two SkilletLickers 78-rpm records in its current catalog, he stressed, and having recently listened to some of the others in the company’s vaults, he “found they were considerably less

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attractive from a commercial standpoint than the four sides already out.” Sholes upbraided McCuen, instructing him that “we should not re-issue any more old records of this type, and I wish you and your salesmen would stop that type of thinking unless it is actually focused on a record which can produce worthwhile sales,” which in the past, he added, had typically been disappointing for reissues of “various race and hillbilly recordings.” For his part, Eades, who claimed to have been present in San Antonio in 1934 when Tanner and the Skillet-Lickers had waxed these recordings, tried to explain why those particular records were so much better than more recently released breakdown numbers and why they would remain enduringly popular with record buyers. “I know what makes them click,” Eades professed. “Old Tanner and the Skillet Lickers was an excellent bunch of Hillbilly musicians; this, plus the fact that each one of them had at least a pint of whiskey under the belt at the time they were recording.” Eades had a vested interest in defending the reissue of the Skillet-Lickers sides, since he had personally reinstated them in the catalog immediately after World War II, in part to meet demand for several hundred copies from the University of Tennessee, where they were used in a square-dancing course. But he clearly saw no reason why they would not continue to attract steady sales, though he offered no opinion as to whether additional vintage Skillet-Lickers selections should be rereleased.118 Despite Sholes’s skepticism and Eades’s caution, it was Brad McCuen who had caught a glimpse of the future here. This 1952 debate was about a single reissue, two Skillet-Lickers sides on a 78-rpm record. But McCuen’s real sights were set on the potential of the long-playing album as a vehicle for reissuing vast quantities of music and other recorded material, including comedy skits and even radio broadcasts, available in the RCA Victor vaults. Over the next few years, he came up with an endless stream of creative ideas for compilation albums of old material, much of it in the roots music field, but with a predilection for various kinds of jazz. Among McCuen’s proposals were an LP tentatively titled “Big Band Boogie,” showcasing selections by Count Basie, Bunny Berigan, Tommy Dorsey, and Benny Goodman, among others; “Paul Whiteman, The Star Maker,” an album of that sweet jazz orchestra leader’s Victor sides that featured artists who also had major careers elsewhere, among them Bix Beiderbecke, Mildred Bailey, Bing Crosby, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, and Eddie Lang; a similar retrospective highlighting the work of Hal Kemp, another sweet jazz orchestra leader who, although largely forgotten by the 1950s, had recorded more than 150 sides for the Victor label between 1937 and his death in 1940; and a celebration of the jazz clubs on Manhattan’s 52nd Street, using Victor recordings by some of that fabled music scene’s hippest habitués, including Erroll Garner, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, and Lennie Tristano. In the mid-1950s, McCuen even seemed to be directly channeling Eli Oberstein’s Mikado project when he proposed combining the late Fats Waller’s ambitious tone poem, “London Suite” (HMV B-10059-B-10061), originally released in 1949 as an unaccompanied piano solo on the British label His Master’s Voice, with new settings by jazz bandleader-arranger Richard Maltby. “Commercially, this would

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be a field day for promotion,” McCuen tried to persuade his bosses: “Waller dead 13 years records again in 1956!”119 It was perhaps telling that McCuen should suggest Maltby as Waller’s posthumous collaborator. Richard Maltby & His Orchestra enjoyed its biggest hit with “Themes from ‘The Man with the Golden Arm’ ” (Vik 4X-0196), a medley of instrumentals from that controversial 1955 film, released on RCA Victor’s Vik subsidiary. On that 45-rpm single, Maltby and his orchestra did in miniature, over the course of two minutes and twenty-two seconds, what McCuen had in mind for thematically coherent compilation albums spread across fifty or more minutes. Not all of Brad McCuen’s ideas for such albums came to fruition. Yet, like other A&R men, he realized that the long-playing record was an exciting new medium for recorded music, past and present. He also learned that this format offered new opportunities for unscrupulous companies to assemble new compilations of previously released material to which they held no legal rights. In fact, McCuen spent much of the mid- to late 1960s investigating the unlicensed use of prewar Victor roots recordings by other labels, including Blue Ace, Folkways, Historical Jazz, Jazz Panorama, Palm Club, and the aptly named Jolly Roger and Pirate. All these indie and historic reissue labels were suspected of producing bootleg albums that recycled obscure or out-of-print blues, jazz, and hillbilly selections for avid collectors and nostalgia junkies during what legal historian Alex Sayf Cummings calls a postwar “surge of piracy” in the recording industry.120 Whether working in these shadowy enterprises or, as with McCuen and Don Pierce, for legitimate companies, putting together albums of new or old music represented a challenging new dimension of A&R work. As record executives pondered album themes, content, and track sequencing (a whole new skill for those used to having to choose only the A- and the B-side of a 78-rpm disc), it was clear that the format offered them new creative and commercial opportunities—as, of course, it also did for singers, musicians, and songwriters. As it happened, in Don Cusic’s phrase, “the music business was a singles business until the 1960s,” and most pop, country, and R&B artists, as well as their industry handlers, continued to focus chiefly on producing hit singles until at least the last years of that decade.121 Meanwhile, however, many jazz musicians, frequently aided by the same kind of relaxed, hands-off approach that often characterized record production within the country music field, were already stretching their musical ideas across twelve inches of increasingly durable microgroove vinyl that could easily hold in excess of twenty-five minutes per side, allowing them an artistic latitude otherwise available only in live performances. A number of older A&R men, such as John Hammond, were frustrated that the relentless quest for hit singles sometimes prevented record labels from fully exploring the creative potential and commercial longevity of their most talented new discoveries, something he believed that the album format could facilitate, in the hands of the right kind of producer. He felt this tension acutely with respect to the handling of

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young Aretha Franklin at Columbia, where the label’s resources were plowed into a commercially and creatively disappointing series of singles in the early 1960s. While Hammond produced Franklin’s albums on a shoestring budget, she was “assigned to another producer to make popular singles. . . . I watched her go from one producer to another while these lavish single records did little to increase her sales and nothing to enhance her career.” The problem, Hammond later wrote in his autobiography, was a generational and philosophical split regarding attitudes toward A&R work and record production: “It was the feeling at Columbia that, while I might be able to find a potential star, I was not able to produce the sort of commercial single records that became hits.”122 While Hammond fumed, Don Pierce, Brad McCuen, and some of their colleagues were using the long-playing album to recycle the musical past and cultivate a popular demand for “oldies” that has come to form much of the foundation of recording industry profits into the twenty-first century. “Nostalgia is probably the number one force in selling album merchandise,” McCuen wrote in a prescient 1956 memo, in which he also emphasized the need to refine remastering techniques to ensure that decrepit old masters were marketable in the new album age of superior, high-fidelity sound. “When buying these oldies the public does not expect hi-fi—but they don’t want flat records,” he noted. “On Victor we proved that a bass-less, high-less recording with no audible surface noise would not sell.” McCuen concluded that the public would accept some surface noise on their oldies reissue albums if the dynamic range, and, with it, much of the charm and potency of the original recordings, could be preserved.123 Through these acts of curation and the choices they made about which material to reissue, A&R officials like McCuen helped refashion listeners’ understanding of what American popular music, particularly commercially recorded roots music, had been between the two world wars. This, in turn, has helped shape notions of authenticity, ideas about which roots artists and musical styles were the most important, that have endured, essentially unchallenged, into the twenty-first century. But such notions have a complex, sometime quite tenuous relationship to the historical evidence. To give but one famous example: in 1961, John Hammond oversaw Columbia’s reissue of Robert Johnson’s largely forgotten 1936–1937 recordings with Don Law on Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers. This enormously influential album, in conjunction with producer Frank Driggs’s mythologizing liner notes, began the process whereby a marginally important regional bluesman was elevated to the most iconic figure of prewar country blues: a benchmark for artistry and authenticity. As A&R staffs developed the reissue and compilation practices associated with the long-playing album, they made decisions about what to include on greatest hits packages of individual artists, or on thematically driven “various artists” anthologies, that did much to define—and sometimes to distort—American roots music traditions and canons. Don Pierce shared Brad McCuen’s conviction about the commercial potential of albums, which became increasingly important in the Starday story during the 1960s. In 1961, Pappy Daily left to become head of the country music A&R department at

Although Starday’s roots were in Los Angeles and Houston, its move to Nashville in the late 1950s reflected that city’s growing preeminence as a recording and music publishing center. Many of the other indies that made a splash, or at least caused a significant ripple, in the country music recording industry were also located in or around Nashville. One revealing early example was Bullet Records. Founded in 1945 by Jim Bulleit, an entrepreneurial former Grand Ole Opry announcer who also ran a pressing plant and later a distribution firm, Bullet had a phenomenal national pop hit with “Near You” (Bullet 1001), recorded at the Castle Studio by Francis Craig & His Orchestra in 1946. This record, which virtually took up residence at the top of Billboard’s singles chart during the spring and summer of 1947, sold some two million copies. Financial difficulties forced Bulleit to sell off his share of the record company in 1948, but he continued as general manager. Before its demise in 1956, Bullet enjoyed more modest success with country records by soon-to-be major producers Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley (the latter recording as Brad Brady & His Tennesseans), as well as by Pee Wee King, Minnie Pearl, Ray Price, and the York Brothers, among many others. It released pop fare by Craig, Patti Clayton, and Bob Crosby, but also put out

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United Artists. He was followed by George Jones, whom he continued to produce until 1971, although the irresistible gravitational pull of Nashville meant that most of their recordings were made there rather than in Houston. Initially left to his own devices, in October 1964 Pierce hired Hal Neely, a former vice president and general manager at King Records. The two men kept Starday afloat partly with newly recorded material by old faithfuls such as Cowboy Copas, Minnie Pearl, the Willis Brothers, and Red Sovine, the latter of whom reinvented himself at Starday as a highly successful singer of mawkish truck-driving songs. But Starday’s income derived mainly from an extensive reissue program centered on Pierce’s imaginatively compiled and gaudily packaged albums.124 That program intensified in 1968 when, following Syd Nathan’s death, Neely brokered a deal to buy King Records’ music and publishing assets, along with its artists’ contracts, including that of James Brown, for $1.75 million. Neely also oversaw the creation of a new company named Starday-King Records Inc., which owned some twenty thousand masters and twenty-two thousand song copyrights. In a rapid and byzantine series of deals, the Nashville-based LIN Broadcasting Corporation purchased Starday-King in November 1968 for $5 million. Neely bought it all back three years later for $1.4 million, this time as a partner in the Tennessee Recording and Publishing Company that he co-owned with Freddy Bienstock, Mike Leiber, and Jerry Stoller. By then, Neely had risen to become Starday-King’s president with Pierce serving in an advisory capacity. In 1974, the label was bought out again, this time by Gusto Records, and enjoyed a final moment of dubious glory two years later when Red Sovine’s maudlin “Teddy Bear” (Starday 142) topped the country music charts.125

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some stirring black gospel records by the likes of the Fairfield Four and the Famous Jubilee Singers. Bullet even took a stab at Mexican music with Cinco Troubadores and recorded dozens of choice R&B records by artists such as the Big Three Trio (featuring Willie Dixon and recommended to Jim Bulleit by Lester Melrose), Cecil Gant, Wynonie Harris, and B. B. King, whose first release, “Miss Martha King” / “When Your Baby Packs Up and Goes” (Bullet 309), appeared on the label.126 Most other postwar indies in Tennessee, among them Delta, J-B, Nashboro, Red Robin, Tennessee/Republic, and World, were similarly eclectic, playing fast and loose with conventional racial and musical divisions. This was a hallmark of Sun Records in Memphis, launched in 1952 by independent record producer Sam Phillips, who had previously cut discs at his Memphis Recording Service for Chess Records of Chicago. Emblazoned above the entrance to the Sun studio was the mantra of many an A&R official or independent record company owner: “We record anything—anywhere— anytime.” Phillips lived up to that motto, recording jazz (Johnny London), blues and R&B (James Cotton, B. B. King, Little Junior Parker, the Prisonaires, and Howlin’ Wolf), country music (Harmonica Frank Floyd and Johnny Cash), and, beginning in the mid-1950s, rockabilly (Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, and Billy Lee Riley)—a dynamic new hybrid that fused R&B with country music, and, in so doing, helped spark the rock & roll revolution.127 There were other portents of this gathering challenge to the musical and marketing divisions that had become largely normalized before World War II. Some of the most interesting and even some of the most successful postwar country music was recorded by indies that also had impressive R&B, jazz, and gospel credentials, their eclecticism driven by ambitious owners and enterprising A&R staffs. In 1943, Syd Nathan had originally planned Cincinnati-based King Records as a country label. Even as the company’s R&B reputation grew, Henry Glover—an African American record producer who ranked as “one of the greatest A&R men in the business,” according to King’s leading sales and promotions man, Colonel Jim Wilson—produced country and bluegrass acts such as Grandpa Jones and Merle Travis (recording together as the Shepherd Brothers, with Travis recording solo as Bob McCarthy), Cowboy Copas, the Delmore Brothers, the Bailes Brothers, the York Brothers, and Moon Mullican. Moreover, at King and its subsidiary Federal label, R&B acts regularly recorded country songs, while country performers routinely covered R&B hits, sometimes under Glover’s studio supervision. For example, R&B singer-saxophonist Bull Moose Jackson & His Buffalo Bearcats cut a version of Wayne Raney’s “Why Don’t You Haul Off and Love Me” (King 791), which was released on King 4322, and blues shouter Wynonie Harris covered Hank Penny’s “Bloodshot Eyes” (Decca 9-29597) on King 4461. Further diversifying King’s catalog, honky-tonk pianist-singer Moon Mullican cut Lead Belly’s classic folk blues ballad “Goodnight Irene” (Allegro 9025), and Nat King Cole’s pop hit “Mona Lisa” (Capitol 1010), which were coupled together on Mullican’s King 886 release. He also recorded the Todd Rhodes Orchestra’s “Rocket 69” (King 4528), rechristened “Rocket to the

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Moon” (King 1198), while veteran country guitar duo the York Brothers reworked the Dominoes’ risqué R&B smash “Sixty-Minute Man” (Federal 12022) for the country market (King 970).128 Syd Nathan and Henry Glover at King Records were hardly unique in troubling the traditional demarcations between country and rhythm & blues recordings and markets. The covering of country songs by African American R&B artists was a fairly widespread phenomenon by the late 1940s and early 1950s. “Crying in the Chapel” (Jubilee 45-5122), the biggest hit for the seminal vocal group the Orioles, was a cover of Darrell Glenn’s country hymn (Valley 105), which he had recorded for Knoxville-based indie Valley. Most putatively R&B indies at least dabbled in country music, if often with limited commercial or artistic success. In 1953, for example, the Bihari Brothers created the Flair label subsidiary of their Modern Records specifically for the country market, although after a series of flops it became home to electric bluesmen such as Elmore James. Around the same time, Art Rupe recruited and recorded white country acts Smokey Stover, Johnny Tyler, and Jerry Green for Specialty, which specialized in R&B as well as gospel music.129 Even more intriguing was the foray into country music by DC Records, a tiny black-owned, Washington, DC-based label formed by Haskell Davis and Lillian Claiborne that specialized in jazz as well as R&B. Claiborne apparently also did some freelance A&R work and independent production for other labels, or at least she was used to having larger companies purchase DC masters to issue on their own labels. Her customers included RCA Victor, for which Steve Sholes bought both masters and contracts for R&B hopefuls T. N. T. Tribble and the Heartbreakers. Specialty files also credit Claiborne for the studio production on a marvelously off-kilter instrumental by Frank Motley & His Crew titled “Frantic” (Specialty SP-454). Recorded at the US Recording Studio in Washington in June 1952 by trumpeter Motley, whom Claiborne probably also managed (and who had other recordings released by DC), “Frantic” is especially significant, not just because of Claiborne’s race and gender in a world still dominated by white men, but also because the rollicking tune, full of echo and carefully manicured distortion, so clearly reveals the extent of her creative involvement in the studio. “The whole thing is fed thru a chamber and is replete with reverberations,” marveled a Billboard review, which deemed the recording “worth a listen.” Claiborne’s output certainly ranged far beyond the blues, jazz, and gospel music that had constituted the prewar “race records” classification. DC issued spoken word recordings and, perhaps most remarkably, country records by the likes of Ray Davis & His Band as well as Sleepy McDaniel & His Radio Playboys. In fact, when Atlantic Records flirted briefly with a country music series in 1950, it purchased twenty country masters Claiborne had recorded for DC. The standouts included several sides by Howington Brothers & His Tennessee Haymakers, among them “Alabama Jubilee” (Atlantic 726).130 As a black woman, Claiborne was an unusual figure in postwar A&R-production circles. Generally speaking, among A&R managers and their major or indie label bosses,

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there was rarely, if ever, much evidence of a particularly progressive racial agenda in the sense of public support for, or even a private commitment to, the burgeoning African American struggle for civil and voting rights that would become a mass movement in the 1960s. Nevertheless, the commercial imperatives of A&R work, the never-ending search for hits that encouraged many officials and labels to record anything, anytime, anywhere, helped create the environment for new, racially complex, sometimes even integrated record companies, musical styles, and, however fleetingly or unevenly, consumer markets. In November 1963, Billboard abandoned its separate R&B singles chart, since it no longer detected any meaningful differences between black and white consumer preferences, at least among the teenagers and young adults who dominated the market for rock & roll, pop, and nascent soul music.131

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Ahmet Ertegun’s 1950 foray into country music may have been a commercial failure, but Atlantic Records was not. From its inception in 1947, with a succession of outstanding staff and partners—some of whom, like his brother Nesuhi Ertegun, Herb Abramson, Miriam Bienstock, Jesse Stone, and Jerry Wexler, repeatedly made a mockery of efforts to differentiate among A&R, songwriting, promotion, and production duties—Ertegun built Atlantic into one of the largest independent labels of the postwar era, with special strengths in R&B, jazz, rock & roll, soul, and later, with the likes of the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Yes, rock music. Raised in Washington, DC, the wealthy, well-educated son of a Turkish diplomat, Ertegun had a real passion for most of the music he recorded, certainly during Atlantic’s first two decades. He contrasted his attitude with that of many of the record label executives and A&R officials he encountered in his early years in the recording industry. “I met a lot of these people; they were mostly crooks,” he cheerfully told interviewer John Broven. “They didn’t know a trumpet from a saxophone, and they knew nothing about music. They cared less; they just made records by accident.” These accusations are not without merit, but they flatten distinctions among a diverse range of A&R managers and representatives, pre- and postwar, reducing them to nothing more than opportunistic caricatures.132 Ertegun prided himself that Atlantic treated its recording artists and songwriters with far more respect and generosity than did most of its competitors. In fact, he claimed that he was appalled at how other labels, particularly in the R&B field, behaved toward their talent. “I’m not the one to judge. I don’t know who did what,” he explained to journalist Louis Barfe, before judging Eli Oberstein’s old Savoy associate, Herman Lubinsky, as worthy of special condemnation. “I know that Herman Lubinsky used to take photographs [of himself] giving Wynonie Harris a Cadillac,” which, Ertegun elaborated, would have been worth far less than the royalties the blues shouter should have received.133 Of course, a car in lieu of cash was another long-standing, if dishonorable,

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A&R tradition. In 1937, J. B. Long had done much the same, presenting Blind Boy Fuller with a cheap automobile to compensate for the fact that the bluesman was not receiving anywhere near his due in royalties. Twenty years later, Sam Phillips famously lost Carl Perkins from his stable of rockabilly stars at Sun Records because, according to Perkins, Phillips had withheld most of the royalties owed him on his self-penned “Blue Suede Shoes” (Sun 234). It was bad enough that Perkins allegedly received only $26,000 for a hit that should have earned him at least four times that amount in royalties, but Phillips added insult to injury by deducting from the singer-songwriter’s already reduced payments the cost of a new Cadillac that he had given to him, ostensibly as a gift.134 Clearly, some things had changed little when it came to contracting and rewarding talent in the world of recorded American roots music. Consequently, Ahmet Ertegun was keen to draw a clear distinction between Atlantic and many of its competitors in terms of how it conducted its affairs. For Ertegun, those differences in attitudes and practices were grounded in class differences: “We came from basically a different background from most of those people. . . . They grew up poor, and they never developed a respect for the artists until the artists became so big that then the artists had no respect for them.” The key figures at Atlantic were, Ertegun said, simply more educated and cosmopolitan than most of their predecessors and many of their contemporaries in the business: “I never drove a truck in my life,” Ertegun explained with some pride, “but they all had trucks; they drove around the country and sold records for cash,” often slyly undercutting the prices charged by official local distributors in order to make a few more dollars. Determined to define his place and Atlantic’s place in the history of American recording, an aging Ertegun also told Broven that, when he started out recording roots music, “there were no admirable people in with the majors or the independents.” He did, however, qualify his statement by admitting, “There were a few gentlemen in the majors, but mostly they were just trash. They were crap.” By contrast, Ertegun claimed that the executives who ran Atlantic “all came from families where we were taught ethical values and morals, and we acted in the same way.” Atlantic exemplified a new kind of decency and professionalism (“we had bookkeepers, and we were people who went to universities”) in an industry long dominated by chancers, rogues, and bullies whose conduct was often morally, and sometimes legally, questionable.135 Ertegun’s claims are not unfounded, but his self-serving reminiscences simplifiy a complex reality. There were few untarnished heroes and unadulterated villains among the A&R men and women who were, in many respects, the architects of recorded American roots music. Moreover, that truism applies to both the prewar and the postwar periods—something that Ertegun’s personal experience might have encouraged him to reflect upon more closely. After Atlantic had enjoyed a few years of sustained commercial success, Ertegun recalled, two unnamed representatives from Columbia Records, anxious to acquire new artists and recordings without necessarily beating the bushes to find them on their own, “offered to take over our label and distribute it for us. I said, ‘Really? What would you give us for that?’ They said, ‘Five per cent royalty.’ I said,

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‘What about the artists?’ He said, ‘You’re not giving niggers royalties, are you?’ I said, ‘Yes we are.’ He said, ‘Well, you’re going to spoil the whole business for everybody.”136 While there is no way to verify or, for that matter, to disprove Ertegun’s story, he was not completely forthcoming. Nor was the postwar roots recording industry about to be spoiled by a belated outbreak of fairness when it came to royalties and other remunerations for singers, musicians, and songwriters. Most recording artists continued to be paid a paltry royalty rate of between 1 and 4 percent of the retail price of records sold, or they could still settle for a onetime flat-fee payment, perhaps as much as $200 per usable side, but usually far less. As before World War II, roots artists who composed their own material were routinely denied the rewards commensurate with their creativity; cut-ins, or unearned songwriting credits, remained commonplace among record label owners, record producers, and A&R men—who were often one and the same. In the world of R&B, the situation was so bad that, in the late 1980s, Howell E. Begle, chief lawyer for the nonprofit Rhythm & Blues Foundation Inc., launched a major investigation into the historic abuse of recording artists and songwriters. His findings culminated in a series of courtroom victories, some belated reimbursements by record companies to aggrieved and needy performers, and, in some cases, revised payment practices when it came to reissues of older material on “greatest hits” and other compilation albums that were enormous money-spinners for record companies, but that rarely benefited the artists who had made the original recordings. Ironically, among the first settlements secured by Begle was a $30,000 compensation payment to Ruth Brown, one of Atlantic’s most popular R&B and rock & roll stars of the 1950s. Over the years, Brown’s recordings had been endlessly reissued on Atlantic albums in the United States and leased to other companies around the globe. Begle’s forensic accountancy disclosed that, when she left Atlantic in 1964, Brown was actually deemed to owe the company nearly $26,000. Believing that she would never be able to repay those debts, Atlantic simply stopped bothering to track, let alone pay her a share of, the royalties accrued from the international recycling of her recordings over several decades. As Begle’s investigation widened, and as the accusations of negligence, malfeasance, and gross exploitation multiplied, the Rhythm & Blues Foundation obtained similar compensation payments for other Atlantic R&B recording artists from the 1940s and 1950s, including the Drifters, the Clovers, and Big Joe Turner. None of them had received a royalty statement for the better part of a quarter century, and all were reported as still in debt to a company that had made steady income from their recordings throughout that time. Former artists at other labels also became involved in the campaign for compensation and reform, among them Bo Diddley, Hank Ballard, and Dexter Gordon. Perhaps most infamously, Muddy Waters had died in 1983, but was still showing a negative balance of $56,000 against his name when MCA purchased Chess Records three years later. Soon thereafter, the new owners discovered that the late bluesman’s recordings should have generated royalties for his estate of around $25,000 in 1985 alone. As Ruth Brown and Howell Begle took their complaints before the United

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States House of Representatives’ Criminal Justice Subcommittee, threatening a classaction lawsuit against the recording industry for racketeering, Atlantic found itself under fairly constant threat of legal action. It was compromised and embarrassed by the bad publicity, particularly given Ertegun’s repeated claims that his label had staked out the moral high ground in its dealings with R&B artists. In May 1988, a few days before a major gala in Madison Square Garden to mark its fortieth anniversary, Atlantic had quietly and, according to Begle, grudgingly turned over a check to the Rhythm & Blues Foundation for $1.5 million, to be disbursed among thirty-five recording artists and songwriters who had claims against the label for unpaid royalties. A decade later, Atlantic finally overhauled its back-payment and royalty provisions for what Billboard termed its “heritage artists,” the hundreds of singers and musicians whose records had appeared on the label between 1948 and 1969.137 Despite the disarming whiff of hypocrisy swirling around his claims of virtue, Ahmet Ertegun was a great record man who really was far less cynical and rapacious than many, maybe most, of his competitors. This was a cutthroat industry from its inception, and the drive for company and personal profits had always encouraged a culture of exploitation among A&R officials. Moreover, although African Americans had suffered acutely from injurious contracts when they were recording, and from a lack of compensation for the subsequent reissue of those recordings, Begle’s investigation confirmed that shortchanging black artists was part of a much broader pattern of discriminatory practices within the recording industry. Ertegun himself recognized as much when he explained the industry’s policy of simply giving the best deals to the most successful acts. The record companies, Ertegun said, “paid Bing Crosby, they paid Louis Armstrong,” an African American luminary, “but they didn’t pay Bumble Bee Slim,” a veteran bluesman who had reappeared on various independent labels, including Marigold, Specialty, and Fidelity, in the 1950s, with no great success and, as Ertegun implied, therefore no financial reward.138 As in the prewar era, African American artists and songwriters who worked for black-owned record companies often fared no better financially than those who worked for white-owned ones. Motown, for example, had notoriously mean and restrictive contractual arrangements with its artists and songwriters. In 1968, this led to a $22 million lawsuit by Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Eddie Holland, the label’s most formidable songwriting team, over unpaid royalties due from their contributions to seventy singles and twenty-seven albums for Motown. Martha Reeves was another Motown artist who, after years of litigation, finally secured compensation for outstanding royalties in 1991 with the help of the Rhythm & Blues Foundation. “Motown,” Reeves stated, “had signed us to ironclad contracts and turned us into international stars. Yet after several years of million-selling records and sold-out concerts, in 1969 I realized that my personal income was but a fraction of what it should have been.” While relatively few roots recording artists ever became national, let alone international, stars, the gist of Reeves’s complaint would have resonated with many of them, irrespective of

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idiom or era—and their own protests would most likely have fallen on equally deaf ears among the record company executives and A&R staffs who brokered their contracts.139 These and similar stories of exploitation highlight the central, most persistent and unsettling, yet wholly predictable paradox that the pioneering A&R men and women of the interwar years bequeathed to their postwar successors. There was always an inherent ruthlessness to the business that, to a greater or lesser extent, tarnished just about everyone involved in it. Most A&R officials were engaged in a ferocious, highly competitive scramble for best-selling talent, lucrative song properties, and maximum profits in a modern, consumer-driven industry that produced some of America’s most beloved and enduring music. They were complicit in some of the most sordid aspects of the recording industry, and they undoubtedly recorded their fair share of dross. Yet for the past century or so they have played a vital role in committing to shellac and vinyl, and more recently to polycarbonate plastic and digital formats, music of immense power and breathtaking beauty. With few precedents to follow and working largely through trial and error, the trailblazing recording managers and talent scouts of the 1920s and 1930s established the position of the A&R official at the heart of the recording industry, even if the precise details of what that job entailed were always unstable and subject to endless negotiations and refinements. Whether heroes or villains, music connoisseurs or craven opportunists, fumbling incompetents or inspired visionaries, those A&R pioneers were not only integral to the creation and development of the roots music recording industry, they were also largely responsible for creating a body of recorded music that spoke eloquently to the American and, indeed, the human condition in all its complexity. Along with the singers, musicians, and songwriters whose work they shepherded onto records and sold to the public, they were the architects of recorded American roots music, the foundation for rock & roll, hip hop, Americana, and much of the world’s contemporary popular music.

Notes INTRODUCTION 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

“Mountain Folk Music Is Being Recorded Here,” Twin City Sentinel (Winston-Salem, NC), September 21, 1927, quoted in Bob Carlin, String Bands in the North Carolina Piedmont (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2004), 152. Brunswick Record Edition of American Folk Songs, October 23, 1928, 1, reprinted in Archie Green, “Commercial Music Graphics #41,” JEMFQ 13 (Summer 1977): 75. Tony Russell, Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921–1942, with editorial research by Bob Pinson, assisted by the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 9–26. See Patrick Huber, “Black Hillbillies: African American Musicians on Old-Time Records, 1924– 1932,” in Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music, ed. Diane Pecknold (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 24, 26. Victor Talking Machine Company, Olde Time Fiddlin’ Tunes (New York: Victor Talking Machine Co., 1924), n. p., reprinted in Archie Green, “Commercial Music Graphics: Four,” JEMFN 4 (March 1968): 8, 13. Columbia advertisement, Burlington (NC) Daily Times, May 20, 1927. Paramount advertisement, Chicago Defender, April 3, 1926, reproduced in Jeff Todd Titon, Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994 [1977]), 209. The American South, real and imagined, has regularly been mobilized as a source of romantic nostalgia and a touchstone of authenticity in the modern United States and, indeed, globally. See, for example, Karen L. Cox, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “From Appalachian Folk to Southern Foodways: Why Americans Look to the South for Authentic Culture,” in Creating and Consuming the American South, ed. Martyn Bone, Brian Ward, and William A. Link (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015), 27–48. See also Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 138. For the idea of “fabricating authenticity” in country music, see Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Throughout this book, we generally use the names of record labels, such as OKeh and Paramount, as convenient shorthand to refer to the phonograph or record companies that actually manufactured these labels, in this case, the General Phonograph Corporation (later, between 1926 and 1933, the OKeh Phonograph Corporation) and the New York Recording Laboratories, respectively. For more details about the histories of such interwar record companies and labels, see Allan Sutton and Kurt Nauck, American Record Labels and Companies: An Encyclopedia (1891– 1943) (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2000). 313

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Nathan Miller, New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2004 [2003]), 10. 12. Among the most impressive recent additions to the literature on interwar A&R work is Bernard MacMahon and Allison McGourty, with Elijah Wald, American Epic: When Music Gave America Her Voice (New York: Touchstone, 2017), the companion to a PBS documentary series, American Epic (www.americanepic.com), although it, like many previous studies in the field, falls into the trap of relying too heavily, usually uncritically, on the uncorroborated personal testimony of A&R men. Other important accounts include Barry Mazor, Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014); John Hammond, with Irving Townsend, John Hammond on Record: An Autobiography (New York: Ridge Press, 1977); Dunstan Prial, The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006); Nathaniel Shilkret, Nathaniel Shilkret: Sixty Years in the Music Business, ed. Niel Shell and Barbara Shilkret (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005); Bruce Bastin, with Kip Lornell, The Melody Man: Joe Davis and the New York Music Scene, 1916–1978 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012); Archie Green, “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol,” JAF 78 (July– September 1965): 204–28; Stephen Calt, “The Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label—Part 2: The Mayo Williams Era,” 78 Quarterly no. 4 (1989): 9–30, reprinted as “The Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Music Label: Mayo Williams and Paramount Records,” in Rhythm & Business: The Political Economy of Black Music, ed. Norman Kelley (New York: Akashic Books, 2005), 86–111; Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow, “Paramount, Part 4: The Advent of Arthur Laibly,” 78 Quarterly no. 6 (1991): 8–26; Gayle Dean Wardlow, “The Talent Scouts: H. C. Speir (1895–1972),” 78 Quarterly no. 8 (1994): 11–33; Charles K. Wolfe, “The Legend That Peer Built: Reappraising the Bristol Sessions,” JCM 12 (1989): 24–35, reprinted in The Country Reader: Twenty-Five Years of the Journal of Country Music, ed. Paul Kingsbury (Nashville, TN: Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), 3–20, and in The Bristol Sessions: Writings about the Big Bang of Country Music, ed. Charles K. Wolfe and Ted Olson (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2005), 17–39; William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Michael Jarrett, “Early Record Men: How Talent Scouts, Recording Supervisors and A&R Men Shaped Music,” Pulse no. 216 (June 2002): 48–53; Kyle Barnett, “Record Men: Talent Scouts in the U.S. Recording Industry, 1920–1935,” in Making Media Work: Cultures of Management in the Entertainment Industries, ed. Derek Johnson, Derek Kompare, and Avi Santo (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 113–41. Although it focuses more broadly on the international sound-recording industry between 1878 and 1940, Hugo Strötbaum’s Recording Pioneers web site (www.recordingpioneers.com) is also useful, especially the extensive directory he has compiled of A&R officials and recording engineers, many of whom were involved in interwar American roots music. 13. For similar definitions and usages of “American root music” and “roots music” (apparently, an abbreviated form of “grassroots music”), see, for example, Filene, Romancing the Folk, especially 4; Nolan Porterfield, ed., Exploring Roots Music: Twenty Years of the JEMF Quarterly (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004); and both the web site for American Roots Music, a four-part PBS documentary film series, and its companion book of that same title: American Roots Music, www.pbs. org/americanrootsmusic/ (accessed June 19, 2015); Robert Santelli, Holly George-Warren, and Jim Brown, eds., American Roots Music (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), especially 8–13. 14. Clayton “Jack” Jackson interview by John K. MacKenzie, probably Lynn, Indiana, probably 1970, JKMC. Jackson’s memory may have failed him here, as Wickemeyer appears to have been a Lutheran. See “Ezra C. Wickemeyer” (obituary), Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN), August 26, 1956. 11.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

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Shilkret, Nathaniel Shilkret, 37, 42, 44. Victor’s “Domestic” catalog consisted of standard popular music, chiefly of singers and dance orchestras, while its prestigious “Red Seal” catalog featured internationally known classical musicians and opera singers, most famously Enrico Caruso. The company’s “Export” catalog, as Shilkret explained, consisted of foreign-language recordings for sale in “Mexico, Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and all of Central America and South America” (37). Don Law interview by Douglas B. Green, Nashville, Tennessee, May 14, 1975, CMFOHP. Brian Rust, Jazz and Ragtime Records (1897–1942), 6th rev. and exp. ed., 2 vols. (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2002 [1961]); Robert M. W. Dixon, John Godrich, and Howard W. Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 1890–1943, 4th ed. (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1997 [1964]); Russell, Country Music Records. The definitive discography of foreign-language recordings in the United States covers a similar time span: Richard K. Spottswood, Ethnic Music on Records: A Discography of Ethnic Recordings Produced in the United States, 1893 to 1942, 7 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990). Andre Millard, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 65; “Census Figures Tell Growth of ‘Talker’ Industry,” TMW, June 15, 1921, 105; “Census Shows Growth of Talking Machine Industry,” TMW, August 15, 1922, 126. Millard, America on Record, 72–73; Sutton and Nauck, American Record Labels and Companies, 283–85, 300–303, 325–29. Richard K. Spottswood, “ ‘Do You Sell Italians?’ ” JEMFQ 15 (Winter 1979): 225. On the foreignlanguage record industry in the United States between the world wars, see, for example, American Folklife Center, Ethnic Recordings in America: A Neglected Heritage (Washington, DC: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, 1982), especially Pekka Gronow, “Ethnic Recordings: An Introduction,” 1–31; Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 65–87; Allan Sutton, A Phonograph in Every Home: The Evolution of the American Recording Industry, 1900–19 (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2010), 155–59. “An Almost Untouched Record Selling Field with Millions of Prospective Customers,” TMW, June 15, 1922, 4. OKeh advertisement, TMW, October 15, 1922, between 18 and 19. “New Incorporation,” TMW, April 15, 1919, 61; “Make Polish Language Records,” TMW, December 15, 1920, 61; “Making Irish Records,” TMW, November 15, 1921, 177. Millard, America on Record, 74–75; Titon, Early Downhome Blues, 200; Norm Cohen, Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 32. For overviews of the race and the hillbilly recording industries during the interwar years, see, for example, Robert M. W. Dixon and John Godrich, Recording the Blues (London: November Books, 1970); Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 109–57; Allan Sutton, Race Records and the American Recording Industry, 1919–1945: An Illustrated History (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2016). Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph, 1877–1977, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Collier Books, 1977 [1955]), 255. Titon, Early Downhome Blues, 200; Dixon and Godrich, Recording the Blues, 64–67, 77. Millard, America on Record, 65–188. “Mid-West Point of View: Record Trade Possibilities,” TMW, November 15, 1924, 132. “Steppin’ High with This Hot Blues Business,” Talking Machine Journal, 1926, quoted in Jerry Zolten, “Daniel Brown,” in Field Guide to Paramount Records and Associated Labels accompanying The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Vol. 2 (1928–32), 6-LP boxed set (Third Man Records/ Revenant Records TMR 204), 47.

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30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

Erich Nunn, Sounding the Color Line: Music and Race in the Southern Imagination (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 4–5. Other important recent works that explore the hybridity and complex racial dynamics of American popular music, especially in southern-based vernacular traditions, include Pecknold, ed., Hidden in the Mix; Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Ronald Radano, Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). See Dixon and Godrich, Recording the Blues, especially 9–48, and Titon, Early Downhome Blues, 202. Mazor, Ralph Peer, 121–22, 125. For more on the Lomaxes and other song collectors who recorded American vernacular music in the early decades of the twentieth century, see, for example, Nolan Porterfield, Last Cavalier: The Life and Times of John A. Lomax (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); John Szwed, The Man Who Recorded the World: A Biography of Alan Lomax (London: William Heinemann, 2010), especially 1–216; Erika Brady, A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999); Marybeth Hamilton, In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), 1–124. Alan Lomax letter to Harold Spivacke, April 8, 1939, Series 1: Correspondence, 1925–1952 and undated, Subseries 3: Alan Lomax, 1935–1969 and undated, Box 4, Folder 144, John A. and Alan Lomax Papers, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. See also Szwed, Man Who Recorded the World, 142–43, although Szwed erroneously gives the date of Lomax’s letter as March 8, rather than April 8, 1939. Even the conservative elder Lomax came to embrace some of his son’s favorable ideas about commercial American roots music. In 1941, for example, he compiled and annotated Smoky Mountain Ballads (Victor P-79), an album of five 78-rpm discs assembled from Victor’s and Bluebird’s hillbilly catalogs and aimed at cosmopolitan, northern folk music fans. See Archie Green, “Commercial Music Graphics: Twenty-One,” JEMFQ 8 (Summer 1972): 82, 88. For Ledbetter’s and Morganfield’s recordings for the Library of Congress (and, in the former’s case, for the Asch and Disc labels), see Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 517–32; 662–64. See also Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell, The Life and Legend of Leadbelly (New York: Da Capo Press, 1999 [1994]), especially 8, 47, 160–66, 211, 221–31, 250–52, and Robert Gordon, Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 2002), 38–50, 57–61. For more on Asch, see Tony Olmstead, Folkways Records: Moses Asch and His Encyclopedia of Sound (New York: Routledge, 2003). The discussion here and in the following two paragraphs draws heavily on Norm Cohen, “Robert W. Gordon and the Second Wreck of the ‘Old 97,’ ” JAF 87 (January 1974): 12–38, reprinted in part in Cohen, Long Steel Rail, 197–226; Mazor, Ralph Peer, 122–25. The million-plus figure for Victor 19427 reflected combined sales of Dalhart’s August 1924 acoustical record and his March 1926 electrical rerecording of this same coupling. After Dalhart remade these selections using Western Electric’s new recording process, Victor officials replaced the original record in its catalogs with the higher-fidelity one. Both records, however, bore the same label number. See Norm Cohen, “Commercial Music Documents: Number Six,” JEMFQ 6 (Winter 1970): 171–73, and Jack Palmer, Vernon Dalhart: First Star of Country Music (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2005), 128–29. See also Lewis Wood, “Train Wreck Song in Supreme Test,” New York Times, November 13, 1939, which claimed that Victor sold more than 1.2 million copies of the record, generating “a gross revenue of $475,486” and “a net profit of $130,591.” Palmer, Vernon Dalhart, 126–29; for a summary of the protracted legal proceedings in this case, see Cohen, “Robert W. Gordon and the Second Wreck of the ‘Old 97,’ ” 29–34. In settling the 1926 lawsuit, Victor paid $3,500 to OKeh’s recording manager Fred W. Hager who, two years earlier,

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Jim Macnie, “Producer/Label Owner Thiele Dies,” Billboard, February 10, 1996, 12, 90; Thiele quoted in Michael Jarrett, Producing Country: The Inside Story of the Great Recordings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014), 1. Malcolm Rockwell, “Does Anybody Know When the Various Recording Companies Realized That They Needed an Artist and Repertoire Administrator?,” August 13, 2012, 78-L Mail List, klickitat.78online.com/pipermail/78-l/Week-of-Mon-20120813/049184.html (accessed September 22, 2016). The long-form phrase is also, though less commonly, rendered variously as “Artist and Repertoire,” “Artist and Repertory,” and “Artists and Repertory.” “Important Activities of the Trade Are Feature of the Month in Los Angeles,” TMW, July 15 1924, 106; Allan Sutton, Recording the ’Twenties: The Evolution of the American Recording Industry, 1920– 29 (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2008), 107. King was in California at the time of the June 1924 Los Angeles sessions but may have actually been attending to business in Oakland and, thus, did not personally supervise the installation of the makeshift studio or the actual recording sessions. Instead, as Talking Machine World reported, the sessions were conducted “under the supervision” of chief recording engineer Harry O. Sooy, manager of Victor’s recording departments, along with two officials from Victor’s newly established West Coast manufacturing plant and recording laboratory in Oakland: Fred Elsasser, the manager of its recording laboratory, and George Hall, its superintendent of production. In his unpublished memoir, Sooy does not mention King or Hall being present at the sessions. But he does seem to indicate that Elsasser and William J. Linderman, one of Sooy’s assistant recording engineers at Victor’s recording departments, assisted in recording the acts. That, of course, does not preclude the possibility that King was in attendance and did, in fact, oversee these sessions, as most scholars have presumed. See “Important Activities of the Trade,” 106; Harry O. Sooy, entries for June 6 and 28, 1924, “Memoir of My Career at Victor Talking Machine Company, 1898–1925,” David Sarnoff Library, www.davidsarnoff.org/sooyh -maintext1921.html (accessed February 3, 2015); and Sutton, Recording the ’Twenties, 107. Archie Green, “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol,” JAF 78 (July–September 1965): 224n29. In this footnote, Green also pointed out that “A&R man, the acronym or initialism for Artist and

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had copyrighted the train-wreck ballad using one of his aliases (“F. Wallace Rega”), although the registration credited Whitter as its composer. In 1929, Victor also purchased, for $100 each, the rights of Charles Noell and Fred Lewey, the two former Danville, Virginia, textile workers whom, with Gordon’s assistance and after a thorough investigation on the firm’s part, were determined to have actually written the song. See Cohen, “Robert W. Gordon and the Second Wreck of the ‘Old 97,’ ” 20–21, 22. 38. Robert W. Gordon letter to James A. Richardson, November 2, 1926, quoted in Cohen, “Robert W. Gordon and the Second Wreck of the ‘Old 97,’ ” 17–19 (quotation on 17–18). 39. “Starr Co. Sending Expedition to Make Records of Melodies of Hopi Indians,” TMW, June 15, 1926, 16, reprinted in “From the Archives: TMW Excepts,” JEMFQ 9 (Spring 1973): 32; “To Record Hopi Indian Songs on Gennett Records,” Music Trade Review, May 29, 1926, 81; Rick Kennedy, Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy: Gennett Studios and the Birth of Recorded Jazz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 176. On Fewkes’s pioneering ethnographic recordings of the Passamaquoddy, see Brady, Spiral Way, 54–55. 40. Kennedy, Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy, 176; “Records of Historic Value to Americans,” TMW, June 15, 1926, 11, reprinted in “From the Archives: TMW Excepts,” 32; Jackson interview.

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6.

7.

8.

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Repertoire man (talent scout-recording producer-studio factotum), does not appear in standard American references for alphabetic designations.” Talking Machine World’s account of Victor’s June 1924 sessions in Los Angeles is also revealing as a prime example of the problems faced by modern-day scholars as a result of the ambiguous and terse language found in such trade journals. Reports often attributed the “supervision” or “direction” of such field-recording sessions to recording engineers, but meant this in a technical sense—as it probably did in Sooy’s case in Los Angeles—as in setting up the temporary studios and operating the recording equipment, not in the same sense we mean in this book (and as is common among recording industry historians) of providing musical direction or other in-studio recommendations to artists. Still, in the absence of official A&R men, recording engineers did sometime act in this latter capacity. In short, this episode underscores the difficulties often involved in determining which members of a recording department’s staff were actually present and what their exact studio responsibilities entailed at particular interwar recording sessions. An alternative possibility is that “A&R” may have originated with the entertainment industry weekly, Variety, whose online “Slanguage Dictionary” defines the initialism as “relating to the artists and repertoire department of a recording company.” According to the dictionary, the magazine has a long history of coining or employing its “own distinctive slanguage” that dates almost as far back as its founding in 1905. Such terms were developed and employed, a headnote suggests, “in part . . . as a way to fit long words into small headlines, but . . . also to create a clubby feel among the paper’s entertainment industry readers.” However, Variety’s earliest use of the term “A&R,” to our knowledge, dates to only 1948. See “Slanguage Dictionary,” Variety magazine, variety.com/static-pages/slanguage-dictionary/ (accessed December 17, 2011), and “Conkling, Fowler Named Cap Veepees,” Variety, April 21, 1948, 47 (“Conklin, head of the company’s artist and repertoire, is now veepee in charge of a. and r.”). “Palitz Number 5 in Decca’s A&R with Dave Kapp,” Billboard, January 12, 1946, 17. The Oxford English Dictionary erroneously traces the first known printed usage of “A&R” to Joe Csida’s article, “Victor’s A&R ‘Revolution,’ ” Billboard, June 19, 1948, 3, 4, 20, 21. See Oxford English Dictionary Online, www.oed.com (accessed December 16, 2013). By 1949, “A&R” was in widespread use in Billboard. For other examples of the magazine’s early usage of the initialism and its many variations, see, for example: “Hendler to Sue Cosmo for 25G,” December 28, 1946, 16 (“ex-A & R exec”); “Selvin Goes to Columbia under Sacks,” September 6, 1947, 14 (“manager of popular a. and r. duties” and “director of the entire pop a. and r. operation”); “Release Date Blues Reprise,” September 13, 1947, 22 (“Cap.’s A. & R. chief ”); “Pub & Disker, Cat & Mouse,” November 22, 1947, 21 (“a. and r. boys”); “Music as Written: New York,” December 6, 1947, 19 (“MGM’s A & R boss”); “Petrillo Again!,” December 27, 1947, 19 (“RCA Victor’s Coast a-and-r chief ”); “George Trasker into P.M. Field to Take Up Wax Ban Slack,” January 17, 1948, 36 (“a-and-r man”); “Music as Written: Hollywood,” March 20, 1948, 19 (“Columbia Coast A & R topper”); Csida, “Victor’s A & R ‘Revolution,’ ” 3, 4, 20, 21 (“plattery’s a. and r. chief,” “a. and r. end of the business,” “previous pop a. and r. set-ups,” “a. and r. committee,” “firm’s Coast a. and r. man,” and “specific phases of the a. and r. picture”); “RCA Mexican Waxing Body Blow to Ban,” July 17, 1948, 19 (“a. and r. chief ” and “a. and r. execs”); “Vox Joy,” September 4, 1948, 37 (“London’s a & r kleagle”); “Selvin, Higgins Move in Col.’s A&R Shake-Up,” October 23, 1948, 17, 40 (“pop a.-and-r. operation,” “veteran a.-and-r. exec,” “manager of pop a.-and-r. in the East,” and “pop a.-and-r. department”); “Cap Inks Laurence,” December 18, 1948, 43 (“Cap[itol Records] a. & r. man”). The Billboard 1943 Music Year Book (Cincinnati, OH: Billboard Publishing Co., 1943), 111. Frederick Douglas “Fritz” Pollard was an All-American halfback at Brown University and then later a star running back and the first black coach in the fledgling National Football League. He was also

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14. 15.

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a mentor and close friend of A&R pioneer J. Mayo Williams: they played together at Brown and then, in the mid-1920s, for the Hammond Pros in the NFL. During World War II, after his coaching career had ended, Pollard worked as an entertainment booking agent with Suntan Studios in Harlem—where, he later claimed, he booked performances for the likes of Billie Holiday, Count Basie, and Fats Waller, among others—and as a talent scout at Beacon Records. Nonetheless, Pollard, who was postumously inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2005, is far better remembered today for his outstanding athletic career than his little-known A&R work. See John M. Carroll, Fritz Pollard: Pioneer in Racial Advancement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998 [1992]), especially 60, 93, 171, 206, 210–14. On nineteenth-century usages of the phrase “artists and repertoire” (or “repertory”) in grand opera, see, for example: “The World of Amusements,” Chicago Tribune, April 28, 1867; “The German Opera Season,” New York Herald, June 2, 1888; “Opera and Concert,” Boston Sunday Globe, September 23, 1888; Grand Opera House advertisement, Philadelphia Inquirer, June 18, 1893. For the 1916 reference to Victor’s “Artists’ Department,” see Raymond Sooy, entry for February 1, 1916, “Memoirs of My Traveling and Recording Experiences for the Victor Talking Machine Company,” David Sarnoff Library, www.davidsarnoff.org/soo-maintext.html (accessed February 3, 2015). It should be noted that the evidence for the existence of this department in 1910 does not come from a contemporary source, but rather from a comment in the unpublished memoirs of internationally renowned Irish tenor John McCormack. In February 1910, McCormack, then performing with the Manhattan Opera, signed his first recording contract to make Red Seal records with Victor. McCormack referred to Calvin G. Child, the company official who recruited him, as “the head of the Artists’ Department of the Victor Talking Machine Company.” See Lily McCormack, I Hear You Calling Me (Milwaukee, WI: Bruce Publishing Co., 1949), 104–5. Victor may have organized a department under that name as early as 1901, the year of the firm’s incorporation. In a 1931 letter, former Victor executive John S. Macdonald explained that in 1922, after working for several years as Victor’s sales manager, he “returned to the Artist Department [sic] with my very dear friend C. G. Child who had been at the head of the Department since the formation of the Victor Company.” See John S. Macdonald letter to Ulysses J. Walsh, February 9, 1931, reprinted in Tim Gracyk, comp., Companion to the Encyclopedia of Popular American Recording Pioneers, 1895–1925 (Granite Bay, CA: privately published, ca. 2001), n.p. See also C. G. Child, “Your Opportunity to Create a Greater Interest in Music,” TMW, July 15, 1916, 46. “New Posts for Victor Officials,” Music Trade Review, January 13, 1923, 34. See also “Important New Posts for Two Victor Co. Officials,” TMW, January 15, 1923, 122. Macdonald was himself a former recording artist who, even while doubling as a Victor A&R man for popular music as early as 1904, had recorded prolifically for the label as a singer under the pseudonym Harry Macdonough. His recording career, though, stretched back to 1898. See Tim Gracyk, with Frank Hoffman, Popular American Recording Pioneers, 1895–1925 (New York: Haworth Press, 2000), 223–30. “Retirement of Calvin G. Child,” TMW, October 15, 1923, 1; Sooy, entry for October 1, 1923, “Memoir of My Career at Victor Talking Machine Company.” Sooy, entry for October 2, 1923, “Memoir of My Career at Victor Talking Machine Company.” Sooy, various entries, “Memoir of My Career at Victor Talking Machine Company.” On Sooy and his brothers, Raymond and Charles, both of whom also worked as recording engineers for Victor, see Paul D. Fischer, “The Sooy Dynasty of Camden, New Jersey: Victor’s First Family of Recording,” Journal on the Art of Record Production no. 7 (November 2012), arpjournal.com /the-sooy-dynasty-of-camden-new-jersey-victor%E2%80%99s-first-family-of-recording/ (accessed December 8, 2014).

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16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

Sooy, entry for February 1, 1916, “Memoir of My Career at Victor Talking Machine Company.” See also Sooy, entry for February 1, 1916, “Memoirs of My Traveling and Recording Experiences for the Victor Talking Machine Company.” Nathaniel Shilkret, Nathaniel Shilkret: Sixty Years in the Music Business, ed. Niel Shell and Barbara Shilkret (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 36, 37. “Jack Kapp, Vocalion Sales and Recording Director, Inaugurates New Policies,” TMW, February 1928, 94. Peer’s career is meticulously traced in Barry Mazor, Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014). “Important Activities of the Trade,” 106; “Encouraging Business Outlook in the West,” TMW, July 15, 1924, 82. See also “R. S. Peer on Coast Trip,” TMW, June 15, 1924, 102. As with many important interwar American roots recordings, there are many competing versions about the circumstances surrounding Smith’s historic recordings and the relative importance of the contributions of Peer, Hager, and Bradford in that process and in the commercial success of these records. See, for example, Perry Bradford, Born with the Blues (New York: Oak Publications, 1965), 13–14, 114–29; Robert M. W. Dixon and John Godrich, Recording the Blues (London: November Books, 1970), 9–10; Allan Sutton, Race Records and the American Recording Industry, 1919–1945: An Illustrated History (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2016), 9–17. For the best effort to sort out the conflicting evidence, see Mazor, Ralph Peer, 37–42. On Carson’s debut recordings and their impact, see Green, “Hillbilly Music,” 208–19, and Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 43–44, 72, 74–77, 79. Carson was not the first hillbilly artist to make commercial recordings: fiddlers Alexander Campbell “Eck” Robertson and Henry C. Gilliland, of Texas and Oklahoma, respectively, recorded for Victor, probably under Nat Shilkret’s supervision, on June 30 and July 1, 1922. Their first record was not released, however, until April of the following year, only a couple months prior to Carson’s debut recording session. See Green, “Hillbilly Music,” 217; Norm Cohen, “Early Pioneers,” in Stars of Country Music: Uncle Dave Macon to Johnnie Rodriguez, ed. Bill C. Malone and Judith McCulloh (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 11–13; and Tony Russell, Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921–1942, with editorial research by Bob Pinson, assisted by the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 757. For Peer’s commercial innovations within the industry, see Mazor, Ralph Peer, especially 53–56, 72–81, 125–28, 168–69, 224–26. “Story of the Prisoner’s Songs,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 7, 1940; “Prisoner’s Song Recorded,” Baltimore Afro-American, December 7, 1940; Herman R. Allen, “Life-Termer Gets Fresh Start on Boogie-Woogie,” Indianapolis Star, September 21, 1941; Ludlow W. Werner, “Across the Desk,” New York Age, October 18, 1941; Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, 2nd ed. (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1993 [1973]), 236–37; Hammond quoted in Jane Cabot, “Youth Makes Good Use of Time in Prison: Ready for Musical Career,” Journal and Guide (Norfolk, VA), August 2, 1941, cited in Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 257–58. John A. Lomax, “Report of the Honorary Consultant and Curator,” in Report of the Librarian of Congress for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1933, reprinted in Carl Engel, Archive of American Folk Song: A History, 1928–1939 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress Project: Work Projects Administration/Annual Reports of the Librarian of Congress, 1940), 24. Tom Lord, Clarence Williams (Chigwell, UK: Storyville Publications and Co., 1974); Ted Vincent, Keep Cool: The Black Activists Who Built the Jazz Age (London: Pluto Press, 1995), 52–57; David A.

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28.

321

27.

Jasen and Gene Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around: Black Popular Songwriters, 1880–1930 (New York: Routledge, 2005), 278–307. Christopher Hillman and Roy Middleton, with Hennie van Veelo, Richard M. Jones: The Forgotten Man of Jazz (Tavistock, UK: Cygnet Productions, 1997), especially 8, 10, 11–14, 16–17, 42; Paul Eduard Miller, ed., Esquire’s 1945 Jazz Book (New York: A. S. Barnes and Co., 1945), 198–99; Timothy Dodge, The School of Arizona Dranes: Gospel Music Pioneer (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 30–31; James Lincoln Collier, Louis Armstrong: An American Genius (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 169–70. The extent of Jones’s involvement in Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions remains in dispute. As in the case of Mamie Smith’s historic 1920 recordings for OKeh, disagreement exists about both how these seminal sessions originated and the relative importance of several A&R men’s contributions to them. Others credited with the conception, organization, or supervision of these sessions include Ralph Peer, Tommy Rockwell, and Elmer Aaron “E. A.” Fearn, president of the Consolidated Talking Machine Company of Chicago, one of OKeh’s major distributors. See Collier, Louis Armstrong, 169–70, 179–80; Terry Teachout, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co., 2009), 91–92, 93; Brian Harker, Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4–5, 110, 111; Mazor, Ralph Peer, 66–67; and, for the best overview of the competing claims regarding the roles of various A&R men in the Hot Five sessions, Gene H. Anderson, The Original Hot Five Recordings of Louis Armstrong (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2007), 13–17. Fearn was instrumental in the Chicago recording expeditions that OKeh staged during the early to mid-1920s, and the recording sessions, in fact, took place in makeshift studios set up on the fourth floor of his company’s headquarters on West Washington Street. Eventually, in May 1925, OKeh engineers installed a “permanent recording laboratory” in the same building. For many of these sessions, Fearn scouted talent and sometimes even supervised the recordings. “In the recording processes,” Talking Machine World noted of OKeh’s October 1923 expedition, “Mr. Fearn . . . showed himself an able director.” Among the other sessions he supervised were those of Armstrong’s Hot Five in November 1925 and February 1926. “Install Permanent Okeh Record Laboratory,” TMW, June 15, 1925, 115; “Local Talent Makes Okeh and Odeon Records,” TMW, November 15, 1923, 114; “Make OKeh and Odeon Records in Chicago,” TMW, March 15, 1926, 104; Anderson, Original Hot Five Recordings of Louis Armstrong, 37. Dickerson quoted in Alex van der Tuuk, “Aletha Dickerson: Paramount’s Reluctant Recording Manager,” Vintage Jazz Mart, www.vjm.biz/new_page_18.htm (accessed June 19, 2015); Alex van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall: The Roots and History of Paramount Records, 2nd ed. (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2012 [2003]), 133–37. Calt, “Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Music Label—Part 2,” 9–30, especially 12–14, 16, 17; William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 126. For more on Williams’s life and career, see Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 126–29; Steve Hoffman, “J. Mayo Williams,” in Encyclopedia of the Blues, ed. Edward Komara, 2 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 2:1079–80; Jasen and Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around, 307–33. Contrary to scholars’ often-repeated claim, Williams did not earn his nickname “Ink” for his uncanny ability to sign promising talent to recording contracts. Rather, the moniker dated at least to his college football days and probably stemmed from Williams’s skin color. See, for example, “Maine Is Trounced by Brown,” Boston Sunday Post, October 10, 1920. Colin Escott, “Frank Walker,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 568–69. Gayle Dean Wardlow, “Earnie [sic] Oertle: San Antonio-Bound with Robert Johnson,” Living Blues no. 220 (August 2012): 70–72, reprinted as “Ernie Oertle: San Antonio Bound with Robert

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33.

34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

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Johnson” in The Frog Blues and Jazz Annual, No. 3, ed. Paul Swinton (Fleet, UK: Frog Records, Ltd., 2013), 112–14. Allan Sutton and Kurt Nauck, American Record Labels and Companies: An Encyclopedia (1891– 1943) (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2000), 143; Floyd Levin, “Kid Ory’s Legendary Nordskog/ Sunshine Recordings,” Jazz Journal International 46 (July 1993): 6–10, Doctor Jazz/Monrovia Sound Studio, www.doctorjazz.co.uk/page35.html (accessed July 7, 2015); Sutton, Race Records and the American Recording Industry, 59–61. The group was Kid Ory’s Creole Jazz Band, performing “Ory’s Creole Trombone” / “Society Blues” (Nordskog 3009), under the label credit Spikes’ Seven Pods of Pepper Orchestra. Brian Rust, Jazz and Ragtime Records (1897–1942), 6th rev. and exp. ed., 2 vols. (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2002 [1961]), 2:1610. Rick Kennedy, “Waxing Poetic: Ezra Wickemeyer, Gennett’s Genius,” IAJRC (International Association of Jazz Record Collectors) Journal 42 (December 2009): 34, 36–38; Hugo Strötbaum, “Ezra Charles August Wickemeyer,” Recording Pioneers, www.recordingpioneers.com/RP _WICKEMEYER1.html (accessed July 7, 2015). Hugo Strötbaum, “Harold Salmon Soulé,” Recording Pioneers, www.recordingpioneers.com /RP_SOULE4.html (accessed July 4, 2015); Polk’s Portland City Directory, 1920 (Portland, OR: R. L. Polk and Co., 1920), 1138. Hugo Strötbaum, “Gordon Aplin Soulé,” Recording Pioneers, www.recordingpioneers.com /RP_SOULE2.html (accessed July 4, 2015). On Soulé’s 1927 Birmingham expedition, see “Gennett Recording Expedition in Birmingham, Ala.,” TMW, July 1927, 34d; Paul Oliver, Barrelhouse Blues: Location Recording and the Early Traditions of the Blues (New York: BasicCivitas Books, 2009), 98–99; and Burgin Mathews, “The Birmingham Sessions: Gennett Records and the Sounds of 1920s Alabama,” Old-Time Herald 14 (January 2017): 24–36. Gurre Ploner Noble, Hula Blues: The Story of Johnny Noble, Hawaii, Its Music and Musicians (Honolulu, HI: E. D. Noble, 1948), especially 75–77; “Brunswick Sends Men to Honolulu to Make New Hawaiian Records,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 11, 1928; Ross Laird, Brunswick Records: A Discography of Recordings, 1916–1931, 4 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 1:21–22. Jeff Davis, “Around the Plaza,” San Antonio Light, December 1, 1932, and August 22, 1935. Tony Olmstead, Folkways Records: Moses Asch and His Encyclopedia of Sound (New York: Routledge, 2003), especially 10–11, 16–19, 23, 35–39. Hugo Strötbaum, “Anton Heindl,” Recording Pioneers, www.recordingpioneers.com/RP_HEINDL1 .html (accessed July 8 2015); “Columbia Recording Laboratory Opened in Chicago,” TMW, August 15, 1915, 67–68; Tim Brooks, The Columbia Master Book Discography, 4 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 1:31; Pekka Gronow, “Ethnic Recordings: An Introduction,” in American Folklife Center, Ethnic Recordings in America: A Neglected Heritage (Washington, DC: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, 1982), 5, 36–37. By way of comparison, Gronow estimates that, during that same period, Columbia released only about five thousand records in its domestic popular series (5). “New Foreign Language Records,” TMW, February 15, 1922, 146b; “Columbia Co. Recording in Chicago,” TMW, September 15, 1924, 126. University of California at Santa Barbara Library, “Józef Kálmán (vocalist: tenor vocal),” Discography of American Historical Recordings, adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/talent/detail/44187 /Klmn_Jzef_vocalist_tenor_vocal (accessed July 13, 2017); “Pathé Foreign Record Section Keeps Pace with Trade Growth,” Music Trades, July 5, 1919, 5; Allan Sutton, A Phonograph in Every Home: The Evolution of the American Recording Industry, 1900–19 (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2010), 159.

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“A. Thallmayer Columbia Foreign Record Manager,” TMW, December 15, 1925, 1. The announcement of Thallmayer’s return to Columbia shared the front page of Talking Machine World’s December 15, 1925, issue with the news of Ralph Peer’s promotion to the position of OKeh’s general sales manager, other indications of the industry’s growing awareness of the importance of A&R men. See “A. Thallmayer Columbia Foreign Record Manager” and “R. S. Peer Made Okeh General Sales Manager,” both in TMW, December 15, 1925, 1. William Russell, comp., “Oh, Mister Jelly”: A Jelly Roll Morton Scrapbook (Copenhagen, Denmark: JazzMedia Aps., 1999), 535; Steve Wallace, “Keynote Address,” on his web blog, wallacebass. com/?p=2300 (accessed May 27, 2015). Satherley quoted in Tony Scherman, “Arthur E. Satherley,” in Encyclopedia of Country Music, 471. See also Art Satherley interview by Douglas B. Green, Hollywood, California, June 27, 1974, CMFOHP; Ed Kahn, “Pioneer Recording Man: Uncle Art Satherley,” in Pictorial History of Country Music, Vol. 3, ed. Thurston Moore (Denver, CO: Heather Enterprise, 1970), 12–13; Norm Cohen, “ ‘I’m a Record Man’: Uncle Art Satherley Reminisces,” JEMFQ 8 (Spring 1972): 18–21, reprinted in Exploring Roots Music: Twenty Years of the JEMF Quarterly, ed. Nolan Porterfield (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 45–51; and Alan John Britton, Uncle Art (Milton Keynes, UK: AuthorHouse UK, 2010). “Behind the Scenes: Don Law,” Country Song Roundup, June 1952, 15; Don Law interview by Douglas B. Green, Nashville, Tennessee, May 14, 1975, CMFOHP; Eric Olsen, “Don Law,” in The Encyclopedia of Record Producers, by Eric Olsen, Paul Verna, and Carlo Wolff (New York: Billboard Books, 1999), 444–46; Robert K. Oerman and Sandy Neese, “Music Row Pioneer Don Law Dies at 80,” Tennessean (Nashville), December 22, 1982. Helen Oakley Dance interview by Monk Rowe, San Diego, California, February 12, 1998, Fillius Jazz Archive, Hamilton College, Clinton, New York, contentdm6.hamilton.edu/cdm/ref/collection /jazz/id/753 (accessed April 3, 2015); Ben Ratliff, “Helen Oakley Dance, Jazz Critic, Dies at 88,” New York Times, June 1, 2001; Peter Vacher, “Helen Oakley Dance,” Guardian (UK) web site, June 21, 2001, www.theguardian.com/news/2001/jun/22/guardianobituaries2 (accessed June 19, 2015). For more on Antonopoulou (one of several alternate spellings of her surname), see Richard K. Spottswood, Ethnic Music on Records: A Discography of Ethnic Recordings Produced in the United States, 1893 to 1942, 7 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 3:1144–49. On these female talent scouts, see Michael Taft, Talkin’ to Myself: Blues Lyrics 1921–1942, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005 [1983]), 303; Jeff Davis, “Around the Plaza,” San Antonio Light, March 26, 1938; Amy Freeman Lee, “The Mexican Music Industry,” San Antonio Express, September 17, 1939; “Many Phonograph Records Made of Local Talent During Past Summer,” Bristol (TN) Herald Courier, September 25, 1927, reprinted in Charles Wolfe, “The Legend That Peer Built: Reappraising the Bristol Sessions,” JCM 12 (1989): 26, reprinted in The Country Reader: Twenty-Five Years of the Journal of Country Music, ed. Paul Kingsbury (Nashville, TN: Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), 3–20, and in The Bristol Sessions: Writings about the Big Bang of Country Music, ed. Charles K. Wolfe and Ted Olson (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2005), 17–39; and Stephen Calt, “The Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label—Part One,” 78 Quarterly no. 3 (1988): 23n7. Edison Shop manager quoted in “Do Men or Women Prove the Bigger Purchasers of Talking Machines and Record Outfits?,” TMW, February 15, 1919, 71, 72 (quotation). For more responses by dealers to Talking Machine World’s national survey, see “Do Men or Women Prove the Bigger Purchasers of Talking Machines and Record Outfits?,” TMW, February 15, 1919, 67, 69, 71–73. Gayle Dean Wardlow, Chasin’ That Devil Music: Searching for the Blues, ed. with an introduction by Edward Komara (San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books, 1998), 143.

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54. 55.

56. 57.

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61.

62. 63. 64.

Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 91. Stephen Calt, “The Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label—Part 2: The Mayo Williams Era,” 78 Quarterly no. 4 (1989): 16, reprinted as “The Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Music Label: Mayo Williams and Paramount Records,” in Rhythm and Business: The Political Economy of Black Music, ed. Norman Kelley (New York: Akashic Books, 2005), 86–111. John Hammond, with Irving Townsend, John Hammond on Record: An Autobiography (New York: Ridge Press, 1977), 158. Daniel I. McNamara, ed., The ASCAP Biographical Dictionary of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1948), 24; “Arthur Bergh Dies; Composer Was 81,” New York Times, February 14, 1962. McNamara, ASCAP Biographical Dictionary, 170. Bob Olson, “Homer Rodeheaver, Pioneer of Sacred Records,” Tim’s Phonographs and Old Records, www.gracyk.com/rodeheaver.shtml (accessed July 6, 2015); Sutton and Nauck, American Record Labels and Companies, 178–79, 318–19; Jerry Zolten, “Wiseman Sextette,” in Field Manual: Paramount Records and Associated Labels accompanying The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Vol. 1 (1917–27), 6-LP boxed set (Third Man Records/Revenant Records TMR 203), 271. Shilkret, Nathaniel Shilkret, especially pp. x, 37–39, 41–43, 45–46, 69–71. Charles K. Wolfe, “Early Country Music in Knoxville: The Brunswick Sessions and the End of an Era,” OTM no. 12 (Spring 1974): 20; “Richard F. Voynow,” New York Times, September 18, 1944; Ted Olson and Tony Russell, book accompanying The Knoxville Sessions, 1929–1930: Knox County Stomp, 4-CD boxed set (Bear Family Records BCD 16097), 23. Barbara Brockman McClenny, “Nomination to the Georgia Music Hall of Fame ‘Georgy’ Awards,” May 30, 1990, Folder 12: Polk C. Brockman, Box 21, Series 5, Research Files, Wayne W. Daniel Collection, Popular Music Collections, Special Collections and Archives, University Library, Georgia State University, Atlanta; “James Knott Polk Dies at Age of 92,” Atlanta Constitution, September 30, 1938; “Appoints New Okeh Jobbers,” TMW, September 15, 1921, 37; Polk C. Brockman interview by Archie Green and Ed Kahn, Atlanta, Georgia, August 11, 1961, and Polk C. Brockman interview by Archie Green, Ed Kahn, and Helen Sewell, Atlanta, Georgia, August 27, 1963, both in AGP; Green, “Hillbilly Music,” 208. Brockman interview by Green and Kahn; Green, “Hillbilly Music,” 208–10; Mazor, Ralph Peer, 49–56; OKeh advertisement, TMW, June 15, 1924, between 66 and 67; Archie Green, “Commercial Music Graphics: Two,” JEMFN 3 (September 1967): 15–17. Gayle Dean Wardlow, “Recording the Blues in Mississippi and the South, 1923–1940,” Blues and Rhythm no. 192 (September 2004): 8–12; “Recording and Radio: WRVA and the 1929 Richmond OKeh Sessions.” Virginia Cavalcade 51 (Summer 2002): 136–42; Gregg Kimball, “Foreword,” booklet notes to Virginia Roots: The 1929 Richmond Sessions, 2-CD set (Outhouse Records 1001), n.p.; Bob Carlin, String Bands in the North Carolina Piedmont (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2004), 153; “Officials to Hear Talent in Making 150 Okeh Records,” San Antonio Light, February 24, 1928. “James K. Polk, Inc., Has Won High Rank in Seven Years,” TMW, December 1928, 36; Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 144; Brockman interview by Green and Kahn; Brockman interview by Green, Kahn, and Sewell. Dance interview by Rowe; Hammond, with Townsend, John Hammond on Record, 28. Law interview. Mazor, Ralph Peer, 11–18, 22, 25–28.

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“Chicago and the Middle West,” Music Trade Review, July 26, 1924, 29; Lester Melrose, “My Life in Recording,” in American Folk Music Occasional, No. 2, ed. Chris Strachwitz and Pete Welding (New York: Oak Publications, 1970), 59–61; Björn Englund, with additional material by Mark Berresford, “Further Notes on Jelly Roll Morton: Jelly Roll and the Melrose Brothers,” Vintage Jazz Mart, www.vjm.biz/165-morton.pdf. (accessed December 8, 2016); “Home of ‘Blues,’ ” Presto, November 10, 1923, 25; Roger House, Blue Smoke: The Recorded Journey of Big Bill Broonzy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 100–101, 106–9, 111–14; Bob Riesman, I Feel So Good: The Life and Times of Big Bill Broonzy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 58–60; Samuel B. Charters, The Country Blues (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975 [1959]), 182–94; Mike Rowe, Chicago Blues: The City and the Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975 [1973]), 17–25. Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 159–62; Howard Whitman, “Profiles: Pulse on the Public,” New Yorker, August 24, 1940, 24–28; Dave Kapp interview by Joan Franklin and Robert Franklin, New York, New York, November 1959, Popular Arts Project, Columbia Center for Oral History, Columbia University, New York, New York. “T. G. Rockwell with Columbia Co.,” TMW, January 15, 1925, 134; “Jack Kapp Resigns from Columbia,” Music Trade Review, October 24, 1925, 32; “T. G. Rockwell Now with Okeh Recording Labs.,” TMW, January 15, 1927, 6; “T. Malcom’s Father, Tommy Rockwell,” Victrola and 78 Journal no. 9 (Summer 1996): 59; Teachout, Pops, especially 127–28, 134, 141, 152, 159, 162–65. Kurt Gegenhuber, “Smith’s Amnesia Theater: ‘Moonshiner’s Dance’ in Minnesota,” in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music: America Changed through Music, ed. Ross Hair and Thomas Ruys Smith (New York: Routledge, 2017), 154–57; Sutton and Nauck, American Record Labels and Companies, 98; “Gennett Recording Expedition Returning to St. Paul,” TMW, October 1927, 48; Robert M. W. Dixon, John Godrich, and Howard Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 1890– 1943, 4th ed. (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1997 [1964]), xxxvi, 713, 819, 843; Russell, Country Music Records, 107, 224, 323. See also “Distributors of New Gennett Records Appointed,” TMW, April 1927, 34; “Twin Cities Talking Machine Jobbers Report Satisfactory Summer Business,” TMW, August 1927, 90. John Randolph, “A Pioneer Race Recorder,” Jazz Journal 10 (February 1957): 11; Doug Jydstrup, “Winston Holmes: Kansas City Promoter,” 78 Quarterly no. 2 (1968): 17–21; Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix, Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop—A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 34–35, 45–48, 49–51; Paul Swinton, “ ‘A Kansas City Call’: Winston Holmes and His Meritt Record Label,” in The Frog Blues and Jazz Annual, No. 3, 115–25; “Makes First Record,” Chicago Defender, January 10, 1925; Sutton, Race Records and the American Recording Industry, 64–65; Holmes quoted in “New Race Record,” Chicago Defender, October 9, 1926; Alex van der Tuuk, “Lottie Kimbrough-Beaman and Winston Holmes,” in Field Manual accompanying The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Vol. 2 (1928–32), 6-LP boxed set (Third Man Records/Revenant Records TMR 204), 192–93. H. C. Speir interview by Gayle Dean Wardlow, Jackson, Mississippi, May 18, 1968, GDWC; David Evans, “An Interview with H. C. Speir,” JEMFQ 8 (Autumn 1972): 117–21; Gayle Dean Wardlow, “The Talent Scouts: H. C. Speir (1895–1972),” 78 Quarterly no. 8 (1994): 11–33; Wardlow, Chasin’ That Devil Music, 126–49. Long quoted in Kip Lornell, “Living Blues Interview: J. B. Long,” Living Blues no. 29 (September– October 1976): 13; Bruce Bastin, Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995 [1986]), 217–19. Harry Charles interview by Gayle Dean Wardlow, Birmingham, Alabama, March 20, 1968, GDWC; Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow, “The Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),”

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74.

75. 76.

77.

78.

79.

80. 81.

82. 83. 84.

78 Quarterly no. 5 (1990):10–11, 18–20; Alex van der Tuuk, “Harry Charles: ‘I Am Not a Spender, I Am an Investor!” ParamountsHome.org, www.paramountshome.org/index.php?option=com_conte nt&view=article&id=146:harry-charles-i-am-not-a-spender-i-am-an-investor&catid=49:new-york -recording-laboratories-employees&Itemid=54 (accessed July 8, 2015). Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow, “Paramount, Part 4: The Advent of Arthur Laibly,” 78 Quarterly no. 6 (1991): 8–26; Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow, “Paramount’s Decline and Fall (Part 5),” 78 Quarterly no. 7 (1992): 12–14, 16, 22; Art Laibly interview by John Steiner, probably Park Ridge, Illinois, March 11, 1970, John Steiner Collection, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, Chicago, Illinois. In contrast to their generally negative treatment of Laibly, such accounts tend to valorize Williams as an A&R genius and to celebrate Speir’s legendary dependency on his own unfailing instinct for finding talent. For example, Speir assured a surprisingly credulous David Evans that he had never been “motivated by commercial standards. He simply chose artists whose music appealed to him personally,” as Evans puts it. David Evans, Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 72. For a typically celebratory, though not wholly uncritical, account of Williams’s career, see Calt, “Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label—Part 2,” 9–30; on Speir, see Wardlow, “Talent Scouts,” 11–33, and Wardlow, Chasin’ That Devil Music, 126–49. Laibly interview; Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 23. The information on Laibly, Williams, and Paramount comes chiefly from Calt and Wardlow, “Paramount, Part 4,” 8–26; Rick Kennedy and Randy McNutt, Little Labels—Big Sound: Small Record Companies and the Rise of American Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 29–35; Evans, Big Road Blues, 65–66; Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 126–29. Within the field of blues studies, a number of competing claims have been advanced about who recommended Jefferson to Paramount. Some authorities suggest that the first referral actually came from one of Ashford’s employees, Sam Price, a Dallas blues singer-pianist and himself a future race recording artist and A&R manager, in the form of a letter to J. Mayo Williams. Dixon and Godrich, Recording the Blues, 34; Alan B. Govenar and Jay F. Brakefield, Deep Ellum and Central Track: Where the Black and White Worlds of Dallas Converged (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1998), 67; Alan Govenar, “Blind Lemon Jefferson: The Myth and the Man,” Black Music Research Journal 20 (Spring 2000): 12. Price’s own testimony, though, suggests that he urged Ashford to contact Paramount about Jefferson rather than doing it directly himself. Sammy Price, What Do They Want: A Jazz Autobiography? (Wheatly, UK: Bayou Press, 1989), 27. Paul Swinton, “Blind Lemon Jefferson,” in Field Manual accompanying Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Vol. 1 (1917–27), 147; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 442–45. On Jefferson’s vocal and instrumental innovations, see David Evans, “Musical Innovation in the Blues of Blind Lemon Jefferson,” Black Music Research Journal 20 (Spring 2000): 83–116. Jeff Todd Titon, Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994 [1977]), 207. Calt and Wardlow, “Paramount, Part 4,” 16. A. C. Laibly letter to Doc Roberts, March 30, 1927, Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 13: Correspondence with Paramount Record Company, 1927–1929, DRP. Calt and Wardlow, “Paramount, Part 4,” 20, 21. Calt and Wardlow, “Paramount, Part 4,” 20, 25. Calt and Wardlow, “Paramount, Part 4,” 16, 17.

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92. 93.

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CHAPTER 2 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 26–27. “Records Made in Charlotte to Perpetuate Mountain Ballads,” Charlotte Observer, August 9, 1927. The next day, the headline of a follow-up Observer article echoed this same rustic theme: “Musicians Trek from Mountains to City to Record Old Ballads of Hill Country,” Charlotte Observer, August 10, 1927. For some of the best overviews of southern field-recording sessions and how they operated, see Paul Oliver, Barrelhouse Blues: Location Recordings and the Early Traditions of the Blues (New York: BasicCivitas Books, 2009); Kip Lornell and Ted Mealor, “A&R Men and the Geography of Piedmont Blues Recordings from 1924–1941,” ARSC Journal 26 (Spring 1995): 1–22; Charles K. Wolfe, “The Bristol Syndrome: Field Recordings of Early Country Music,” in Country Music Annual 2002, ed. Charles K. Wolfe and James E. Akenson (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 202–21; Tony Russell, “Country Music on Location: ‘Field Recording’ before Bristol,” Popular Music 26 (January 2007): 23–31, and its sequel, Russell, “Aftershocks: Location Recording after the Bristol Sessions,” International Country Music Journal, 2016 (2016): 57–65; and Patrick Huber, “Before ‘The Big Bang of Country Music’: Recording Hillbilly Music on Location prior to the 1927 Bristol Sessions,” International Country Music Journal, 2016 (2016): 21–48. Russell, “Aftershocks,” 59–60. Huber, Linthead Stomp, 26–27.

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Calt and Wardlow, “Paramount, Part 4,” 18, 21; J. Mayo Williams telephone interview by John K. MacKenzie, August 5, 1970, JKMC. Brockman interview by Green and Kahn. Complete Catalog of 1924 Records, Paramount—The “Popular Race Record”—and Black Swan Race Records, reproduction included in The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Vol. 1 (1917–27), 30; Godrich and Dixon, Recording the Blues, 22–23. The “one hit in ten” formula is attributed to Speir in Calt and Wardlow, “Paramount, Part 4,” 10. Elsewhere, Wardlow also claims that Polk C. Brockman invoked this same ratio as a rough guide to success. See Wardlow, “Recording the Blues in Mississippi,” 9. Calt and Wardlow, “Paramount, Part 4,” 10; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, xxxvi; Sutton and Nauck, American Record Labels and Companies, 20–21; William Barlow, Looking Up at Down: The Emergence of Blues Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 129; Sutton, Race Records and the American Recording Industry, 201–10. Calt, “Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label—Part 2,” 19, 20. On Williams’s A&R career after Paramount, see Jasen and Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around, 324–33. Ted Gioia, Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2008), 52. Wardlow, “Talent Scouts,” 32n13; Wardlow, Chasin’ That Devil Music, 147. Gioia, Delta Blues, 133–34, 176; Wardlow, “Earnie [sic] Oertle,” 71; Stephen C. LaVere, booklet notes to Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, 2-CD boxed set (Columbia Records C2K 46222), 15. For a somewhat different account of Speir’s quarrel with ARC, see Wardlow, Chasin’ That Devil Music, 140. Gioia, Delta Blues, 64.

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7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

Ryan André Brasseaux, Cajun Breakdown: The Emergence of an American-Made Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 51. Russell, “County Music on Location,” 25, 26–27. “Now! A Western Laboratory,” TMW, August 15, 1921, 112. Talking Machine World’s comment was in regard to Brunswick’s recent opening of its first studio in Chicago on South Wabash Avenue. But see also “New Recording Center,” TMW, July 15, 1923, 100. Cary Ginell, The Decca Hillbilly Discography, 1927–1945 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), xiii. “Brunswick Co.’s Net Profit $2,553,809.79 for Year 1926,” TMW, April 1927, 3; Allan Sutton and Kurt Nauck, American Record Labels and Companies: An Encyclopedia (1891–1943) (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2000), 252–54. For more on Brunswick and its operations, see Ross Laird, Brunswick Records: A Discography of Recordings, 1916–1931, 4 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 1:xiii–xv, 1–25, 44–48. Andre Millard, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 12; Tony Russell, Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921–1942, with editorial research by Bob Pinson, assisted by the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 9–33, 44–45. Huber, “Before ‘The Big Bang of Country Music,’ ” 30. Patrick Huber, “The New York Sound: Citybilly Recording Artists and the Creation of Hillbilly Music, 1924–1932,” JAF 127 (Spring 2014): 143, 145, 150 (Appendix B). “Return from Okeh Record Making Trip to Chicago,” TMW, July 15, 1924, 54. Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Popular Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 157–86; Jerrold Northrop Moore, Sound Revolutions: A Biography of Fred Gaisberg, Founding Father of Commercial Sound Recording (London: Sanctuary, 1999), especially 45–116; Hugo Strötbaum, ed., “The Fred Gaisberg Diaries, Parts 1 and 2,” in the “Documents” section of Recording Pioneers, www.recordingpioneers.com/rs_documents.html (accessed July 11, 2015); Pekka Gronow, “The Record Industry Comes to the Orient,” Ethnomusicology 25 (May 1981): 251–84; Allan Sutton, A Phonograph in Every Home: The Evolution of the American Recording Industry, 1900–19 (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2010), 149–55. Harry O. Sooy, entries for June 8–18 and July 18, 1908, “Memoir of My Career at Victor Talking Machine Company, 1898–1925,” David Sarnoff Library, www.davidsarnoff.org/sooyh-maintext1921 .html (accessed July 11, 2015). “Columbia Recording Laboratory Opened in Chicago,” TMW, August 15, 1915, 67–68. “Columbia Recording Laboratory Opened in Chicago,” TMW, August 15, 1915, 67. Heindl quoted in “Opportunities in Foreign Record Trade,” TMW, March 15, 1913, 36. “Makes Columbia Records on Coast,” TMW, February 15, 1920, 29; “A Columbia Surprise,” TMW, September 15, 1920, 143; “A Columbia Achievement,” Music Trade Review, September 11, 1920, 31; “Will Make Records on Coast,” TMW, March 15, 1921, 67; “Records Made in Kansas City,” TMW, April 15, 1921, 141; “Make Records in Chicago,” Music Trade Review, February 25, 1922, 54; Allan Sutton, Recording the ’Twenties: The Evolution of the American Recording Industry, 1920–29 (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2008), 91–92; Huber, “Before ‘The Big Bang of Country Music,’ ” 23. On these early southern location recording sessions, see Sooy, entry for August 3, 1908, “Memoir of My Career at Victor Talking Machine Company”; “Victor Records by Wm. H. Taft” and “Edison Records by Wm. H. Taft,” TMW, August 15, 1908, 28 and 35, respectively; Columbia advertisement, TMW, September 15, 1908, 1; Tim Brooks, The Columbia Master Book Discography, 4 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 1:32; Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of

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26. 27.

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29. 30.

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22.

the Recording Industry, 1890–1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004 ), 221, 225–27; and Huber, “Before ‘The Big Bang of Country Music,’ ” 23. Ross Laird and Brian Rust, Discography of OKeh Records, 1918–1934 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 4. For discussions and listings of such “remote” or “road” recording trips, as they are also occasionally called, see Laird, Brunswick Records, 1:20–25, 3:1225–32; Laird and Rust, Discography of OKeh Records, 4–15; Robert M. W. Dixon, John Godrich, and Howard Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 1890–1943, 4th ed. (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1997 [1964]), xxiii–xxxvi; and Oliver, Barrelhouse Blues. “Okey [sic] Plans to Make Phonograph Records Here for First Time,” Atlanta Journal, June 15, 1923. On Bogan’s recording, see Robert M. W. Dixon and John Godrich, Recording the Blues (London: November Books, 1970), 27, and Archie Green, “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol,” JAF 78 (July–September 1965): 208. Brockman quoted in Gayle Dean Wardlow, “Recording the Blues in Mississippi and the South, 1923–1940,” Blues and Rhythm no. 192 (September 2004): 9. Russell, “Aftershocks,” 58–59. Amy Freeman Lee, “The Mexican Music Industry,” San Antonio Express, September 17, 1939. Our thanks to Tony Russell for drawing our attention to this source. Paul Oliver, “Special Agents: An Introduction to the Recording of Folk Blues in the Twenties,” Jazz Review 2 (February 1959): 22, reprinted as “Special Agents: How the Blues Got on Record,” in Blues Off the Record: Thirty Years of Blues Commentary, by Paul Oliver (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1984), 48–56; Russell, “Aftershocks,” 64; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, xxiii–xxxvi. Huber, “Before ‘The Big Bang of Country Music,’ ” 30. Brockman quoted in Wardlow, “Recording the Blues in Mississippi and the South,” 10. Some accounts claim that Ralph Lembo, a furniture store owner and talent scout in Itta Bena, Mississippi, had previously discovered the Mississippi Sheiks and had, in fact, arranged for them to record at this February 1930 Shreveport field session. See, for example, Stephen Calt and Gayle Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charlie Patton (Newton, NJ: Rock Chapel Press, 1988), 214–15. In a 1959 interview, however, Brockman explained that his trip was designed to record only W. K. Henderson and that the session with the Mississippi Sheiks was entirely serendipitous. “The thing that bailed the whole deal out was the Mississippi Sheiks,” Brockman explained. “They bailed the whole expedition out, and it wasn’t planned at all.” See Polk C. Brockman interview by Fred Hoeptner and Bob Pinson, Atlanta, Georgia, July 10, 1959, AGP. Dixon and Godrich, Recording the Blues, 27; Polk C. Brockman interview by Archie Green and Ed Kahn, Atlanta, Georgia, August 11, 1961, AGP. Ralph Peer, “Discovery of the 1st Hillbilly Great,” Billboard, May 16, 1953, 20; Charles K. Wolfe, “Ralph Peer at Work: The Victor 1927 Bristol Sessions,” OTM no. 5 (Summer 1972): 12. On the now-legendary 1927 Bristol Sessions, see also Charles K. Wolfe, “The Legend That Peer Built: Reappraising the Bristol Sessions,” JCM 12 (1989): 24–35, reprinted in The Country Reader: Twenty-Five Years of the Journal of Country Music, ed. Paul Kingsbury (Nashville, TN: Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), 3–20, and in The Bristol Sessions: Writings about the Big Bang of Country Music, ed. Charles K. Wolfe and Ted Olson (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2005), 17–39; Ted Olson and Tony Russell, book accompanying The Bristol Sessions, 1927–1928: The Big Bang of Country Music, 5-CD boxed set (Bear Family Records

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33.

34. 35.

36.

37.

38.

BCD 16094 EK); and Barry Mazor, Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014), 87–120. Frank Walker interview by Mike Seeger, probably New York, New York, June 19, 1962, Mike Seeger Collection, SFC, transcribed in part as “Who Chose These Records? A Look into the Life, Tastes, and Procedures of Frank Walker,” in Anthology of American Folk Music, ed. Josh Dunson and Ethel Raim (New York: Oak Publications, 1973), 8–17. On Walker’s 1928 and 1929 Johnson City sessions, see Ted Olson and Tony Russell, book accompanying The Johnson City Sessions, 1928–1929: “Can You Sing or Play Old-Time Music?” 4-CD boxed set (Bear Family Records BCD 16083). On October 3, 1928, shortly before Columbia’s first sessions in Johnson City, Frank Walker (or possibly his assistant Wilford J. “Bill” Brown) ran an advertisement in both local newspapers, the Johnson City Chronicle and the Johnson City Staff-News, to recruit talent. The notice, headlined “Can You Sing or Play Old-Time Music?,” invited aspiring recording artists to attend an upcoming open audition to be held at the Marshall-Porter Furniture Company on East Main Street, on October 13, between 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. “This is an actual try-out for the purpose of making Columbia Records,” the ad assured readers. Over the next week, the notice was republished in both newspapers, culminating with a brief press release, headlined “Wanted—Players of Native Songs to Make Records,” on October 12, in the Johnson City Staff-News, that repeated the invitation to the next day’s audition. See Columbia notice, Johnson City (TN) Chronicle and Johnson City (TN) Staff-News, both October 3, 1928, and Olson and Russell, book accompanying Johnson City Sessions, 6. Walker interview. Allan Sutton, Recording the ’Thirties: The Evolution of the American Recording Industry, 1930–39 (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2011), 99–104; Russell, “Aftershocks,” 60–61; “Brunswick Records Mexican Tunes at Studio in S. A.,” San Antonio Light, December 1, 1932. On the San Antonio press coverage of these A&R men and their field-recording activities, see also “Texas Folk Music Will Be Recorded,” San Antonio Light, October 27, 1937; Lee, “Mexican Music Industry”; and Jeff Davis’s “Around the Plaza” columns in San Antonio Light, December 1, 1932; April 5, 1934; October 21, 1936, respectively. Russell, “Aftershocks,” 61–62. To attract Mexican talent at southwestern field sessions, A&R men sometimes placed notices for open auditions in local Spanish-language newspapers. Mendoza, for example, made her first recordings in 1928, at age twelve, with her family’s band, Cuerteto Carta Blanca, after her father saw an OKeh ad for such a tryout that appeared in San Antonio’s La Prensa newspaper. See Chris Strachwitz, with James Nicolopulos, comps., Lydia Mendoza: A Family Autobiography (Houston, TX: Arte Público Press, 1993), vii, 32 (OKeh’s notice in the February 28, 1928, issue of La Prensa is reproduced on vii). Lee, “Mexican Music Industry.” For more on Mendoza, see Strachwitz, with Nicolopulos, Lydia Mendoza and Yolanda Broyles-González, Lydia Mendoza’s Life in Music / La Historia de Lydia Mendoza (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); on Martínez, who is widely heralded as “The Father of Conjunto Music,” see Manuel H. Peña, The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working-Class Music (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 51–59; and Manuel Peña, Música Tejana: The Cultural Economy of Artistic Transformation (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999), especially 91–94. Anita Sheer, Len Kunstadt, Harrison Smith, and Bob Colton, “Blues Galore: The Story of Victoria Spivey,” Record Research 2 (May–June 1956): 3, 4; Dixon and Godrich, Recording the Blues, 27–28; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 853–57. In a 1960 interview, Spivey told Paul Oliver that, since Johnson was out when she arrived at the De Luxe Music Shoppe, she auditioned

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48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

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for a salesgirl. But then the singer also claimed she was only fifteen years old at the time. Memory is a tricky business. Paul Oliver, Conversation with the Blues (London: Jazz Book Club, 1967), 118. See also Sheer et al., “Blues Galore,” 3, where Spivey repeated a similar story, this time confusing the clerk with Johnson’s wife. Charles K. Wolfe, Kentucky Country: Folk and Country Music of Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 125; Walker interview; Charles Wolfe, “Columbia Records and Old-Time Music,” JEMFQ 14 (Autumn 1978): 120, reprinted in Exploring Roots Music: Twenty Years of the JEMF Quarterly, ed. Nolan Porterfield (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 199–217. Jeff Todd Titon, Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994 [1977]), 210; David Evans, Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 75. William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 131–32. Harry Charles interview by Gayle Dean Wardlow, Birmingham, Alabama, 1968, GDWC. David Evans, “An Interview with H. C. Speir,” JEMFQ 8 (Autumn 1972): 119; Gayle Dean Wardlow, “The Talent Scouts: H. C. Speir (1895–1972),” 78 Quarterly no. 8 (1994): 13, 23. Charles likewise maintained a recording machine for this same purpose in his office in Atlanta while he was living there during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Alex van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall: The Roots and History of Paramount Records, 2nd ed. (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2012 [2003]), 123. Gayle Dean Wardlow, Chasin’ That Devil Music: Searching for the Blues, ed. with an introduction by Edward Komara (San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books, 1998), 63–67; Alan B. Govenar and Jay F. Brakefield, Deep Ellum and Central Track: Where the Black and White Worlds of Dallas Converged (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1998), 106–7. J. Mayo Williams telephone interview by John K. MacKenzie, August 5, 1970, JKMC. Williams quoted in Stephen Calt, “The Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label—Part 2: The Mayo Williams Era,” 78 Quarterly no. 4 (1989): 19, 20 (quotation), reprinted as “The Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Music Label: Mayo Williams and Paramount Records,” in Rhythm and Business: The Political Economy of Black Music, ed. Norman Kelley (New York: Akashic Books, 2005), 86–111. Nennstiel quoted in Charles K. Wolfe, “George Reneau: A Biographical Sketch,” JEMFQ 15 (Winter 1979): 206. See, for example, Wardlow, “Talent Scouts,” 17. Brockman interview by Green and Kahn. See, for example, Wardlow, “Talent Scouts,” 13. “RCA-Victor Will Make Recording Series in Dallas,” Dallas Morning News, January 31, 1932. David Kapp interview by John Krimsky, New York, New York, July 27, 1951, a transcription of which Cary Ginell graciously provided (copy in authors’ possession); Ginell, Decca Hillbilly Discography, xvi, xvii. Russell, “Country Music on Location,” 25. “Brunswick Recording Expedition Ends Trip,” Talking Machine World and Radio-Music Merchant, December 1929, 60. The article mistakenly reported that Voynow’s recording expedition spanned eight months; as Allan Sutton notes, however, the trip actually ran only three months—from late August to mid-November, 1929. See Allan Sutton, Race Records and the American Recording Industry, 1919–1945: An Illustrated History (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2016), 254. “Local Talent Makes Okeh and Odeon Records,” TMW, November 15, 1923, 114; “Make OKeh and Odeon Records in Chicago,” TMW, March 15, 1926, 104; “Install Permanent Okeh Record Laboratory,” TMW, June 15, 1925, 115.

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56. 57.

58.

59.

60.

61.

62.

63. 64.

65. 66.

Wolfe, “Columbia Records and Old-Time Music,” 120. Oliver, “Special Agents,” 22; Gary Hickinbotham, “A History of the Texas Recording Industry,” Journal of Texas Music History 4 (2004): 5; Tom Hanchett, “Recording in Charlotte, 1927–1945,” in The Charlotte Country Music Story, ed. George Holt (Charlotte: North Carolina Arts Council, 1985), 14; Patrick Huber, book accompanying The Dixon Brothers: “A Blessing to People” 4-CD boxed set (Bear Family Records BCD 16817DK), 38, 48, 56, 62–63, 73, 85. Donald Lee Nelson, “ ‘Mama, Where You At?’: The Chronicle of Mauis LaFleur,” JEMFQ 19 (Summer 1983): 77, reprinted in Ryan A. Brasseaux and Kevin S. Fontenot, eds., Accordions, Fiddles, Two Step and Swing: A Cajun Music Reader (Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana Studies, 2006), 339–45. Olson and Russell, book accompanying The Bristol Sessions, 4; Charles K. Wolfe, “Early Country Music in Knoxville: The Brunswick Sessions and the End of an Era,” OTM no. 12 (Spring 1974): 20; Ted Olson and Tony Russell, book accompanying The Knoxville Sessions, 1929–1930: Knox County Stomp, 4-CD boxed set (Bear Family Records BCD 16097); “Robert Johnson Records at the Gunter Hotel,” official blog of the Sheraton Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, thesheratongunter blog.com/2013/11/06/robert-johnson-records-at-the-gunter-hotel/ (accessed July 12, 2015). On Jesse Johnson’s talent-scouting activities, see van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall, 142; Dennis Owsley, City of Gabriels: The History of Jazz in St. Louis, 1895–1973 (St. Louis, MO: Reedy Press, 2006), 54; and Dean Alger, The Original Guitar Hero and the Power of Music: The Legendary Lonnie Johnson, Music, and Civil Rights (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2014), 79–80. Michael Taft actually refers to the multitalented Johnson as a “record producer,” but the assertion is not sourced. Equally intriguing, Taft claims that Edith North Johnson, Jesse’s wife, also “travelled as a talent scout in the 1920s.” Michael Taft, Talkin’ to Myself: Blues Lyrics 1921–1942, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005 [1983]), 303. Sykes quoted in Oliver, Conversation with the Blues, 113, 122; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 204, 872–77. See also the Walter Davis interview in Oliver, Conversation with the Blues, 113. Davis recalled his first session being arranged by Johnson and Kapp in New York, after Kapp offered him a $50 contract, but his memory seems to fail him here, as Kapp was then an A&R executive at Brunswick. Titon, Early Downhome Blues, 213. See also Evans, “Interview with H. C. Speir,” 117–21, and Wardlow, Chasin’ That Devil Music, 131–49. Wardlow, Chasin’ That Devil Music, 140, 149. Ben Wynne, In Tune: Charley Patton, Jimmie Rodgers, and the Roots of American Music (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), 134–36. Although still rather uncritical of the hagiography surrounding Speir, Wynne’s book is more sensitive to the complexity of Speir’s relationship with Patton. Wardlow, Chasin’ That Devil Music, 175. Kip Lornell and Jim O’Neal, “Interview with Sleepy John Estes and Hammie Nixon,” in The Voice of the Blues: Classic Interviews from Living Blues Magazine, ed. Jim O’Neal and Amy van Singel (New York: Routledge, 2013), 53. Speir told researcher Gayle Dean Wardlow that he had discovered Jim Jackson busking on the streets in downtown Jackson, Mississippi. “He was just a bum,” Speir recalled. “Nobody ever paid any attention to him.” Speir also remembered that Jackson was a “dope head,” and, as a result of his “cocaine habit,” Speir “sold” his contract with the blues singer-guitarist to fellow talent scout Loren L. Watson, who ran a record distributorship and retail store in Memphis. Watson arranged for Jackson to record for Vocalion in 1927, and over the next few years, the bluesman went on to make more than three dozen issued sides, among them the enduringly popular, two-part “Jim Jackson’s Kansas City Blues” (Vocalion 1144). See H. C. Speir interview by Gayle Dean Wardlow, Jackson, Mississippi, May 18, 1968, GDWC; Wardlow,

69.

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73. 74.

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79. 80.

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“Talent Scouts,” 25; and Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 428–30. For more on Watson, see Tony Russell, “Scouting for Blues: An Occasional Series on the Early A&R Men: 1. Loren L. Watson.” Juke Blues no. 27 (Autumn 1992): 23. Oliver, “Special Agents,” 22; University of California at Santa Barbara Library, “Will Shade (session supervisor),” Discography of American Historical Recordings, adp.library.ucsb.edu/index .php/talent/detail/47155/Shade_Will_session_supervisor (accessed March 17, 2017); Samuel Charters, The Blues Makers (New York: Da Capo Press, 1991 [1967/1977]), 2:21–22. Giles Oakley, The Devil’s Music: A History of the Blues, rev. ed. (London: BBC Books, 1983 [1976]), 177. Peter J. Sylvester, A Left Hand Like God: A History of Boogie-Woogie Piano (New York: Da Capo Press, 1989), 70–71. Big Bill Broonzy, Big Bill Blues: William Broonzy’s Story as Told to Yannick Bruynoghe (New York: Oak Publications, 1964 [1955]), 141–42 (quotation on 142); Bob Riesman, I Feel So Good: The Life and Times of Big Bill Broonzy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 85–86, 280n5. Mazor, Ralph Peer, 58–59; Tony Russell, Country Music Originals: The Legends and the Lost (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 9. See also Ivan M. Tribe, The Stonemans: An Appalachian Family and the Music That Shaped Their Lives (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), especially 36–44, 47–51. Stoneman quoted in Mazor, Ralph Peer, 92; Peer quoted in “Record Engineers Locate in Bristol,” Bristol (TN) Herald Courier, July 24, 1927. Mazor, Ralph Peer, 113. Ralph Peer interview by Lillian Borgeson, Hollywood, California, January and May 1959, John Edwards Memorial Foundation Collection, SFC. Donna L. Halper, Radio Music Directing (Boston: Focal Press, 1991), 18; “ASCAP Grabs 45 Mil via Radio,” Billboard, January 8, 1949, 3, 14. On the development of commercial radio and of licensing agreements among ASCAP, record companies, and radio broadcasters, see Erik Barnouw, A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States to 1933 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 119–20, and Russell Sanjek and David Sanjek, American Popular Music Business in the 20th Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 24–32, 58–78. Sutton and Nauck, American Record Labels and Companies, 266–67, 317–18; Sanjek and Sanjek, American Popular Music Business, 23–24, 47–50. Sanjek and Sanjek, American Popular Music Business, 33–46. John Hammond, with Irving Townsend, John Hammond on Record: An Autobiography (New York: Ridge Press, 1977), 113–14; Dunstan Prial, The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 56–57. Charles interview, 1968. The Blue Sky Boys (Bill and Earl Bolick) interview by Douglas B. Green, Camp Springs, North Carolina, May 26, 1974, CMFOHP. Whitey and Hogan (Roy “Whitey” Grant and Arval Hogan) interview by John W. Rumble, Nashville, Tennessee, November 5, 1982, CMFOHP. For more on the radio barn dance phenomenon, see, for example, Chad Berry, The Hayloft Gang: The Story of the National Barn Dance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Kristine M. McCusker, Lonesome Cowgirls and Honky-Tonk Angels: The Women of Barn Dance Radio (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Charles K. Wolfe, A Good-Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry (Nashville, TN: Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, 1999); Wayne W. Daniel, Pickin’ on Peachtree: A History of Country Music in Atlanta, Georgia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 109–26, 127–51; Bob Carlin, String Bands in

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84.

85. 86.

87. 88.

89.

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the North Carolina Piedmont (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2004), 172–96; Pamela Grundy, “ ‘ We Always Tried to be Good People’: Respectability, Crazy Water Crystals, and Hillbilly Music on the Air, 1933–1935,” Journal of American History 81 (March 1995): 1591–620; “Recording and Radio: WRVA and the 1929 Richmond OKeh Sessions,” Virginia Cavalcade 51 (Summer 2002): 136–42; Jeffrey J. Lange, Smile When you Call Me a Hillbilly: Country Music’s Struggle for Respectability, 1939–1954 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 19–66; Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 97–117; Pete Stamper, It All Happened in Renfro Valley (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1999). “WSM Artists Making Records,” Nashville Tennessean, April 17, 1927, reproduced in Charles K. Wolfe, The Grand Ole Opry: The Early Years, 1925–35, Old Time Music Booklet 2 (London: Old Time Music, 1975), 34; David C. Morton, with Charles K. Wolfe, DeFord Bailey: A Black Star in Early Country Music (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 51–55; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 31; Russell, Country Music Records, 87–88. Rick Kennedy, Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy: Gennett Studios and the Birth of Recorded Jazz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 162–67; Russell, Country Music Originals, 171–73. For more on Kincaid’s career, see Loyal Jones, Radio’s “Kentucky Mountain Boy,” Bradley Kincaid (Berea, KY: Berea College Appalachian Center, 1980), and Erich Nunn, Sounding the Color Line: Music and Race in the Southern Imagination (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 22–30. Both of Bailey’s two debut Columbia sides went unissued, but Pickard’s releases, as well as those of the Golden Eco Quartet, all bear this station identification on their labels. See Russell, Country Music Records, 87–88, 691, and Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 31, 305. Kennedy, Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy, 162. Clayton “Jack” Jackson interview by John K. MacKenzie, probably Lynn, Indiana, probably 1970, JKMC. Russell, Country Music Records, 482–85. Acuff quoted in Elizabeth Schlappi, Roy Acuff: The Smoky Mountain Boy, 2nd ed. (Gretna, LA: Pelican, 1997 [1978]), 27–29 (quotation on 27). Guthrie T. Meade Jr., “Copyright: A Tool for Commercial Rural Music Research,” Western Folklore 30 (July 1971): 213. Jimmie Davis interview by Ronnie F. Pugh, Nashville, Tennessee, October 10, 1983, CMFOHP. Sutton and Nauck, American Record Labels and Companies, 266–67; Russell, Country Music Records, 11; Schlappi, Roy Acuff, 30. Gene Autry, with Mickey Herskowitz, Back in the Saddle Again (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 2; Holly George-Warren, Public Cowboy No. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 40; Douglas B. Green, Singing in the Saddle: The History of the Singing Cowboy (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press and Country Music Foundation Press, 2003), 122. In his memoir, Shilkret also claimed credit for assisting Autry at this point in his musical career by offering him similar encouragement. See Nathaniel Shilkret, Nathaniel Shilkret: Sixty Years in the Music Business, ed. Niel Shell and Barbara Shilkret (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 113. George-Warren, Public Cowboy No. 1, 46–55. In the early 1930s, Oberstein even tried to use Autry as a pawn in an escalating turf war with his former mentor and A&R giant, Ralph Peer, within RCA Victor’s roots music division. Regarding this rivalry, see Mazor, Ralph Peer, 152, 158–59, 171, 179–80. George-Warren, Public Cowboy No. 1, 64–65, 123–24. Arthur Satherley interview by Douglas B. Green, Fountain City, California, March 26, 1975, CMFOHP.

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101.

102. 103.

104.

105.

106. 107.

108.

109.

110.

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George-Warren, Public Cowboy No. 1, 76, 88; Green, Singing in the Saddle, 128. Green, Singing in the Saddle, 111–19 (quotation on 119); George-Warren, Public Cowboy No. 1, 123–29, 134. George-Warren, Public Cowboy No. 1, 141–42. Gene Autry, “3 Pals,” Country Song Roundup, June 1950, 15, quoted in George-Warren, Public Cowboy No. 1, 79–81 (quotation on 80); Autry quoted in Green, Singing in the Saddle, 116. On the complex relationship between Fuller and Long, see Oakley, Devil’s Music, 191, and Bruce Bastin, “Blind Boy Fuller,” in Blind Boy Fuller, ed. Stefan Grossman (Van Nuys, CA: Alfred Music Publishing, 1993), 10–12, 14–17. Russell, Country Music Records, 700; Kinney Rorrer, Rambling Blues: The Life and Songs of Charlie Poole (Danville, VA: McCain Printing Co., 1992 [1982]), 43–44; Huber, Linthead Stomp, 145–46. Russell, Country Music Records, 410, 700; Rorrer, Rambling Blues, 44; Huber, Linthead Stomp, 146. Jack Palmer, Vernon Dalhart: First Star of Country Music (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press. 2005), 388; Johnson quoted in Paul Oliver, Conversation with the Blues, 115. Record companies employed another fifty-seven pseudonyms on Dalhart’s releases issued in Great Britain, Canada, and other foreign countries. See Palmer, Vernon Dalhart, 388. The fourth edition of Blues and Gospel Records indicates that, contrary to Johnson’s claim, his releases appeared under rather fewer than ten pseudonyms, but he did manage to record for six labels (QRS, Brunswick, Paramount, OKeh, Victor, and Bluebird) between 1929 and 1933. See Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 453–54. Dwight Butcher interview by Cecil Whaley, Nashville, Tennessee, July 28, 1969, CMFOHP; Russell, Country Music Records, 148–49. In fact, none of Butcher’s Crown releases were issued under his own name, and he was billed as Joe Smith (The Colorado Cowboy), rather than (The Lonesome Cowboy), on his 1934 Bluebird sides. See Russell, Country Music Records, 148–49. See also “Tapescript: Interview with Dwight Butcher (T7–184),” JEMFQ 5 (Spring 1969): 10–15. Charles quoted in Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow, “Paramount, Part 4: The Advent of Arthur Laibly,” 78 Quarterly no. 6 (1991): 11, 13 (quotation on 13; emphasis in the original). Blues and Gospel Records indicates that this Brunswick session took place in New York on September 30, 1926, but as Charles recalled that both sessions occurred in Chicago, the discography may be in error. See Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 422–23. Harry Charles interview by Gayle Dean Wardlow, Birmingham, Alabama, March 20, 1968, GDWC. Wardlow, “Recording the Blues in Mississippi and the South,” 10–11; Sutton, Race Records and the American Recording Industry, 193–94; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 443. A. C. Laibly letter to Doc Roberts, February 21, 1927, Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 13: Correspondence with Paramount Record Company, 1927–1929, DRP. In this letter, Laibly mistakenly believed Roberts was under contract to OKeh, rather than to Gennett. A. C. Laibly letter to Doc Roberts, March 7, 1927, Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 13: Correspondence with Paramount Record Company, 1927–1929, DRP. Biographical details for Oakley are drawn mainly from Helen Oakley Dance interview by Monk Rowe, San Diego, California, February 12, 1998, Fillius Jazz Archive, Hamilton College, Clinton, New York, contentdm6.hamilton.edu/cdm/ref/collection/jazz/id/753 (accessed December 8, 2013); Helen Oakley Dance interview by Mark Tucker, Vista, California, January 9, 1987, Oral History of American Music, Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut, www.library.yale.edu/about /departments/oham/ELLINGTON_helen_oakley_dance.html (accessed December 8, 2013). Since the events related here predate Oakley’s 1947 marriage to English-born jazz critic and historian Stanley Dance, we have used her maiden name throughout.

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113. 114.

115. 116. 117.

118. 119. 120. 121.

122. 123.

124.

125.

126.

127.

Dance interview by Rowe; Prial, Producer, 80–81. Dance interview by Rowe. Dance interview by Tucker. Jim Prohaska, “Irving Mills—Record Producer: The Master and Variety Labels,” IAJRC journal 30 (Spring 1997): 1–9, iajrc.org/docs/irving_mills_variety.pdf (accessed January 30, 2015); Sutton, Recording the ’Thirties, 119–22. Dance interview by Rowe. Dance interview by Tucker. Helen Oakley Dance interview by Patricia Willard, Vista, California, September 26 and 27, 1989, Smithsonian Institution Ellington Oral History Project, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. Harvey G. Cohen, Duke Ellington’s America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 154. Cohen, Duke Ellington’s America, 154. Dance interview by Rowe; Prohaska, “Irving Mills.” Helen Oakley Dance, Stormy Monday: The T-Bone Walker Story (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987). Prohaska, “Irving Mills.” Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 201. On these and other early independent jazz labels, see Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 301–6; Sutton and Nauck, American Record Labels and Companies, 24, 52–53, 111, 188, 210; and Sutton, Recording the ’Thirties, 122–25. On Gabler and his Commodore label, see Dave Dexter Jr., “They All Know Milt Gabler,” Down Beat, April 15, 1940, 12; Gilbert Millstein, “Profiles: For Kicks—I” and “Profiles: For Kicks—II,” New Yorker, March 9, 1946, 30–34, 36, 38, 40, and March 16, 1946, 34–38, 41–43, respectively; Gilbert Millstein, “The Commodore Shop and Milt Gabler,” in Eddie Condon’s Treasury of Jazz, ed. Eddie Condon and Richard Gehman (London: Peter Davies, 1957), 98–118; “Jazz Scene Legend: Gabler Writes ’30’ for Commodore Disk Shop,” Billboard, November 3, 1958, 3, 18; John Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 92–94; and Douglas Martin, “Milton Gabler, Storekeeper of the Jazz World, Dies at 90,” New York Times, July 25, 2001. For more on the circumstances surrounding Holiday’s recording of “Strange Fruit,” see David Margolick, Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song (New York: Echo Press, 2001), especially 46–47; Terry Trilling-Josephson, Café Society: The Wrong Place for the Right People (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 49–53; and Prial, Producer, 129–30. James Wierzbicki, Music in the Age of Anxiety: American Music in the Fifties (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 33. Condon and anonymous musician both quoted in Millstein, “Commodore Shop and Milt Gabler,” 100, 110. A. C. Laibly letter to Doc Roberts, March 30, 1927, Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 13: Correspondence with Paramount Record Company, 1927–1929, DRP.

CHAPTER 3 1. 2.

Art Satherley interview by Douglas B. Green, Nashville, Tennessee, October 15, 1974, CMFOHP. “Miss Arizona Juanita Dranes” contract with the General Phonograph Corporation, June 17, 1926, reproduced in Malcolm Shaw, “Arizona Dranes and OKeh,” Storyville no. 27 (February 1970): 86–87.

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7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

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Doc Phill [sic] Roberts contract with the Starr Piano Company, May 10, 1928, Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 1: Agreements with the Starr Piano Company, September 1925–April 1930, DRP. Jelly Roll Morton contract with RCA Manufacturing Company Inc., September 26, 1939, reproduced in William Russell, comp., “Oh, Mister Jelly”: A Jelly Roll Morton Scrapbook (Copenhagen, Denmark: JazzMedia Aps., 1999), 532–33. Russel, “Oh, Mister Jelly,” 532–33. Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow, “Paramount, Part 4: The Advent of Arthur Laibly,” 78 Quarterly no. 6 (1991): 16–17. The details of Williams’s employment history remain murky for this period, however, and his simultaneous association with both Paramount and Black Patti is disputed. Contrary to Calt and Wardlow, Allan Sutton asserts that Williams’s involvement with Black Patti did not overlap with his tenure at Paramount. In the spring of 1927, Sutton claims, Williams resigned from his A&R position at Paramount to “serve as the front-man for the new Black Patti venture,” but when that ill-fated endeavor ended after only six months, he returned to “scouting informally” for his former employer. Williams left Paramount for good sometime in 1928. See Allan Sutton, Race Records and the American Recording Industry, 1919–1945: An Illustrated History (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2016), 191, 201, 211, 215n28. Harry Charles interview by Gayle Dean Wardlow, Birmingham, Alabama, 1968, GDWC. Long quoted in Kip Lornell, “Living Blues Interview: J. B. Long,” Living Blues no. 29 (September–October 1976): 18. See also Bruce Bastin, Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995 [1986]), 228. H. C. Speir interview by Gayle Dean Wardlow, Jackson, Mississippi, February 8, 1970, GDWC. See also Gayle Dean Wardlow, “The Talent Scouts: H.C. Speir (1895–1972),” 78 Quarterly no. 8 (1994): 11–33, and Gayle Dean Wardlow, Chasin’ That Devil Music: Searching for the Blues, ed. with an introduction by Edward Komara (San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books, 1998), 126–30, 140. Irving Mills interview by Irene Kahn Atkins, Beverly Hills, California, April 23, 1981, Duke Ellington Oral History Project, Oral History of American Music, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Tony Russell, Country Music Originals: The Legends and the Lost (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 96; Charles K. Wolfe, Kentucky Country: Folk and Country Music of Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 27–29. J. Mayo Williams telephone interview by John K. MacKenzie, August 5, 1970, JKMC; J. Mayo Williams interview by William Russell and John Steiner, probably Chicago, Illinois, November 20, 1970, William Russell Jazz Collection, Williams Research Center, Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans, Louisiana; Stephen Calt, “The Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label—Part 2: The Mayo Williams Era,” 78 Quarterly no. 4 (1989): 14, 16–17, reprinted as “The Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Music Label: Mayo Williams and Paramount Records,” in Rhythm and Business: The Political Economy of Black Music, ed. Norman Kelley (New York: Akashic Books, 2005), 86–111. Williams interview by Russell and Steiner. Harold Soulé interview by John K. MacKenzie, probably Sandy, Oregon, June 28, 1961, JKMC. Clayton “Jack” Jackson interview by John K. MacKenzie, probably Lynn, Indiana, probably 1970, JKMC. Anita Sheer, Len Kunstadt, Harrison Smith, and Bob Colton, “Blues Galore: The Story of Victoria Spivey,” Record Research 2 (May–June 1956): 3; “Spivey’s Records Biggest Seller,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 25, 1928; “Miss Spivey Sues,” Chicago Defender, October 20, 1928.

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22. 23.

24.

25.

A. C. Laibly letter to Doc Roberts, March 30, 1927, Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 13: Correspondence with Paramount Record Company, 1927–1929, DRP; Robert Springer, “Folklore, Commercialism and Exploitation: Copyright in the Blues,” Popular Music 26 (January 2007): 39; Stephen Calt, I’d Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2008 [1994]), 158–59. Ryan André Brasseaux, Cajun Breakdown: The Emergence of an American-Made Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 51. Whitey and Hogan (Roy “Whitey” Grant and Arval Hogan) interview by John W. Rumble, Nashville, Tennessee, November 5, 1982, CMFOHP. Springer, “Folklore, Commercialism and Exploitation,” 33–34. For more on the importance of copyrights in the recording industry before World War II, see William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), especially 118–19, 132, 133, 139–40, 188–89; Guthrie T. Meade Jr., “Copyright: A Tool for Commercial Rural Music Research,” Commercialized Folk Music special issue, Western Folklore 30 (July 1971): 206–14; and David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 150–77. Satherley quoted in Maurice Zolotow, “Hillbilly Boom,” Saturday Evening Post, February 12, 1944, 36, reprinted in Linnell Gentry, ed., A History and Encyclopedia of Country, Western, and Gospel Music, 2nd rev. ed. (Nashville, TN: Clairmont Corp., 1969 [1961]), 36–42; H. C. Speir interview by Gayle Dean Wardlow, Jackson, Mississippi, 1969, GDWC; David Evans, “An Interview with H. C. Speir,” JEMFQ 8 (Autumn 1972): 120; Wardlow, “Talent Scouts,” 25. Springer, “Folklore, Commercialism and Exploitation,” 34. For Satherley’s varying payment claims, see Arthur Satherley, “Handwritten Note,” n.d., Art Satherley Files, Frist Library and Archive, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee; and Art Satherley interview by Douglas B. Green, Fountain City, California, March 26, 1975, CMFOHP. Although the Norfolk Jubilee Quartet (sometimes Norfolk Jazz Quartette) was a well-established recording unit by 1923, $100 seems unusually high, and, in the context of this interview, Satherley may have been thinking instead of a session fee of $100. Given eight sides from the April 1923 session were issued, this works out to $12.50 per side, split four ways. The alternative—that the group received $800, or $100 per side, for the session—seems unlikely. Son House interview by John Fahey, Barry Hansen, and Mark Levine, Venice, California, May 7, 1965, ParamountsHome.org, paramountshome.org/index.php?option=com_content&view =article&id=112:son-house-interview-1965-&catid=47:new-york-recording-laboratoriesoral -histories&Itemid=54 (accessed February 5, 2015). See also Jeff Todd Titon, Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994 [1977]), 214. Robert M. W. Dixon, John Godrich, and Howard Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 1890–1943, 4th ed. (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1997 [1964]), 707–8; Stephen Calt and Gayle Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charlie Patton (Newton, NJ: Rock Chapel Press, 1988), 182–83; Ted Gioia, Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2008), 71. Patton’s debut June 1929 session occurred, as noted, at the Starr Piano Company’s Richmond, Indiana, studio. Paramount officials sometimes leased this studio to record its own artists, at a rate of $40 per master, between June and October of that year, before the opening of the label’s new recording facilities in Grafton, Wisconsin. See Alex van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall: The Roots and History of Para-

28.

29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

35.

36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

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27.

339

26.

mount Records, 2nd ed. (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2012 [2003]), 136–37, and Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow, “Paramount’s Decline and Fall (Part 5),” 78 Quarterly no. 7 (1992): 12, which mistakenly cites an $80 fee per master. William H. Young and Nancy K. Young, Music of the Great Depression (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 19, 20–21 (table 1). Bert Collier, “Fiddlin’ John on Broadway,” Atlanta Journal Magazine, February 10, 1924; Gene Wiggins, “John Carson: Early Road, Radio, and Records,” JCM 8 (May 1979): 32; Gene Wiggins, Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy: Fiddlin’ John Carson, His Real World, and the World of His Songs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 77. Barry Mazor, Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014), 74–85. Ben Wynne, In Tune: Charley Patton, Jimmie Rodgers, and the Roots of American Music (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), 151; Mazor, Ralph Peer, 81, 125–28; Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 37–39. Meade, “Copyright,” 209. Harvey G. Cohen, Duke Ellington’s America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 4, 49–50. Samuel B. Charters, The Country Blues (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975 [1959]), 115. Clarence Williams letter to Sylvester Weaver, May 12, 1924, reproduced in Jim O’Neal, “Guitar Blues: Sylvester Weaver,” Living Blues no. 52 (Spring 1982): 19, 20 (letter). Jimmie Davis interview by Ronnie F. Pugh, Nashville, Tennessee, October 10, 1983, CMFOHP; Mazor, Ralph Peer, 184 (emphasis in the original). Mazor, Ralph Peer, 78, 81–82. For much of 1928, Peer received the entire two cents of the mechanical royalties per side on the records, which he continued to share with songwriters. In December of that year, though, Victor (renamed RCA Victor after the Radio Corporation of America acquired the firm in January 1929) assumed outright ownership of Southern Music, and until 1932, when he resumed sole control of the publishing firm, Peer functioned more like a regular salaried employee. See Mazor, Ralph Peer, 127–28. Patsy Montana interview by John W. Rumble, Nashville, Tennessee, June 9, 1984, CMFOHP. Montana was unsure about the rate: “I believe it was one cent a side. . . . Maybe it was a half a cent. I don’t know.” The latter appears more likely. Mazor, Ralph Peer, 152–53. Mazor, Ralph Peer, 152–53. Meade, “Copyright,” 212; Judith McCulloh, “Hillbilly Records and Tune Transcriptions,” Western Folklore 26 (October 1967): 227, 228; Wiggins, Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy, 78, 81–82, 261; Charles K. Wolfe, Classic Country: Legends of Country Music (New York: Routledge, 2001), 68; Guthrie T. Meade Jr., with Dick Spottswood and Douglas S. Meade, Country Music Sources: A BiblioDiscography of Commercially Recorded Traditional Music (Chapel Hill: Southern Folklife Collection, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries in Association with the John Edwards Memorial Forum, 2002), 333. Meade, “Copyright,” 212. Polk C. Brockman letter to Archie Green, November 29, 1957, Series 5: Research Files, Box 58, Folder 12: Jenkins, Andrew (Revd.) 1 of 2, Wayne W. Daniel Collection, Popular Music Collections, Special Collections and Archives, University Library, Georgia State University, Atlanta.

340 N OT E S TO PAG E S 1 0 0 – 1 04

42.

43. 44.

45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55.

56. 57. 58.

59.

Mrs. J. J. Futrelle (Irene Spain) letter to Judy McCulloh, March 16, 1965, quoted in McCulloh, “Hillbilly Records and Tune Transcriptions,” 227–28 (quotation on 228). Spain, a singer, pianist, and organist, was herself a recording artist who, along with her stepfather and sister, recorded as the Jenkins Family and the Jenkins’ Sacred Singers for OKeh and Bluebird between 1924 and 1934. See Tony Russell, Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921–1942, with editorial research by Bob Pinson, assisted by the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 455–57, 861. Wiggins, “John Carson,” 35; Wiggins, Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy, 81–82, 120. Jack Palmer, Vernon Dalhart: First Star of Country Music (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2005), 140–42; Russell, Country Music Records, 247, 250, 251, 253, 255; Charles K. Wolfe, “Event Songs,” in Readin’ Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Honky Tonk Bars, ed. Cecelia Tichi, special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 94 (Winter 1995): 224. Incidentally, the Reverend Jenkins’s stepdaughter Irene Spain composed the music to “Little Mary Phagan,” while Fiddlin’ John Carson and his daughter Rosa Lee were credited with penning the lyrics. See Meade, Country Music Sources, 92. Mrs. J. J. Futrelle (Irene Spain) letter to Archie Green, November 29, 1957, Series 5: Research Files, Box 58, Folder 12: Jenkins, Andrew (Revd.) 1 of 2, Wayne W. Daniel Collection; Barbara Brockman McClenny, handwritten note, Series 5: Research Files, Box 21, Folder 12: Polk C. Brockman, Wayne W. Daniel Collection. Williams telephone interview by MacKenzie; Calt, “Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label—Part 2,” 14, 15; van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall, 65–66; Meade, “Copyright,” 210. Williams telephone interview by MacKenzie. Williams telephone interview by MacKenzie; Meade, “Copyright,” 211. Williams interview by Russell and Steiner. Calt, “Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label—Part 2,” 17. Williams telephone interview by MacKenzie. Williams telephone interview by MacKenzie. Frank C. Taylor, with Gerald Cook, Alberta Hunter: A Celebration in Blues (New York: McGraw Hill, 1987), 65–66; Calt, “Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label—Part 2,” 18–19; Alberta Hunter interview by Steve Cushing, Harlem, New York, January 30, 1984, in Blues before Sunrise: The Radio Interviews, comp. Steve Cushing (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 45. Calt repeats Williams’s claims that, of all his artists, only Hunter was disaffected with his business dealings, though curiously Calt mentions Big Bill Broonzy’s similar protests in a footnote. See “Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label—Part 2,” 19, 30n14. Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 128. Williams quoted in Calt, “Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label—Part 2,” 18, 19; Williams interview by Russell and Steiner. Carlton Brown, “Cow Cow Odyssey Colorful but Tragic,” Down Beat, December 1, 1945, 14–15. George Hoeffer, “The Hot Box,” Down Beat, January 25, 1956, 31. Chris Albertson, Bessie: Empress of the Blues (London: Abacus, 1975 [1972]), 37; “Afterthoughts,” Storyville no. 83 (June–July 1979): 200; Edward Brooks, The Bessie Smith Companion: A Critical and Detailed Appreciation of the Recordings (Wheathampstead, UK: Cavendish Publishing Co., 1982), xvii–xviii. Albertson, Bessie, 37–38, 50; Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 119–20; William Barlow, Looking Up at Down: The Emergence of Blues Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 130.

63.

64. 65.

66. 67.

68.

69. 70.

71.

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61. 62.

John Hammond, “An Experience in Jazz History,” in Black Music in Our Culture: Curricular Ideas on the Subjects, Materials, and Problems, ed. Dominique-René de Lerma (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1970), 59; John Hammond, with Irving Townsend, John Hammond on Record: An Autobiography (New York: Ridge Press, 1977), 119–23; Albertson, Bessie, 164; Dunstan Prial, The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 58–60; Barlow, Looking Up at Down, 130. It is simply impossible to be precise about the nature or extent of Columbia’s “underpayment” of Smith. William Howland Kenney claims that she should have earned roughly $30,875 in mechanical royalties for the thirty-eight selfcomposed sides she recorded for the company, working on the assumption that her own compositions sold on average as well as her recordings of other songwriters’ material. This figure seems relatively accurate, though Kenney uses Smith’s career total of approximately 160 issued sides as the baseline for his calculations, alongside Hammond’s vague estimate of “between six and seven million” records sold—an estimate which actually pertains to sales of only Smith’s 1923–1928 records (127 sides); her later 1929–1933 recordings did not sell nearly as well. (See Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 120.) If we adjust the number of sides in play when calculating a notional average sales for Smith’s recording during her heyday, the potential mechanical royalties on sales of, say, 6.5 million copies of the twenty-eight self-composed sides Columbia issued between 1923 and 1928, comes to $28,661.42. In the absence of definitive sales and accounting data, however, this unsatisfactorily fuzzy math is ultimately far less important than acknowledging that Smith was paid only a tiny fraction of the money that her talent generated for Columbia—and far less than if she had retained copyright to her compositions. Barlow, Looking Up at Down, 130; Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 120. Billie Holiday, with William Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues (London: Penguin, 1984 [1956]), 38. “Henry Johnson” (John Hammond), “Music Sold for Less Than a Song,” New Masses, July 7, 1936, 29. Holiday, with Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues, 38. Russell, Country Music Records, 151; Bill Callahan interview by Ronnie Pugh and David Hayes, Dallas, Texas, January 4, 1979, CMFOHP. Bastin, Red River Blues, 214–40; Lornell, “Living Blues Interview: J. B. Long,” 13–22 (quotation on 17). Bastin, Red River Blues, 228. Bastin notes that Long was not credited as songwriter on any Fuller recordings until April 1938, and then only on songs that were issued much later. It was only at the Fuller’s March 1940 sessions that Long routinely received songwriting credits, though he appears to have contributed at least modestly to some of the bluesman’s earlier compositions. “Contract: Exclusive Artist—Blind Boy Fuller,” March, 4, 1940, Folder 1, Satherley, Arthur (Logs), 94–065, CPM. It is also possible, of course, that Long conscientiously passed on the money due to Fuller, though the circumstantial evidence suggests otherwise. Report quoted in Bastin, Red River Blues, 235; Lornell, “Living Blues Interview: J. B. Long,” 13–22. Long quoted in Lornell, “Living Blues Interview: J. B. Long,” 16. See also Bastin, Red River Blues, 228. University of California at Santa Barbara Library, “W. W. [sic] Ellsworth (session supervisor),” Discography of American Historical Recordings, adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/talent/detail /114846/Ellsworth_W._W._session_supervisor (accessed March 17, 2017); the Girls of the Golden West (Millie Good McCluskey and Bill McCluskey) interview by John W. Rumble, Cincinnati, Ohio, November 4, 1988, CMFOHP. Ironically, Millie missed the Girls of the Golden West’s February 28, 1938, session at which “Texas Moon” was waxed under Art Satherley’s direction. The act that day consisted of only Dolly Good, with Millie’s husband, Bill McCluskey, contributing vocals

341

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72.

73.

74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80.

81.

82.

83.

84. 85.

86.

87.

88.

to some sides. See Russell, Country Music Records, 371. For more on the Girls of the Golden West, see Kristine M. McCusker, Lonesome Cowgirls and Honky-Tonk Angels: The Women of Barn Dance Radio (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 68–81. On the Dixon Brothers, see Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 216–73, and Patrick Huber, book accompanying The Dixon Brothers: “A Blessing to People,” 4-CD boxed set (Bear Family Records BCD 16817DK). Dorsey M. Dixon interview by Eugene Earle and Archie Green, East Rockingham, North Carolina, August 7 and 8, 1962, AGP. See also Huber, Linthead Stomp, 257–59, and Huber, book accompanying Dixon Brothers, 19. Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 128. Springer, “Folklore, Commercialism and Exploitation,” 40. Titon, Early Downhome Blues, 211. Archie Green, “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol,” JAF 78 (July–September 1965): 209–10; Evans, “Interview with H. C. Speir,” 119; Gayle Dean Wardlow, “Recording the Blues in Mississippi and the South, 1923–1940,” Blues and Rhythm no. 192 (September 2004): 8. Titon, Early Downhome Blues, 211. Callahan interview. Frank Walker interview by Mike Seeger, probably New York, New York, June 19, 1962, Mike Seeger Collection, SFC, transcribed in part as “Who Chose These Records? A Look into the Life, Tastes, and Procedures of Frank Walker,” in Anthology of American Folk Music, ed. Josh Dunson and Ethel Raim (New York: Oak Publications, 1973), 8–17. Ralph Peer interview by Lillian Borgeson, Hollywood, California, January and May 1959, John Edwards Memorial Foundation Collection, SFC. Tim Schuller, “ ’Til I Find My Way Home: The Lost Brownie McGhee Interview,” Blues Access no. 26 (Summer 1996): 14. Jeffrey J. Lange, Smile When You Call Me a Hillbilly: Country Music’s Struggle for Respectability, 1939–1954 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 32. Calt, “Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label—Part 2,” 16. Art Laibly interview by John Steiner, probably Park Ridge, Illinois, March 11, 1970, John Steiner Collection, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, Chicago, Illinois. Cohen, Duke Ellington’s America, 263; “Duke Ellington, Peeved at RCA-Victor, Asks for Release from Disk Contract,” Variety, December 19, 1945, 37. Brad McCuen interview by Patricia Willard, Nashville, Tennessee, August 2 and 3, 1989, Smithsonian Institution Ellington Oral History Project, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Cohen, Duke Ellington’s America, 264–65. Satherley interview by Green, March 26, 1975. Decades earlier, Satherley recounted the same incident, though in far less detail, to a Time magazine reporter. See “September Records,” Time, September 2, 1940, 45. In a vivid illustration of the perilous nature of personal testimony as a historical source, Satherley’s reminiscence appears to place this episode in the Great Depression, with plummeting record sales providing the context for his inability to offer the best-selling quartet a more lucrative contract. Satherley, however, did not work with the group after June 1928, well before the Wall Street Crash sent the recording industry into a tailspin. One necessarily speculative interpretation for this temporal displacement is that Satherley found it easier to talk about, and therefore by extension to excuse, this kind of exploitation in terms of the acute financial pressures of the Great Depression, when, in fact, it was routine practice among A&R men, even in the relatively flush years of the 1920s.

90. 91.

93. 94.

95. 96.

97. 98. 99.

100.

101.

102.

CHAPTER 4

Robert M. W. Dixon, John Godrich, and Howard Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 1890–1943, 4th ed. (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1997 [1964]), 287; Allan Sutton, Race Records and the American Recording Industry, 1919–1945: An Illustrated History (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2016), 217; Lerone A. Martin, Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Shaping of Modern African American Religion (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 96, 97–98. Martin asserts that Polk C. Brockman discovered the Reverend Gates. This seems doubtful, though, since Brockman appears to have scouted exclusively for OKeh during this period. Nor, to our knowledge, did he ever claim to have been the first to find the minister. Brockman did, however, later sign him and act as his manager, as discussed in this chapter. It appears more likely that, if a talent scout did indeed locate Gates and recommend him to Frank Walker, it was Dan Hornsby, as Paul Oliver claims, or a fellow Columbia scout who worked the Atlanta beat. See Martin, Preaching on Wax, 97, and Paul Oliver, Barrelhouse Blues: Location Recording and the Early Traditions of the Blues (New York: BasicCivitas Books, 2009), 26. 2. Martin, Preaching on Wax, 98. 3. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 287–94; Robert M. W. Dixon and John Godrich, Recording the Blues (London, UK: November Books, 1970), 38, 40; Sutton, Race Records and the American Recording Industry, 217–18; Atlanta Phonograph Company manager quoted in “Sells Thousand Records a Week of One Number,” TMW, September 15, 1926, 70. 1.

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92.

Satherley interview by Green, March 26, 1975. A transcription error has “ties” rendered as “toys.” Satherley interview by Green, March 26, 1975. Satherley interview by Green, March 26, 1975. Jackson interview. Jackson’s memory here is almost certainly flawed on the particulars. But the point that he and his Gennett superiors were happy to super-exploit new black talent is clear, while the underlying racist stereotyping (his reminiscence also describes how he spent much of his time rounding up habitually drunk African American musicians) is hard to miss. Brockman quoted in Calt and Wardlow, “Paramount, Part 4,” 26n18 (emphasis in original). Evans, “Interview with H. C. Speir,” 119; Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 266; David Evans, Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 72. Evans, Big Road Blues, 72. Although no figures were provided, the contract allegedly made her “the highest salaried Colored phonograph star in the country.” “Ethel Must Not Marry,” Chicago Defender, December 24, 1921. Art Satherley interview by Douglas B. Green, Hollywood, California, June 30, 1974, CMFOHP. Peer interview. Paul Garon and Beth Garon, Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2014 [1992]), 32 (emphasis in the original). Garon and Garon, Woman with Guitar, 32, 292–93; “Contract: Exclusive Artist—Big Bill Broonzy,” December 12, 1939, Folder 1, Satherley, Arthur (Logs), 94-065, CPM. Memphis Minnie’s first recordings were for the Columbia Phonograph Company, a different entity than the Columbia Recording Corporation, a subsidiary of CBS. Garon and Garon, Woman with Guitar, 32, 48, 292–93, 391n15; “Contract: Exclusive Artist—Memphis Minnie,” July 19, 1948, Folder 3, Satherley, Arthur (Logs), 94–065, CPM. The “Bluebird Beat” tag was coined by blues scholar Samuel Charters in his landmark study, Country Blues, 183.

343

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

“Interesting Addresses Feature Dinner Meeting of Baltimore Columbia Dealers,” TMW, August 15, 1926, 80. See also “Demand for Record So Big Dealer Drives to Factory,” TMW, August 15, 1926, 86. Martin, Preaching on Wax, 104; Dixon and Godrich, Recording the Blues, 38, 40, 41. For a detailed discussion of the Reverend Gates and other preachers who recorded sermons for the race record market during this period, see also Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 140–83, and Martin, Preaching on Wax. Martin, Preaching on Wax, 103–5, 107, 138; Sutton, Race Records and the American Recording Industry, 219, 221–22; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 287–90. Among these nearly one hundred sides were many duplicates of Gates’s most popular titles. Brockman quoted in Oliver, Songsters and Saints, 270; Polk C. Brockman interview by Archie Green and Ed Kahn, Atlanta, Georgia, August 11, 1961, AGP. See also Martin, Preaching on Wax, 107. Roger S. Brown, “Recording Pioneer Polk Brockman,” Living Blues no. 23 (September/October 1975): 31; Martin, Preaching on Wax, 97. Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997), 46–47, 246n29. Peterson argues that, beyond giving “clear instructions about the general sort of music that they wanted” (46), A&R officials’ creative input during the interwar period was negligible. Also typical of this school of thought, D. K. Wilgus contends that “Brockman, like other recording scouts and executives of the 1920s, had almost no realization of what he was actually doing.” D. K. Wilgus “The Rationalistic Approach,” in A Good Tale and a Bonny Tune,” ed. Mody C. Boatright, Wilson M. Hudson, and Allen Maxwell (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1964), 231. Brockman quoted in Brown, “Recording Pioneer Polk Brockman,” 31. See also Karl Hagstrom Miller, who argues that Brockman, like most other talent scouts, “had little stomach for the sound of the tunes he was hawking,” but he and his contemporaries “found they could overcome their distaste for native music if the products sold well.” Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Popular Music in the Age of Jim Crow, 201. Communication studies scholar Kyle Barnett also challenges this conventional wisdom about the roles of A&R men (he prefers to call them “talent scouts”). Barnett argues that “everyday work responsibilities collapse any simple distinctions between management and creative labor,” and that those “who worked within record companies regularly performed tasks that bridged managerial and creative roles.” In large part, he explains, this was because many independent record companies of the 1920s employed such small staffs that, as a result, A&R men were required to perform “numerous tasks that we might now understand as managerial (organizing recording or sales trips) or creative (writing or choosing material for artists, determining the best take from a given recording session).” See Kyle Barnett, “Record Men: Talent Scouts in the U.S. Recording Industry, 1920–1935,” in Making Media Work: Cultures of Management in the Entertainment Industries, ed. Derek Johnson, Derek Kompare, and Avi Santo (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 124–25. Laibly literally left his mark on the recordings he supervised. According to recording engineer Alfred Schultz, Laibly liked to carve the initial “L” into all his wax masters at Paramount. Alfred Schultz interview by Gayle Dean Wardlow, Grafton, Wisconsin, August 2, 1968, GDWC. A. C. Laibly letter to Doc Roberts, February 21, 1927, Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 13: Correspondence with Paramount Record Company, 1927–1929, DRP. In this letter, Laibly mistakenly believed Roberts was contracted to OKeh, rather than to Gennett.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

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15.

A. C. Laibly letter to Doc Roberts, April 30, 1927, Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 13: Correspondence with Paramount Record Company, 1927–1929, DRP; Tony Russell, Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921–1942, with editorial research by Bob Pinson, assisted by the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 478–79. The release of the September 1927 material on Broadway was again credited to the Old Smoky Twins. T. G. Rockwell letter to John Hurt, November 8, 1928, reprinted in Philip R. Ratcliffe, Mississippi John Hurt: His Life, His Times, His Blues (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 56–66, 120–42 (letter on 61); Dick Spottswood, liner notes to Mississippi John Hurt: Folksongs and Blues (Gryphon Records GLP 13157); Tony Russell, Blacks, Whites and Blues (New York: Stein and Day, 1970), 25–31; Oliver, Songsters and Saints, 255; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 418–19. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 418–19. Rick Kennedy and Randy McNutt, Little Labels—Big Sound: Small Record Companies and the Rise of American Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 5–7. See also Rick Kennedy, Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy: Gennett Studios and the Birth of Recorded Jazz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 45–48, 53–81. “F. D. Wiggins Takes Charge of Gennett Record Sales,” TMW, July 15, 1924, 18. There remains some disagreement about who exercised final authority over commercial releases at Gennett, but most of the former employees interviewed by researcher John K. MacKenzie, notably chief recording engineer Harold Soulé, agreed that Fred D. Wiggins was often crucial here. See Harold Soulé interview by John K. MacKenzie, probably Sandy, Oregon, June 28, 1961, JKMC; John K. MacKenzie, “Recording and Record Manufacturing at the Starr Piano Company,” n.d., unpublished manuscript, 4–5, 8, Box 4: Research Files, Miscellaneous, 1910–1974, Folder 20, JKMC; and Kyle S. Barnett, “The Recording Industry’s Role in Media History,” in Convergence Media History, ed. Janet Staiger and Sabine Hake (New York: Routledge, 2009), 83–87. MacKenzie, “Recording and Record Manufacturing at the Starr Piano Company,” 1, 8; Harold Soulé interview by John K. MacKenzie, probably Portland, Oregon, January 2, 1964, JKMC; Kennedy, Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy, 90. Green Bailey letter to Dock [sic] Roberts, August 26, 1928, Series 2: Roberts’s Music and Fellow Musicians, Box 2, Folder 7: Correspondence with Green Bailey, 1928, DRP; Lee A. Butt letters to Doc Roberts, September 1, October 9, and November 15, 1928, all in Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 3: Gennett Correspondence, 1928, DRP. Lee A. Butt letters to Doc Roberts, November 13 and 15, 1928, both in Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 3: Gennett Correspondence, 1928, DRP; Russell, Country Music Records, 88. Art Satherley interview by Douglas B. Green, Hollywood, California, June 30, 1974, CMFOHP. The story of “San Antonio Rose” is told in Charles Townsend, San Antonio Rose: The Life and Music of Bob Wills (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1986 [1976]), 190–97, but his account appears to dispute Satherley’s claim that it was at his suggestion that Wills and the band penned lyrics to “San Antonio Rose.” According to Townsend, this occurred at the prompting of Fred Kramer, a representative of famed New York music publishing firm Irving Berlin Inc., which was interested in acquiring the publication rights to the piece, but only if it included lyrics. “As it turned out,” Townsend writes, Wills’s addition of the lyrics proved to be “one of the most important things he ever did in his entire career, and had it not been for the Irving Berlin firm, he probably would never have done it.” See Townsend, San Antonio Rose, 190–91.

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23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

“Songs from Texas,” Time, March 24, 1941, 36, reprinted in Linnell Gentry, ed., A History and Encyclopedia of Country, Western, and Gospel Music, 2nd rev. ed. (Nashville, TN: Clairmont Corp., 1969 [1961]), 32. Satherley interview. See Peter Doyle, Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900–1960 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), and Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) for two theoretically sophisticated studies of how record producers, broadly understood, helped refashion the relationships between performers and audiences that had once existed in live music settings through their manipulation of soundscapes on disc. Although not focusing on the role of A&R officials per se, Doyle, in particular, recognizes the importance of interwar experiments with acoustic staging to create a new, yet familiar, sense of shared sonic space that united artists and their absent listeners on record. Joe DePriest, “Cheerful Dan Hornsby,” Bluegrass Unlimited 24 (August 1989): 32–35; Russell, Country Music Records, 98, 345, 441–42; Atlanta Country Music Hall of Fame web site, www.atlantacountrymusichalloffame.com/ (accessed July 25, 2015; web site now discontinued). Contrary to DePriest, folklorist John Minton indicates that Hornsby was Jewish and “classically trained,” but offers no evidence for either claim, though to be sure, Hornsby may have taken formal music lessons. See John Minton, 78 Blues: Folksongs and Phonographs in the American South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 175. DePriest, “Cheerful Dan Hornsby,” 32–33, 34; Alton Delmore, Truth Is Stranger Than Publicity, ed. Charles K. Wolfe (Nashville, TN: Country Music Foundation Press, 1995 [1977]), 59–61, 65–68. “Notes on Records,” San Antonio Express, July 6, 1941. Norm Cohen, Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 410, which mistakenly identifies the Baxters as being brothers. They were, in fact, father and son. See Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 44. DePriest, “Cheerful Dan Hornsby,” 32–33; Russell, Country Music Records, 366, 567–70, 584–85, 871, 891, 979; Frank Walker interview by Mike Seeger, probably New York, New York, June 19, 1962, Mike Seeger Collection, SFC, transcribed in part as “Who Chose These Records? A Look into the Life, Tastes, and Procedures of Frank Walker,” in Anthology of American Folk Music, ed. Josh Dunson and Ethel Raim (New York: Oak Publications, 1973), 8–17; Minton, 78 Blues, 128, 130, 149, 158–60, 168–71, 187–207. For a list of the Skillet-Lickers’ skit recordings, see Minton, 78 Blues, 256n25. There is, however, some dispute about who actually conceived of and wrote the scripts for these skits. Two members of the stringband, fiddler Clayton McMichen and his brother-in-law Bert Layne, who was also a fiddler, together claimed credit for much of this imaginative work. But, as John Minton sensibly concludes, the creation of these skits “was to some degree collaborative, involving both the group members and their media handlers.” Whatever the case, Walker also performed, alongside Hornsby, in a speaking role on two of these recordings; he was even credited (as Uncle Fuzz) on them. On another of the band’s sides he supervised, “Turkey in the Straw” (Columbia 15084-D), recorded in 1926, Walker apparently played harmonica. See Minton, 78 Blues, 158–60; Fred Hoeptner and Bob Pinson, “Clayton McMichen Talking: [Part] 3,” OTM no. 3 (Winter 1971/1972): 14–15; Bert Layne, as told to Margaret Riddle, “A Skillet-Licker’s Memoirs, Part 2,” OTM no. 15 (Winter 1974/1975): 24; and Russell, Country Music Records, 569, 887–88. [Ed Paterson], “Atlanta Shouts the Blues,” Melody Maker, May 26, 1951, 9, ParamountsHome.org, paramountshome.org/gallery/displayimage.php?album=4&pos=27 (accessed July 27, 2015); Bruce Bastin, Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,

34.

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36.

37.

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1995 [1986]), 107; William Barlow, Looking Up at Down: The Emergence of Blues Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 195. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 303, 734–35; Bastin, Red River Blues, 91, 143, 144; Jeff Tarrer, letter to the editor, Storyville no. 83 (June–July 1979): 167–68; Patrick Huber, “Black Hillbillies: African American Musicians on Old-Time Records, 1924–1932,” in Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music, ed. Diane Pecknold (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 62n21, 69n58. The fourth edition of Blues and Gospel Records does not list Bechtel as participating in either the Quillians’ April 1930 or October 1931 sessions, but Bruce Bastin indicates that Bechtel, indeed, did, based on information supplied by Ben Quillian himself. See Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 734–35, and Bastin, Red River Blues, 143, 144. For evidence of Bechtel’s and Flanagan’s membership in Hornsby’s various bands during this period, see, for example, “Entertainers at Big Atlanta Radio Exposition Opening Monday Are Artists of Radio, Stage,” Atlanta Constitution, September 9, 1928, and Russell, Country Music Records, 441–42. Delmore, Truth Is Stranger Than Publicity, 60 unnumbered footnote; Charles Wolfe, “Columbia Records and Old-Time Music,” JEMFQ 14 (Autumn 1978): 120, 121, reprinted in Exploring Roots Music: Twenty Years of the JEMF Quarterly, ed. Nolan Porterfield (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 199–217. Nathaniel Shilkret, Nathaniel Shilkret: Sixty Years in the Music Business, ed. Niel Shell and Barbara Shilkret (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 36, 37, 40–44, 69–72. For more on Shilkret and his long, distinguished musical career, see also Tim Gracyk, with Frank Hoffman, Popular American Recording Pioneers, 1895–1925 (New York: Haworth Press, 2000), 293–304. Shilkret, Nathaniel Shilkret, 42. Dalhart had earlier recorded the song for Edison, under the title “The Wreck on the Southern Old 97” (Edison 51361), in May 1924. Russell, Country Music Records, 242. Shilkret, Nathaniel Shilkret, 42. For another, somewhat different Shilkret account about his rewriting of “The Prisoner’s Song” and the circumstances surrounding its recording, see his 1952 interview by Jim Walsh in Richmond, Virginia, excerpted in Jim Walsh, “Favorite Pioneer Record Artists: Vernon Dalhart, Part IV,” Hobbies, August 1960, reprinted in JEMFQ 18 (Fall/Winter 1982): 136–37. In the interview, Shilkret explained that the song manuscript Dalhart originally brought him consisted of “some penciled notes but no music.” It was “a mess” and “couldn’t be used as it stood.” Shilkret, in this account, claimed even more credit for reworking the song, telling Walsh that he “wrote more verses and ground out a simple, mournful tune to fit the words. . . . There would have been no ‘Prisoner’s Song’ record if it had not been for my altering, editing, and adding to the manuscript.” Shilkret quoted in Walsh, “Favorite Pioneer Record Artists: Vernon Dalhart, Part IV,” 137. See also “Shilkret’s Song,” Time, October 3, 1936, 51. For the best attempt to sort out the tangle of conflicting claims surrounding the composition and recording of “The Prisoner’s Song,” see Jack Palmer, Vernon Dalhart: First Star of Country Music (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2005), 113–24, 165–66, but see also Walter Darrell Haden, “Vernon Dalhart (1883–1948) and ‘The Prisoner’s Song,’ ” JEMFQ 6 (Winter 1970): 152–59. Carson J. Robison, “Prisoner’s Song,” unpublished manuscript, Folder 15: “Prisoner’s Song,” undated, Carson J. Robison Collection, Special Collections, Axe Library, Pittsburg State University, Pittsburg, Kansas; Palmer, Vernon Dalhart, 128–29. Between 1924 and 1934, Dalhart recorded “The Prisoner’s Song” for eleven other companies, which issued the recordings on no fewer than fifty-one labels in the United States alone. Russell, Country Music Records, 242–46, 256–57, 281, 291–92; Palmer, Vernon Dalhart, 125, 133.

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38.

39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

44.

45.

46. 47.

48.

49.

Shilkret, Nathaniel Shilkret, 42–43; Robert D. Morritt, “Carson J. Robison: Pioneer Country Music Artist and Musician,” New Amberola Graphic no. 29 (Summer 1979): 5; Nathaniel Shilkret interview by Duke Bolton, n.p., ca. 1960s, excerpted in “Nat Shilkret Talks about Vernon Dalhart, ‘The Lonesome Road,’ Gene Austin, Andy Sannella,” YouTube.com, www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkvs G10R6sA (accessed August 11, 2015). Shilkret quoted in Walsh, “Favorite Pioneer Record Artists: Vernon Dalhart, Part IV,” 137. Shilkret, Nathaniel Shilkret, 69–72. A 1926 Billboard article claimed that Shilkret had acquired “a catalog of about 30 real American folk songs” on his song-hunting expedition. “The Victor company,” the article explained, “plans to release all of the songs both as vocal and instrumental numbers. Several of the larger music houses are angling for the publishing rights or at least an opportunity to get in on the ground floor in getting them out.” See “Victor to Release Southern Folk Songs,” Billboard, January 30, 1926, 22. Whitey and Hogan (Roy “Whitey” Grant and Arval Hogan) interview by John W. Rumble, Nashville, Tennessee, November 5, 1982, CMFOHP. See also John W. Rumble, “Country Music and the Rural South: Reminiscing with Whitey and Hogan,” JCM 10 (1985): 43. Whitey and Hogan interview. See also Rumble, “Country Music and the Rural South,” 43. Jim O’Neal, “Helen Humes,” Living Blues no. 52 (Spring 1982): 24; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 411. Charlie Poole Jr. interview by Eugene W. Earle and Archie Green, Mountain Home, Tennessee, August 13, 1962, AGP; Russell, Country Music Records, 410, 699, 700; Kinney Rorrer, Rambling Blues: The Life and Songs of Charlie Poole (Danville, VA: McCain Printing Co., 1992 [1982]), 37–38, 42–44. See also Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 107, 142–43, 145–46. Stokes quoted in Richard Nevins, liner notes to The North Carolina Ramblers, 1928–1930 (Biograph Records BLP-RC-6005). Russell’s Country Music Records discography indicates that McMichen and Stokes never recorded for Columbia in New York. In contrast to Nevins, Norm Cohen places this episode in Atlanta, at one of Walker’s many Columbia field sessions there. “Walker,” Cohen writes, “assured [McMichen and the other Skillet-Lickers] that there were far better bands in New York playing pop music; Columbia, he said, brought their recording equipment to Atlanta to record country music, not popular music.” See Norman Cohen, “The Skillet Lickers: A Study of a Hillbilly String Band and Its Repertoire,” JAF 78 (July–September 1965): 240. Huber, Linthead Stomp, 145–46. Archie Green and Ed Kahn, transcript summary of interview with Rosa Lee Carson Johnson (Moonshine Kate), August 27, 1963, Series 5: Research Files, Box 24, Folder 3: Carson, John (1 of 4), Wayne W. Daniel Collection, Popular Music Collections, Special Collections and Archives, University Library, Georgia State University, Atlanta. Johnson’s recollections here are clearly mistaken insofar as Brockman certainly did supply her father, Fiddlin’ John Carson, with at least one song to record, “The Death of Floyd Collins” (OKeh 40363). Such are the pitfalls of relying on the memories of aging A&R men and their recording artists. See Gene Wiggins, Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy: Fiddlin’ John Carson, His Real World, and the World of His Songs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 38–40. Green and Kahn, transcript summary of interview with Rosa Lee Carson Johnson (Moonshine Kate). Charles K. Wolfe, Kentucky Country: Folk and Country Music of Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 27–28.

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53. 54.

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56. 57.

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59. 60.

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Important studies of the interplay between traditional folk music and commercially recorded roots music include Anne Cohen and Norm Cohen, “Folk and Hillbilly Music: Further Thoughts on Their Relation,” JEMFQ 13 (Summer 1977): 50–57; David Evans, Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); and Peterson, Creating Country Music. Alex van der Tuuk, “Aletha Dickerson: Paramount’s Reluctant Recording Manager,” Vintage Jazz Mart, www.vjm.biz/new_page_18.htm (accessed August 17, 2015); Stephen Calt, “The Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label—Part 2: The Mayo Williams Era,” 78 Quarterly no. 4 (1989): 16–17, reprinted as “The Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Music Label: Mayo Williams and Paramount Records,” in Rhythm and Business: The Political Economy of Black Music, ed. Norman Kelley (New York: Akashic Books, 2005), 86–111. Stephen Calt, in his groundbreaking series of articles on Paramount, acknowledges that Williams employed staff arrangers, but disputes that he ever hired full-time songwriters or composers, because of the ample supply of compositions to which he had access by his recording artists and freelance songwriters. See Calt, “Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label—Part 2,” 17. Lester Melrose, “My Life in Recording,” in American Folk Music Occasional, No. 2, ed. Chris Strachwitz and Pete Welding (New York: Oak Publications, 1970), 60–61; Paul Garon and Beth Garon, Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2014 [1992]), 65; Mike Rowe, Chicago Blues: The City and the Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975 [1973]), 17–25, especially 17–18; Roger House, Blue Smoke: The Recorded Journey of Big Bill Broonzy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 100–101, 106–9, 111–14; Bob Riesman, I Feel So Good: The Life and Times of Big Bill Broonzy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 84–86, 101–2, 111, 139. Rowe, Chicago Blues, 17 (emphasis in original). P. I. Burks letter to Doc Roberts, May 28, 1927, Series 2: Roberts’s Music and Fellow Musicians, Box 2, Folder 7: Correspondence with Paul I. Burks, 1927–1928, DRP. Unfortunately, it is not known if Roberts ever followed up on Burks’s tip and recorded this material. For a somewhat similar example, this one involving a Gennett record dealer who wanted certain selections commercially recorded, see H. M. Little letter to Doc Roberts, December 14, 1929, Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 4: Gennett Correspondence, 1929, DRP. Archie Green, “Commercial Music Graphics: Twenty,” JEMFQ 8 (Spring 1972): 27, 29. For a similar public appeal, see Complete Catalog of 1924 Records, Paramount—The “Popular Race Record”— and Black Swan Race Records, 30, reproduction included in The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Vol. 1 (1917–27), 6-LP boxed set (Third Man Records/Revenant Records TMR 203); and Dixon and Godrich, Recording the Blues, 22–23. Walker interview. Lee A. Butt letter to Doc Roberts, November 13, 1928, Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 3: Gennett Correspondence, 1928, DRP; Russell, Country Music Records, 88, 588. Lee A. Butt letter to Doc Roberts, February 25, 1929, Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 4: Gennett Correspondence, 1929, DRP. Lee A. Butt letter to Doc Roberts, February 25, 1929; Russell, Country Music Records, 297. Lee A. Butt letter to Doc Roberts, March 5, 1929, Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 4: Gennett Correspondence, 1929, DRP; Russell, Country Music Records, 293, 380. Lee A. Butt letter to Doc Roberts, February 25, 1929, Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 4: Gennett Correspondence, 1929, DRP; Russell, Country Music Records, 297.

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62.

63. 64.

65.

66.

67.

68.

69.

70.

71.

72.

73. 74.

Doc Roberts interview by Archie Green and Norm Cohen, Richmond, Kentucky, May 26, 1969, AGP; “Tapescript: An Interview with Doc Roberts (T7–279),” JEMFQ 7 (Autumn 1971): 102. For other examples of A&R managers assigning southern roots artists material to learn and record, see Allan W. Fritzsche letter to Land Norris, April 10, 1926, reproduced in “Commercial Music Documents: Number Nine,” JEMFQ 7 (Autumn 1971): 125; Charles Wolfe, The Devil’s Box: Masters of Southern Fiddling (Nashville, TN: Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, 1997), 75; and F. D. Wiggins letters to Dock [sic] Roberts, May 5 and August 27, 1928, both in Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 3: Gennett Correspondence, 1928, DRP. Russell, Country Music Records, 588, 753–54. Lee A. Butt letters to Doc Roberts, May 8, May 14, and June 4, 1929, all in Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 4: Gennett Correspondence, 1929, DRP. Lee A. Butt letter to Doc Roberts, June 4, 1929, Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 4: Gennett Correspondence, 1929, DRP. Harold M. Little letters to Doc Roberts, November 30 and December 14, 1929, both in Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 4: Gennett Correspondence, 1929, DRP. Russell, Country Music Records, 589, 754. Martin and Roberts’s son James did, however, record a lone vocal duet at these sessions, “Sweet Evalina, Dear Evalina,” that was rejected. Russell, Country Music Records, 242, 243, 740, 902, 954; Guthrie T. Meade Jr. with Dick Spottswood and Douglas S. Meade, Country Music Sources: A Biblio-Discography of Commercially Recorded Traditional Music (Chapel Hill: Southern Folklife Collection, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries in association with the John Edwards Memorial Forum, 2002), 45–46. Meade, Country Music Sources, 210; Russell, Country Music Records, 166, 335, 368, 387, 705, 744, 827. Patrick Huber, book accompanying The Dixon Brothers: “A Blessing to People,” 4-CD boxed set (Bear Family Records BCD 16817DK), 49, 50–51, 63; Russell, Country Music Records, 321, 581; Meade, Country Music Sources, 211–14. Competing versions of “Maple on the Hill” also appeared in ARC’s and Decca’s catalogs. Meade, Country Music Sources, 685–86; Russell, Country Music Records, 321, 453, 632, 633, 709; Huber, book accompanying The Dixon Brothers, 73, 74–76. See Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 139, 803, 881, 882, as well as the various artists listed in “Index to Titles” who recorded these blues selections, 1119, 1156, 1186. Smith’s “Down Hearted Blues” was itself a cover of Alberta Hunter’s 1922 original recording of the song (Paramount 12005), for which Hunter wrote the lyrics. See Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 412. As folklorist John Minton notes, the sexually suggestive “It’s Tight Like That” “even inspired a flurry of recorded sermons playing on its catch phrase,” among them the Reverend Emmett Dickinson’s “Sermon on Tight Like That” (Paramount 12925) and the Reverend J. M. Gates’s “These Hard Times Are Tight Like That” (OKeh 8850). As Minton explains, “These put the fad to God’s work, with no hint of the original’s risqué subtext.” See Minton, 78 Blues, 119, and Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 213, 293, 681. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 25, 26–27. Kerry Segrave, Jukeboxes: An American Social History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2002), 50, 110. See also Allan Sutton, Recording the ’Thirties: The Evolution of the American Recording Industry, 1930–39 (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2011), 25–33.

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78. 79. 80.

81.

82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87.

88. 89.

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Sills quoted in Cameron Shipp, “Expert Comes Here to Direct Making Phonograph Records,” Charlotte News, January 26, 1938. Our thanks to Tom Warlick for sharing a photocopy of this article with us. Satherley interview. Bill C. Malone, Country Music U.S.A., rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985 [1968]), 153–58; Russell, Country Music Records, 241, 303, 315, 914. “It Makes No Difference Now” was written by Floyd Tillman, who, along with Dexter, Daffan, and Tubb, is often acclaimed as one of the major pioneers of honky-tonk music. For more on these recording artists and the chief characteristics of the regional subgenre they spearheaded, see Nick Tosches, “Honky-Tonkin’: Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams, and the Bartender’s Muse,” in Country: The Music and the Musicians, ed. Paul Kingsbury, Alan Axelrod, and Susan Costello, 2nd ed. (New York: Country Music Foundation and Abbeville Press, 1994 [1988]), 153–75; Ronnie Pugh, Ernest Tubb: The Texas Troubadour (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), especially 322–23; and Jeffrey J. Lange, Smile When You Call Me a Hillbilly: Country Music’s Struggle for Respectability, 1939–1954 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 2, 76–77, 85–87, 160–61. Lange, Smile When You Call Me a Hillbilly, 76. Dexter quoted in Lange, Smile When You Call Me a Hillbilly, 76. Maurice Zolotow, “Hillbilly Boom,” Saturday Evening Post, February 12, 1944, 22–23, reprinted in Gentry, History and Encyclopedia of Country, Western, and Gospel Music, 37; Lange, Smile When You Call Me a Hillbilly, 76–77; “Most Played Juke Box Folk Records,” Billboard, January 8, 1944, 18; “National and Regional Best Selling Retail Records,” Billboard, October 30, 1943, 12. “Pistol Packin’ Mama,” Life, October 11, 1943, 43, and “Bull Market in Corn,” Time, October 4, 1943, 49–50, both reprinted in Gentry, History and Encyclopedia of Country, Western, and Gospel Music, 33–34, 35; Lange, Smile When You Call Me a Hillbilly, 77; “Most Played Juke Box Folk Records,” Billboard, January 8, 1944, 18; January 15, 1944, 16; January 22, 1944, 16; January 29, 1944, 16; February 5, 1944, 18; February 12, 1944, 20; February 19, 1944, 16. In calculating the popularity of “Pistol Packin’ Mama,” Billboard also included jukebox plays of Al Dexter’s original recording, which shared the top spot during these weeks with the Crosby-Andrews Sisters pop version. Covers by other artists also sometimes factored into these tabulations. See, for example, “Most Played Juke Box Folk Records,” Billboard, January 15, 1944, 16. “Bull Market in Corn,” 49–50. Pugh, Ernest Tubb, 55. “Bull Market in Corn,” 50. Mamie Smith’s hit recording “Crazy Blues,” to cite but one example, was covered not only by blues and jazz artists but also by Bennie Krueger & His Orchestra, featuring a vocal chorus by Al Bernard, for Brunswick (Brunswick 2077) in February 1921. See David A. Jasen, A Century of American Popular Music: 2000 Best-Loved and Remembered Songs (1899–1999) (New York: Routledge, 2002), 40. David Kapp interview by John Krimsky, New York, New York, July 27, 1951. On Crosby and his string of hit pop covers of hillbilly songs, see Don Cusic, The Cowboy in Country Music: An Historical Survey with Artist Profiles (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2011), 112–13. Kapp interview by Krimsky. Bastin, Red River Blues, 228; David Evans, “An Interview with H. C. Speir,” JEMFQ 8 (Autumn 1972): 120.

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90.

91.

92.

93. 94.

95.

96.

97.

98.

Harry Charles interview by Gayle Dean Wardlow, Birmingham, Alabama, 1968, GDWC; Charles quoted in Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow, “Paramount, Part 4: The Advent of Arthur Laibly,” 78 Quarterly no. 6 (1991): 11, 13 (quotation); Alex van der Tuuk, “Harry Charles: ‘I Am Not a Spender, I Am an Investor!,” ParamountsHome.org, www.paramountshome.org/index .php?option=com_content&view=article&id=146:harry-charles-i-am-not-a-spender-i-am-an -investor&catid=49:new-york-recording-laboratories-employees&Itemid=54 (accessed July 8, 2015). Charles was unable to identify the singer involved. Gayle Dean Wardlow speculates that it may have been Mary Johnson, but she apparently never recorded in St. Louis. Nor did she ever record as many as eight sides at any single session or at consecutive ones, according to the fourth edition of Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 468–69. Perry Bradford, Born with the Blues (New York: Oak Publications, 1965), 114–33, 138–39, 155, 157–58; David A. Jasen and Gene Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around: Black Popular Songwriters, 1880–1930 (New York: Routledge, 2005), 260–69. Ronald Clifford Foreman Jr., “Jazz and Race Records, 1920–32: Their Origins and Their Significance for the Record Industry and Society” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois, 1968), 69–81; Godrich and Dixon, Recording the Blues, 10–14; Daphne Duval Harrison, Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990 [1988]), 45–50; Sutton, Race Records and the American Recording Industry, 23–32. Metronome, January 1922, quoted in Harrison, Black Pearls, 43. “Fame and Fortune,” Chicago Defender, October 6, 1923. This article was apparently paraphrasing a recent, but as-yet-unidentified article in Variety. See also “Origin of ‘Blues’ Numbers,” Sheet Music News, October 1923, 8, reprinted in Karl Koenig, ed., Jazz in Print: An Anthology of Selected Early Readings in Jazz History (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2002), 260–62. Sutton, Race Records and the American Recording Industry, 69–80; Phonograph and Talking Machine Weekly, October 10, 1923, 38, reprinted in Walter C. Allen, Hendersonia: The Music of Fletcher Henderson and His Musicians: A Bio-Discography, Jazz Monographs No. 4 (Highland Park, NJ: Walter C. Allen, 1973), 63–64; Billboard, November 10, 1923, 14, excerpted in Allen, Hendersonia, 64. The unidentified “white publisher” with the “strong ‘blues’ catalog” mentioned in the Chicago Defender article above may, in fact, have been Jack Mills Inc. See James A. Jackson, “ ‘Blues’ Seem to Have Taken the Country by Storm,” Amsterdam News (New York), July 11, 1923. Sutton, Race Records and the American Recording Industry, 71; Bob Koester, “Lester Melrose: An Appreciation,” in American Folk Music Occasional, No. 2, 58. “Places Singers,” Chicago Defender, November 15, 1924; Bruce Bastin, with Kip Lornell, The Melody Man: Joe Davis and the New York Music Scene, 1916–1978 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), xvii–xix, 15–29; Sutton, Race Records and the American Recording Industry, 70–80, 87–92. On occasion, Davis himself even pitched in musically, if minimally, at the sessions, possibly playing kazoo on Viola McCoy’s 1924 recording “Memphis Bound” (Edison 51478) and, according to his biographer Bruce Bastin, personally contributing “many assorted sound effects” on the blues recordings he supervised for Ajax during the mid-1920s. See Bastin, with Lornell, Melody Man, 25. Jasen and Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around, 260–69, 270–76, 286–89, 293. Another music publisher involved in contracting these sorts of A&R package deals was Harry Pace. In a 1922 Billboard profile, Pace, former president of the publishing concern Pace & Handy Music Company, explained that he launched his own record company, the Pace Phonograph Corporation, manufacturer of Black Swan Records, because of the difficulty he encountered with white-

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owned companies recording the blues talent he assembled as a freelance talent scout. “In spite of what the recording managers said, I was positive that some of the singers I had contracted with possessed good recording voices, but I realized that they would never get an opportunity to show what they could do, not unless someone organized a company with that object in view. And that was what gave me the idea to enter the phonograph business for colored artists exclusively.” Pace quoted in E. M. Wickes, “Melody Mart: Music Makers,” Billboard, February 4, 1922, 36. For a partial list of train wreck ballads on pre–World War II hillbilly records, see Meade, Country Music Sources, 44–48, 50–51, 72–78. See also Cohen, Long Steel Rail, 169–274. Palmer, Vernon Dalhart, 126–29; Charles K. Wolfe, “Event Songs,” in Readin’ Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Honky Tonk Bars, ed. Cecelia Tichi, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 94 (Winter 1995): 217–30; “Mournful Melodies on Edison Records Popular,” TMW, October 15, 1925, 199. Wilgus, “Rationalistic Approach,” 229; “Ralph S. Peer Visits Important Points South,” TMW, May 15, 1925, 82; Polk C. Brockman interview by Fred Hoeptner and Bob Pinson, Atlanta, Georgia, July 10, 1959, AGP. See also Brockman interview by Green and Kahn, August 11, 1961. For more on the Floyd Collins saga, see Robert K. Murray and Roger W. Brucker, Trapped! The Story of Floyd Collins (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982). Wilgus, “Rationalistic Approach,” 229–30; Spain quoted in Wiggins, Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy, 95. As with so many other classic songs in interwar roots music, the details surrounding Jenkins’s composition of “The Death of Floyd Collins” vary, including Spain’s own accounts over the years. For the best discussion of the ballad’s origins, see David N. Brison, “Floyd Collins Ballads: Song Background for Jenkins Ballad No. 1,” on Cave and Bat-Inspired Recorded Music and Spoken Word: An International Discographical Database, 1905–2005, caveinspiredmusic.com/rubriques /country_music/country_music.html (accessed August 13, 2015). Russell, Country Music Records, 176, 247, 453; Wilgus, “Rationalistic Approach,” 230; Palmer, Vernon Dalhart, 141–42; Wolfe, “Event Songs,” 220–21, 224. Polk C. Brockman letter to Archie Green, September 3, 1957, Series 5: Research Files, Box 58, Folder 12: Jenkins, Andrew (Revd.) 1 of 2, Wayne W. Daniel Collection. P. C. Brockman letter to Rev. Andrew Jenkins, December 20, 1926, Series 5: Research Files, Box 21, Folder 12: Polk C. Brockman, Wayne W. Daniel Collection. See also D. K. Wilgus, “The Individual Song: ‘Billy the Kid,’ ” Western Folklore 30 (July 1971): 226–34, reprinted in The Billy the Kid Reader, ed. Frederick Nolan (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 172–76; and Archie Green, “Commercial Music Graphics: Number Twenty-Eight,” JEMFQ 10 (Spring 1974): 19–22. This was not the only time A&R men and their staffs would go to great lengths to research and acquire primary source material for the purpose of composing an event song. In September 1926, five months after the oil tanker Gulf of Venezuela exploded in the harbor at Port Arthur, Texas, killing twenty-nine crewmen, the Port Arthur (TX) News reported, “Representatives of the Brunswick Phonograph company are in the city securing firsthand data on the catastrophe, one of the most terrible in the history of American shipping, and its story will be written in a song and set to music.” Vernon Dalhart, the newspaper added, “will probably be the vocalist to record the number.” But, apparently, neither he nor any other recording artist ever commercially recorded a topical ballad about this event, for Brunswick or any other company, and it remains doubtful that such a song was ever composed. “Song to Tell Story of Ship Blast,” Port Arthur (TX) News, September 15, 1926. Russell, Country Music Records, 265, 266, 268.

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107. 108.

109. 110.

111.

112.

113.

114.

Wilgus, “Individual Song: ‘Billy the Kid,’ ” 231, 234. James Haswell, “Ballad Factory Dolled in Spats,” Cumberland (MD) Evening Times, June 24, 1926. On Robison and his songwriting and recording career, see Robert Coltman, “Carson Robison: First of the Rural Professionals,” OTM no. 29 (Summer 1978): 5–13, 27; Wayne W. Daniel, “Carson J. Robison: Granddaddy of the Hillbillies,” JCM 23 (2004): 28–37; and John Kendrick, “Carson Robison: An Architect of Country Music,” Old-Time Herald 12 (August–September 2010): 24–31. Walker interview. Robison quoted in Hugh Leamy, “Now Come All You Good People,” Collier’s, November 2, 1929, 58, reprinted in Gentry, History and Encyclopedia of Country, Western, and Gospel Music, 6–13. Norm Cohen, “Scopes and Evolution in Hillbilly Songs,” JEMFQ 6 (Winter 1971): 174–81; Russell, Country Music Records, 248, 249. Indeed, Walker so valued Robison’s songwriting talent that, in 1928, when Dalhart signed a two-year contract with Columbia, Walker attempted to induce Robison to sign a similar contract, in order to keep this best-selling recording team together. “Mr. Frank Walker called me into his office,” Robison later wrote, “ . . . [and] asked if I would accept a $10,000.00 a year guarantee to go with Dalhart, because it was his belief that my material that I wrote for Dalhart was most important to Dalhart’s recording career, but I refused the offer and that was the end of my association with Mr. Dalhart.” See Robison, “Prisoner’s Song.” Ultimately, the A&R man’s assessment of the duo’s musical partnership proved correct. After his split with Dalhart in mid-1928, Robison went on to enjoy even greater success in a long, fruitful songwriting and recording career, paired with other singing partners and eventually fronting his own bands, which stretched almost until his death in 1957. One indication of both the longevity of Robison’s career and his characteristic alertness to changing musical trends is that one of his final releases, in 1956, featured his self-penned “Rockin’ and Rollin’ with Grandmaw (On Saturday Night)” (MGM 12266), which celebrated America’s latest musical trend. In contrast, Dalhart’s recording career declined considerably and, for all intents and purposes, collapsed after 1930, though he did record as late as 1939. See Daniel, “Carson J. Robison,” especially 31–36; Kendrick, “Carson Robison,” 30–31; and Palmer, Vernon Dalhart, 205–42. For more on Miller and his songwriting and recording career, see Doron K. Antrim, “Whoopand-Holler Opera,” Collier’s, January 26, 1946, 18, 85, reprinted in Gentry, History and Encyclopedia of Country, Western, and Gospel Music, 43–47; Bill C. Malone, “Bob Miller,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, ed. Paul Kingsbury, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 345; and Ronnie Pugh, “A Song for Every Plot,” JCM 24 (2005): 33–37. See David Evans, “High Water Everywhere: Blues and Gospel Commentary on the 1927 Mississippi River Flood,” in Nobody Knows Where the Blues Come From: Lyrics and History, ed. Robert Springer (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 3–75. See also Paul Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the Blues (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990 [1960]), 217–24. Wallace quoted in Eric Townley and Ron Harwood, “The Texas Nightingale: An Interview with Sippie Wallace,” Storyville no. 108 (August–September 1983): 229; Evans, “High Water Everywhere,” 34–35. In what has to be the most bizarre example of such prompting, Big Bill Broonzy claimed that, during the 1927 Mississippi River flood, Paramount A&R man J. Mayo Williams took him and a group of fellow race recording artists, including allegedly Bessie Smith, Lonnie Johnson, Kansas Joe McCoy, and Sippie Wallace, out on a chartered boat to view the devastation for the purpose of inspiring them to write particularly gripping blues songs about the event. Undoubtedly, though, the story is apocryphal. See Paul Oliver, Bessie Smith (London: Cassell, 1959), 47; Evans, “High Water Everywhere,” 69n28; and House, Blue Smoke, 42–43.

117. 118. 119.

120.

121.

122.

123.

124.

125.

126. 127.

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Columbia advertisements, Chicago Defender, April 2 and May 28, 1927. David Evans makes a convincing case that Smith’s “Back-Water Blues” was composed in the wake of an earlier flood she had witnessed in Nashville. See Evans, “High Water Everywhere,” 24–29. Russell, Country Music Records, 96, 576, 638, 907. Meade, Country Music Sources, 86–87; Russell, Country Music Records, 268–69, 271. Evans, “High Water Everywhere,” 18. Evans, “High Water Everywhere,” 47–49. On Mason, see Calt and Wardlow, “Paramount, Part 4,” 20, and Gayle Dean Wardlow, “The Talent Scouts: H. C. Speir (1895–1972),” 78 Quarterly no. 8 (1994): 29. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 291; Russell, Country Music Records, 276, 278, 279, 454. Stephen Calt and Gayle Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charlie Patton (Newton, NJ: Rock Chapel Press, 1988), 239–42, 244–48; David Evans, “Charlie Patton Biography (Part 3),” excerpt from “Charley Patton: The Conscience of the Delta,” in book accompanying Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton, 7-CD boxed set (Revenant Records 212), ParamountsHome.org, paramountshome.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=ar ticle&id=78:charley-patton-biography-part-3-dr-david-evans&catid=45:new-york-recording -laboratoriesartist&Itemid=54 (accessed May 7, 2015). Evans notes that on several other songs Patton used personal experience and real events to criticize the racialized brutality of southern jails and law enforcement, “Revenue Man Blues” (Vocalion 02931) being one notable example. See Evans, “Charlie Patton Biography (Part 3). H. C. Speir, for example, recalled posting bail for Tommy Johnson and vouching for several of his other blues artists after their run-ins with law enforcement officials. See Wardlow, “Talent Scouts,” 25. Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993 [1973]), 237; Paul Oliver, Screening the Blues: Aspects of the Blues Tradition (New York: Da Capo Press, 1989 [1968]), 160–62. For other recorded blues tributes to Joe Louis, see Oliver, Screening the Blues, 150–63. Guido van Rijn, Roosevelt’s Blues: African-American Blues and Gospel Songs on FDR (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 194–95. Paul Swinton, “A Twist of Lemon,” Blues and Rhythm no. 121 (August 1997): 9, ParamountsHome. org, paramountshome.org/Spotlight.htm (accessed August 16, 2015); Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 214, 988. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 235, 284, 578, 622, 989. Russell, Country Music Records, 78, 79; Meade, Country Music Sources, 109. Some two and a half years earlier, on February 15, 1931, Autry had recorded another tribute song, “The Death of Mother Jones” (Banner 32133, Oriole 8053, and Romeo 5053, among others), this one about the fiery radical labor leader Mary Harris Jones who had only died a few months earlier at the age of ninety-three. W. R. Calaway, his A&R man at the American Record Corporation, had given Autry the song to record, but in a 1959 interview, Calaway’s widow told folklorist Archie Green that her late husband did not write the song. Instead, she believed that he had probably either purchased it during one of his southern talent-scouting trips or received it in the mail from one of the artists he managed. Whatever the case, that did not prevent the devious Calaway from copyrighting the song in his own name and even crediting himself as its composer. See Russell, Country Music Records, 74, and Archie Green, Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal-Mining Songs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 250–51.

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128.

129.

130. 131.

132.

133.

134.

135. 136.

137.

Archie Green, “Commercial Music Graphics: Number Twenty-Six,” JEMFQ 9 (Autumn 1973): 110, 113; [Norm Cohen], “Editor’s Note” to Archie Green, “Commercial Music Graphics: Number Twenty-Seven,” JEMFQ 9 (Winter 1973): 165; Satherley quoted in Holly George-Warren, Public Cowboy No. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 115. Stephen Calt, I’d Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2008 [1994]), 5. Michael Taft calls Johnson’s song a “conscious cover” of the James original. See Michael Taft, The Blues Lyric Formula (New York: Routledge, 2006), 23. Evans, Big Road Blues, 145. Wolfe, “Columbia Records and Old-Time Music,” 121–24, especially 122 (table 1). Columbia’s series actually ended in 1932 (with Columbia 15782-D), but Wolfe omitted the selections that appeared on the fifty-six records issued that year due to a lack of sales figures. Our figure of 24 percent for newly composed hillbilly selections counts not only those releases that Wolfe categorized as “Event Songs,” “Original Country Vocal,” and “Original Instrumental,” but also those described as “Comedy” (i.e., “humorous songs as well as skits”). See Wolfe, “Columbia Records and OldTime Music,”121, 122 (table 1). Tony Russell, “Aftershocks: Location Recording after the Bristol Sessions,” International Country Music Journal, 2016 (2016): 57–58. See also Charles K. Wolfe, “The Rest of the Story: Other Early Recordings Sessions in the Tri-Cities Area,” in The Bristol Sessions: Writings about the Big Bang of Country Music, ed. Charles K. Wolfe and Ted Olson (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2005), 235–56; Ted Olson and Tony Russell, book accompanying The Johnson City Sessions, 1928–1929: “Can You Sing or Play Old-Time Music?” 4-CD boxed set (Bear Family Records BCD 16083); and Ted Olson and Tony Russell, book accompanying The Knoxville Sessions, 1929–1930: Knox County Stomp, 4-CD boxed set (Bear Family Records BCD 16097). W. R. Calaway letters to Doc Roberts, December 27, 1930 and December 28, 1932, both in Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 18: Correspondence with the American Record Corporation, 1930–1934, DRP. Green and Kahn, transcript summary of interview with Rosa Lee Carson Johnson (Moonshine Kate); Russell, Country Music Records, 175, 179. Russell, Country Music Records, 177. Bernstein quoted in “Outdreams Alger, Outgrows 49-Inch Store and Now Has 10 Busy Places,” Pioneer Press (St. Paul, MN), September 25, 1927, reproduced in part in Kurt Gegenhuber, “ ‘Old Is the New New’ Is Old,” June 11, 2006, on his web blog, The Celestial Monochord, www.celestialmonochord.org/2006/06/old_is_the_new_.html (accessed August 9, 2015). See also Kurt Gegenhuber, “Smith’s Amnesia Theater: ‘Moonshiner’s Dance’ in Minnesota,” in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music: America Changed through Music, ed. Ross Hair and Thomas Ruys Smith (New York: Routledge, 2017), 159, 169n32. See, for example, the lengthy list of “Answer to” selections in the “Index to Titles,” in Russell, Country Music Records, 1016.

CHAPTER 5 1.

Gayle Dean Wardlow, “Earnie [sic] Oertle: San Antonio-Bound with Robert Johnson,” Living Blues no. 220 (August 2012): 70–72, reprinted as “Ernie Oertle: San Antonio Bound with Robert Johnson,” in The Frog Blues and Jazz Annual, No. 3, ed. Paul Swinton (Fleet, UK: Frog Records Ltd., 2013), 112–14; Chris Salewicz, 27: Robert Johnson (New York: Quercus, 2014), n.p. Salewicz suggests that Oertle may actually have been the recording engineer for Johnson’s debut sessions

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in San Antonio, but gives no source for this. The booklet notes to the 1998 compact disc version of Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers, however, credits Vincent J. Liebler as the “Original Recording Engineer,” and a brief mention of him in a local newspaper, along with an accompanying photograph, does place him in San Antonio on or around November 11, 1936, less than two weeks before Johnson’s first session. See “Credits,” in booklet notes to Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers (Columbia Records/Legacy Recordings CK 65746), 11, and “Something New,” San Antonio Light, November 11, 1936. Also shown in the photograph is Ralph Perez, an ARC A&R man who specialized in Spanish-language recordings. Given that specialty and the fact that several Mexican musicians also recorded at the San Antonio sessions, Perez may have attended one or more of Johnson’s November 1936 sessions. Ted Gioia claims, again without divulging his sources, that Law’s ARC supervisor, Art Satherley, was also present at the Gunter Hotel. Though not impossible, this seems less likely since Satherley never apparently mentioned it in any of his many interviews. See Ted Gioia, Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2008), 176. There is a vast, if uneven, literature on Johnson’s musical career, all of which tries to make sense of his recording sessions with Don Law. Although we do not always agree with their conclusions, of particular value are Samuel Charters, Robert Johnson (New York: Oak Publications, 1973); Peter Doyle, Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900–1960 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 76–87; Peter Guralnick, Searching for Robert Johnson (New York: Dutton, 1989); Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch, Robert Johnson: Lost and Found (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Patricia R. Schroeder, Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), especially 25–27; Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), especially 105–92; Gayle Dean Wardlow, Chasin’ That Devil Music: Searching for the Blues, ed. with an introduction by Edward Komara (San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books, 1998), 86–93. 2. Walker quoted in Michael Streissguth, Voices of the Country: Interviews with Classic Country Performers (New York: Routledge, 2004), 160. 3. Frank Driggs, liner notes to Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers (Columbia Records CL 1654); Frank Driggs letter to Don Law (with Law’s marginal comments), April 10, 1961, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (available online at The Delta Blues, www.tdblues.com/2009/06/don-law-robert-johnson-letter/; accessed June 3, 2015). The memory politics of this episode and its competing interpretations are explored in Schroeder, Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary America, 25–27, though she too assumes that Johnson really was facing a wall while recording. 4. Many scholars have accepted that the now-famous incident that Law described involving the Mexican musicians occurred at Johnson’s recording debut, on Monday, November 23, 1936. Johnson also recorded twice later that week, on Thursday, November 26, and on Friday, November 27. Neither Law nor Driggs indicate at which of these sessions this episode took place, but based on a comparison of discographies, the encounter probably actually occurred at Johnson’s November 27 session: on that date, the twin-guitar duo Andrés Berlanga and Francisco Montalvo recorded ten cancións (matrices SA 2617-SA 2626) immediately prior to Johnson’s session (encompassing matrices SA 2627-SA 2633); singer Hermanas Barraza, accompanied by pianist Daniel Palomo, waxed six selections (matrices SA 2634-SA 2639) immediately following the bluesman. This was the only day at the San Antonio sessions on which Johnson and any Mexican musicians recorded and, therefore, the best chance for them to encounter one another in the makeshift studio in

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

Room 414. Phonograph industry historian Allan Sutton also reaches this same conclusion. Certainly, Law’s emphasis on Johnson’s nervousness as an explanation for his behavior makes more sense if it occurred on his first, rather than on his third, day of recording. It is possible, of course, that the incident did, indeed, occur at Johnson’s first session, when some Mexican musicians just happened to be in the studio, perhaps conferring with Law, at the same time as the bluesman. But Law’s additional comments in the 1975 interview discussed below in this section seem to preclude this possibility. Whatever the date, it does not much alter the larger point of Law’s story or our interpretation of it. See Robert M. W. Dixon, John Godrich, and Howard Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 1890–1943, 4th ed. (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1997 [1964]), 476–77; Richard K. Spottswood, Ethnic Music on Records: A Discography of Ethnic Recordings Produced in the United States, 1893 to 1942, 7 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 4:1669, 1676; and Allan Sutton, Race Records and the American Recording Industry, 1919–1945: An Illustrated History (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2016), 298. Sutton, Race Records and the American Recording Industry, 298. Wald, Escaping the Delta, 120. Driggs letter; Driggs, liner notes to Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers. Don Law interview by Douglas B. Green, Nashville, Tennessee, May 14, 1975, CMFOHP. Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers, Vol. 2 (Columbia Records C 30034). The caption below the album’s cover artwork reads: “Robert Johnson first records in a makeshift studio in a San Antonio hotel room—November, 1936.” This possibility is briefly noted in Pearson and McCulloch, Robert Johnson, 73–74. In his liner notes to the 1961 album, Driggs claims that Johnson’s arrest occurred on the evening of his arrival in San Antonio, Sunday, November 22, the day before his first recording session. See Driggs, liner notes to Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers, and Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 476–77. More likely, an incarceration after his first session might explain the two-day pause before Johnson waxed additional sides on Thursday and Friday of that week. Driggs letter. For another alleged example of an A&R man, in this case Paramount’s J. Mayo Williams, assisting one of his artists (Blind Lemon Jefferson) in procuring prostitutes, see Paul Swinton, “A Twist of Lemon,” Blues and Rhythm no. 121 (August 1997): 6, ParamountsHome.org, paramountshome.org/Spotlight.htm (accessed August 16, 2015). Gioia, Delta Blues, 176. Driggs letter. At the time of the 1936 San Antonio sessions, Law was thirty-four years old, only nine years older than Johnson. Gioia, Delta Blues, 176. Shines quoted in Wald, Escaping the Delta, 118 (emphasis in the original). See also Pete Welding, “Ramblin’ Johnny Shines,” Living Blues no. 22 (July/August 1975): 29, and Jas Obrecht, Blues Guitar: The Men Who Made the Music (San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books, 1993), 13. Wald, Escaping the Delta, 118. On the wide range of secular and sacred material routinely sung by Johnson and other bluesmen, as well as the range of African American musical tastes in the Delta, see also Wald, Escaping the Delta, 91–102, and Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Willie Moore and Elizabeth Moore interview by Gayle Dean Wardlow, Sumner and Tutwiler, Mississippi, December 13, 1969, GDWC. Shines quoted in Wald, Escaping the Delta, 118. The eclecticism of southern black musical tastes was confirmed when African American sociologists Charles S. Johnson and Lewis Wade Jones from Fisk University joined white folklorist Alan

23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

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22.

359

21.

Lomax, assistant in charge of the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Song, to explore black musical culture in Coahoma County, Mississippi. In 1941–1942, they discovered black juke joints rocking, not to country blues, but to the urbane swing, jump, and jive of Louis Jordan, Lil Green, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington that captivated African American audiences throughout the nation. Only two of the 108 recorded sides identified in their survey of black jukeboxes in Clarksdale consisted of downhome blues, with Tommy McClennan’s “Whiskey Head Man” (Bluebird B-8760) representing the lone instance of a local blues. That bustling cotton market town was not the site of some kind of mythical cultural isolation romanticized by certain folklorists and critics as the wellspring of blues “authenticity,” but rather part of an American South undergoing rapid social and cultural transformations and closely connected to powerful national media and musical trends that transcended regional and even racial categories. “List of Records on Machines in Clarksdale Amusement Places,” Folder 7: Lists, Library of Congress/Fisk University Mississippi Delta Collection, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; “Appendix 5: List of Records on Machines in Clarksdale Amusement Places,” in John W. Work, Lewis Wade Jones, and Samuel C. Adams Jr., Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941–1942, ed. Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005), 311–14; Tony Russell, “Clarksdale Piccolo Blues,” Jazz and Blues 1 (November 1971): 30; Mike Rowe, Chicago Blues: The City and the Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975 [1973]), 213; Marybeth Hamilton, “The Blues, The Folk, and African-American History,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6 (December 2001): 20–22. Dennis McNally also notes the decision (which he attributes to Don Law) to record and then release the second take of “Come On in My Kitchen” (Vocalion 03563, plus others), rather than the more “subtle first version.” Dennis McNally, On Highway 61: Music, Race and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2014), 215. For a balanced discussion of the largely sterile, yet still heated, debate about the mix of innovation and derivation in Johnson’s recordings, see Schroeder, Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary America, 55–57, and Gioia, Delta Blues, 170–71. David Evans, Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 109. William Ferris stresses how bluesmen adapted their repertoires and performance styles when they played for white audiences. See his Blues from the Delta (New York: Da Capo Press, 1984 [1978]), 91–97. On Patton’s eclecticism, see Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 133; Evans, Big Road Blues, 107–9; and Ben Wynne, In Tune: Charley Patton, Jimmie Rodgers, and the Roots of American Music (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2014), 78, 128. On Johnson, see Wald, Escaping the Delta, 97. Williams quoted in Stephen Calt, “The Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label—Part 2: The Mayo Williams Era,” 78 Quarterly no. 4 (1989): 16, 30n8, reprinted as “The Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Music Label: Mayo Williams and Paramount Records,” in Rhythm and Business: The Political Economy of Black Music, ed. Norman Kelley (New York: Akashic Books, 2005), 86–111. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 590–91. On these points, see, for example, Charles Wolfe, “Black String Bands: A Few Notes on a Lost Cause,” Old-Time Herald 1 (Fall 1987): 15, 17; Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Popular Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), especially 215–40. Michael Gray, Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes: In Search of Blind William McTell (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), 209. Other important studies of McTell’s career include David Evans, “Blind Willie

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29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

McTell,” in booklet notes to Atlanta Blues, 1933 (John Edwards Memorial Foundation JEMF-106), 6–24; Bruce Bastin, Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995 [1986]), 128–40. Harold Soulé interview by John K. MacKenzie, probably Portland, Oregon, January 2, 1964, JKMC; John K. MacKenzie, “Recording and Record Manufacturing at the Starr Piano Company,” n.d., unpublished manuscript, p. 4, Box 4: Research Files, Miscellaneous, 1910–1974, Folder 20, JKMC. Alton Delmore, Truth Is Stranger Than Publicity, ed. Charles K. Wolfe (Nashville, TN: Country Music Foundation Press, 1995 [1977]), 59. Delmore, Truth Is Stranger Than Publicity, 60, 61. Delmore, Truth Is Stranger Than Publicity, 59, 65. Delmore, Truth Is Stranger Than Publicity, 65–66. Delmore, Truth Is Stranger Than Publicity, 66–68, especially the unnumbered footnote on 68; Tony Russell, Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921–1942, with editorial research by Bob Pinson, assisted by the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 309; Charles K. Wolfe, “The Delmore Brothers: A Pre-War Discography,” JCM 6 (Spring 1975): 3. The Delmore Brothers’ debut disc sold just 511 copies, which, according to Charles K. Wolfe, was about average at the time for Columbia’s hillbilly releases in the Depression-ravaged record market. In his memoir, Alton Delmore also recalled waxing two additional selections at this session, “The Girls Don’t Worry My Mind” and “Smoky Mountain Bill and His Song.” Neither title, however, is listed among unissued masters in Columbia files, and, as Wolfe notes, “their disposition remains a mystery.” See Delmore, Truth Is Stranger Than Publicity, 67, especially the unnumbered footnote, and Wolfe, “Delmore Brothers,” 3. See, for example, “How It Feels to Sing into a Tin Horn,” Boston Sunday Post, October 1, 1916; “ ‘Horn Fright’ New Nervous Trouble Attacking Artists,” Pittsburgh Gazette Times, March 31, 1919; Sophie Braslau, “The Toil of Making Phonograph Records,” Atlanta Constitution, December 11, 1921; “Makers of ‘Canned Music’ Suffer ‘from Horn Shyness,’ ” Charlotte Observer, June 13, 1922; “Why Some Singers Suffer Phonograph Fright,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 17, 1918. See also “Singing for Talking Machines,” TMW, September 15, 1912, 23, and “ ‘Stage Fright’ before the Talking Machine,” TMW, April 15, 1914, 51. For two examples from the roots music field, see “Local Talent Makes Okeh and Odeon Records,” TMW, November 15, 1923, 114, and “Okeh Company May Make Records Here,” Asheville (NC) Citizen, August 26, 1925, reprinted in Charles K. Wolfe and Tony Russell, “The Asheville Session,” OTM no. 31 (Winter 1978/1979): 6. For a general discussion of the conditions under which acoustic recordings were made, see Tim Gracyk, with Frank Hoffman, Popular American Recording Pioneers, 1895–1925 (New York: Haworth Press, 2000), 15–17. “ ‘Horn Fright’ New Nervous Trouble Attacking Artists.” Talking Machine World had identified this nervous condition as early as 1912 but had given it no name. The term “horn fright” was already in use, however, a few years before Etude “diagnosed” the problem. See “Singing for Talking Machines”; “How It Feels to Sing into a Tin Horn.” The electrical recording equivalent of “horn fright” was “microphone fright” or “mike fright.” Although primarily associated with the nervousness felt by inexperienced speakers and performers on radio, these terms were also sometimes used to describe similar problems in the recording industry. On the use of these terms in early radio, see, for example, “Even Veteran Actors Are Nervous When First Facing the Microphone,” Rochester (NY) Democrat and Chronicle, September 18, 1927, and Roger Batchelder, “ ‘Mike Fright,’ Something Akin to Stage Fright, Gets Would-Be Radio

41.

42.

43. 44.

45.

46.

47.

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40.

361

38. 39.

Singers,” Montana Standard (Butte, MT), July 28, 1931; and for examples of their occasional application to interwar sound recording, see Helen Morgan, “Parties Are Making Records These Days,” Burlington (NC) Daily Times-News, December 20, 1937, and John Selby, “Frank Luther Holds Record for Records,” Indianapolis Sunday Star, June 2, 1940. Harry Charles interview by Gayle Dean Wardlow, Birmingham, Alabama, 1968, GDWC. McGee quoted in Charles K. Wolfe, Tennessee Strings: The Story of Country Music in Tennessee (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996 [1977]), 35. Uncle Dave Macon quoted, apparently as recalled by Kirk McGee, in Wolfe, Tennessee Strings, 35–36. In this quotation (whose source seems to be an uncited interview with McGee), “cap” may be an abbreviated form of the common southern honorific “captain”; then again, it might be a mistakenly transcribed reference to Jack Kapp, then one of Brunswick’s recording managers, albeit based in Chicago. Russell, Country Music Records, 334; Ryan André Brasseaux, Cajun Breakdown: The Emergence of an American-Made Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 49. As Brasseaux notes, Columbia officials misspelled the French title of the song, “Allons à Lafayette,” on the label of the record as “Allon a Laufette.” See Brasseaux, Cajun Breakdown, 242n4. Falcon quoted in Lauren C. Post, “Joseph C. [sic] Falcon, Accordion Player and Singer: A Biographical Sketch,” Louisiana History 11 (Winter 1970), reprinted in Ryan A. Brasseaux and Kevin S. Fontenot, eds., Accordions, Fiddles, Two Step and Swing: A Cajun Music Reader, (Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana Studies, 2006), 324. Brasseaux, Cajun Breakdown, 51. Billie Holiday, with William Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues (New York: Penguin Books, 1984 [1956]), 36–37; Dunstan Prial, The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 43–47, 60–62; Brian Rust, Jazz and Ragtime Records (1897–1942), 6th rev. and exp. ed., 2 vols. (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2002 [1961]), 1:646, 2:1875. See also John Hammond, with Irving Townsend, John Hammond on Record: An Autobiography (New York: Ridge Press, 1977), 91–93, 119, 147–48. Satherley quoted in Norm Cohen, “ ‘I’m a Record Man’: Uncle Art Satherley Reminisces,” JEMFQ 8 (Spring 1972): 19, reprinted in Exploring Roots Music: Twenty Years of the JEMF Quarterly, ed. Nolan Porterfield (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 45–50. Frank Walker interview by Mike Seeger, probably New York, New York, June 19, 1962, Mike Seeger Collection, SFC, transcribed in part as “Who Chose These Records? A Look into the Life, Tastes, and Procedures of Frank Walker,” in Anthology of American Folk Music, ed. Josh Dunson and Ethel Raim (New York: Oak Publications, 1973), 8–17. Soulé interview, January 2, 1964; MacKenzie, “Recording and Record Manufacturing at the Starr Piano Company,” 1; Rick Kennedy and Randy McNutt, Little Labels—Big Sound: Small Record Companies and the Rise of American Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 6–7; Rick Kennedy, Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy: Gennett Studios and the Birth of Recorded Jazz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 28–29. More than once, Orlando Marsh relocated his Chicago studio, Marsh Laboratories Inc., where he often oversaw recordings for Paramount during the mid- to late 1920s, reportedly because the rumbling din of the nearby Chicago Elevated Railway disrupted his sessions. Helen Oakley Dance encountered similar issues with passing “L” trains at Brunswick’s Chicago studios during the mid-1930s. “It shook the studio. And so, much of it didn’t come out well, which was too bad,” she lamented. See Alex van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall: The Roots and History of Paramount Records, 2nd ed. (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2012 [2003]), 56–57; Helen Oakley Dance interview by Mark Tucker, Vista, California,

362 N OT E S TO PAG E S 1 7 5 – 7 9

48.

49.

50. 51.

52.

53.

54.

55.

56. 57.

58. 59.

60.

January 9, 1987, Oral History of American Music, Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut, www.library.yale.edu/about/departments/oham/ELLINGTON_helen_oakley_dance.html (accessed January 30, 2015). H. C. Speir interview by Gayle Dean Wardlow, Jackson, Mississippi, May 18, 1968, GDWC; Gayle Dean Wardlow, “The Talent Scouts: H. C. Speir (1895–1972),” 78 Quarterly no. 8 (1994): 17; van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall, 151. Satherley quoted in Charles Townsend, San Antonio Rose: The Life and Music of Bob Wills (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1986 [1976]), 116–17. Walker interview. Burnett quoted in Charles Wolfe, booklet notes to “A Ramblin’ Reckless Hobo”: The Songs of Dick Burnett and Leonard Rutherford (Rounder Records 1004). See also Charles K. Wolfe, “Man of Constant Sorrow: Richard Burnett’s Story, [Part] 2,” OTM no. 10 (Autumn 1973): 5. Johnson quoted in Paul Oliver, Conversation with the Blues (London: Jazz Book Club, 1967), 109–10 (quotation on 110). The matrix numbers for Edith North Johnson’s first QRS recordings (311 and 312) immediatly precede those for Stump Johnson’s first side (313), and in all likelihood they recorded at the same whisky-fueled session. See Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 449, 453. Big Bill Broonzy, Big Bill Blues: William Broonzy’s Story as Told to Yannick Bruynoghe (New York: Oak Publications, 1964 [1955]), 47. Kennedy and McNutt, Little Labels—Big Sound, 34. For a detailed discussion of these 1930 Paramount sessions and the selections these artists recorded, see Edward Komara, “Blues in the Round,” Black Music Research Journal 17 (Spring 1997): 3–36. Son House interview by John Fahey, Barry Hansen, and Mark Levine, Venice, California, May 7, 1965, ParamountsHome.org, paramountshome.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article &id=112:son-house-interview-1965-&catid=47:new-york-recording-laboratoriesoral-histories& Itemid=54 (accessed February 5, 2015). Decades later, Laibly denied that he ever plied his artists with alcohol before or during sessions. “They didn’t get a drop while they were recording. You couldn’t take a chance. I would give it to them after they were done with the recording.” A substantial amount of evidence suggests otherwise, however. Laibly quoted in Stephen Calt and Gayle Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charlie Patton (Newton, NJ: Rock Chapel Press, 1988), 16 (emphasis in original). See also Calt and Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues, 256n5, and Sutton, Race Records and the American Recording Industry, 260–61. Speir quoted in Wardlow, “Talent Scouts,” 17; Evans, Big Road Blues, 200, 250. Clayton “Jack” Jackson interview by John K. MacKenzie, probably Lynn, Indiana, probably 1970, JKMC; Kennedy, Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy, 178–79. Art Satherley interview by Douglas B. Green, Hollywood, California, June 30, 1974, CMFOHP. Hammond, with Townsend, John Hammond on Record, 180–85 (quotations on 180, 181, 184). According to Hammond’s memoir, he was told that X’s mental problems were most likely related to the ravages of syphilis, which the jazzman had contracted “long ago” and of which he “had only partially been cured” (185). The clinical details of this episode and Hammond’s account are discussed in Frederick J. Spencer, Jazz and Death: Medical Profiles of Jazz Greats (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), 114–16. Spencer speculates that the musician whom Hammond disguised as X was most likely Bobby Moore, rather than drummer Jo Jones, whom Hammond later implicated. Prial, Producer, 99; Hammond, with Townsend, John Hammond on Record, 187–92; William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890–1945

64.

65. 66.

67.

68.

69.

70.

71.

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63.

363

61. 62.

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 177–80; “Henry Johnson” (John Hammond), “Music Sold for Less Than a Song,” New Masses, July 7, 1936, 29; “Henry Johnson” (John Hammond), “Phonograph Music,” New Masses, April 20, 1937, 35–38. Coincidentally, New Masses was the same magazine in which Hammond, employing the same pen name of “Henry Johnson,” praised Robert Johnson in print for the first time. In March 1937, Hammond described him as “the greatest Negro blues singer who has cropped up in recent years,” adding that, on his two recent Vocalion releases, “Johnson makes Leadbelly [sic] sound like an accomplished poseur.” Thus, Hammond made his first contribution to the social construction of that Mississippi bluesman’s now-towering legacy as an unimpeachably “authentic” artist. See “Henry Johnson” (John Hammond), “Recorded Music,” New Masses, March 2, 1937, 29. Hammond also helped sow the seeds of Johnson’s posthumous legend by liberally praising the recently deceased singer and playing a couple of his recorded sides onstage at Carnegie Hall on December 23, 1938, as part of the now-legendary “From Spirituals to Swing” fundraiser for New Masses at which Hammond had intended Johnson to perform. The twenty-seven-year-old blues singer-guitarist had died, however, reportedly poisoned by a jealous husband, some four months earlier, on August 16. But, as Ted Gioia suggests, “The legend of Robert Johnson was no doubt born that winter day in Carnegie Hall.” See Gioia, Delta Blues, 188. Prial, Producer, 98–101. Prial, The Producer, 102. Oberstein quoted in Cameron Shipp, “Expert Comes Here to Direct Making Phonograph Records,” Charlotte News, January 26, 1938. Helen Oakley Dance interview by Monk Rowe, San Diego, California, February 12, 1998, Fillius Jazz Archive, Hamilton College, Clinton, New York, contentdm6.hamilton.edu/cdm/ref/collection /jazz/id/753 (accessed June 9, 2015). Dance interview by Tucker. “Process of Recording Described,” Knoxville News-Sentinel, April 13, 1930, reprinted in part in Ross Laird, Brunswick Records: A Discography of Recordings, 1916–1931, 4 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 1:24–25. Dave Kapp interview by Joan Franklin and Robert Franklin, New York, New York, November 1959, Popular Arts Project, Columbia Center for Oral History, Columbia University, New York, New York. See also David Kapp interview by John Krimsky, New York, New York, July 27, 1951. Cary Ginell, with special assistance from Roy Lee Brown, Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 100; Manuel Peña, Música Tejana: The Cultural Economy of Artistic Transformation (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999), 52; Neil V. Rosenberg, Bluegrass: A History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005 [1985]), 34. Tom Hanchett, “Early Charlotte Area Recording Sessions, 1927–1945,” unpublished data sheet (copy in author’s possession); Patrick Huber, book accompanying The Dixon Brothers: “A Blessing to People,” 4-CD boxed set (Bear Family Records BCD 16817DK), 103. Russell, Country Music Records, 137–38; Ginell, with Brown, Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing, 188; Kapp interview by Krimsky. Kapp’s total figure of “350 selections” for his March 1936 recording expedition to New Orleans is inflated. As Cary Ginell notes, the trip actually yielded only “247 sides,” still an impressive total. Ginell also points out that the sessions ran from March 2–21. It remains unclear, however, if Kapp and his engineer recorded every day during their twenty-day visit. See Ginell, with Brown, Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing, 264n27. Raymond R. Sooy memo, June 16, 1931, quoted in Robert M. W. Dixon and John Godrich, Recording the Blues (London: November Books, 1970), 76; Rosenberg, Bluegrass, 34; Sutton, Race

364 N OT E S TO PAG E S 1 8 2 – 84

72.

73. 74.

75.

76.

77.

78.

Records and the American Recording Industry, 268, 280n11; Neil V. Rosenberg and Charles K. Wolfe, The Music of Bill Monroe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 9; Huber, book accompanying Dixon Brothers, 92. Ginell, with Brown, Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing, 100; Ralph Peer interview by Lillian Borgeson, Hollywood, California, January and May 1959, John Edwards Memorial Foundation Collection, SFC. Oberstein quoted in Rosenberg and Wolfe, Music of Bill Monroe, 9. Mendoza quoted in Chris Strachwitz, with James Nicolopulos, comps., Lydia Mendoza: A Family Autobiography (Houston, TX: Arte Público Press, 1993), 32, 88, 92–93 (quotation on 88). Mendoza appears to have been confused about the identity of the interpreter, who she referred to as Beatriz Morín, but about whom, she admitted, “I’m not real sure about her last name.” Her actual name was probably Bee McCann, an employee of the El Popular Record Shop and later, beginning in 1939, owner of her own store, the Bee McCann Music Shop, in San Antonio. Evidence for this identification comes from local newspaper accounts. In a March 1938, column, for example, Jeff Davis of the San Antonio Light noted that, in advance of Eli Oberstein’s arrival, McCann was making the rounds “digging up local talent for the recording session here.” Amy Freeman Lee also mentioned McCann in a San Antonio Express article about local Mexican recording artists, noting that she “has been instrumental in introducing many recording artists and in selecting their repertoire.” See Strachwitz, with Nicolopulos, Lydia Mendoza, 88; Jeff Davis, “Around the Plaza,” San Antonio Light, March 26, 1938; and Amy Freeman Lee, “The Mexican Music Industry,” San Antonio Express, September 17, 1939. More disconcertingly, Mendoza later accused “Beatriz Morín” of conspiring with another RCA Victor A&R man (whom she recalled only as “Mr. Medaris”) and taking advantage of her lack of fluency in English to cheat her out of the royalties due to her on her Bluebird recordings. See Strachwitz, with Nicolopulos, Lydia Mendoza, 92–93. Sajewski quoted in Richard K. Spottswood, “The Sajewski Story: Eighty Years of Polish Music in Chicago,” in American Folklife Center, Ethnic Recordings in America: A Neglected Heritage (Washington, DC: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, 1982), 142. Segura quoted in Pekka Gronow, “Ethnic Recordings: An Introduction,” in American Folklife Center, Ethnic Recordings in America, 19. See also John H. Cowley, “Moonshine and Mosquitoes: The Story of Dewey Segura,” Old Time Music no. 40 (Winter 1984): 12–14, reprinted in Brasseaux and Fontenot, Accordions, Fiddles, Two Step and Swing, 379–82. House interview. For more on Laibly’s recording policies and practices, see van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall, 166–68. Stephen Calt, I’d Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2008 [1994]), 5; Jeff Todd Titon, Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994 [1977]), 215; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 437, 443. Likewise, Ralph Peer encouraged Rozelle Ming, the guitarist for Floyd Ming & His Pep Steppers, to maintain her practice of beating time with her feet and placed a board beneath them and a microphone nearby in order to accentuate the sound of her rhythmic foot-patting on the recordings she and the stringband made during their lone Victor session in Memphis in 1928. She later told interviewer Tony Russell, however, that she believed this effect spoiled the recordings. Her husband, Floyd Ming, apparently did as well, although his wife’s foot-tapping did inspire the name of the band, which he conceived on the spot when Peer asked him how the group should be credited on records. Tony Russell, “Pep-Stepping with the Mings,” OTM no. 20 (Spring 1976): 13; Tony Russell, Country Music Originals: The Legends and

81.

82.

83. 84.

85. 86.

87.

88.

89.

90.

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80.

365

79.

the Lost (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 120; Chris Jong, letter to the editor, Old-Time Herald 7 (Spring 2001), 2–3. Russell, “Pep-Stepping with the Mings,” 13; Walker quoted in Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made It, ed. Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff (New York: Dover Publications, 1966 [1955]), 178. For another example of this practice involving Walker, see Archie Green and Eugene Earle, booklet notes to The Carolina Tar Heels (Folk Legacy Records FSA-24), 3. Stomping one’s feet during a session could do more damage than simply ruining a recorded take. At one of his 1927–1928 Paramount sessions in Chicago, Big Bill Broonzy claimed that his recording fee was greatly reduced after he allegedly broke “one of the recording machines which cost five hundred dollars by patting my feet on it.” Broonzy, Big Bill Blues, 46. Satherley quoted in Maurice Zolotow, “Hillbilly Boom,” Saturday Evening Post, February 12, 1944, 36, 38, reprinted in Linnell Gentry, ed., A History and Encyclopedia of Country, Western, and Gospel Music, 2nd rev. ed. (Nashville, TN: Clairmont Corp., 1969 [1961]), 36–42. Shores quoted in Charles Wolfe, “Five Years with the Best: Bill Shores and North Georgia Fiddling,” OTM no. 25 (Summer 1977): 5. Soulé as quoted in MacKenzie, “Recording and Record Manufacturing at the Starr Piano Company,” 4. See also Soulé interview, January 2, 1961. David Evans, “An Interview with H. C. Speir,” JEMFQ 8 (Autumn 1972): 119. Whitey and Hogan (Roy “Whitey” Grant and Arval Hogan) interview by John W. Rumble, Nashville, Tennessee, November 5, 1982, CMFOHP. See also John W. Rumble, “Country Music and the Rural South: Reminiscing with Whitey and Hogan,” JCM 10 (1985): 43–44. Brasseaux, Cajun Breakdown, 50. Monroe quoted in “Origin of ‘Blues’ Numbers,” Sheet Music News, October 1923, 41, reprinted in Jazz in Print: An Anthology of Selected Early Readings in Jazz History, ed. Karl Koenig (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2002), 260–62. See also Evans, Big Road Blues, 67–68. “Young Blind Musician Records for Vocalion,” TMW, June 15, 1924, 46; Z. Heraclitus Knox, “Recalling the Short Career of Early Country Music Singer George Reneau,” Metro Pulse, March 28, 2012, www.metropulse.com/columns/ask-doc-knox/recalling-short-career-early-country-music-singer (accessed May 12, 2015; link now discontinued); Charles K. Wolfe, “George Reneau: A Biographical Sketch,” JEMFQ 15 (Winter 1979): 205–6; Wolfe, Tennessee Strings, 32; Russell, Country Music Records, 740–41. For Austin’s comment about why Hess rejected Reneau’s vocals, see Jim Walsh, “Singer and Record ‘Fiend’ Find Much to Talk About,” Johnson City (TN) Press, April 27, 1939, and Gene Austin, with Ralph M. Pabst, Gene Austin’s Ol’ Buddy (Phoenix, AZ: Augury Press, 1984), 60–62. See also Patrick Huber, “The New York Sound: Citybilly Recording Artists and the Creation of Hillbilly Music, 1924–1932,” JAF 127 (Spring 2014): 140–41. Charles K. Wolfe, “Fiddlin’ Powers and His Family,” OTM no. 42 (Winter 1985/1986): 8, 9; Victor Talking Machine Company, Olde Time Fiddlin’ Tunes (New York: Victor Talking Machine Co., 1924), n.p., reprinted in Archie Green, “Commercial Music Graphics: Four,” JEMFN 4 (March 1968): 8, 13. Russell, Country Music Records, 703; Powers quoted in Wolfe, “Fiddlin’ Powers and His Family,” 8. According to Wolfe’s article, Charles Powers sang on “Sour Wood Mountains” (Victor 19448), but Russell’s Country Music Records, as well as the online Discography of American Historical Recordings, indicate that only Robison supplied vocals on the four songs in question. See Wolfe, “Fiddlin’ Powers and His Family,” 8, 10; Russell, Country Music Records, 703; and University of

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91.

92.

93. 94. 95.

96. 97.

98.

99. 100.

101. 102.

103. 104. 105.

106.

107. 108. 109.

110.

California at Santa Barbara Library, “Victor matrix B-30583. Sour Wood Mountains / Fiddlin’ Powers & Family,” Discography of American Historical Recordings, adp.library.ucsb.edu/index .php/matrix/detail/800004743/B-30583-Sour_wood_mountains (accessed September 13, 2015). Kazee quoted in Loyal Jones, “Buell Kazee,” JEMFQ 14 (Summer 1978): 61. See also Archie Green, “Commercial Music Graphics: Twelve,” JEMFQ 6 (Spring 1970): 26; Charles G. Bowen, “Buell Kazee: The Genuine Article,” Sing Out! 20 (September–October 1970): 14; Joe Bussard, Wilson Reeves, and Leon Kagrise, “Buell Kazee Talking,” OTM no. 6 (Autumn 1972): 7; and Gene Bluestein, “A Conversation with Buell Kazee,” Old-Time Herald 3 (Spring 1993): 26. W. R. Calaway letter to Doc Roberts, December 29, 1932, Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 18: Correspondence with the American Record Corporation, 1930– 1934, DRP. Huber, “New York Sound,” 141, 142, 145, 147, 151n31. Huber, “The New York Sound,” 147. Ralph S. Peer, “Ralph Peer Sees No Hypo for Late Jimmy [sic] Rodgers; Dalhart Not a Hillbilly,” Variety, November 2, 1955, 52; William Ruhlmann, Breaking Records: 100 Years of Hits (New York: Routledge, 2004), 47; Ivey quoted in Nolan Porterfield, Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of America’s Blue Yodeler (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992 [1979]), 385. See also Huber, “New York Sound,” 141. Wolfe, Tennessee Strings, 32. See, for example, Samuel B. Charters, The Country Blues (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975 [1959]), 46; Titon, Early Downhome Blues, xvii–xviii. David A. Jasen and Gene Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around: Black Popular Songwriters, 1880–1930 (New York: Routledge, 2005), 261–62, 264; Sutton, Race Records and the American Recording Industry, 10, 11–12, 21n9; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 828. See also Perry Bradford, Born with the Blues (New York: Oak Publications, 1965), 118–19, 121–22, 124–26. See “Index to Accompanists” in Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 1339–70. For more on the use of session musicians in the hillbilly recording field, see Huber, “New York Sound,” 145–46, and “Index to Performers” in Russell, Country Music Records, 985–1011. Russell, Country Music Records, 403, 472, 473. Huber, “New York Sound,” 147. See, for example, Russell, Country Music Records, 242, 245, 288, 604, 668–69, as well as the discography’s “Abbreviations: Instruments and Frequently Used Terms” (43–44). Russell, Country Music Originals, 144–45; Russell, Country Music Records, 620, 842. Huber, “New York Sound,” 147. For a fascinating study of how imagined geographies have been created through record production, see Doyle, Echo and Reverb. For examples of such activities in Atlanta, see Russell, Country Music Records, 208, 211–12, 318, 345, 366, 517, 568, and Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 156, 303, 735. Russell, Country Music Records, 109, 668–69. Russell, Country Music Records, 100, 423. Bob Riesman, I Feel So Good: The Life and Times of Big Bill Broonzy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 61–64, 66–67; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 254–55. Jasen and Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around, 329; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 351–53, 407, 440; David Harrison, “Harlem Hamfats,” in Encyclopedia of the Blues, ed. Edward Komara, 2 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1:403.

113.

114.

115.

116.

117.

118.

119. 120. 121.

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112.

John Minton, 78 Blues: Folksongs and Phonographs in the American South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 119–20; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 703–4; Swinton, “Twist of Lemon,” 8–9. Minton, 78 Blues, 120–21; Russell, Country Music Records, 667–68. For another example of an ensemble record made at a southern field session, see “Jim Jackson’s Jamboree—Parts I and II” (Vocalion 1428), a two-part Vocalion skit in which Jackson was joined by Tampa Red, Georgia Tom, and Speckled Red on up-tempo blues numbers with occasional dialogue, recorded at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis on October 14, 1929. Presumably Jack Kapp (though possibly J. Mayo Williams) conceived the idea for this record. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 430. Huber, “Black Hillbillies,” 71–77 (Appendix A); Charles K. Wolfe, “The Bristol Sessions: The Cast of Characters,” in The Bristol Sessions: Writings about the Big Bang of Country Music, ed. Charles K. Wolfe and Ted Olson (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2005), 45–47, 52–53; Charles K. Wolfe, liner notes to The Bristol Sessions: Historic Recordings from Bristol, Tennessee, 2-CD set (Country Music Foundation CMF-011-D); Ted Olson and Tony Russell, book accompanying The Bristol Sessions, 1927–1928: The Big Bang of Country Music, 5-CD boxed set (Bear Family Records BCD 16094 EK), 32, 87; Russell, Country Music Records, 463; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 998. For a fuller treatment of these and the other racially integrated sessions discussed below, see Huber, “Black Hillbillies,” 19–20, 27-37. Gene Wiggins, with Tony Russell, “Hell Broke Loose in Gordon County, Georgia,” OTM no. 25 (Summer 1977): 13; Tony Russell, liner notes to Black Fiddlers: The Remaining Titles of Andrew and Jim Baxter, Nathan Frazier and Frank Patterson, the Complete Recorded Works of Cuje Bertram (1929–c. 1970) (Document Records DOCD-5631); Bastin, Red River Blues, 38–40; Russell, Country Music Records, 367; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 44. Porterfield, Jimmie Rodgers, 258–60; Russell, Country Music Records, 804; Huber, “Black Hillbillies,” 19–20, 57n3. The origins of this remarkable session, like those of many of the historic recording sessions discussed in this book, remain in dispute. Rodgers’s biographer Nolan Porterfield believes that this studio collaboration was arranged by Peer, who had known Louis Armstrong since the mid-1920s when the jazz trumpeter was then under exclusive contract with Peer’s then-employer, OKeh Records. Jazz historian Dan Morganstern, however, claims that it was at Rodgers’s “special request” that Armstrong and his wife accompanied him on the recording. Ultimately, as Armstrong biographers Max Jones and John Chilton note, “How this improbable partnership came into being remains one of jazz’s unsolvable riddles.” See Porterfield, Jimmie Rodgers, 258; Dan Morgenstern, booklet notes to Louis Armstrong: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1923–1934, 4-CD boxed set (Columbia Records/Legacy Recordings C4K 57176), 50; and Max Jones and John Chilton, Louis: The Louis Armstrong Story, 1900–1971 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1971), 236. Rust, Jazz and Ragtime Records, 2:1328; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 767; Russell, Country Music Records, 804; Porterfield, Jimmie Rodgers, 72. Porterfield, Jimmie Rodgers, 292–93, 297–99; Russell, Country Music Records, 805, 806; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 767. Porterfield, Jimmie Rodgers, 291–92; Russell, Country Music Records, 805. Russell, Country Music Records, 805. Russell, Country Music Records, 803. For additional Rodgers collaborations with these two bands at his 1930 Hollywood sessions, see Russell, Country Music Records, 804.

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122. 123.

124.

125.

126.

127.

128.

129.

130. 131.

132.

133. 134.

135.

136.

137.

138.

Peer interview. Huber, “Black Hillbillies,” 20, 21, 71–81 (Appendixes A and B). See also Miller, Segregating Sound, 217–40. Huber, “Black Hillbillies,” 28, 62n21. See also “Index to Accompanists” in Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 1339–70. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 303, 413, 492, 735, 811–12. For other examples of interwar blues records produced at integrated recording sessions in which white hillbilly artists participated, see Russell, Country Music Records, 196, 745, and Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 43, 1018. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 811–12; Hammond, with Townsend, John Hammond on Record, 120–21; Prial, Producer, 59. Allan Sutton, among other scholars, credits the Original New Orleans Jazz Band, which recorded for OKeh, with the first racially integrated jazz session. All of its members were white (including front man and pianist Jimmie Durante) except for clarinetist Achille Baquet, a light-complexioned black Creole from New Orleans who passed for white professionally. Sutton, Race Records and the American Recording Industry, 110, identifies, without a source and apparently mistakenly, the year of this historic session as 1919. But Rust, Jazz and Ragtime Records, 2:1297–98, gives the approximate date as “c. November 1918.” Rust is more likely correct, and elsewhere Sutton also gives a date of “late 1918” for the session. Allan Sutton, A Phonograph in Every Home: The Evolution of the American Recording Industry, 1900–19 (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2010), 260. The next day, Morton joined the New Orleans Rhythm Kings to record several additional pieces, although jazz scholars continue to dispute the exact number of selections on which he actually played. See Richard M. Sudhalter, Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 43–45; Kennedy, Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy, 73–76, 159; and Rust, Jazz and Ragtime Records, 2:1228. Hammond, with Townsend, John Hammond on Record, 114, 147–48; Prial, Producer, 55–56, 61–62, 69–70, 91–92. Russell, Country Music Records, 242, 757, 761, 892. See Victor Talking Machine Company, Olde Time Fiddlin’ Tunes, n.p., reprinted in Green, “Commercial Music Graphics: Four,” 8. For each of these A&R managers, see the list of artists he accompanied or performed with on record in “Index to Performers,” in Russell, Country Music Records, 988, 989, 1000, 1002. Russell, Country Music Records, 57–58. See the listing of recording artists for whom Henderson provided musical accompaniment in “Index to Accompanists,” in Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 1351. For each of these A&R managers, see the list of artists he or she accompanied on record in “Index to Accompanists,” in Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 1346, 1355, 1368–69. Jasen and Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around, 279, 289; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 1368–69; Rust, Jazz and Ragtime Records, 2:1840–54. Paul Swinton, “ ‘A Kansas City Call’: Winston Holmes and His Meritt Record Label,” in The Frog Blues and Jazz Annual, No. 3, ed. Paul Swinton (Fleet, UK: Frog Records Ltd., 2013), 123; Alex van der Tuuk, “Lottie Kimbrough-Beaman and Winston Holmes,” in Field Manual accompanying The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Vol. 2 (1928–32), 6-LP boxed set (Third Man Records/ Revenant Records TMR 204), 192–93; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 46. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 515.

1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

Charles Wolfe, “A Lighter Shade of Blue: White Country Blues,” in Nothing but the Blues: The Music and the Musicians, ed. Lawrence Cohn (New York: Abbeville Press, 1993), 233–36; Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Popular Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 220; Patrick Huber, “Black Hillbillies: African American Musicians on Old-Time Records, 1924–1932,” in Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music, ed. Diane Pecknold (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 48; Tony Russell, Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921–1942, with editorial research by Bob Pinson, assisted by the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 55; Frank Walker interview by Mike Seeger, probably New York, New York, June 19, 1962, Mike Seeger Collection, SFC, transcribed in part as “Who Chose These Records? A Look into the Life, Tastes, and Procedures of Frank Walker,” in Anthology of American Folk Music, ed. Josh Dunson and Ethel Raim (New York: Oak Publications, 1973), 8–17. Charles K. Wolfe asserts that the release of the Allen Brothers’ record in Columbia’s race series resulted from a mistake made by an unidentified A&R official at the company’s New York headquarters who, “familiar with neither southern accents nor music,” believed the duo to be African American. But in his 1962 interview, Walker suggested that the series assignment was a deliberate decision and one that he made himself. See Wolfe, “Lighter Shade of Blue,” 235, and Walker interview. Columbia advertisement, Chicago Defender, January 7, 1928. Walker interview. Walker mistakenly claimed that the furor concerned “Salty Dog Blues” (Columbia 15175-D), but that recording, one of the sides on the Allen Brothers’ first release, appeared in Columbia’s 15000-D hillbilly series. See Russell, Country Music Records, 55. Miller, Segregating Sound, 220; Wolfe, “Lighter Shade of Blue,” 236–37; Walker interview. To help keep track of information about particular recordings throughout the various phases of post-production, record companies used custom in-house forms called “label copy notices” or “notices of coupling and assignment.” These documents contained basic information about a record’s production, marketing, and release schedule, including the title and artist credit as it should appear on the printed record labels, the preferred “use” take for a selection, its coupling and series assignments, the date of its manufacture order, the number of discs in the initial

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Jerry Zolten, “Wiseman Sextette,” in Field Manual accompanying The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Vol. 1 (1917–27), 6-LP boxed set (Third Man Records/Revenant Records TMR 203), 271–72. But compare Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 766, 1058, which does not identify Rodeheaver as speaking or singing on these July 1923 sides and, moreover, places this session in New York. This discography does indicate, however, that he preached on four issued titles, recorded “c. early 1923” and on August 10, 1923, by the Wiseman Sextet. Credited to “Homer Rodeheaver & Wiseman Sextet,” the recordings appeared as couplings on Rodeheaver’s own Rainbow label (Rainbow 1043 and 1044). 140. Russell, Country Music Records, 368. Charles’s self-proclaimed musical contributions to race records go unacknowledged in Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, but see Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow, “Paramount, Part 4: The Advent of Arthur Laibly,” 78 Quarterly no. 6 (1991): 16; van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall, 116; and Harry Charles interview by Gayle Dean Wardlow, Birmingham, Alabama, March 20, 1968, GDWC. 141. Russell, Country Music Records, 97, 297, 298, 653.

139.

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7.

8.

9.

10.

pressing order, and the monthly catalog supplement in which the release was to be announced. See Dan Mahony, The Columbia 13/14000-D Series: A Numerical Listing, Record Handbook No. 1. (Stanhope, NJ: Walter C. Allen, 1961), 5–6; “Commercial Music Documents: Number Five,” JEMFQ 5 (Winter 1969): 146; and Charles Wolfe, “Columbia Records and Old-Time Music,” JEMFQ 14 (Autumn 1978): 119, reprinted in Exploring Roots Music: Twenty Years of the JEMF Quarterly, ed. Nolan Porterfield (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 199–217. Harold Soulé interview by John K. MacKenzie, probably Portland, Oregon, January 2, 1964; Joseph E. Geier interview by John K. MacKenzie, probably Richmond, Indiana, April 1970, both in JKMC; John K. MacKenzie, “Recording and Record Manufacturing at the Starr Piano Company,” unpublished typescript, 5–7, Box 4: Research Files, Miscellaneous, 1910–1974, Folder 20, JKMC. On the plating and pressing processes at Gennett, see MacKenzie, “Recording and Record Manufacturing at the Starr Piano Company,” 6–8. Cary Ginell, with special assistance from Roy Lee Brown, Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 100, 264n27; Norm Cohen, “ ‘I’m a Record Man’: Uncle Art Satherley Reminisces,” JEMFQ 8 (Spring 1972): 20; Walker interview. [John Steiner], “Art Laibly,” unpublished typescript, 1, Series 3: Record Industry and Collecting, Subseries 1: Paramount and S/D Records, Box 31, Folder 4: History of Paramount Records, Interviews, John Steiner, 1968–1997, John Steiner Collection, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, Chicago, Illinois. See, for example, Neil V. Rosenberg, Bluegrass: A History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005 [1985]), 34; Tom Hanchett, “Early Charlotte Area Recording Sessions, 1927–1945,” unpublished data sheet (copy in author’s possession); Patrick Huber, book accompanying The Dixon Brothers: “A Blessing to People,” 4-CD boxed set (Bear Family Records BCD 16817DK), 103; Tony Russell, “Aftershocks: Location Recording after the Bristol Sessions,” International Country Music Journal, 2016 (2016): 60. As Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow note, however, churning out recordings at such a furious pace sometimes caused A&R officials to lose sight of the best pieces in a roots artist’s repertoire. At the American Record Corporation (ARC) during the 1930s, for example, A&R manager Art Satherley might record two dozen or more selections by a country bluesman or a hillbilly stringband in just two to three days of sessions. But such an “indiscriminate recording approach,” Calt and Wardlow argue, “only increased the odds of commercial miscarriage,” because it made it more difficult for Satherley and his assistants “to distinguish front-line repertoire pieces from works that trickled forth in response to the company’s milking process.” As a case in point, Calt and Wardlow cite Charley Patton’s “Poor Me” (Vocalion 2651), the twenty-fourth of twenty-six selections he recorded over the course of three days in 1934. This non-blues piece apparently was not part of Patton’s regular performing repertoire. Given how late into his sessions it appeared, he probably only offered the song in order to satisfy the A&R man’s request for additional numbers. Nonetheless, Satherley approved the first take of this number and selected it as Patton’s first ARC release, although, according to Calt and Wardlow, “Patton persistently went off-key while singing the phrase-ending keynote of each chorus.” This decision not only exposed “the inadequacies of [ARC’s] approach,” they assert, but also “the limitations of Arthur Satherley as its guiding executive” and “his ineptitude as a recording director.” Stephen Calt and Gayle Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charlie Patton (Newton, NJ: Rock Chapel Press, 1988), 243. Calt and Wardlow claim that “Poor Me” was the twenty-third selection that Patton recorded at these sessions, but the fourth edition of Blues and Gospel Records indicates it was actually the twenty-

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

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12. 13.

371

11.

fourth. See Robert M. W. Dixon, John Godrich, and Howard Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 1890–1943, 4th ed. (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1997 [1964]), 709. Nathaniel Shilkret, Nathaniel Shilkret: Sixty Years in the Music Business, ed. Niel Shell and Barbara Shilkret (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 37. Shilkret, Nathaniel Shilkret, 37. Paul D. Fischer, “The Sooy Dynasty of Camden, New Jersey: Victor’s First Family of Recording,” Journal on the Art of Record Production no. 7 (November 2012): n.p., arpjournal.com/the-sooy-dynasty -of-camden-new-jersey-victor%E2%80%99s-first-family-of-recording/ (accessed December 8, 2014). Art Laibly interview by John Steiner, probably Park Ridge, March 11, 1970, John Steiner Collection. See also Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow, “Paramount’s Decline and Fall (Part 5),” 78 Quarterly no. 7 (1992): 13, in which the authors describe a slightly different membership and operation for Paramount’s ad hoc record evaluation committee. Over the years, others involved in passing judgment on test pressings at Paramount included John M. Bostwick, longtime president of the Wisconsin Chair Company and its record company subsidiary, the New York Recording Laboratories; recording managers Maurice Supper and Art Satherley; pressing plant foreman Walter Klopp; and chief recording engineer Alfred Schultz. See Alex van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall: The Roots and History of Paramount Records, 2nd ed. (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2012 (2003), 39–40, 41; Alex van der Tuuk, “Alfred Schultz: Paramount’s Pressing Foreman,” Vintage Jazz Mart, www.vjm.biz/new_page_9.htm (accessed September 29, 2015); Calt and Wardlow, “Paramount’s Decline and Fall (Part 5),” 13; and Calt and Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues, 271n3. Charles quoted in Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow, “Paramount, Part 4: The Advent of Arthur Laibly,” 78 Quarterly no. 6 (1991): 16. MacKenzie, “Recording and Record Manufacturing at the Starr Piano Company,” 8; Kyle S. Barnett, “The Recording Industry’s Role in Media History,” in Convergence Media History, ed. Janet Staiger and Sabine Hake (New York: Routledge, 2009), 86. Barnett’s essay offers a particularly useful case study of Gennett’s corporate structure and operations during the 1920s. “F. D. Wiggins Takes Charge of Gennett Record Sales,” TMW, July 15, 1924, 18; MacKenzie, “Recording and Record Manufacturing at the Starr Piano Company,” 8. Doc Phill [sic] Roberts contract with Starr Piano Company, May 10, 1928, Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 1: Agreements with the Starr Piano Company, September 1925–April 1930, DRP. For a similar clause in another of Roberts’s contracts with the company, see Agreement between Starr Piano Company and Dennis W. Taylor, Dock [sic] Roberts, and Welby Toomey, September 29, 1925, Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 1: Agreements with the Starr Piano Company, September 1925–April 1930, DRP. Clayton “Jack” Jackson interview by John K. MacKenzie, probably Lynn, Indiana, probably 1970; Lee Butt telephone interview by John K. MacKenzie, undated, both in JKMC. Others who appear to have occasionally evaluated test pressings at Gennett include the Starr Piano Company’s secretary and co-owner, Fred Gennett, and its musical director, Harold M. Little, a classically trained musician who headed the music department of a local high school and who, unlike most of his colleagues, had a deep knowledge of music, though not necessarily roots music. John K. MacKenzie, “Recording Procedure, Gennett-Style, as Derived from Interviews with Harold Soule and a Study of the Personnel Divisions of the Company and Their Functions,” unpublished typescript, 1, Box 4: Research Files, Miscellaneous, 1910–1974, Folder 20, JKMC; Jackson interview; Geier interview. MacKenzie, “Recording and Record Manufacturing at the Starr Piano Company,” 8.

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22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

Soulé interview, January 2, 1964. Harold Soulé interview by John K. MacKenzie, probably Sandy, Oregon, June 28, 1961, JKMC. “No Two Master Records Alike,” TMW, May 15, 1919, 78. Lester Melrose, “My Life in Recording,” in American Folk Music Occasional, No. 2, ed. Chris Strachwitz and Pete Welding (New York: Oak Publications, 1970), 61. See also David Evans, Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 75. For an example of the conventional wisdom, see sociologist Richard A. Peterson’s contention that interwar A&R men “did not make aesthetic judgments about which of the recorded country or blues songs to release.” Rather, their decisions were based on “the technical quality of the reproduction process and on the prior sales success of the particular performer.” Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 46–47, 246n29. Photocopies of Gennett ledgers, 1925–1931 (in authors’ possession); Russell, Country Music Records, 882. We thank Norm Cohen for making copies of these documents from his research files available to us. The original ledgers are located in The Gennett Records Division of Starr Piano Company Records and Sound Discs Collection, Series 1: Records, 1920–1939, Subseries 1b: Ledgers and Disposition Records, 1925–1939, Boxes 13–16, Institute of Jazz Studies, Dana Library, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey. Wiggins quoted in “November 1st in Gennett History” on Gennett Records Discography, gennett .wordpress.com/tag/p-j-mcnamara-trio/ (accessed September 22, 2016). Lee A. Butt letter to Doc Roberts, October 8, 1929, Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 4: Gennett Correspondence, 1929, DRP; Russell, Country Music Records, 588, 589, 754. Gennett ledgers; Russell, Country Music Records, 88, 143, 702, 831. Gennett ledgers. Gennett ledgers; Russell, Country Music Records, 560, 946. MacKenzie, “Recording and Record Manufacturing at the Starr Piano Company,” 9. See also Jackson interview. Williams quoted in Calt and Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues, 183 (emphasis in the original). Other Paramount officials, including Williams’s archrival at the firm, Art Laibly, seemed to lack such commercial savvy. Under his management, Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow assert, Paramount “squandered a probable hit by placing two of Patton’s best-known songs, ‘Pony Blues’ and ‘Banty Rooster,’ on the same record.” See Calt and Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues, 185, and for a critical assessment of Laibly’s approach to pairing sides, 183–84. Soulé interview, June 28 1961. Jackson interview; MacKenzie, “Recording and Record Manufacturing at the Starr Piano Company,” 9. Jackson as quoted in MacKenzie, “Recording and Record Manufacturing at the Starr Piano Company,” 9. See also Jackson interview. Norman Cohen, “Computerized Hillbilly Discography: The Gennett Project,” Western Folklore 30 (July 1971): 188–89; Rick Kennedy, “Gennett Records: Capturing America’s Musical Grassroots,” 78 Quarterly no. 8 (1994): 38; Rick Kennedy, Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy: Gennett Studios and the Birth of Recorded Jazz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 142–48; Russell, Country Music Records, 17–18. Cohen, “Computerized Hillbilly Discography,” 188.

40.

42. 43.

44.

45. 46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

51. 52.

53.

54. 55.

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41.

Geier as quoted in Kennedy, “Gennett Records,” 46. See also Geier interview. Cohen, “Computerized Hillbilly Discography,” 188–89. Jackson as quoted in MacKenzie, “Recording and Record Manufacturing at the Starr Piano Company,” 9–10. See also Jackson interview. Tom Tsotsi, “Gennett-Champion Blues: Richmond, Indiana: (1923–1934)—Part 4,” 78 Quarterly no. 6 (1991): 88; Russell, Country Music Records, 63, 297, 730–31, 851. Kennedy, Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy, 145–46. Kennedy, Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy, 153–54. According to chief recording engineer Harold Soulé, in order to reduce production costs and meet its contract, Gennett used less shellac in the stencil label records it pressed for Sears, Roebuck & Company. “Shellac was pretty expensive in those days,” he recalled. Harold Soulé interview by John K. MacKenzie, probably Sandy, Oregon, August 3, 1961, JKMC. Soulé as quoted in MacKenzie, “Recording and Record Manufacturing at the Starr Piano Company,” 8. See also Soulé interviews, June 28, 1961, and January 2, 1964; and Kennedy, Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy, 153–54, which mistakenly attributes this quotation to Soulé’s colleague, Joe Geier. MacKenzie, “Recording and Record Manufacturing at the Starr Piano Company,” 8. “ ‘Wreck of the Shenandoah’ Withdrawn by Victor Co.,” TMW, November 15, 1925, 50. That same month, the QRS Music Company, a Chicago piano-roll manufacturer, announced that it had taken similar action. “The issuing of a music roll in connection with ‘The Wreck of the Shenandoah’ would be capitalizing on a national disaster, and neither humane nor patriotic,” the press release read. “At the same time the trade is notified that the company has withdrawn from circulation all rolls listed under the title ‘The Wreck of the Shenandoah.’ This is done in deference to the widows and orphans of the commander and crew who lost their lives in the accident.” “A QRS Announcement,” Presto, November 14, 1925, 23. Russell, Country Music Records, 250, 252; Archie Green, Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded CoalMining Songs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 113–53. Though credited to Jenkins, the song’s lyrics were adapted from either a 1910 British song titled “Don’t Go Down in the Mine, Dad” or a folk variant of it that Jenkins knew or happened to hear. Jack Palmer, Vernon Dalhart: First Star of Country Music (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2005), 142–44. Russell, Country Music Records, 250, 251, 252, 281. Gennett ledgers; Russell, Country Music Records, 216–17. Gennett ledgers; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 824, which offers a slight mistranslation of these ledger comments. Gennett ledgers; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 696–97. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 456; Paul Oliver, Screening the Blues: Aspects of the Blues Tradition (New York: Da Capo Press, 1989 [1968]), 217. Oliver, Screening the Blues, 217. For a complete discography of Bo Carter’s recorded titles, see Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 150–53, which lists only nine unissued sides for Carter. Samuel B. Charters, The Country Blues (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975 [1959]), 212, 213. Some of Blind Boy Fuller’s alternate takes of these selections did remain unissued, however. For a complete discography of his recordings, see Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 277–81. For other discussions about the sexual suggestiveness of recorded blues, see, for example, Guy B. Johnson, “Double Meaning in the Popular Negro Blues,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 22 (April–June 1927): 12–20; Ronald Clifford Foreman Jr., “Jazz and Race Records,

373

38. 39.

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56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68.

69.

1920–32: Their Origins and Their Significance for the Record Industry and Society” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois, 1968), 196–200; and especially Oliver, Screening the Blues, 164–261. Oliver, Screening the Blues, 216. In contrast, Samuel Charters suggests that, in their efforts to boost sales during the late 1920s and early 1930s, A&R managers encouraged their race recording artists to produce bawdy but wildly popular “party blues” and other “openly salacious” numbers. Charters, Country Blues, 166–67, 212–13. Oliver, Screening the Blues, 232, 249. David Evans, “An Interview with H. C. Speir,” JEMFQ 8 (Autumn 1972): 120. Brunswick file card quoted in Oliver, Screening the Blues, 217. Chicago Whip editorial, ca. January 1925, reprinted in “Views of Other Editors,” Pittsburgh Courier, January 24, 1925. For a similar complaint in the black press about race records, see “Widening the Breach,” Half-Century Magazine 17 (January–February 1925): 3, 21. Prior to becoming Paramount’s race recording manager, J. Mayo Williams had worked as a columnist for the Chicago Whip and, even after his departure from the newspaper, remained close friends with its editor and co-founder, Joseph D. Bibb, a Yale-educated lawyer and civil rights leader. Bibb’s brother-inlaw was Harry H. Pace, president and founder of the Pace Phonograph Company, manufacturer of Black Swan Records, and Bibb served as the company’s executive treasurer, while his widowed mother, Viola, served on its board of directors. According to Allan Sutton, in 1924, Bibb was among those who negotiated the company’s sale to Paramount. See Stephen Calt, “The Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label—Part 2: The Mayo Williams Era,” 78 Quarterly no. 4 (1989): 13, reprinted as “The Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Music Label: Mayo Williams and Paramount Records” in Rhythm and Business: The Political Economy of Black Music, ed. Norman Kelley (New York: Akashic Books, 2005), 86–111; Allan Sutton, Recording the ’Twenties: The Evolution of the American Recording Industry, 1920–29 (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2008), 57, 63n5; and Allan Sutton, Race Records and the American Recording Industry, 1919–1945: An Illustrated History (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2016), 36, 54n4. “Ban on Records with Repulsive Titles Suggested,” Pittsburgh Courier, January 12, 1929. “Ban on Records with Repulsive Titles Suggested.” Columbia’s advertisement for this record appeared in the Chicago Defender, December 29, 1928. “First Releases of Vocalion Race Records on Market,” TMW, June 15, 1926, 103. “Vocalion Race Records,” Chicago Defender, May 1, 1926. Foreman, “Jazz and Race Records,” 137. Aaron Sternfield, “Decca’s R&B Resurgence,” Billboard, June 24, 1967, sec. 2, 66. Gene Wiggins, Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy: Fiddlin’ John Carson, His Real World, and the World of his Songs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 82–84, offers a slight mistranslation of the final couplet quoted above. Carson also incorporated these same couplets into his 1923 OKeh recording “Papa’s Billy Goat” (OKeh 4994) and his 1934 Bluebird rendition of this same number (Bluebird B-5787). Spain quoted in Judith McCulloh, “Hillbilly Records and Tune Transcriptions,” Western Folklore 26 (October 1967): 228. See also Wiggins, Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy, 82–84. Wiggins speculates that, in her comment about vulgarity, Spain may have been referring not to Carson’s records but to race records. As she told Wiggins in a 1977 interview, “Those Negro records—sometimes they would be so obscene that Daddy would have to come in there and help me. He’d say, ‘Well now. Reeny, just you don’t think that I’m a man and I won’t think about you being a woman.’ That’s just how obscene they were.” Spain quoted in Wiggins, Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy, 84. Russell, Country Music Records, 48, 300, 804. The fullest and certainly the most entertaining

72.

73.

74. 75.

76. 77.

78.

79.

80.

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71.

375

70.

discussion of such material is the chapter titled “Stained Panties and Coarse Metaphors,” in Nick Tosches, Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock ’n’ Roll (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996 [1977]), 120–56. Rebecca Thomas, “The Cow That’s Ugly Has the Sweetest Milk,” in The Women of Country Music: A Reader, ed. Charles K. Wolfe and James E. Akenson (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), 140. At a June 1936 session, Hartman’s Heart Breakers waxed such suggestive songs as “Give It to Me, Daddy” (Bluebird B-6542) and “Let Me Play With It” (Bluebird B-6481), with a woman, identified only as Betty Lou, singing the lead vocals. See Russell, Country Music Records, 408. But she was an exception. The era’s relatively few female hillbilly singers generally avoided raunchy songs, or were carefully steered clear of them by A&R managers who accepted, profited from, and helped sustain traditional ideals of femininity in which white women, especially romanticized notions of southern white womanhood, were unsullied by base matters of the flesh. Foreman, “Jazz and Race Records,” 101–7; Archie Green, “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol,” JAF 78 (July–September 1965): 207, 211–14, 220–22. See, for example, Tony Russell, Blacks, Whites and Blues (New York: Stein and Day, 1970), especially 26–30; Bill C. Malone, Southern Music, American Music (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1979), 4–10; Huber, “Black Hillbillies,” 22–23. William G. Roy, “ ‘Race Records’ and ‘Hillbilly Music’: Institutional Origins of Racial Categories in the American Commercial Recording Industry,” Poetics 32 (June–August 2004): 265–79 (quotation on 277). See also Keith Negus, Musical Genres and Corporate Culture (London: Routledge, 1999). Roy, “ ‘Race Records’ and ‘Hillbilly Music,’ ” 272. Bill Ivey, “Border Crossing: A Different Way of Listening to American Music,” in booklet notes to From Where I Stand: The Black Experience in Country Music, 3-CD boxed set (Warner Brothers Records CD 9 46428–2), 10. Roy, “ ‘Race Records’ and ‘Hillbilly Music,’ ” 277–78; Huber, “Black Hillbillies,” 23. For the influence of eugenics in America at this time, see, for example, Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell, eds., Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006); Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Kyle Crichton, “Thar’s Gold in Them Hillbillies,” Collier’s, April 30, 1938, 24, reprinted in Linnell Gentry, ed., A History and Encyclopedia of Country, Western, and Gospel Music, 2nd rev. ed. (Nashville, TN: Clairmont Corp., 1969 [1961]), 24–28; Pekka Gronow, “A Preliminary Check-List of Foreign-Language 78’s,” JEMFQ 9 (Spring 1973): 24; Pekka Gronow, “Ethnic Recordings: An Introduction,” in American Folklife Center, Ethnic Recordings in America: A Neglected Heritage (Washington, DC: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, 1982), 7; Richard K. Spottswood, Ethnic Music on Records: A Discography of Ethnic Recordings Produced in the United States, 1893 to 1942, 7 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 1:xxviii; Miller, Segregating Sound, 180–84, 187–89. Huber, “Black Hillbillies,” 23. American record companies began issuing a small assortment of foreign-language recordings as early as 1893, but the first dedicated numerical series for such releases (Columbia’s 5300 Spanish records series) was not created until 1904. See Spottswood, Ethnic Music on Records, 1:xxviii, and Huber, “Black Hillbillies,” 60n15. Ralph Peer interview by Lillian Borgeson, Hollywood, California, January and May 1959, John

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81. 82. 83. 84.

85.

86.

87.

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Edwards Memorial Foundation Collection, SFC. For more on this process, see, for example, Christopher A. Waterman, “Race Music: Bo Chatmon, ‘Corrine Corrina,’ and the Excluded Middle,” in Music and the Racial Imagination, ed. Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), especially 167; Ivey, “Border Crossing,” 8–11; Huber, “Black Hillbillies,” especially 22–24, 26–27. “Fame and Fortune,” Chicago Defender, October 6, 1923. OKeh advertisement, TMW, July 15, 1921, between 18 and 19 (emphasis in the original). “Reviews of Recording Discs,” Variety, June 16, 1922, 22. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, xxvii; Roy, “ ‘Race Records’ and ‘Hillbilly Music,’ ” 274. Foreman, “Jazz and Race Records,” 101; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, xxiii– xxxix; Robert M. W. Dixon and John Godrich, Recording the Blues (London: November Books, 1970), 16–19, 21–22, 32–33, 60. On the emergence of the industry marketing term “race records,” see Foreman, “Jazz and Race Records,” 92–113. Columbia’s 13000-D series was discontinued after only eight releases, reportedly because of Walker’s concern that superstitious consumers’ triskaidekaphobia might dampen sales. It was replaced by the long-running 14000-D series, which ended in 1933, after 681 releases. See Mahony, Columbia 13/14000-D Series, 4; Foreman, “Jazz and Race Records,” 116; Dixon and Godrich, Recording the Blues, 22; and Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, xxvii. Green, “Hillbilly Music,” 215–16; Russell, Country Music Records, 4, 9–26. By the time of its demise in 1932, Columbia officials had released 782 records in this series, more than any other firm’s interwar hillbilly series except for Decca’s 5000 “Hill Billy” series, which ran between 1934 and 1945. See Wolfe, “Columbia Records and Old-Time Music,” 119, and Cary Ginell, comp., The Decca Hillbilly Discography, 1927–1945 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), xvi. Cohen, “Computerized Hillbilly Discography,” 187; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, xxxv; Russell, Country Music Records, 17. Although Gennett chose to issue its hillbilly and race releases in a general records series, it did identify the former selections, in its 1928 Gennett Records of Old Time Tunes catalog and elsewhere, using special nomenclature such as “Old Time Singin’ and Playin,’ ” “Old Time Playin,’ ” “Old Time Sacred Singing,” and “Old Time Dance with Calls.” Gennett also produced a similar catalog for its race records in 1928, titled Gennett Race Records. Within its standard catalogs, Gennett classified such selections under the heading “Race Record” and even identified them as such on record labels, but it never went so far as to inaugurate a dedicated race records series. See Gennett Records of Old Time Tunes (Richmond, IN: Gennett Records, 1928), reprinted as Gennett Records of Old Time Tunes: A Catalog Reprint, JEMF Special Series, No. 6 (Los Angeles: John Edwards Memorial Foundation, n.d.); Gennett Race Records (Richmond, IN: Gennett Records, 1928); Dixon and Godrich, Recording the Blues, 53; and Sutton, Race Records and the American Recording Industry, 105. The cover and a few pages of the race record catalog can be viewed online. See “Gennett Electrobeam Race Records: Highlights from the 1928 Catalog,” Mainspring Press Record Collectors’ Blog, 78records.wordpress. com/2011/11/14/gennett-electr obeam-race-records-%E2%80%A2-highlights-from-the-1928-catalog/ (accessed October 7, 2015). Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, xxvii. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, xxiv; Russell, Country Music Records, 11–12. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, xxxviii; Russell, Country Music Records, 16; Ginell, Decca Hillbilly Discography, xiii, xvi. Spottswood, Ethnic Music on Records, 1:xxxviii; Allan Sutton and Kurt Nauck, American Record

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Labels and Companies: An Encyclopedia (1891–1943) (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2000), 39; Ginell, Decca Hillbilly Discography, xiv, xv. Particularly insightful on this topic is Miller, Segregating Sound, especially chapters 3–7. Russell, Blacks, Whites and Blues, 26–30. Roy, “ ‘Race Records’ and ‘Hillbilly Music,’ ” 277. Miller, Segregating Sound, 220. See also Erich Nunn, Sounding the Color Line: Music and Race in the Southern Imagination (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015). Victor Talking Machine Company, Olde Time Fiddlin’ Tunes (New York: Victor Talking Machine Co., 1924), n.p., reprinted in Archie Green, “Commercial Music Graphics: Four,” JEMFN 4 (March 1968): 8, 13. Bill C. Malone, Country Music U.S.A. rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985 [1968]), 5. On the extensive black-white musical exchange that shaped hillbilly music and its vernacular antecedents, see, for example, Russell, Blacks, Whites and Blues; John Cohen, “The Folk Music Interchange: Negro and White,” Sing Out! 14 (January 1965): 42–49; John S. Otto and Augustus M. Burns, “Black and White Cultural Interaction in the Early Twentieth Century South: Race and Hillbilly Music,” Phylon 35 (4th Quarter, 1974): 407–17; Wolfe, “Lighter Shade of Blue,” 233–63; Paul F. Wells, “Fiddling as an Avenue of Black-White Musical Interchange,” Black Music Research Journal 23 (Spring–Autumn 2003): 135–47. Russell, Blacks, Whites and Blues, 42, 93. Miller, Segregating Sound, 233. “The Brunswick 100 Series—‘Songs from Dixie,’ ” JEMFQ 9 (Autumn 1973): 104; Huber, “Black Hillbillies,” 47. Examples of such Brunswick hillbilly sides, in the order listed above, include Angeles Le Jeunne’s “La Valse de Church Point” / “Petit tes Canaigh” (Brunswick 368), DeFord Bailey’s “Pan American Blues” / “Dixie Flyer Blues” (146), Hank Keene & His Connecticut Hill Billies’ “The ‘Run-Away Boy’ ” / “Little Sweetheart of the Prairie” (516), Henri LaCroix’s “Fauborg Waltz Clog” / “Montreal Reel” (342), Colin J. Boyd’s “Medley of Highland Flings” / “Medley of Scotch Strathspeys” (534), Honeyboy and Sassafras’s “The Chicken Sermon” / “She’s My Honey Bee” (509), John Wilfahrt’s Concertina Orchestra’s “Clarinet Polka” / “Tinker Polka” (407), Thorstein Skarning & His Old Time Orchestra’s “Maybelle Schottische” / “The Caller” (477), and Théophile Salnave’s “Lucky Strike” / “Wrigley’s en Batterie” (487). Other firm’s hillbilly lists were equally diverse, with selections by New England old-time fiddlers, popular singers and dance orchestras, Hawaiian guitarists, Irish melodeon players, Cajun and Mexican duos, and even Russian balalaika troupes. See Huber, “Black Hillbillies,” 47. Huber, “Black Hillbillies,” 30–31; Russell, Country Music Records, 61–62. Huber, “Black Hillbillies,” 21, 71–81 (Appendixes A and B). As discussed previously, in the most famous of these interracial ventures, jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong and pianist Lillian Hardin Armstrong accompanied Jimmie Rodgers on “Blue Yodel No. 9” at an RCA Victor session in Hollywood in July 1930. It was ironic that this was just one of many interracial sessions run by Ralph Peer, the man who later reveled in the fact that he had invented separate race and hillbilly records series. Yet his behavior was wholly in keeping with the opportunistic, pragmatic character of most A&R managers. As Peer’s biographer Barry Mazor points out, “For a man whose place in music history is often over-condensed and reduced to that of a promulgator of ‘market segmentation,’ or even ‘segregation’ because of his role in developing discrete hillbilly and race music arenas, Ralph Peer could rarely compartmentalize his own roles or areas of musical responsibility at all—not in the course of a session, or in the course of some days.” During his time as an A&R man between 1920 and 1934, Peer found, signed, recorded, issued, and marketed talent in

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every imaginable style of roots music from jazz to blues, from hillbilly to Cajun, from gospel to calypso. Barry Mazor, Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014), especially 132–34. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 905; Huber, “Black Hillbillies,” 54. Russell, Country Music Records, 670; Huber, “Black Hillbillies,” 55. The correct title of Osborne’s selection should probably be “Taken In Blues.” Tony Russell, comp., “Jess Johnston Discography,” OTM no. 37 (Autumn 1981–Spring 1982): 19; Russell, Country Music Records, 464; Huber, “Black Hillbillies,” 55. Russell, Country Music Records, 87–88; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 31; Huber, “Black Hillbillies,” 40. The latter Victor release’s label identifies Bilbro as “D. H. Bilbro,” but United States census records indicate that his name was actually Bert Hunter Bilbro and that in 1930, the year before he recorded this selection, he was working as a doffer in a cotton mill in Chester, South Carolina, the city for which his harmonica solo was presumably named. See Benjamin Franklin V, An Encyclopedia of South Carolina Jazz and Blues Musicians (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016), 24–25. Huber, “Black Hillbillies,” 40. On this point, see, for example, Dixon and Godrich, Recording the Blues, 76. Tim Brooks makes a similar point about the white record companies that first recorded African Americans before World War I. They were, he suggests, not trying “to change the social order. They simply did not have the luxury of enforcing irrational social conventions like ‘the color line.’ ” See Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 2. Russell, Country Music Records, 22, 27; [Tony Russell], “OKeh 45000 Series,” OTM no. 1 (Summer 1971): 25. See, for example, Brunswick 361, featuring H. M. Barnes & His Blue Ridge Ramblers’ “Repasz Band March” / “Our Director March,” a coupling that also appeared on Melotone M18022 as “La Marche Mt. Laurier” / “La Marche de Notre Directeur,” credited to Le Orchestre Cartier. To cite another example, the same stringband’s “Echoes of Shenandoah Valley” / “Mandolin Rag” (Brunswick 397) surfaced on Canadian Brunswick (52079) as “Les Echos de St. Laurent” / “La Marche Quebecoise” by Les Joyeux Montrealais. Russell, Country Music Records, 27, 94–95. For additional such examples on Brunswick and its subsidiary Vocalion label, see Russell, Country Music Records, 479–81, 879–80. Oddly, Oberstein decided against issuing either of these sides in Bluebird’s domestic B-5000 series, in which Jack Pierce & the Oklahoma Cowboys’ western-themed numbers usually appeared. Russell, Country Music Records, 696. Other examples of Bluebird’s hillbilly-Mexican cross-listings included two of the instrumentals Oberstein recorded on January 22, 1935, with fiddler Arthur Smith: “Mocking Bird” (Bluebird B-5843) and “Red Apple Rag” (Bluebird B-5928), which were also released on Bluebird B-2434, retitled as “El Sinsonte” and “Manzana Roja,” respectively, and attributed to Arturo Muniz. Russell, Country Music Records, 840. Ginell, Decca Hillbilly Discography, xiv. Russell, Country Music Records, 418; Spottswood, Ethnic Music on Records, 4:1957. Richard K. Spottswood, “Commercial Ethnic Recordings in the United States,” in American Folklife Center, Ethnic Recordings in America: A Neglected Heritage (Washington, DC: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, 1982), 63; Richard K. Spottswood, “The Sajewski Story: Eighty Years of Polish Music in Chicago,” in Ethnic Recordings in America, 160–62. Another of Martinez’s waltzes from Bluebird’s Mexican catalog, “Silencio de la Noche” (Blue-

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bird B-3124), was issued by Oberstein under the same title in Bluebird’s “Acadian French” series (Bluebird B-2032)—as the flipside of Louisiana Pete’s “Delta”—and as “Blonda Charlie” (Victor V-20097) by Dragspel och Gitarr in Victor’s Scandinavian series. Spottswood, Ethnic Music on Records, 4:2069–70. We would like to thank Wade Falcon for bringing these examples to our attention. See Wade Falcon, “ ‘Ma Fiancee’—Louisiana Pete,” Early Cajun Music, earlycajunmusic .blogspot.com/2014/09/ma-fiancee-louisiana-pete.html (accessed October 7, 2015). Shilkret, Nathaniel Shilkret, 41. Danko quoted in “Slovakia Is on the Map,” TMW, February 15, 1921, 129. See Spottswood, Ethnic Music on Records, 1:38, 40, 42, 60. For examples of Paramount releases of Cajun records in its race series, see Russell, Country Music Records, 101, 375, 854. Wolfe, “Lighter Shade of Blue,” 236; Miller, Segregating Sound, 220; Russell, Country Music Records, 55–57. Allen quoted in Lee Allen, with Charles Wolfe, “Lee Allen’s Radio Days and Other Salty Dog Chronicles,” OTM no. 44 (Winter 1987/1988): 10 (emphasis in the original). See also Lee Allen interview by Charles K. Wolfe, Lebanon, Tennessee, April 12, 1979, Charles K. Wolfe Audio Collection, CPM. Huber, “Black Hillbillies,” 52–53. Walker as quoted in “Who Chose These Records?,” 16. See also Walker interview. Before creating Columbia’s 13000-D/14000-D series, Walker did place Bessie Smith’s earliest releases in the label’s A1 standard popular records series, and long after inaugurating the race series, he continued to issue many of Ethel Waters’s records in the successor to Columbia’s A1 series, its 1-D popular records series. Contrary to Walker’s claim, though, none of Ted Lewis & His Orchestra’s selections ever appeared in the label’s race series, although one of the band’s records, “The Gold Diggers’ Song” / “Moonlight Millionaires,” waxed in New York in May 1933, was scheduled to be issued in that series on Columbia14679-D. Its release was canceled, however, and according to discographer Dan Mahony, “the coupling split and later issued on Columbia 2775-D (first title) and 2774-D (second title),” both of which appeared in the popular series, “about July, 1933.” By then, though, Walker was no longer employed at Columbia. See Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 803–4, 994–97; Mahony, Columbia 13/14000-D Series, 62, 74; and “Walker’s Victor Duties,” Variety, January 24, 1933, 33. One rare, perhaps even unique, instance of Walker releasing a white dance band’s recordings in the 14000-D series is Joe Mannone’s Harmony Kings’ coupling “Sadness Will Be Gladness” / “Cat’s Head” on Columbia 14282-D. See Mahony, Columbia 13/14000-D Series, 41, 74. Walker interview. Walker contended that “Crawdad Song” was the first side he waxed with Jimmie Davis, but there is no evidence that Davis ever recorded the song. However, as the Lone Star Cowboys backed Davis at a few 1933 recording sessions, it is likely that Walker simply forgot that this was a selection that the band recorded under its own name without Davis. See Russell, Country Music Records, 509. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 570; Russell, Country Music Records, 531; Huber, “Black Hillbillies,” 40–41. Conforming to prevailing perceptions of the segmented music market, however, Walker subsequently released McCoy’s other four harmonica instrumentals exclusively in Columbia’s race series. Tom Tsotsi and Pete Whelan, “Black Patti,” 78 Quarterly no. 11 (2000): 50–51; Russell, Country Music Records, 267, 269. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 578; Russell, Country Music Records, 240. On

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White’s eclectic recorded output, particularly the spirituals he waxed for ARC under Satherley’s supervision between 1932 and 1936, see Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 1018– 21. Conqueror, the label on which the McGhee-Daffan coupling appeared, was one of a constellation of dime-store labels originally in the ARC galaxy, until Columbia purchased that company in 1938. Interestingly, although ARC had formally separated its popular music offerings from its race and hillbilly releases in November 1935, A&R managers continued to allow music to leak across racial and stylistic boundaries. ARC’s Oriole 8000 and Romeo 5000 series both included hillbilly releases among their core race record issues. On Banner and Melotone, in contrast, blues and hillbilly records mingled with popular selections, just as they did on a reconfigured Vocalion. See Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, xxxiii, and Russell, Country Music Records, 11. The most thorough and analytical discussions of Black Swan Records are David Suisman, “Coworkers in the Kingdom of Culture: Black Swan Records and the Political Economy of African American Music,” Journal of American History 90 (March 2004): 1295–1324, and the slightly revised version of this article in his Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 204–39. Other important studies of this fascinating label include Foreman, “Jazz and Race Records,” 74–81; Ted Vincent, “The Social Context of Black Swan Records,” Living Blues no. 86 (May/June 1989): 34–40; Ted Vincent, Keep Cool: The Black Activists Who Built the Jazz Age (London: Pluto Press, 1995), 92–105; Helge Thygesen, Mark Berresford, and Russ Shor, Black Swan: The Record Label of the Harlem Renaissance: A History and Catalogue Listing, Including Olympic Records and Associated Labels (Nottingham, UK: VJM Publications, 1996); Sutton, Race Records and the American Recording Industry, 35–54. For more on Henderson’s role at Black Swan, see Walter C. Allen, Hendersonia: The Music of Fletcher Henderson and His Musicians: A Bio-Discography, Jazz Monographs No. 4 (Highland Park, NJ: Walter C. Allen, 1973), 10–17, 33, and Jeffrey Magee, The Uncrowned King of Swing: Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 21–25. Black Swan press release, ca. January 15, 1921, quoted in Forman, “Jazz and Race Records,” 75. On Pace and the race politics and cultural motivations that informed his Black Swan venture, see Suisman, “Co-workers in the Kingdom of Culture,” especially 1300–1305, and Suisman, Selling Sounds, especially 208–16. Pace quoted in “Black Swan Records,” Chicago Defender, May 7, 1921. Suisman, “Co-workers in the Kingdom of Culture,” 1303–4, 1306–7, 1311; Suisman, Selling Sounds, 213–16, 217–18, 223; Black Swan advertisements in Crisis 22 (July 1921): 140, and Chicago Defender, May 7, 1921, and December 9, 1922. Suisman, “Co-workers in the Kingdom of Culture,” 1320; Suisman, Selling Sounds, 234; “White Performers on Black Swan,” Mainspring: A Free Online Journal, www.mainspringpress.com /BSpseudo.html (accessed October 25, 2015; link now discontinued). Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 992; Suisman, “Co-workers in the Kingdom of Culture,” 1307–8; Suisman, Selling Sounds, 218–19. Ethel Waters, with Charles Samuels, His Eye Is on the Sparrow: An Autobiography (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992 [1951]), 141–42. For more on the racial and stylistic economy of Black Swan, see Suisman, “Co-workers in the Kingdom of Culture,” 1295–1324; Suisman, Selling Sounds, 204–39; Vincent, “Social Context of Black Swan Records,” 34–40; and Vincent, Keep Cool, 92–105. Race and class often combined to shape A&R conceptions about whom and what to record. “Chicago nigger-town was too hi[gh]-brow . . . too good for us,” remembered Clayton “Jack” Jackson, explaining why Gennett talent scouts like himself sought most of their black artists “down along

CHAPTER 7 1.

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Nathan Miller, New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2004 [2003]), 151–53. The best account of the emergence of modern advertising and its enormous influence on American life and culture between the world wars is Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 275. Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1932); Erskine Caldwell, God’s Little Acre (New York: Viking Press, 1933). On eugenics and responses to cognitive disability in the South, see Gregory Michael Dorr, Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008); Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Steven Noll, Feeble-Minded in Our Midst: Institutions for the Mentally Retarded in the South, 1900–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and J. E. L. Riley, “ ‘Idiot-Brained South’: Intellectual Disability and Eugenics in Southern Modernism” (Ph.D. dissertation, Northumbria University, 2015). On the deployment of these southern stereotypes on interwar hillbilly recordings, see, for example, many of the rural drama skits discussed in John Minton, 78 Blues: Folksongs and Phonographs in the American South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008). Brunswick Record Edition of American Folk Songs, October 23, 1928, 1, reprinted in Archie Green, “Commercial Music Graphics #41,” JEMFQ 13 (Summer 1977): 75–78. See also Patrick Huber, “Inventing Hillbilly Music: Record Catalog and Advertising Imagery, 1922–1929,” paper presented at International Country Music Conference, Nashville, TN, May 27, 2005 (copy in authors’ possession); Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 2, 4; and Huber, “Black Hillbillies: African American Musicians on Old-Time Records, 1924–1932,” in Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music, ed. Diane Pecknold. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 24, 26–27. For A&R managers’ complaints about inadequate advertising budgets, see, for example, Kyle Crichton, “Thar’s Gold in Them Hillbillies,” Collier’s, April 30, 1938, 24, reprinted in Linnell Gentry, ed., A History and Encyclopedia of Country, Western, and Gospel Music, 2nd rev. ed. (Nashville, TN: Clairmont Corp., 1969 [1961]), 24–28; Frank Walker interview by Mike Seeger, probably New York, New York, June 19, 1962, Mike Seeger Collection, SFC, transcribed in part as “Who Chose These Records? A Look into the Life, Tastes, and Procedures of Frank Walker,” in Anthology of American Folk Music, ed. Josh Dunson and Ethel Raim (New York: Oak Publications, 1973), 8–17. At its peak, for example, the short-lived Black Swan label was advertising in forty black newspapers and magazines. See “A Consolidation,” Chicago Defender, April 19, 1924. On these points as they relate to hillbilly records, see Huber, Linthead Stomp, 75–77. Since the

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the river in Cincinnati and a little of it up in Pittsburgh.” Jackson interview. Edison memos quoted in Raymond R. Wile, comp., “Country and Race Records and the Edison Company: A Selection of Comments from the Trial Books of Thomas A. Edison, 1924,” Record Research no. 142 (September 1976): 6. See also Sutton, Recording the ’Twenties, 69–70, 72, and Sutton, Race Records and the American Recording Industry, 78–79.

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15. 16.

17. 18.

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1960s, scholars such as Archie Green, Ronald Foreman Jr., Jeff Todd Titon, and Mark K. Dolan have closely analyzed the advertisements and promotional literature that record companies developed to define and market race and hillbilly records. See, for example, Archie Green’s pioneering articles in his “Commercial Music Graphics” series that appeared in the John Edwards Memorial Foundation Quarterly (originally the John Edwards Memorial Foundation Newsletter) between 1967 and 1985; Ronald Clifford Foreman Jr., “Jazz and Race Records, 1920–32: Their Origins and Their Significance for the Record Industry and Society” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois, 1968), 211–64; Jeff Todd Titon, Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994 [1977]), 218–60; Mark K. Dolan, “Extra! Chicago Defender Race Records Ads Show South from Afar,” Southern Cultures 13 (Fall 2007): 106–24. Brunswick supplement quoted in Harry Smith, booklet notes to Anthology of American Folk Music, 3-CD boxed set (Folkways Records FP 251—FP 253), Entry #73. On OKeh’s advertising managers and their staff members, see, for example, “New Okeh ‘Ad’ Manager,” TMW, January 15, 1922, 83; “Unusual Okeh Publicity Drive,” TMW, May 15, 1923, 150; “Race Record Album Offers Dealers Big Opportunity for Boosting Sales Volume,” TMW, November 15, 1924, 94; “J. A. Sieber Made Officer of Advertising Company,” TMW, January 15, 1925, 100; “A. M. Kennard Now Okeh Phonograph Co. Ad Manager,” TMW, July 1927, 34d; Floyd J. Calvin, “Spivey’s Records Biggest Seller,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 25, 1928; “Okeh Race Records in New Supplement,” TMW, April 1928, 70. In December 1924, when Sieber’s OKeh colleague, assistant advertising manager Joseph A. Sullivan, resigned to join an advertising agency, Talking Machine World praised the duo’s work, noting, “During the year Mr. Sullivan has collaborated to excellent advantage with J. A. Sieber, Okeh advertising manager, in the preparation of race record advertising. Having lived in the Southern States for many years, Mr. Sullivan is thoroughly familiar with the peculiarities of the Southern negro dialect, and Okeh advertising copy has reflected his knowledge in this direction.” “J. A. Sullivan Resigns from General Phono. Corp.,” TMW, December 15, 1924, 166. “Okeh Wholesalers Meet at First Annual Convention,” TMW, June 15, 1923, 135; Archie Green, “Commercial Music Graphics: One,” JEMFN 2 (June 1967): 51. Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow, “The Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 78 Quarterly no. 5 (1990): 10; Alex van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall: The Roots and History of Paramount Records, 2nd ed. (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2012 [2003]), 81; Foreman, “Jazz and Race Records,” 181. Norm Cohen, “ ‘I’m a Record Man’: Uncle Art Satherley Reminisces,” JEMFQ 8 (Spring 1972): 18, reprinted in Exploring Roots Music: Twenty Years of the JEMF Quarterly, ed. Nolan Porterfield (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 45–51; van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall, 81–82. “Plant in Which the Paramount Records Are Made,” TMW, November 15, 1918, 62. Stephen Calt, “The Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label—Part One,” 78 Quarterly no. 3 (1988): 18; van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall, 26. Calt, “Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label—Part One,” 18. “M. A. Supper General Manager,” TMW, February 15, 1919, 58; “M. A. Supper General Manager,” Music Trade Review, March 15, 1919, 46; Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 18. Stephen Calt, “The Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label—Part 2: The Mayo Williams Era,” 78 Quarterly no. 4 (1989): 11, reprinted as “The Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Music Label: Mayo Williams and Paramount Records,” in Rhythm and Business: The Political Economy of Black Music, ed. Norman Kelley (New York: Akashic Books, 2005), 86–111; John Tefteller, “Gold in Grafton! Unknown Patton Photo,

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Paramount Artwork Surface after 70 Years!” 78 Quarterly no. 12 (2005): 24. Calt, “Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label—Part 2,” 11; Calt, “Anatomy of a ‘Race’ Label—Part One,” 10; Robert M. W. Dixon and John Godrich, Recording the Blues (London: November Books, 1970), 19, 64; Robert M. W. Dixon, John Godrich, and Howard Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 1890–1943, 4th ed. (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1997 [1964]), xxxvii. Paramount advertisement, Chicago Defender, August 19, 1922; van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall, 82. One of the records, Paramount 20148, was by Specht’s Society Entertainers, a white dance orchestra—another reminder of the fluid definition of race records during the industry’s infancy. Foreman, “Jazz and Race Records,” 104. Paramount advertisement, Chicago Defender, December 8, 1923; Dixon and Godrich, Recording the Blues, 19; van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall, 87. Although J. Mayo Williams, Paramount’s race recording manager in Chicago, later claimed credit for conceiving this slogan, it was more likely Supper’s brainchild. Paramount advertisements, Chicago Defender, March 15 and 29, May 31, 1924; Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 11; Alex van der Tuuk, “Paramount Records for Sale or How to Sell Records,” ParamountsHome.org, www.paramountshome.org/index.php?option=com _content&view=article&id=67:paramount-records-for-sale-or-how-to-sell-records-&catid=37 :miscellaneous-paramount-articles&Itemid=54 (accessed October 6, 2015). This second edition, Complete Catalog of 1924 Records, Paramount—The “Popular Race Record”—and Black Swan Race Records, was, as its title suggests, ostensibly a record catalog, but at least one advertisement billed it as the “Paramount-Black Swan ‘Book of the Blues.’” See Paramount advertisement, Chicago Defender, May 31, 1924. A reproduction of this booklet is included in The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Vol. 1 (1917–27), 6-LP boxed set (Third Man Records/Revenant Records TMR 203). Paramount advertisement, Chicago Defender, May 31, 1924. In 1927, during Art Laibly’s tenure as sales manager, Paramount published a third souvenir Paramount Book of Blues, this one featuring biographies and photographs of the label’s most popular recording artists—among others, the label’s new star, Blind Lemon Jefferson—alongside lyrical and musical transcriptions of some of their best-selling records. See van der Tuuk, “Paramount Records for Sale or How to Sell Records,” and Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 11. Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 22–23. In January 1925, Supper and his brother-in-law Frederick W. Boerner formed the F. W. Boerner Company, a Port Washington firm that proudly billed itself as “The World’s Largest Race Records Mail Order House.” Tefteller, “Gold in Grafton!” 23. Eventually, the company expanded, as its monthly circulars indicated, to also sell other products directed at African American consumers, including dream books, love potions, hair-straightening concoctions, and skin-whitening creams. For more on the F. W. Boerner Company, see Samuel B. Charters, The Country Blues (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975 [1959], 54; van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall, 91, 94, 96; and Alex van der Tuuk, comp., “F. W. Boerner Company: Paramount Mail Orders,” ParamountsHome.org, www .paramountshome.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=60:f-w-boerner-company -paramount-mail-orders&catid=36:miscellaneous-articles-and-interviews&Itemid=54 (accessed September 25, 2016). Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 10; Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow, “Paramount’s Decline and Fall (Part 5),” 78 Quarterly no. 7 (1992): 13, 22; Art Laibly interview by John Steiner, probably Park Ridge, Illinois, March 11, 1970, John Steiner Collection, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, Chicago, Illinois. Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 10; van der Tuuk, Paramount’s

383

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28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

Rise and Fall, 81. But see also Tefteller, “Gold in Grafton!” 34, which, in contrast, claims that the famous Paramount ads were created by the firm’s own in-house advertising staff. Williams quoted in Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 10. Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 10. The crucial importance of A&R officials in promoting records has been largely ignored or downplayed in the existing scholarship, occasionally even that on Paramount, whose inner workings have been perhaps the most thoroughly documented of all interwar roots record labels. To their credit, Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow devote an entire article to these matters in their 78 Quarterly series on Paramount. But their assertion that “there was no coordination between its sales and recording branches” at the label is certainly not true. As the contributions of Laibly and Stephany amply demonstrate, the A&R men who recorded roots music were often intimately involved with the business of record promotion. Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3), 10; van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall, 81. Burley, who went on to become a longtime syndicated columnist at the Chicago Defender and several other newspapers, was himself something of a talent scout: he helped launch Louis Jordan’s recording career by introducing him in the fall of 1938 to J. Mayo Williams, then an A&R man at Decca. That December, Williams oversaw the session that produced the bandleader-saxophonist’s first recordings issued under his own name. See Ted Watson, “Dan Burley Dug Up a ‘Hit-Maker,’ ” Chicago Defender, February 15, 1975, and John Chilton, Let the Good Times Roll: The Story of Louis Jordan and His Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997 [1992]), 63–64. Archie Green, “Commercial Music Graphics: Nineteen,” JEMFQ (Winter 1971): 171–73. Green, “Commercial Music Graphics: Nineteen,” 172–173; Roberts quoted in “Tapescript: An Interview with Doc Roberts,” JEMFQ 7 (Autumn 1971): 102. Roberts quoted in “Tapescript: An Interview with Doc Roberts,” 102. A. C. Laibly letter to Doc Phil Roberts, April 30, 1927, Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 13: Correspondence with Paramount Record Company, 1927–1929, DRP. A. C. Laibly letter to Doc Phil Roberts, April 30, 1927. Green, “Commercial Music Graphics: Nineteen,” 172–73; A. C. Laibly letter to Doc Phill [sic] Roberts, May 27, 1927, DRP. A. C. Laibly letter to Doc Roberts, June 3, 1927, DRP. See also A. C. Laibly letter to Doc Roberts, June 18, 1927, DRP. H. J. Stephany letter to Doc Roberts, August 5, 1927. Lee A. Butt letter to Doc Roberts, October 9, 1928, Series 1: Correspondence from Record Companies, Box 1, Folder 3: Gennett Correspondence, 1928, DRP. “OKeh Artist Visits New York,” TMW, December 15, 1923, 52; Huber, Linthead Stomp, 77. “New Okeh Record Artists,” TMW, November 15, 1921, 142. Bruce Bastin, Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995 [1986]), 101–2; OKeh advertisement, Chicago Defender, June 21, 1924. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 22; Bastin, Red River Blues, 101. “R. S. Peer on Coast Trip,” TMW, June 15, 1924, 102; “Encouraging Business Outlook in the West,” TMW, July 15, 1924, 82; “General Phonograph Corp. Official Here,” TMW, July 15, 1924, 106. “R. S. Peer Returns from Trip,” TMW, October 15, 1924, 160. “Ralph S. Peer Visits Important Points South,” TMW, May 15, 1925, 82. D. F. Law letter to “All Brunswick and Vocalion Dealers,” June 10, 1931, reprinted in Chris Strach-

49.

51. 52.

53. 54.

55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81.

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50.

witz, letter to the editor, 78 Quarterly no. 10 (1999): 7. “Columbia Co. Advertising Commended by Publication,” TMW, March 15, 1925, 176. “Jack Kapp Heads Race Record Brunswick Division,” TMW, April 15, 1926, 63. Our discussion here about Kapp and Vocalion Records draws upon Foreman, “Jazz and Race Records,” 136–38. “Brunswick Co. Announces Vocalion Race Records,” TMW, May 15, 1926, 84. “First Release of Vocalion Race Records on Market,” TMW, June 15, 1926, 103. “50,000 Sales of One Vocalion Record,” TMW, January 15, 1927, 101. See also “Jack Kapp Visits New York,” TMW, January 15, 1927, 101. “Inside Stuff on Music,” Variety, March 23, 1927, 47. “Jack Kapp, Vocalion Sales and Recording Director, Inaugurates New Policies,” TMW, February 1928, 94. See also “Jack Kapp Heads Vocalion Division of Brunswick,” Music Trade Review, February 18, 1928, 4. “Inside Stuff on Music,” Variety, March 21, 1928, 70. Talking Machine Journal, March 1924, quoted in Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 18. Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 18. Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 18. Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 18, 20–22. Cohen, “ ‘I’m a Record Man,’ ” 18. Paramount advertisement, Chicago Defender, April 12, 1924. Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 10–11. Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 10–11. For examples of such recruiting, see Paramount advertisements, Chicago Defender, August 19 and 26, 1922. Paramount advertisement, Chicago Defender, August 18, 1923. See also Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 11. Paramount advertisements, Chicago Defender, May 12 and August 11, 1923. Paramount advertisement, Chicago Defender, May 12, 1923. Satherley quoted in van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall, 82; Cohen, “ ‘I’m a Record Man,’ ” 18. Williams quoted Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 11, 18. Satherley quoted in van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall, 84. Helge Thygesen, Mark Berresford, and Russ Shor, Black Swan: The Record Label of the Harlem Renaissance: A History and Catalogue Listing, Including Olympic Records and Associated Labels (Nottingham, UK: VJM Publications, 1996), 6, 7. Dixon and Godrich, Recording the Blues, 13. Black Swan advertisement, 1923, quoted in Dixon and Godrich, Recording the Blues, 16. Black Swan advertisement, Chicago Defender, August 11, 1923. Cohen, “ ‘I’m a Record Man,’ ” 18. Satherley quoted in Cohen, “ ‘I’m a Record Man,’ ” 18. Satherley quoted in van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall, 84. Satherley quoted in van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall, 85. Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow, “Paramount, Part 4: The Advent of Arthur Laibly,” 78 Quarterly no. 6 (1991): 21. Laibly interview. Charters, Country Blues, 92. Walker interview.

385

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386

82. 83.

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84.

85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98.

99.

100. 101. 102. 103.

104.

105. 106. 107.

Walker interview. Walker as quoted in “Who Chose These Records?,” 14–15. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 738. Much of our discussion of “Ma Rainey’s Souvenir Record” here is based upon Sandra R. Lieb, Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 25; van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall, 99; and especially “Paramount Portrait Labels,” Old Hat Records, www.oldhatrecords.com/ResearchParamountPicDisks.html (accessed October 13, 2015). Paramount advertisement, Chicago Defender, June 28, 1924. Paramount advertisement, Chicago Defender, June 28, 1924. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 738. Our discussion of “Ma Rainey’s Mystery Record” here is chiefly indebted to Dixon and Godrich, Recording the Blues, 24–26; van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall, 99; and especially Foreman, “Jazz and Race Records,” 131–33. Paramount advertisement, Chicago Defender, May 31, 1924. “ ‘Mystery Record,’ ” Chicago Defender, May 31, 1924. Paramount advertisement, Chicago Defender, May 31, 1924. Paramount advertisement, Chicago Defender, June 14, 1924 (emphasis in the original). Paramount advertisement, Chicago Defender, May 31, 1924. Paramount advertisement, Chicago Defender, May 31, 1924. “Mystery Solved,” Chicago Defender, September 13, 1924. Lieb, Mother of the Blues, 25. Foreman, “Jazz and Race Records,” 132. van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall, 99; “Paramount Portrait Labels”; Tony Russell, Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921–1942, with editorial research by Bob Pinson, assisted by the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 394. van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall, 99; “Paramount Portrait Labels”; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 444. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 707–8. Our discussion of the Masked Marvel contest draws upon Dixon and Godrich, Recording the Blues, 58, and especially van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall, 140–41. Paramount advertisement, Chicago Defender, September 14, 1929 (emphasis in the original). van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall, 140–41. “T.O.B.A. Circuit News,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 23, 1925. On the Black Swan Troubadours tour, see Walter C. Allen, Hendersonia: The Music of Fletcher Henderson and His Musicians: A Bio-Discography, Jazz Monographs No. 4 (Highland Park, NJ: Walter C. Allen, 1973), 24–31, 33; Jitu K. Weusi, “The Rise and Fall of Black Swan Records,” Red Hot Jazz Archive, www.redhotjazz.com/blackswan.html (accessed September 26, 2016); David Suisman, “Co-workers in the Kingdom of Culture: Black Swan Records and the Political Economy of African American Music,” Journal of American History 90 (March 2004): 1309; and Donald Bogle, Heat Wave: The Life and Career of Ethel Waters (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 67–71, 74–85. On Waters’s radio appearance, see Ted Vincent, Keep Cool: The Black Activists Who Built the Jazz Age (London: Pluto Press, 1995), 45, and Bogle, Heat Wave, 83. Archie Green, “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol,” JAF 78 (July–September 1965), 209–10. Polk C. Brockman interview by Archie Green and Ed Kahn, Atlanta, Georgia, August 11, 1961, AGP. “Exhibited at Southeastern Fair,” TMW, November 15, 1924, 70.

110.

112. 113. 114.

115. 116.

117.

118. 119.

120. 121.

122.

123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

128.

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111.

“Outing Demand Continues,” TMW, December 15, 1924, 176. “P. C. Brockman, of James K. Polk, Inc., in Gotham,” TMW, July 15, 1925, 62. General Phonograph Corporation congratulatory notice, TMW, September 15, 1925, 98b. “James K. Polk, Inc., Has Won High Rank in Seven Years,” TMW, December 1928, 36; William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 144; Brockman interview by Green and Kahn; Polk C. Brockman interview by Archie Green, Ed Kahn, and Helen Sewell, Atlanta, Georgia, August 27, 1963, AGP. Paul Oliver, The Story of the Blues (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997 [1969]), 109. Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 18. Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 18; Gayle Dean Wardlow, “The Talent Scouts: H. C. Speir (1895–1972),” 78 Quarterly no. 8 (1994): 23. Wardlow, “Talent Scouts,” 23. Wardlow, “Talent Scouts,” 23; David Evans, “An Interview with H. C. Speir,” JEMFQ 8 (Autumn 1972): 120. The identity of this record remains uncertain. Evans gives its title as “Black Snake Blues,” although he does not associate it with any particular recording artist. Gayle Dean Wardlow, in contrast, believes that it was Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Black Snake Moan.” Jefferson recorded several other similarly titled numbers, however: “That Black Snake Moan” (Paramount 12407), “Black Snake Dream Blues” (Paramount 12510), and “That Black Snake Moan No. 2” (Paramount 12756). And so the record in question also could have been any one of these. See Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 442, 443, 445. Evans, “Interview with H. C. Speir,” 120. As was his habit in this article, Evans here simply reports what Speir had told him, offering no critical analysis of his source. While Speir’s tale of an ingenious marketing gimmick may well be true, his account of black customers easily frightened by a toy snake smacks a little too much of racial stereotyping. Wardlow, “Talent Scouts,” 23. Thomas J. Jamison interview by John W. Rumble, Charlotte, North Carolina, November 23, 1982, CMFOHP. Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 18. Charles quoted in Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 19–20 (quotation on 20). Charles once ran a similar promotional scheme in Birmingham with the Reverend J. O. Hanes, a local white fundamentalist minister who recorded sermons for Paramount, in order to secure a new account with a record dealer. See Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 19. Charles quoted in Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 18, 19 (quotation on 18). Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 19–20. Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 19. Calt and Wardlow, “Buying and Selling of Paramounts (Part 3),” 20. Harry Charles interview by Gayle Dean Wardlow, Birmingham, Alabama, 1968, GDWC. “E. A. Fearn Visits Okeh Offices,” TMW, October 15, 1923, 58; “Local Talent Makes Okeh and Odeon Records,” TMW, November 15, 1923, 114; “Make OKeh and Odeon Records in Chicago,” TMW, March 15, 1926, 104; Terry Teachout, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co., 2009), 93, 402; Gene H. Anderson, The Original Hot Five Recordings of Louis Armstrong (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2007), 9, 14–15. “The Okeh Record Football Team,” TMW, October 15, 1923, 119; Anderson, Original Hot Five

387

108. 109.

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129.

130.

131.

132. 133. 134.

135. 136. 137.

138.

139. 140. 141.

Recordings of Louis Armstrong, 9. “Gets in Touch with 30,000 Colored Elks,” TMW, September 15, 1923, 102; Anderson, Original Hot Five Recordings of Louis Armstrong, 7. On Fearn’s two extravaganzas, see “Carnival of Colored Entertainers and Record Artists in Chicago a Big Success,” TMW, March 15, 1926, 108; “Okeh Cabaret and Style Show, Staged by E. A. Fearn, Is a Tremendous Success,” TMW, June 15, 1926, 6, 18; William Howland Kenney, Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 124; and Anderson, Original Hot Five Recordings of Louis Armstrong, 79–80, 82. “Carnival of Colored Entertainers and Record Artists in Chicago a Big Success,” 108. See also “OKeh Artists’ Night,” Chicago Defender, February 27, 1926. Earlier that year, on March 2, 1926, Fearn had staged a similar public exhibition of the commercial recording process at the Chicago Coliseum, this one at the Midwest Old-Time Fiddlers championship: “See ‘Talker’ Record Made,” TMW, March 15, 1926, 106. For other examples of record companies staging such demonstrations, albeit involving white popular dance or jazz orchestras, see “R. S. Peer Returns from First Public Okeh Recording,” TMW, February 15, 1925, 102; “Recording by Okeh Expedition in Detroit Is Viewed by Thousands of Spectators,” TMW, February 15, 1925, 118; “Starr Branch Provides Feature,” Presto, April 4, 1925, 4; and “Strikingly Effective Publicity Methods of Chubb-Steinburg Co. Win Patronage,” TMW, April 15, 1925, 19. “Carnival of Colored Entertainers and Record Artists in Chicago a Big Success,” 108. “OKeh Artists’ Night.” “Okeh Cabaret and Style Show, Staged by E. A. Fearn, Is a Tremendous Success,” 6, 18. See also Mildred Ann Henson, “Coliseum Will Resemble a Scene from ‘Arabian Night,’ ” and the other articles in the special “Music Section” of the Chicago Defender, June 12, 1926. “Okeh Cabaret and Style Show, Staged by E. A. Fearn, Is a Tremendous Success,” 6. “Okeh Cabaret and Style Show, Staged by E. A. Fearn, Is a Tremendous Success,” 6. Jim Prohaska, “Irving Mills—Record Producer: The Master and Variety Labels,” IAJRC Journal (Spring 1997): 1–9, iajrc.org/docs/irving_mills_variety.pdf (accessed November 3, 2015). David W. Stowe, Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 82; Prohaska, “Irving Mills.” Unidentified Tempo article, July 1937, quoted in Prohaska, “Irving Mills.” Prohaska, “Irving Mills. John Hammond, unidentified article, Down Beat, November 1937, quoted in Prohaska, “Irving Mills.

CHAPTER 8

Joe Carlton, “Oberstein Leaves Victor,” Billboard, May 29, 1948, 19–20. Carlton, “Oberstein Leaves Victor,” 19. 3. Carlton, “Oberstein Leaves Victor,” 20. 4. In a perhaps not-so-odd twist, less than six months after penning this May 1948 article, Carlton left Billboard to join Oberstein’s revived Varsity label as an executive salesman. “Oberstein Acquires Joe Carlton, Ex BB,” Billboard, November 13, 1948, 24. 5. “Folk (Country & Western) Record Section” and “Rhythm & Blues Records,” Billboard, June 25, 1949, 28, 30, respectively. In 1962, Billboard adopted the shorter designation “country” for its “Folk (Country & Western)” record chart. For a discussion of the changing nomenclature, see Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1.

2.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

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7.

389

6.

1997), 196–99, and Ronnie Pugh, “Country Music Is Here to Stay?,” JCM 19 (1997): 32–38. For the racial politics of segregated music markets and their steady but uneven erosion in the 1940s and 1950s, see Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), especially 19–51, 90–122. Pierce quoted in Michael Jarrett, Producing Country: The Inside Story of the Great Recordings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014), 13. Adams quoted in John Broven, Record Makers and Record Breakers: Voices of the Independent Rock ’n’ Roll Pioneers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 24. Carlton, “Oberstein Leaves Victor,” 19; Allan Sutton and Kurt Nauck, American Record Labels and Companies: An Encyclopedia (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2000), 304. For the basic outlines of Oberstein’s career, see Rev. Carl Benson, “Oberstein, Eli (13 Dec 1901–13 June 1960),” in Encyclopedia of Recorded Sound, ed. Frank Hoffman, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2005 [1993]), 2:1501–2, and, especially for his escapades during and immediately after World War II, David Diehl, “ ‘Call It Bootlegging But It’s Legal’: Eli Oberstein and the Coarse Art of Indie Record Production,” ARSC Journal 31 (Fall 2000): 282–93, and Alex Sayf Cummings, Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 35–36. Sutton and Nauck, American Record Labels and Companies, 304; Benson, “Oberstein, Eli,” 1501–2, Diehl, “ ‘Call It Bootlegging But It’s Legal,’ ” 282–93. For more on Oberstein and his Varsity label, see Allan Sutton, Recording the ’Thirties: The Evolution of the American Recording Industry, 1930–39 (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2011), 179–88. “Classic Making Classy Gains,” Billboard, January 16, 1943, 25. “Recording Ban Flouted?,” Billboard, December 12, 1942, 20; “Oberstein’s ‘Peter Piper’ May Be 802’s Jack Small; Union Wants Some Answers,” Billboard, January 16, 1943, 20. See also “Records Made by ‘Bootleg Bands’ Circumvent the Ban by Petrillo,” New York Times, January 23, 1943, and “Bootleg Tag on Records,” Billboard, February 6, 1943, 60. “Big Recording Whodunnit,” Billboard, October 17, 1942, 20; “Recording Ban Flouted?,” 20. “Oberstein Victorious Again, Certain He’ll Be Recording after the Ban Is Forgotten,” Billboard, June 12, 1943, 24; “The Petrillo Recording Ban,” Billboard, November 1, 1947, 20; “Oberstein Out of AFM after Board Hearing,” Billboard, June 26, 1943, 21; Benson, “Oberstein, Eli,” 1501. “BMI’s Interest in Ford Music Is Mainly Disks,” Billboard, January 8, 1944, 14. On the founding and importance of BMI and its battles with ASCAP, see Philip H. Ennis, The Seventh Stream: The Emergence of Rocknroll in America (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992), 4–6, 11–12, 105–9, 165–67, and Ward, Just My Soul Responding, 117–22. “Didn’t You Know Pat Lewis Is Oberstein, You Sq. from Del.?,” Billboard, July 20, 1946, 23. “Obie Kicks Off Varsity, 39c Platters,” Billboard, July 10, 1948, 3, 16; “Oberstein to Offer Varsity Platters Three for a Buck,” Billboard, August 6, 1949, 18. “Selvin Move from Muzak to Majestic Cues Oberstein Exit,” Billboard, May 5, 1945, 15. See also Geoffrey Wheeler, “Majestic Records: Eli Oberstein, Mildred Bailey, and Allegro-Elite LP Imprints,” IAJRC Journal 47 (September 2014): 52–57, www.readperiodicals.com/201409/3603679741 .html (accessed July 28, 2015). “Col., Varsity Set Harmony Co-Op Label,” Billboard, June 18, 1949, 20, 43; “Harmony Disks to Hit Market around July 1,” Billboard, June 25, 1949, 17; “Bailey Hassle May Halt Col’s Harmony Pact,” Billboard, December 3, 1949, 15; “Oberstein Files Counterclaim against Columbia,” Billboard, September 16, 1950, 14. “Oberstein Folds One Diskery, Opens 2[n]d,” Billboard, April 28, 1951, 12. Varsity was not the only

390 N OT E S TO PAG E S 2 7 0 – 7 5

20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

record label to suffer as a result of these wartime price caps. See “Diskeries Seek Freedom from OPS Controls,” Billboard, July 28, 1951, 1, 11. “Oberstein Folds One Diskery, Opens 2[n]d,” 42. “Music as Written: Oberstein to Coast on New Talent Hunt,” Billboard, October 20, 1951, 20; John Hartley Fox, King of the Queen City: The Story of King Records (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 179–80. See also “Oberstein Plan: DJ Advice Sought for King’s Pops,” Billboard, September 15, 1951, 15. Eager to boost King’s classical as well as its pop holdings, Nathan also secured permission from Oberstein to release Varsity-manufactured records (and later long-playing albums from Oberstein’s classical Allegro label) with King covers and labels. “Rupe Sells Out Juke Box—Sterling Piece; Says Obie Is in Deal,” Billboard, August 10, 1946, 37. See also Billy Vera, “The Specialty Story,” in booklet notes to The Specialty Story, 1944–1964, 5-CD boxed set (Specialty Records 5SPCD-4412–2), 15–41. Rupe quoted in Vera, “Specialty Story,” 18–19. “Oberstein Assumes United Press Plant for Sterling’s Debts,” Billboard, March 13, 1948, 16. See also, though, “Correction,” Billboard, March 20, 1948, 15. On Oberstein’s partnership with Rupe, see Broven, Record Makers and Record Breakers, 48–49. In the interview that formed the basis of Broven’s account, an aging Rupe recalled that Oberstein’s involvement with the pressing plant began in either 1945 or 1946, but the former Billboard article indicates that the purchase occurred in 1947. Rupe may well have been thinking about his earlier interactions with Oberstein at Juke Box. “Lubinsky Tries 37 1/2–cent Wax,” Billboard, August 21, 1948, 20. On Oberstein’s relationship with Lubinsky and Savoy Records, see Broven, Record Makers and Record Breakers, 58, and on the early years of the label more generally, 56–59. “Oberstein Buys Allegro Assets to Expand Line,” Billboard, December 6, 1952, 40. “Royale Gets Material for 43 New LP’s,” Billboard, December 15, 1951, 15. “Allegro ‘Ring’ LP’s Authority Disputed,” Billboard, April 3, 1954, 12; Cummings, Democracy of Sound, 76; Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 442–43. “Rights, Masters of Rondo to Oberstein,” Billboard, December 4, 1954, 21; “Oberstein: Moving Back into Pops on Venus Label,” Billboard, January 21, 1956, 24. Cummings, Democracy of Sound, 76; Johns, Piracy, 443. For more on the history of Rondo Records and discographies of the Rondo and Rondo-lette labels, see Robert L. Campbell and Richard Pruter, “Rondo,” Red Saunders Research Foundation campber.people.clemson.edu/rondo.html (accessed August 2, 2017), and Mike Callahan, David Edwards, and Patrice Eyries, “The Rondo Records Story,” Both Sides Now Publications www.bsnpubs.com/pri/rondostory.html (accessed August 2, 2017). “Oberstein to Debut $2.49 Stereo Line,” Billboard, December 8, 1958, 3. For more on Rondo’s frenzied experimentation, see “Obie Predicts Stereo Boom,” Billboard, December 14, 1959, 4. “Satherley Quits Columbia Job,” Billboard, June 7, 1952, 17; “Satherley Steps Out as Col’bia A&R Executive,” Billboard, June 7, 1952, 17, 24. Interestingly, Billboard’s coverage of Satherley’s retirement and Law’s takeover never quite managed to settle on a standard description of the post, “Director of Folk Music Artists and Repertoire” or “in charge of h.b. (hillbilly) and Western catalog.” “Jack Kapp, Headed Decca Records, 47,” New York Times, March 26, 1949; Abel Green, “Jack Kapp Brought New Kind of Showmanship to Disk Biz,” Variety, March 30, 1949, 37, 39; “Kapp Dead, Who’ll Head Decca?,” Billboard, April 2, 1949, 3, 20, 53; “Jack Kapp,” Billboard, April 2, 1949, 64; “David Kapp Dies; Records Leader,” New York Times, March 3, 1976; Fred Bronson, The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits: The Inside Story Behind Every Number One Single on Billboard’s Hot 100

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from 1955 to the Present, 5th ed. (New York: Billboard Books, 2003), 72, 146; David Edwards, Patrice Eyries, Mike Callahan, Randy Watts, Vince Miller, and Tim Neely, “Kapp Records Story,” Both Sides Now Publications www.bsnpubs.com/decca/kapp/kappstory.html (accessed August 9, 2017). “Frank B. Walker Dies at 73; Led MGM Recording Division,” New York Times, October 17, 1963; “Frank B. Walker, Disk Biz Pioneer, Dies in L. I. at 73,” Variety, October 23, 1963, 49; “Frank B. Walker, Dean, Dies at 74 [sic],” Billboard, October 26, 1963, 1, 6; Joe DePriest, “Cheerful Dan Hornsby,” Bluegrass Unlimited 24 (August 1989): 32–35. “Ralph S. Peer, 67, Music Publisher,” New York Times, January 21, 1960; “Ralph S. Peer at 67; Pioneered Global Music Publishing Concept,” Variety, January 27, 1960, 48; “Ralph Peer, Noted Pubber, Dies at 67,” Billboard, January 25, 1960, 2, 16; “Peer-Southern Organization 40th Anniversary Salute,” Billboard, June 1, 1968, P-S-1–P-S-28; Barry Mazor, Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014), especially 155–278. Joe Csida, “Victor’s A&R ‘Revolution,’ ” Billboard, June 19, 1948, 3, 4, 20, 21. “Victor Is Down to One-Man A&R Policy, Change Reflects Shifting Conditions in Biz,” Billboard, April 30, 1949, 3, 19. Herm Schoenfeld, “A&R Men Near Total Eclipse,” Variety, November 30, 1960, 51. “Sholes’ Life Reads Like History Lesson in A&R,” Billboard Music Week, March 20, 1961, 4, 106; Paul Ackerman, “Sholes Dies; Trade Catalyst,” Billboard, May 4, 1968, 1, 70. “Columbia Makes Sweeping Change in Pop A&R Set-Up,” Billboard, September 21, 1959, 2; Elaine Woo, “Studio Composer Frank DeVol [sic] Dies,” Los Angeles Times, October 29, 1999; Chris Morris, “Jazz World Mourns an Innovator,” Billboard, August 4, 2001, 66. Schoenfeld, “A&R Men Near Total Eclipse,” 51. For more on the impact of magnetic tape and “full frequency range recording” technologies, which revolutionized most postwar recording operations and enabled the development of both multitracking and stereo sound reproduction, see Louis Barfe, Where Have All the Good Times Gone?: The Rise and Fall of the Record Industry (London: Atlantic Books, 2004), 152–61; Richard James Burgess, The History of Music Production (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 44–54; Andre Millard, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 199–201; and Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever: The Story of Recorded Music (London: Granta Books, 2009), 104–28. Joe Csida, “Dependence on A & R Staffs Is Disk Trend,” Billboard, November 18, 1950, 1, 11, 39. An article in The Billboard 1943 Music Year Book, for example, explained that, “when the war shut off supplies of virgin shellac coming into the United States from India,” record companies “turned to scrap records for the bulk of shellac used in recent record production.” Gladys Chasins, “Scrap Fights Two Ways,” in The Billboard 1943 Music Year Book (Cincinnati, OH: Billboard Publishing Co., 1943), 83. Possibly the earliest appearance of “record producer” (in the postwar sense) in Billboard came in an August 1953 report about a telegram sent from Capitol Records’ A&R director Voyle Gilmore to Goldie Goldmark, manager of Sheldon Music, concerning a release date restriction on one of that publishing firm’s licensed songs. Goldmark had complained about the label’s allegedly premature release of Vicki Young’s recording of “Ricochet” (Capitol F2543), a song that Theresa Brewer had also just recorded for Decca’s subsidiary label, Coral (Coral 61043). (Brewer’s version became a major hit, reaching #2 on the Billboard singles charts.) “In the future,” Gilmore wired Goldmark, “please make all contacts regarding songs, release dates, etc., with the record producer involved—not the sales department. All future relations with Capitol and Sheldon Music depend on this.” “ ‘Ricochet’s’ Ricocheting Over; Sheldon, Coral, Cap End Fuss,” Billboard, August 22,

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1953, 36. See also “Cap Releasing ‘Ricochet Disk,’ Billboard, August 1, 1953, 16. Schoenfeld, “A&R Men Near Total Eclipse,” 51–52. Carlton, “Oberstein Leaves Victor,” 19. For more on Oberstein’s initial dealings with the Monroe Brothers, see Neil V. Rosenberg and Charles K. Wolfe, The Music of Bill Monroe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 5–6, and Richard D. Smith, Can’t You Hear Me Callin’: The Life of Bill Monroe, Father of Bluegrass (New York: Da Capo Press, 2001), 41–43. Oberstein’s involvement with Bob Skyles & His Skyrockets is discussed in Joe Carr and Alan Munde, Prairie Nights to Neon Lights: The Story of Country Music in West Texas (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1995), 40–42. For the band’s discography, particularly the assorted odd instruments employed on its recordings, see Tony Russell, Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921–1942, with editorial research by Bob Pinson, assisted by the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 838–39. Brad McCuen interview by Patricia Willard, Nashville, Tennessee, August 2 and 3, 1989, Smithsonian Institution Ellington Oral History Project, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Harvey G. Cohen, Duke Ellington’s America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 264–65. “The Allegro-Royale Mikado (1954),” Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, gasdisc.oakapplepress.com /mikroyale.htm (accessed July 23, 2015). “Former Decca Executive Heads Ebony Label,” Jet, December 17, 1951, 64; Robert Greenfield, The Last Sultan: The Life and Times of Ahmet Ertegun (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), 55–56; Jim O’Neal, “Muddy’s First Chicago Record,” Living Blues no. 52 (Spring 1982): 4. See also Jimmy Cunningham Jr., “J. Mayo ‘Ink’ Williams,” in Encyclopedia of Arkansas Music, ed. Ali Welky and Mike Keckhaver (Little Rock, AR: Butler Center Books, 2013), 218–19. By Williams’s own account, Decca executives fired him around 1946 on the advice of an “efficiency expert” brought in to review and economize the company’s operations, another reminder of the postwar turn that saw efficiency experts and accountants wield increasing power at record companies. See J. Mayo Williams interview by William Russell and John Steiner, probably Chicago, Illinois, November 20, 1970, William Russell Jazz Collection, Williams Research Center, Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans, Louisiana. “Hammond Keynote Veepee; May Add Barnet, Pop Jazzists,” Billboard, July 27, 1946, 36. On Hammond’s career after World War II, see John Hammond, with Irving Townsend, John Hammond on Record (New York: Ridge Press, 1997), 269–360, and Dunstan Prial, The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 186–265. Prial, Producer, 102, 203–4; Hammond quoted in “Natural Sound,” New Yorker, July 17, 1954, 17. According to John Broven, the Ertegun brothers had been inspired to promote concerts and to later record music, in part, by Hammond’s work, especially the 1938 “Spirituals to Swing” concert he organized at Carnegie Hall. See Broven, Record Makers and Record Breakers, 62. Prial, Producer, 208–47; Hammond, with Townsend, John Hammond on Record, 243–358. Hammond, with Townsend, John Hammond on Record, 391–95. Samuel Charters, The Country Blues (New York; Da Capo Press, 1975 [1959]), 182–94 (first use on 183). Lester Melrose, “My Life in Recording,” in American Folk Music Occasional, No. 2, ed. Chris Strachwitz and Pete Welding (New York: Oak Publications, 1970), 59–61. For more on Melrose, see Bob Koester, “Lester Melrose: An Appreciation,” in American Folk Music Occasional, No. 2, 58; William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular

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Memory, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 133–34; Mike Rowe, Chicago Blues: The City and the Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975 [1973]), 17–25; Roger House, Blue Smoke: The Recorded Journey of Big Bill Broonzy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 100–101, 106–9, 111–14; and Bob Riesman, I Feel So Good: The Life and Times of Big Bill Broonzy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), especially 84–86, 280n5. Melrose, “My Life in Recording,” 60. “No one has ever accused (Melrose) of exaggerating when he said ’90 percent,’ ” Paul Garon and Beth Garon note, and to substantiate his claim, they enumerate a lengthy list of the blues artists with whom the Chicago-based A&R man worked during that period. See Paul Garon and Beth Garon, Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2014 [1992]), 65. Melrose quoted in Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001 [1950]), 187. Melrose, “My Life in Recording,” 60. “Aberbachs Get Wabash Catalog,” Billboard, March 5, 1955, 15; Bar Biszick-Lockwood, Restless Giant: The Life and Times of Jean Aberbach and Hill and Range Songs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 180. Rowe, Chicago Blues, 17. For more on Melrose and Dixon, see Mitsutoshi Inaba, Willie Dixon: Preacher of the Blues (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2011), 27–29, 30, 33, 37, 40, 60. Berry Gordy, To Be Loved: The Music, the Magic, the Memories of Motown: An Autobiography (New York: Warner Books, 1994), 124 (emphasis in the original). For more on the history of Motown, see Suzanne E. Smith, Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Nelson George, Where Did Our Love Go?: The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Graham Betts, Motown Encyclopedia (n.p.: AC Publishing, 2014); Adam White and Barney Ales, Motown: The Sound of Young America (London: Thames and Hudson, 2016). For more on the social and musical implications of the mix of styles in southern soul, see Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (New York: Harper and Row, 1986); Barney Hoskyns, Say It One Time for the Brokenhearted: Country Soul in the American South (London: Bloomsbury, 1998); Diane Pecknold, “Making Country Modern: The Legacy of Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music,” in Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music, ed. Diane Pecknold (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 82–99; Charles L. Hughes, County Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); and Ward, Just My Soul Responding, 218–22. “Leahy Exits Unique Post,” Billboard, April 27, 1957, 20. Schoenfeld, “A&R Men Near Total Eclipse,” 52; Broven, Record Makers and Record Breakers, 89. “A&R Man Losing Identity, Asserts Don Costa Who’s Establishing His Own Co.,” Variety, October 11, 1961, 55. Mogul quoted in Mike Gross, “Disk Cos. ‘Decentralizing’ A&R; Independents ‘Bulls,’ ” Billboard, October 5, 1968, 1, 70 (quotation); “Art Mogull Makes Arrangement for Cosby U.K. Tour,” Billboard, June 29, 1968, 93. The British rock albums released by Tetragrammaton included Deep Purple’s Shades of Deep Purple (Tetragrammaton T-102) and John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins (Tetragrammaton T-5001). For more on the latter, see John Blaney, John Lennon: Listen to This Book (Guildford, UK: Paper Jukebox, 2005), 10–11. On the “speed wars” of the late 1940s between Columbia (which pioneered the development of the twelve-inch, 33 1/3-rpm, long-playing album under the leadership of George Avakian, an

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important postwar A&R man, especially in the jazz field) and RCA Victor (which championed the seven-inch, 45-rpm single) that eventually saw both formats become central to the recording industry, see Barfe, Where Have All the Good Times Gone?, 152–58, and Millard, America on Record, 193–95, 203–8. Russell Sanjek and David Sanjek, American Popular Music Business in the 20th Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 79, 81, 83. Broven, Record Makers and Record Breakers, 18–19, 487–90; Ward, Just My Soul Responding, 25. For years Don Pierce, co-owner of the important independent country label Starday, complained that, despite its national popularity, country music was poorly served by the nation’s distributors. He was still trying to address that situation in 1966 when he brought the National Record Distributors Sales meeting to Nashville for the first time. See Nathan D. Gibson, with Don Pierce, The Starday Story: The House that Country Music Built (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 130–31. “Diskeries Vie for Juke Box Biz with Direct Sales Tack,” Billboard, April 22, 1950, 3, 24, 124; Singleton quoted in Broven, Record Makers and Record Breakers, 292. For the importance of the jukebox trade to transformations in the record business during the 1940s and 1950s, see also Broven, Record Makers and Record Breakers, 16–19, and Ennis, Seventh Stream, 164, 177. For a general overview of the role of the jukebox in American life and culture during this period, see Kerry Segrave, Jukeboxes: An American Social History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2002), 128–273. Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination, from Amos ’n’ Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern (New York: Times Books, 1999), 223, 224. Philip K. Eberly, Music in the Air: America’s Changing Taste in Popular Music, 1920–1980 (New York: Communication Arts, 1982), 171. J. Goodrich, “The Mayor of Melody,” Tan, February 1950, 70. See also Steven Loza, Tito Puente and the Making of Latin Music (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 94. Douglas, Listening In, 225. “The Negro Market: $15 Billion Annually,” Sponsor, August 24, 1953, 66. 1957 Broadcasting Yearbook-Marketbook Issue (Washington, DC: Broadcasting Publication, 1957), 342–44. For more on the expansion of black-oriented broadcasting during World War II and in the decade or so afterward, see Ward, Just My Soul Responding, 29–36, and Brian Ward, Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), especially 210–11, 280. Because of the often-transient nature of such companies, estimates of the number of record labels in operation at any given time are necessarily tentative. See Millard, America on Record, 229–30, and Katherine Hammill, “The Record Business–It’s Murder,” Fortune, May 1961, 148–51, 178–87. Ward, Just My Soul Responding, 24, 37–55. On the relationship between major and independent labels in the postwar era, see Ward, Just My Soul Responding, 21–29, and Richard A. Peterson, “Why 1955? Explaining the Advent of Rock Music,” Popular Music 9 (January 1990): 97–116. For more on these Spanish-language specialty labels, see Deborah Pacini Hernandez, Oye Como Va!: Hybridity and Identity in Latino Popular Music (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 23–28, 86. Broven, Record Makers and Record Breakers, 44, 278. For more on Lew Chudd and Imperial, especially his relationship with Dave Bartholomew, see Rick Coleman, Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock ’n’ Roll (New York: Da

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Capo Press, 2006), 35–66; Rick Coleman, “The Imperial Fats Domino,” Goldmine no. 282 (May 17, 1991): 8–12; Rick Coleman, “The New Orleans Sound of Fats Domino and Dave Bartholomew,” Goldmine no. 282 (May 17, 1991): 12–13; and John Broven, Rhythm and Blues in New Orleans (Gretna, LA: Pelican Books, 1995), 25–35. Tales of Don Robey’s robust approach to business, including stories of beatings and gun threats, are legion, if sometimes disputed. He appears to have been a particularly ruthless figure in a shark-infested industry. See, for example, James M. Salem, The Late Great Johnny Ace and the Transition from R&B to Rock ’n’ Roll (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 69–70; and Charles Farley, Soul of the Man: Bobby “Blue” Bland (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi Press, 2011), 57–58. On Cohen and Rose, see Michael Kosser, How Nashville Became Music City, U.S.A.: 50 Years of Music Row (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard Corp., 2006), 9–11, 19–25. It is unclear when Nashville was first characterized as “Music City, USA,” but the phrase was certainly in use by 1960. See Cliff Thomas, “ ‘Opry’ Exec Sees Big C. & W. Future,” Billboard, October 31, 1960, 34. For more on Cohen and Castle Studio, see Kosser, How Nashville Became Music City, 5–9, and Charles K. Wolfe, Tennessee Strings: The Story of Country Music in Tennessee (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996 [1977]), 93–94. Sanjek and Sanjek, American Popular Music Business, 87. Don Law interview by Douglas B. Green, Nashville, Tennessee, May 14, 1975, CHFOHP. In 1965, the Bradleys opened another independent studio in Wilson County, Tennessee, called Bradley’s Barn. On Owen Bradley’s career as a record producer, see Kosser, How Nashville Became Music City, 5–14, and Wolfe, Tennessee Strings, 96–98. Sanjek and Sanjek, American Popular Music Business, 87. Chris Morris, “Music Keeps on Truckin’ on ‘Rig Rock Deluxe,’ ” Billboard, September 21, 1996, 55; Tepper quoted in Jarrett, Producing Country, 13. Bradley quoted in Jarrett, Producing Country, 78. Jeffrey J. Lange, Smile When You Call Me a Hillbilly: Country Music’s Struggle for Respectability, 1939–1954 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 223. “Lee Gillette Shifting to Capitol Pop Dept.,” Billboard, August 12, 1950, 18; “Music as Written: Chicago,” Billboard, February 11, 1950, 42; “Cap Expanding Sales Promosh,” Billboard, March 4, 1950, 18; “Cap Folk Chief Goes to Nashville,” Billboard, July 29, 1950, 12. For more on the postwar development of the “Nashville Sound” and the city’s recording scene, see Martin Hawkins, A Shot in the Dark: Making Records in Nashville, 1945–1955 (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press and Country Music Foundation Press, 2006), especially 221–44; Paul Hemphill, The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015 [1970]); Joli Jensen, The Nashville Sound: Authenticity, Commercialization, and Country Music (Nashville, TN: Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, 1998); Kosser, How Nashville Became Music City, especially 1–50; and Wolfe, Tennessee Strings, 93–111. “Music as Written: New York,” Billboard, April 8, 1950, 20. On Atkins and RCA’s new studio, see Kosser, How Nashville Became Music City, 39–40, and Wolfe, Tennessee Strings, 94. Atkins quoted in Nicholas Dawidoff, In the Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 49–50. Atkins quoted in Dawidoff, In the Country of Country, 50. Among the musicians in constant demand for Nashville sessions were pianist Floyd Cramer; drummers Buddy Harman and Farris

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Coursey; guitarists Harold Bradley, Hank “Sugarfoot” Garland, and Grady Martin; bass players Bob Moore and Roy Huskey Jr.; and vocal accompanists the Anita Kerr Singers, the Jordanaires, and the Nashville Edition. For more on the impact of Nashville’s musical consolidation and changing postwar country music practices on older southern musical traditions, see Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 275–81. Steve Sholes, “Developing Country Scene: Styles Change and Quality Improves: Artists, Firms, Increase in Ten Years,” Billboard, May 22 1954, 18, 39. Pierce quoted in Broven, Record Makers and Record Breakers, 282. This account of 4 Star and Starday relies heavily on Broven, Record Makers and Record Breakers, 279–87, and Gibson, with Pierce, Starday Story. Jarrett, Producing Country, 13. Johnny Sippel, “Folk Talent and Tunes,” Billboard, March 5, 1949, 30. “Sacred Singers Hunted by Cap,” Billboard, July 29, 1950, 13. “Rhythm & Blues Notes,” Billboard, December 30, 1950, 18. Johnny Sippel, “Folk Talent and Tunes,” Billboard, June 9, 1951, 30. Andy Bradley and Roger Wood, House of Hits: The Story of Houston’s Gold Star and Sugar Hill Recording Studios (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 48–49. For more on Daily, Starday, and their connections to Gold Star, see Bradley and Wood, House of Hits, 41–73. Bernie Asbell and Joel Friedman, “Mercury to Absorb Starday Diskery,” Billboard, December 15, 1956, 28, 31. Gibson, with Pierce, Starday Story, 34–38, 40–42. Michael Jarrett, “The Self-Effacing Producer: Absence Summons Presence,” in The Art of Record Production: An Introductory Reader for a New Academic Field, ed. Simon Frith and Simon Zagorski-Thomas (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing Group, 2012), 129–48; Pierce quoted in Jarrett, Producing Country, 23–24. In September 1951, for instance, Sholes and McCuen exchanged views on the wisdom of recruiting someone in Nashville to record a version of Hank Williams’s “Lonesome Whistle,” newly released by MGM as the flipside to “Crazy Heart” (MGM 11054). The upshot was a fairly lame rendition by Texas Jim Robertson & the Panhandle Punchers (RCA-Victor 47-4326) cut in RCA Victor Studio 1 in New York, rather than in Nashville. S. H. Sholes memo to B. F. McCuen, September 16, 1951, mentioned in B. F. McCuen letter to Steve Sholes, September 21, 1951, Folder 16: A&R, February 1948–May 1952, RCA Records, Box 1, Brad F. McCuen Collection, CPM. B. F. McCuen memo to Steve Sholes (cc: Dave Kapp and E. D. Eades), April 2, 1952, Folder 16: A&R, February 1948–May 1952, RCA Records, Box 1, Brad F. McCuen Collection. On Kapp’s move to RCA Victor, see Joe Csida, “Dave Kapp to Victor Post; Other Changes,” Billboard, November 24, 1951, 1, 17. Steve Sholes memo to B. F. McCuen (cc: Dave Kapp, J. Y. Burgess, and Al Miller), March 13, 1952; E. D. Eades memo to Steve Sholes (cc: Dave Kapp and Brad McCuen), April 3, 1952, both in Folder 16: A&R, February 1948–May 1952, RCA Records, Box 1, Brad F. McCuen Collection. Brad F. McCuen, “Memo: Album Idea–Big Band Boogie or Big Band Beat,” n d.; Brad F. McCuen memo, “Album Ida–Paul Whiteman, the Star Maker,” n.d.; Brad F. McCuen memo, “Album Idea–‘The Hal Kemp Style’ (Story) ‘Way Back in 1939 AD,’ ” n.d.; Brad F. McCuen memo, “Album Idea—Remember 52nd Street,” n.d.; Brad F. McCuen memo, “Album Idea–Fats Waller & Richard

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Maltby in ‘London Suite,’ ” n.d. (1956), all in Folder 19: A&R Ideas, May 1940–June 1962, RCA Records, Box 1, Brad F. McCuen Collection. Various documents, Folder 9: Labels: Piracy 1969, Brad F. McCuen Collection. See also Cummings, Democracy of Sound, 50–62. Don Cusic, Discovering Country Music (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008), 189. Hammond, with Townsend, John Hammond on Record, 348–49. Brad McCuen letter to Ben Rosker, June 21, 1956, Folder 19: A&R, May 1940–June 1962, RCA Records, Box 1, Brad F. McCuen Collection. “Neely Goes to Starday,” Billboard, October 31, 1964, 4. Bill Williams, “Lin B’casting Buys Starday-King for $5 Mil; Execs, Policy Retained,” Billboard, November 23, 1968, 3; “Starday-King Pubs Sold for $1.4 Mil,” Billboard, October 2, 1971, 3. See also Rick Kennedy and Randy McNutt, Little Labels—Big Sound: Small Record Companies and the Rise of American Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 70; Fox, King of the Queen City, 183–84; and Gibson, with Pierce, Starday Story, 162–66. “Bulleit Peddles Share in Bullet Disks to Execs,” Billboard, February 12, 1949, 16; Inaba, Willie Dixon, 33; Wolfe, Tennessee Strings, 96. For more on Bulleit Records and, in particular, the significance of “Near You” as an index of the growing importance of independent record companies, see Albin J. Zak III, I Don’t Sound Like Nobody: Remaking American Music in the 1950s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 85–88, and Hawkins, Shot in the Dark, 25–54. On Nashville’s postwar indies, see Hawkins, Shot in the Dark, and Wolfe, Tennessee Strings, 96. On Sun, see Colin Escott and Martin Hawkins, Good Rockin’ Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), and Kennedy and McNutt, Little Labels—Big Sound, 89–105. Wilson quoted in Broven, Record Makers and Breakers, 136. On country music at King, see also John W. Rumble, “Roots of Rock & Roll: Henry Glover at King Records,” JCM 14 (1992): 30–42; Fox, King of the Queen City, 12–21, 127–137; and David Sanjek, “What’s Syd Got to Do with It? King Records, Henry Glover, and the Complex Achievement of Crossover,” in Pecknold, Hidden in the Mix, 306–38. Broven, Record Makers and Breakers, 279; Ward, Just My Soul Responding, 47; “Biharis’ Flair Disks Enter Country Field,” Billboard, January 3, 1953, 12. “Rhythm and Blues Notes,” Billboard, October 13, 1951, 30; “Reviews of This Week’s New Records: Rhythm & Blues,” Billboard, March 14, 1953, 48; Vera, “Specialty Story,” 8; “Atlantic H. B. Bally Adds 24 Masters,” Billboard, June 17, 1950, 14; Broven, Record Makers and Breakers, 279. Billboard reinstated its separate R&B chart in January 1965, as black and white “pop” tastes again began to diverge significantly. Ward, Just My Soul Responding, 123–24, 134–42, 173–76. Ertegun quoted in Broven, Record Makers and Record Breakers, 12. Ertegun quoted in Barfe, Where Have All the Good Times Gone?, 169. For this oft-repeated, if rarely agreed upon, Carl Perkins story, see Carl Perkins and David McGee, Go, Cat, Go!: The Life and Times of Carl Perkins, the King of Rockabilly (New York: Hyperion Books, 1996), 218, and Gareth Murphy, Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (London: Serpents Tail, 2015), 98. Ertegun quoted in Broven, Record Makers and Record Breakers, 12. Ertegun quoted in Barfe, Where Have All the Good Times Gone?, 169. Bill Holland, “Atlantic Vows Royalty-Reform Payouts,” Billboard, May 9, 1998, 3, 84; Dominic Pride, “The Thorny Issue of Int’l Royalties,” Billboard, June 10, 1995, 1, 79–80. See also Bob Gulla,

398 N OT E S TO PAG E S 3 1 1 – 1 2

Icons of R&B and Soul (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008), 87–88. There is some disagreement as to whether the payment to Brown was $21,000 or $30,000. See Chip Deffaa, Blue Rhythms: Six Lives in Rhythm and Blues (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), xv–xvii, 45, 56–58, and Greenfield, Last Sultan, 294–303. John Broven is far more inclined to the idea that Ertegun was an enthusiastic, rather than a reluctant, supporter of the work of Begle and the Rhythm & Blues Foundation, only too eager to redress previous underpayments. The evidence, however, strongly suggests Ertegun bowed to steadily mounting legal and public pressure. Broven, Record Makers and Record Breakers, 515n22. 138. Ertegun quoted in Barfe, Where Have All the Good Times Gone?, 169. 139. “Prizewinning Songsmiths Sue,” Jet, December 5, 1968, 58–59; Martha Reeves and Mark Bego, Dancing in the Street: Confessions of a Motown Diva (New York: Hyperion Books, 1994), 8. See also “Martha Reeves Settles Suit over Motown Royalties,” Jet, April 8, 1991, 23, and Howell Begle, “Pioneer R&B Artists Deserve Back Royalties, Billboard, December 24, 1994, 9. For Gordy’s defense of his own financial dealings with his artists, see Gordy, To Be Loved, 267–72.

Sources MANUSCRIPT AND ORAL HISTORY COLLECTIONS

Atlanta, Georgia Special Collections and Archives, University Library, Georgia State University Popular Music and Culture Collection Wayne W. Daniel Collection Berea, Kentucky Special Collections and Archives, Hutchins Library, Berea College Doc Roberts Papers Chapel Hill, North Carolina Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina John Edwards Memorial Foundation Collection Archie Green Papers Mike Seeger Collection Southern Folklife Collection Discographical Files Chicago, Illinois Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago John Steiner Collection Clinton, New York Fillius Jazz Archive, Hamilton College Helen Oakley Dance Interview Indianapolis, Indiana Glick Indiana History Center, Indiana Historical Society John K. MacKenzie Collection Murfreesboro, Tennessee Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University Brad F. McCuen Collection Arthur Satherley Logs Gayle Dean Wardlow Collection Charles K. Wolfe Audio Collection Nashville, Tennessee Frist Library and Archive, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum Country Music Foundation Oral History Project Art Satherley Files New Haven, Connecticut Oral History of American Music, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University Duke Ellington Oral History Project New Orleans, Louisiana Williams Research Center, Historic New Orleans Collection William Russell Jazz Collection 399

400 A&R PIONEERS

New York, New York Columbia Center for Oral History, Columbia University Popular Arts Project Newark, New Jersey Institute of Jazz Studies, Dana Library, Rutgers University Gennett Records Division of Starr Piano Company Records and Sound Discs Collection Pittsburg, Kansas Special Collections, Axe Library, Pittsburg State University Carson J. Robison Collection Washington, DC American Folklife Center, Library of Congress Frank Driggs Letter to Don Law (April 10, 1961) Library of Congress / Fisk University Mississippi Delta Collection John A. and Alan Lomax Papers Recorded Sound Research Center, Library of Congress Talking Machine World Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution Smithsonian Institution Ellington Oral History Project

INTERVIEWS

Allen, Lee. Interview by Charles K. Wolfe, Lebanon, Tennessee, April 12, 1979. Charles K. Wolfe Audio Collection, Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro. Blue Sky Boys, The (Bill and Earl Bolick). Interview by Douglas B. Green, Camp Springs, North Carolina, May 26, 1974. Country Music Foundation Oral History Project, Frist Library and Archive, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee. Brockman, Polk C. Interview by Fred Hoeptner and Bob Pinson, Atlanta, Georgia, July 10, 1959. Archie Green Papers, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ———. Interview by Archie Green and Ed Kahn, Atlanta, Georgia, August 11, 1961. Archie Green Papers, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ———. Interview by Archie Green, Ed Kahn, and Helen Sewell, Atlanta, Georgia, August 27, 1963. Archie Green Papers, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Butcher, Dwight. Interview by Cecil Whaley, Nashville, Tennessee, July 28, 1969. Country Music Foundation Oral History Project, Frist Library and Archive, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee. Butt, Lee. Telephone interview by John K. MacKenzie, undated. John K. MacKenzie Collection, Glick Indiana History Center, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis. Callahan, Bill. Interview by Ronnie Pugh and David Hayes, Dallas, Texas, January 4, 1979. Country Music Foundation Oral History Project, Frist Library and Archive, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee. Charles, Harry. Interview by Gayle Dean Wardlow, Birmingham, Alabama, 1968. Gayle Dean Wardlow Collection, Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro. ———. Interview by Gayle Dean Wardlow, Birmingham, Alabama, March 20, 1968. Gayle Dean Wardlow Collection, Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro.

401 SOURCES

Dance, Helen Oakley. Interview by Monk Rowe, San Diego, California, February 12, 1998. Fillius Jazz Archive, Hamilton College, Clinton, New York. contentdm6.hamilton.edu/cdm/ref/collection/jazz /id/753. Accessed December 8, 2013; April 3, 2015; June 9, 2015. ———. Interview by Mark Tucker, Vista, California, January 9, 1987. Oral History of American Music, Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut. www.library.yale.edu/about/departments/oham /ELLINGTON_helen_oakley_dance.html. Accessed December 8, 2013; January 30, 2015. ———. Interview by Patricia Willard, Vista, California, September 26 and 27, 1989. Smithsonian Institution Ellington Oral History Project, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. Davis, Jimmie. Interview by Ronnie F. Pugh, Nashville, Tennessee, October 10, 1983. Country Music Foundation Oral History Project, Frist Library and Archive, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee. Dixon, Dorsey M. Interview by Eugene Earle and Archie Green, East Rockingham, North Carolina, August 7 and 8, 1962. Archie Green Papers, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Geier, Joseph E. Interview by John K. MacKenzie, probably Richmond, Indiana, April 1970. John K. MacKenzie Collection, Glick Indiana History Center, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis. Girls of the Golden West, The (Millie Good McCluskey and Bill McCluskey). Interview by John W. Rumble, Cincinnati, Ohio, November 4, 1988. Country Music Foundation Oral History Project, Frist Library and Archive, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee. House, Son. Interview by John Fahey, Barry Hansen, and Mark Levine, Venice, California, May 7, 1965. ParamountsHome.org. paramountshome.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id =112:son-house-interview-1965-&catid=47:new-york-recording-laboratoriesoral-histories&Itemid=54. Accessed February 5, 2015. Jackson, Clayton “Jack.” Interview by John K. MacKenzie, probably Lynn, Indiana, probably 1970. John K. MacKenzie Collection, Glick Indiana History Center, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis. Jamison, Thomas J. Interview by John W. Rumble, Charlotte, North Carolina, November 23, 1982. Country Music Foundation Oral History Project, Frist Library and Archive, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee. Kapp David. Interview by Joan Franklin and Robert Franklin, New York, New York, November 1959. Popular Arts Project, Columbia Center for Oral History, Columbia University, New York, New York. ———. Interview by John Krimsky, New York, New York, July 27, 1951. Copy in authors’ possession. Laibly, Art. Interview by John Steiner, probably Park Ridge, Illinois, March 11, 1970. John Steiner Collection, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, Chicago, Illinois. Law, Don. Interview by Douglas B. Green, Nashville, Tennessee, May 14, 1975. Country Music Foundation Oral History Project, Frist Library and Archive, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee. McCuen, Brad. Interview by Patricia Willard, Nashville, Tennessee, August 2 and 3, 1989. Smithsonian Institution Ellington Oral History Project, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Mills, Irving. Interview by Irene Kahn Atkins, Beverly Hills, California, April 23, 1981. Duke Ellington Oral History Project, Oral History of American Music, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Montana, Patsy. Interview by John W. Rumble, Nashville, Tennessee, June 9, 1984. Country Music Foundation Oral History Project, Frist Library and Archive, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee.

402 A&R PIONEERS

Moore, Willie, and Elizabeth Moore. Interview by Gayle Dean Wardlow, Sumner and Tutwiler, Mississippi, December 13, 1969. Gayle Dean Wardlow Collection, Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro. Peer, Ralph. Interview by Lillian Borgeson, Hollywood, California, January and May 1959. John Edwards Memorial Foundation Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Poole, Charlie, Jr. Interview by Eugene W. Earle and Archie Green, Mountain Home, Tennessee, August 13, 1962. Archie Green Papers, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Roberts, Doc. Interview by Archie Green and Norm Cohen, Richmond, Kentucky, May 26, 1969. Archie Green Papers, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Satherley, Art. Interview by Douglas B. Green, Hollywood, California, June 27, 1974. Country Music Foundation Oral History Project, Frist Library and Archive, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee. ———. Interview by Douglas B. Green, Hollywood, California, June 30, 1974. Country Music Foundation Oral History Project, Frist Library and Archive, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee. ———. Interview by Douglas B. Green, Nashville, Tennessee, October 15, 1974. Country Music Foundation Oral History Project, Frist Library and Archive, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee. ———. Interview by Douglas B. Green, Fountain City, California, March 26, 1975. Country Music Foundation Oral History Project, Frist Library and Archive, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee. Schultz, Alfred. Interview by Gayle Dean Wardlow, Grafton, Wisconsin, August 2, 1968. Gayle Dean Wardlow Collection, Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro. Shilkret, Nathaniel. Interview by Duke Bolton, n.p., ca. 1960s. Excerpted in “Nat Shilkret Talks about Vernon Dalhart, ‘The Lonesome Road,’ Gene Austin, Andy Sannella.” YouTube.com. www.youtube .com/watch?v=tkvsG10R6sA. Accessed August 11, 2015. Soulé, Harold. Interview by John K. MacKenzie, probably Sandy, Oregon, June 28, 1961. John K. MacKenzie Collection, Glick Indiana History Center, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis. ———. Interview by John K. MacKenzie, probably Sandy, Oregon, August 3, 1961. John K. MacKenzie Collection, Glick Indiana History Center, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis. ———. Interview by John K. MacKenzie, probably Portland, Oregon, January 2, 1964. John K. MacKenzie Collection, Glick Indiana History Center, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis. Speir, H. C. Interview by Gayle Dean Wardlow, Jackson, Mississippi, May 18, 1968. Gayle Dean Wardlow Collection, Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro. ———. Interview by Gayle Dean Wardlow, Jackson, Mississippi, 1969. Gayle Dean Wardlow Collection, Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro. ———. Interview by Gayle Dean Wardlow, Jackson, Mississippi, February 8, 1970. Gayle Dean Wardlow Collection, Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro. Walker, Frank. Interview by Mike Seeger, probably New York, New York, June 19, 1962. Mike Seeger Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Transcribed in part as “Who Chose These Records? A Look into the Life, Tastes, and Procedures of Frank Walker.” In Anthology of American Folk Music, ed. Josh Dunson and Ethel Raim, 8–17. New York: Oak Publications, 1973.

Engel, Carl. Archive of American Folk Song: A History, 1928–1939. Washington, DC: Library of Congress Project: Work Projects Administration/Annual Reports of the Librarian of Congress, 1940. Lomax, John A. “Report of the Honorary Consultant and Curator.” In Report of the Librarian of Congress for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1933. Reprinted in Carl Engel, Archive of American Folk Song: A History, 1928–1939, 24. Washington, DC: Library of Congress Project: Work Projects Administration/Annual Reports of the Librarian of Congress, 1940.

NEWSPAPERS, MAGAZINES, AND TRADE JOURNALS

Amsterdam News (New York) Asheville (NC) Citizen Atlanta Constitution Atlanta Journal Atlanta Journal Magazine Baltimore Afro-American Billboard (Billboard Music Week) Boston Sunday Globe Boston Sunday Post Bristol (TN) Herald Courier Burlington (NC) Daily Times (Burlington [NC] Daily Times-News) Charlotte News Charlotte Observer Chicago Defender Chicago Tribune Chicago Whip Collier’s Country Song Roundup Crisis Cumberland (MD) Evening Times Dallas Morning News Down Beat Fortune Guardian (UK) Half-Century Magazine Honolulu Advertiser

SOURCES

GOVERNMENT REPORTS

403

Whitey and Hogan (Roy “Whitey” Grant and Arval Hogan). Interview by John W. Rumble, Nashville, Tennessee, November 5, 1982. Country Music Foundation Oral History Project, Frist Library and Archive, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee. Williams, J. Mayo. Telephone interview by John K. MacKenzie, August 5, 1970. John K. MacKenzie Collection, Glick Indiana History Center, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis. ———. Interview by William Russell and John Steiner, probably Chicago, Illinois, November 20, 1970. William Russell Jazz Collection, Williams Research Center, Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans, Louisiana.

404 A&R PIONEERS

Indianapolis Star (Indianapolis Sunday Star) Jet Johnson City (TN) Chronicle Johnson City (TN) Press Johnson City (TN) Staff-News Journal and Guide (Norfolk, VA) Knoxville News-Sentinel La Prensa (San Antonio) Life Los Angeles Times Melody Maker Montana Standard (Butte, MT) Muncie (IN) Evening Press Music Trade Review Music Trades Nashville Tennessean (Tennessean [Nashville]) New Masses New York Age New Yorker New York Herald New York Times New York World Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN) Philadelphia Inquirer Phonograph and Talking Machine Weekly Pioneer Press (St. Paul, MN) Pittsburgh Courier Pittsburgh Gazette Times Port Arthur (TX) News Presto Rochester (NY) Democrat and Chronicle San Antonio Express San Antonio Light San Francisco Chronicle Saturday Evening Post Sheet Music News Sponsor Talking Machine Journal Talking Machine World (Talking Machine World and Radio-Music Merchant) Tan Tempo Time Twin City Sentinel (Winston-Salem, NC) Variety

SOURCES

1957 Broadcasting Yearbook-Marketbook Issue. Washington, DC: Broadcasting Publication, 1957. Albertson, Chris. Bessie: Empress of the Blues. London: Abacus, 1975 (1972). Alger, Dean. The Original Guitar Hero and the Power of Music: The Legendary Lonnie Johnson, Music, and Civil Rights. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2014. Allen, Walter C. Hendersonia: The Music of Fletcher Henderson and His Musicians: A Bio-Discography. Jazz Monographs No. 4. Highland Park, NJ: Walter C. Allen, 1973. American Folklife Center. Ethnic Recordings in America: A Neglected Heritage. Washington, DC: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, 1982. Anderson, Gene H. The Original Hot Five Recordings of Louis Armstrong. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2007. Austin, Gene, with Ralph M. Pabst. Gene Austin’s Ol’ Buddy. Phoenix, AZ: Augury Press, 1984. Autry, Gene, with Mickey Herskowitz. Back in the Saddle Again. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978. Barfe, Louis. Where Have All the Good Times Gone?: The Rise and Fall of the Record Industry. London: Atlantic Books, 2004. Barkan, Elazar. The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Barlow, William. Looking Up at Down: The Emergence of Blues Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Barnouw, Erik. A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States to 1933. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. Bastin, Bruce. Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995 (1986). ———, with Kip Lornell. The Melody Man: Joe Davis and the New York Music Scene, 1916–1978. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. Berry, Chad. The Hayloft Gang: The Story of the National Barn Dance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Betts, Graham. Motown Encyclopedia. n.p.: AC Publishing, 2014. The Billboard 1943 Music Year Book. Cincinnati, OH: Billboard Publishing Co., 1943. Biszick-Lockwood, Bar. Restless Giant: The Life and Times of Jean Aberbach and Hill and Range Songs. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. Blaney, John. John Lennon: Listen to This Book. Guildford, UK: Paper Jukebox, 2005. Bogle, Donald. Heat Wave: The Life and Career of Ethel Waters. New York: HarperCollins, 2011. Bradford, Perry. Born with the Blues. New York: Oak Publications, 1965. Bradley, Andy, and Roger Wood. House of Hits: The Story of Houston’s Gold Star and Sugar Hill Recording Studios. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. Brady, Erika. A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. Brasseaux, Ryan André. Cajun Breakdown: The Emergence of an American-Made Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. ———, and Kevin S. Fontenot, eds. Accordions, Fiddles, Two Step and Swing: A Cajun Music Reader. Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana Studies, 2006. Britton, Alan John. Uncle Art. Milton Keynes, UK: AuthorHouse UK, 2010. Bronson, Fred. The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits: The Inside Story Behind Every Number One Single on Billboard’s Hot 100 from 1955 to the Present. 5th ed. New York: Billboard Books, 2003.

405

BOOKS

406 A&R PIONEERS

Brooks, Edward. The Bessie Smith Companion: A Critical and Detailed Appreciation of the Recordings. Wheathampstead, UK: Cavendish Publishing Co., 1982. Brooks, Tim. The Columbia Master Book Discography. 4 vols. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. ———. Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Broonzy, Big Bill. Big Bill Blues: William Broonzy’s Story as Told to Yannick Bruynoghe. New York: Oak Publications, 1964 (1955). Broven, John. Record Makers and Record Breakers: Voices of the Independent Rock ’n’ Roll Pioneers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. ———. Rhythm and Blues in New Orleans. Gretna, LA: Pelican Books, 1995. Broyles-González, Yolanda. Lydia Mendoza’s Life in Music / La Historia de Lydia Mendoza. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Burgess, Richard James. The History of Music Production. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Caldwell, Erskine. God’s Little Acre. New York: Viking Press, 1933. ———. Tobacco Road. New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1932. Calt, Stephen. I’d Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2008 (1994). ———, and Gayle Wardlow. King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charlie Patton. Newton, NJ: Rock Chapel Press, 1988. Carlin, Bob. String Bands in the North Carolina Piedmont. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2004. Carr, Joe, and Alan Munde. Prairie Nights to Neon Lights: The Story of Country Music in West Texas. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1995. Carroll, John M. Fritz Pollard: Pioneer in Racial Advancement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998 (1992). Charters, Samuel B. The Blues Makers. New York: Da Capo Press, 1991 (1967/1977). ———. The Country Blues. New York: Da Capo Press, 1975 (1959). ———. Robert Johnson. New York: Oak Publications, 1973. Chilton, John. Let the Good Times Roll: The Story of Louis Jordan and His Music. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997 (1992). Cohen, Harvey G. Duke Ellington’s America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Cohen, Norm. Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. Coleman, Rick. Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock ’n’ Roll. New York: Da Capo Press, 2006. Collier, James Lincoln. Louis Armstrong: An American Genius. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Cox, Karen L. Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Cummings, Alex Sayf. Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Currell, Susan, and Christina Cogdell, eds. Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006. Cushing, Steve, comp. Blues before Sunrise: The Radio Interviews. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. Cusic, Don. Discovering Country Music. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008. ———. The Cowboy in Country Music: An Historical Survey with Artist Profiles. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2011. Dance, Helen Oakley. Stormy Monday: The T-Bone Walker Story. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.

407 SOURCES

Daniel, Wayne W. Pickin’ on Peachtree: A History of Country Music in Atlanta, Georgia. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Dawidoff, Nicholas. In the Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music. New York: Vintage Books, 1998. Deffaa, Chip. Blue Rhythms: Six Lives in Rhythm and Blues. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Delmore, Alton. Truth Is Stranger Than Publicity. Ed. Charles K. Wolfe. Nashville, TN: Country Music Foundation Press, 1995 (1977). DeVeaux, Scott. The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Dixon, Robert M. W., and John Godrich. Recording the Blues. London: November Books, 1970. ———, and Howard Rye. Blues and Gospel Records, 1890–1943. 4th ed. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1997 (1964). Dodge, Timothy. The School of Arizona Dranes: Gospel Music Pioneer. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013. Dorr, Gregory Michael. Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. Douglas, Susan J. Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination, from Amos ’n’ Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern. New York: Times Books, 1999. Doyle, Peter. Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900–1960. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005. Driggs, Frank, and Chuck Haddix. Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop—A History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Eberly, Philip K. Music in the Air: America’s Changing Tastes in Popular Music, 1920–1980. New York: Communication Arts, 1982. Ennis, Philip H. The Seventh Stream: The Emergence of Rocknroll in America. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992. Escott, Colin, and Martin Hawkins. Good Rockin’ Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Evans, David. Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993 (1973). Farley, Charles. Soul of the Man: Bobby “Blue” Bland. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi Press, 2011. Ferris, William. Blues from the Delta. New York: Da Capo Press, 1984 (1978). Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Fox, John Hartley. King of the Queen City: The Story of King Records. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Franklin, Benjamin, V. An Encyclopedia of South Carolina Jazz and Blues Musicians. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016. Garon, Paul, and Beth Garon. Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2014 (1992). Gelatt, Roland. The Fabulous Phonograph, 1877–1977. 2nd rev. ed. New York: Collier Books, 1977 (1955). Gennari, John. Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Gentry, Linnell, ed. A History and Encyclopedia of Country, Western, and Gospel Music. 2nd rev. ed. Nashville, TN: Clairmont Corp., 1969 (1961).

408 A&R PIONEERS

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LaVere, Stephen C. Booklet notes to Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings. 2-CD boxed set. Columbia Records C2K 46222. Morgenstern, Dan. Booklet notes to Louis Armstrong: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1923–1934. 4-CD boxed set. Columbia Records/Legacy Recordings C4K 57176. Nevins, Richard. Liner notes to The North Carolina Ramblers, 1928–1930. Biograph Records BLPRC-6005. Olson, Ted, and Tony Russell. Book accompanying The Bristol Sessions, 1927–1928: The Big Bang of Country Music. 5-CD boxed set. Bear Family Records BCD 16094 EK. ———. Book accompanying The Johnson City Sessions, 1928–1929: “Can You Sing or Play Old-Time Music?” 4-CD boxed set. Bear Family Records BCD 16083. ———. Book accompanying The Knoxville Sessions, 1929–1930: Knox County Stomp. 4-CD boxed set. Bear Family Records BCD 16097. Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers, Vol. 2. Columbia Records C 30034. Russell, Tony. Liner notes to Black Fiddlers: The Remaining Titles of Andrew and Jim Baxter, Nathan Frazier and Frank Patterson, the Complete Recorded Works of Cuje Bertram (1929-c. 1970). Document Records DOCD-5631. Smith, Harry. Booklet notes to Anthology of American Folk Music. 3-CD boxed set. Folkways Records FP 251—FP 253. Spottswood, Dick. Liner notes to Mississippi John Hurt: Folksongs and Blues. Gryphon Records GLP 13157. Swinton, Paul. “Blind Lemon Jefferson.” In Field Manual: Paramount Records and Associated Labels accompanying The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Vol. 1 (1917–27), 145–49. 6-LP boxed set. Third Man Records/Revenant Records TMR 203. van der Tuuk, Alex. “Lottie Kimbrough-Beaman and Winston Holmes.” In Field Guide to Paramount Records and Associated Labels accompanying The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Vol. 2 (1928–32), 192–93. 6-LP boxed set. Third Man Records/Revenant Records TMR 204. Vera, Billy. “The Specialty Story.” In booklet notes to The Specialty Story, 1944–1964, 15–41. 5-CD boxed set. Specialty Records 5SPCD-4412–2. Wolfe, Charles. Booklet notes to “A Ramblin’ Reckless Hobo”: The Songs of Dick Burnett and Leonard Rutherford. Rounder Records 1004. ———. Liner notes to The Bristol Sessions: Historic Recordings from Bristol, Tennessee. 2-CD set. Country Music Foundation CMF-011-D. Zolten, Jerry. “Daniel Brown.” In Field Guide to Paramount Records and Associated Labels accompanying The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Vol. 2 (1928–32), 47–48. 6-LP boxed set. Third Man Records/Revenant Records TMR 204. ———. “Wiseman Sextette.” In Field Manual: Paramount Records and Associated Labels accompanying The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Vol. 1 (1917–27), 271–72. 6-LP boxed set. Third Man Records/Revenant Records TMR 203.

DISSERTATIONS AND UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS

Foreman, Ronald Clifford, Jr. “Jazz and Race Records, 1920–32: Their Origins and Their Significance for the Record Industry and Society.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois, 1968. Hanchett, Tom. “Early Charlotte Area Recording Sessions, 1927–1945.” Unpublished data sheet. Copy in authors’ possession. Huber, Patrick. “Inventing Hillbilly Music: Record Catalog and Advertising Imagery, 1922–1929.” Paper presented at International Country Music Conference, Nashville, TN, May 27, 2005. Copy in authors’ possession.

“The Allegro-Royale Mikado (1954).” Gilbert and Sullivan Discography. gasdisc.oakapplepress.com/mikroyale.htm. Accessed July 23, 2015. American Epic. Companion web site to the three-part PBS documentary film series. www.americanepic.com. Accessed December 7, 2017. American Roots Music. Companion web site to the four-part PBS documentary film series. www.pbs.org/americanrootsmusic. Accessed June 19, 2015. Atlanta Country Music Hall of Fame. www.atlantacountrymusichalloffame.com. Accessed July 25, 2015; web site now discontinued. Brison, David N. “Floyd Collins Ballads: Song Background for Jenkins Ballad No. 1.” Cave and BatInspired Recorded Music and Spoken Word: An International Discographical Database, 1905–2005. caveinspiredmusic.com/rubriques/country_music/country_music.html#. Accessed August 13, 2015. Callahan, Mike, David Edwards, and Patrice Eyries. “The Rondo Records Story.” Both Sides Now Publications. www.bsnpubs.com/pri/rondostory.html. Accessed August 2, 2017. Campbell, Robert L., and Richard Pruter. “Rondo.” Red Saunders Research Foundation. campber.people.clemson.edu/rondo.html. Accessed August 2, 2017. Driggs, Frank. Letter to Don Law (with Law’s marginal comments), April 10, 1961. “The Delta Blues.” www.tdblues.com/2009/06/don-law-robert-johnson-letter. Accessed June 3, 2015. Edwards, David, Patrice Eyries, Mike Callahan, Randy Watts, Vince Miller, and Tim Neely. “Kapp Records Story.” Both Sides Now Publications. www.bsnpubs.com/decca/kapp/kappstory.html. Accessed August 9, 2017. Englund, Björn, with additional material by Mark Berresford. “Further Notes on Jelly Roll Morton: Jelly Roll and the Melrose Brothers.” Vintage Jazz Mart. www.vjm.biz/165-morton.pdf. Accessed December 8, 2016. Falcon, Wade. “ ‘Ma Fiancee’—Louisiana Pete.” Early Cajun Music. earlycajunmusic.blogspot.com/2014/09/ma-fiancee-louisiana-pete.html. Accessed October 7, 2015. Gegenhuber, Kurt. “ ‘Old Is the New New’ Is Old.” June 11, 2006. The Celestial Monochord. www.celestialmonochord.org/2006/06/old_is_the_new_.html. Accessed August 9, 2015. Knox, Z. Heraclitus. “Recalling the Short Career of Early Country Music Singer George Reneau.” Metro Pulse, March 28, 2012. www.metropulse.com/columns/ask-doc-knox/recalling-short-career-early-country-music-singer. Accessed May 12, 2015; link now discontinued. “November 1st in Gennett History.” Gennett Records Discography. gennett.wordpress.com/tag/p-j-mcnamara-trio. Accessed September 22, 2016. Olson, Bob. “Homer Rodeheaver, Pioneer of Sacred Records.” Tim’s Phonographs and Old Records. www.gracyk.com/rodeheaver.shtml. Accessed July 6, 2015. Oxford English Dictionary Online. www.oed.com. Accessed December 16, 2013.

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Riley, J. E. L. “ ‘Idiot-Brained South’: Intellectual Disability and Eugenics in Southern Modernism.” Ph.D. dissertation, Northumbria University, 2015. Sooy, Harry O. “Memoir of My Career at Victor Talking Machine Company, 1898–1925.” David Sarnoff Library. www.davidsarnoff.org/sooyh-maintext1921.html. Accessed February 3, 2015; July 11, 2015. Sooy, Raymond. “Memoirs of My Traveling and Recording Experiences for the Victor Talking Machine Company.” David Sarnoff Library. www.davidsarnoff.org/soo-maintext.html. Accessed February 3, 2015.

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“Paramount Portrait Labels.” Old Hat Records. www.oldhatrecords.com/ResearchParamountPicDisks.html. Accessed October 13, 2015. “Robert Johnson Records at the Gunter Hotel.” Official blog of the Sheraton Gunter Hotel in San Antonio. thesheratongunterblog.com/2013/11/06/robert-johnson-records-at-the-gunter-hotel. Accessed July 12, 2015. Rockwell, Malcolm. “Does Anybody Know When the Various Recording Companies Realized That They Needed an Artist and Repertoire Administrator?” August 13, 2012. 78-L Mail List. klickitat.78online.com/pipermail/78-l/Week-of-Mon-20120813/049184.html. Accessed September 22, 2016. “Slanguage Dictionary.” Variety. variety.com/static-pages/slanguage-dictionary. Accessed December 17, 2011. Strötbaum, Hugo, ed. “The Fred Gaisberg Diaries, Parts 1 and 2.” In “Documents” section. Recording Pioneers. www.recordingpioneers.com/rs_documents.html. Accessed July 11, 2015. ———. Recording Pioneers. www.recordingpioneers.com. Accessed July 4, 7, 8, 2015. University of California at Santa Barbara Library. Discography of American Historical Recordings. victor.library.ucsb.edu. Accessed September 13, 2015; March 17, 2017; July 13, 2017. van der Tuuk, Alex. “Aletha Dickerson: Paramount’s Reluctant Recording Manager.” Vintage Jazz Mart. www.vjm.biz/new_page_18.htm. Accessed February 4, 2015; June 19, 2015; August 17, 2015. ———. “Alfred Schultz: Paramount’s Pressing Foreman.” Vintage Jazz Mart. www.vjm.biz/new_page_9.htm. Accessed September 29, 2015. ———, comp. “F. W. Boerner Company: Paramount Mail Orders.” ParamountsHome.org. www.paramountshome.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=60:f-w-boerner -company-paramount-mail-orders&catid=36:miscellaneous-articles-and-interviews&Itemid=54. Accessed September 25, 2016. ———. “Harry Charles: ‘I Am Not a Spender, I Am an Investor!” ParamountsHome.org. www.paramountshome.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=146:harry-charles-i-am -not-a-spender-i-am-an-investor&catid=49:new-york-recording-laboratories-employees&Itemid=54. Accessed July 8, 2015. ———. “Paramount Records for Sale or How to Sell Records.” ParamountsHome.org. www.paramountshome.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=67:paramount -records-for-sale-or-how-to-sell-records-&catid=37:miscellaneous-paramount-articles&Itemid=54. Accessed October 6, 2015. Wallace, Steve. “Keynote Address.” Steve Wallace’s web blog. wallacebass.com/?p=2300. Accessed May 27, 2015. Weusi, Jitu K. “The Rise and Fall of Black Swan Records.” Red Hot Jazz Archive. www.redhotjazz.com/blackswan.html. Accessed September 26, 2016. “White Performers on Black Swan.” Mainspring: A Free Online Journal. www.mainspringpress.com/BSpseudo.html. Accessed October 25, 2015; link now discontinued.

Index Page numbers in bold refer to figures. A&R (Artists and Repertoire) creativity and commerce in, 122–27, 344n11 discrimination and, 28, 112–18, 177 historical context of, 7–10 origins of, 20–22 role of folklorists and song collectors in, 13–16 use of term, 20–22, 317–18n5, 318nn6–8 See also A&R managers and officials; postwar recording industry; record producers A&R managers and officials advertising and, 235–45 African Americans as, 5, 26–28, 112 backgrounds and musical credentials of, 25–31, 33–41, 198, 371n18 contracts and income of, 89–91 creative interventions of, 122–35, 139–40, 187–90, 191–200 modes of involvement of, 126–33 musical contributions on recordings and, 27, 28, 148, 194, 198– 200, 232, 346n30, 352n97 musician selection and, 130, 179–81, 188–89, 191–98, 367n113, 367n116 overview of roles of, 1–5, 11–13, 19–25 regional and local talent scouts and, 13, 40–46, 427

47–48, 61–62, 64–66, 183, 364n74 repertoire selection and, 122–24, 133–46, 168–70 songwriting and, 135–37, 146–59 talent scouting and, 47–86 women as, 5, 27–28, 31, 35, 43, 81–84, 183, 364n74 See also artists’ contracts and copyrights; postproduction; record producers; record sales and marketing; recording expeditions; recording sessions; specific A&R managers and officials ABC-Paramount (label), 285 “Abounding Sin and Abounding Grace” (sermon), 254 Abramson, Herb, 308 Acorn (label), 274 acoustical recording. See recording equipment and methods Acuff, Roy, 71–73, 77, 109, 218, 292–93 Acuff-Rose Publications, 73 Adams, Berle (Beryl Adasky), 267 Adams, Joe, 288 advertising, 235–45, 246–48. See also specific record labels Aeolian Company, 246. See also Vocalion (label) Ajax (label), 148 “Alabama Jubilee” (song), 307 “Alabama Lullaby” (song), 171 Aladdin (label), 289 alcohol, 171, 176–77, 362n55 Alegre (label), 289

Alexander, Arthur, 284 Alexander, “Texas,” 199 Allegro (label), 273 Allegro Royale (label), 279–80 Allen, Lee, 229 Allen Brothers, 169, 201–3, 202, 225, 228–29, 230, 369n1 Alley, Shelly Lee, & His Alley Cats, 200 American Epic (PBS documentary series), 314n12 American Federation of Musicians (AFM), 179, 268, 288 American Record Corporation (ARC), 9, 69, 84, 90, 221 artists’ contracts and copyrights and, 87–88, 106–8, 309 W. R. Calaway and, 71–73, 90, 106–7, 157, 189–90 hillbilly artists and, 71–77, 106, 157, 189–90, 199 Don Law and, 7, 64, 161–68, 170, 199 J. B. Long and, 39, 77, 90, 106–8 Lester Melrose and, 137, 194, 206–7 Ernie Oertle and, 29, 39, 45, 161 post-production and, 213, 214, 370–71n10 race artists and, 77, 90, 106–8, 154, 161–68, 178, 214, 370–71n10 record labels of, 54–55, 81, 84, 106, 148, 213, 380n128 recording expeditions and sessions of, 54–55, 64, 71–73, 175–76; in New York, 75–76, 106, 154; in San Antonio, 29, 64, 161–68, 170, 181, 199, 356–57n1, 357–58n4

428 A&R PIONEERS

American Record Corporation (ARC), continued recording studios of, 64, 161 repertoire selection and, 166–69 H. C. Speir and, 39, 45–46, 90 Herbert J. Yates and, 74–75, 76, 81 See also Brunswick (label); Columbia (label); Satherley, Arthur “Uncle Art” American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), 68–69, 268–69, 272 Anderson, Ivie, 84, 262 Andrews, Ed, 244–45 Andrews Sisters, 143, 351n81 “Angelina” (song), 267 Ansonia (label), 289 “Answer to Maple on the Hill– Part 4” (song), 140 Antonopoulou, Kiria Koula, 31 Apex (label), 280 Apollo (label), 289 Archive of American Folk Song (Library of Congress), 13–14, 26, 358–59n20 Ardoin, Amédé, 225 Arkansas Woodchopper, The, 71 Armstrong, Lillian Hardin, 196, 377–78n102 Armstrong, Louis, 27, 38, 192, 196, 275, 311, 321n27, 367n116 Armstrong, Louis, & His Hot Five/Seven, 27, 259, 260, 321n27 Armstrong, Louis, & His Orchestra, 269 Arnold, Eddy, 275, 295 Arnold, Kokomo, 67, 141–42, 146 artists’ contracts and copyrights, 87–118, 308–12 context of, 110–18 gender and racial dynamics of, 112–18

Great Depression and, 92, 94–95, 98, 117, 342n88 mechanical royalties and, 88–89, 93, 95, 97, 146–47, 150, 341n60 postwar recording industry and, 308–12 pseudonyms and, 77–80, 92, 93, 185, 299 See also specific artists; specific A&R managers and officials; specific record labels Arto (label), 147 Artophone Corporation, 248 Asch (label), 30 Asch, Moses “Moe,” 14, 29–30 Ashford, R. T., 13, 41, 43, 60, 113, 326n77 Atkins, Chester “Chet,” 295–96, 305 Atlanta, Georgia, 193, 247 radio stations in, 53, 70, 128 record sales and marketing in, 255–56, 258–59 recording expeditions and sessions in, 48–49, 53, 64, 119–20, 128–31, 141, 170–71, 244–45 See also Brockman, Polk C.; Columbia (label); James K. Polk Inc.; OKeh (label) Atlanta Journal (newspaper), 53 Atlanta Phonograph Company, 120 Atlantic (label), 280, 281, 289, 307, 308–11 Atlas (label), 271 Augusta, Georgia, 54–55 Austin, Gene, 167, 188, 190–91 Austin, Lovie, 45 Autry, Gene, 73–77, 75, 155, 155–56, 167, 190, 224–25, 288, 292–93 Avakian, George, 394n73 “Back-Water Blues” (song), 153, 355n115 Bailes Brothers, 306 Bailey, DeFord, 71, 225, 226

Bailey, Green, 125–26, 138, 207 Bailey, Mildred, 280, 302 Bailey, Pearl, 270 Ballard, Hank, 310 Baltimore Afro-American (newspaper), 238–39 “Banana in Your Fruit Basket” (song), 214 “Bang Bang Lulu” (song), 218 Banner (label), 148, 213, 380n128 “Banty Rooster Blues” (song), 372n32 Baquet, Achille, 368n127 “Barbara Allen” (song), 230 “Barbecue Blues” (song), 130 Barbecue Bob (Robert Hicks), 129, 130 Bare, Bobby, 295 Barefoot Bill (Ed Bell), 146 barn dances, 139–40. See also radio barn dances Barnet, Charlie, 84 Bartholomew, Dave, 290 Barton, Bruce, 238 Barton, Durstine & Osborn, 238 Basie, Count, 154, 302, 318–19n8, 358–59n20. See also Hammond, John Basie Orchestra, Count, 133–34, 178, 179 Bass, Ralph, 273 Bassett, Dewey & Gassie, 153 Battiste, Harold, 272 Baxter, Andrew, 129, 195–96 Baxter, Jim, 129, 195–96 “Be Kind to a Man When He’s Down” (song), 157–58 Beacon (label), 21, 318–19n8 Bechet, Sidney, 84, 85, 192 Bechtel, Perry, 130, 198 Bee McCann Music Shop (San Antonio, Texas), 364n74 Begle, Howell E., 310–11 Beiderbecke, Bix, 29, 33–35, 36, 302 Belafonte, Harry, 275 Bergh, Arthur, 33 Berigan, Bunny, 267, 302 Berlin, Irving, 33

blues, 4, 9, 11, 100 boundaries among musical genres and, 123–24, 201–3, 202, 220–22, 224–26, 228–30, 379n124 “event songs” and, 151–52, 353n105, 354n111 propriety and taste in, 213–17, 216, 374n56, 374n68 racial dynamics of, 201–3, 202, 215–17, 216, 232–33, 240–42 See also race records; vaudeville blues (classic blues); specific artists Blues Woman, The, 271 Boaz, Edgar, 91 Boerner, Frederick W., 383n25 Bogan, Lucille, 53 Boggs, Dock, 224–25 Boggs-Rice Company (Bristol, Virginia), 31–32 Bono, Sonny, 272 “Boogie #1” (instrumental), 271 “Booster Blues” (song), 4, 42 “Boot That Thing” (song), 65 “Born to Lose” (song), 143 Bostwick, John M., 371n14 Bourne Music Company, 127 Bracey, Ishmon, 66 Bradford, Alex, 271 Bradford, Perry “Mule,” 12, 24, 26–27, 112, 146–47, 148, 192, 260 Bradley, Harold, 291, 294, 395n93, 396n103 Bradley, Owen, 291–92, 292, 295–96, 305, 395n93 Bradley Studios, 291, 292, 293 Bradley’s Barn, 395n93 Bradshaw, Brad, 62 Breaux, Cléoma. See Falcon, Cléoma (née Breaux) Bregman, Vocco & Conn Inc., 268 Brewer, Clinton, 25–26 Bristol, Tennessee, 47–48, 55–56, 62, 64, 67–68, 95, 157, 195

INDEX

“Black Snake Moan” (song), 257, 387n116 Black Swan (label), 115–16, 230–33, 231, 246, 249, 255, 381n8. See also Henderson, Fletcher; Pace, Harry H. Black Swan Record Company. See Black Swan (label); Pace Phonograph Corporation Blackwell, Bumps, 272 Blaine, Jerry, 287 Blake, Blind, 28, 194–95 “Bleeding Hearted Blues” (song), 197 “Blind Lemon’s Birthday Record” (record), 254 “Bloodshot Eyes” (song), 306 Blue, Bud, 195 Blue Ace (label), 303 Blue Note (label), 85 Blue Ridge Gospel Singers, 193–94 Blue Sky Boys, 70 “Blue Suede Shoes” (song), 309 “Blue Yodel No. 8 (Mule Skinner Blues)” (song), 218 “Blue Yodel No. 9” (song), 196, 377–78n102 Bluebird (label), 13, 228 A&R managers and officials and, 35, 36, 118, 128, 130, 157–58 artists’ contracts and copyrights and, 108, 109, 110 boundaries among musical genres and, 221, 227, 228, 378n112, 379n116 foreign-language records and, 58, 183, 227, 364n74, 378n112, 379n116 hillbilly artists and, 70, 78–79, 108, 109, 140–41, 179–80, 229 race artists and, 45, 120 recording expeditions and sessions of, 109, 141, 279, 364n74, 378n112 See also Carson, Fiddlin’ John; Monroe Brothers; Oberstein, Eli; RCA Victor

429

Berman, Bess, 289 Bernard, Al, 194, 351n85 Bernstein, Harry, 38, 158 Berry, Chu, 84, 198 Bibb, Joseph D., 215, 374n60 Bibb, Viola, 374n60 Biddleville Quintette, 146 Bienstock, Freddy, 305 Bienstock, Miriam, 308 Biesel, Charles, 247 Big Bill & the Memphis Five, 194 Big Bopper, The, 299 Big Maybelle, 273 Big Three Trio, 283, 306 Bigard, Barney, 84 Bihari brothers (Lester, Jules, Saul, and Joe), 289, 307 Bilbro, B. H. “Bert,” 226, 378n106 Billboard (magazine), 120, 276, 352–53n98 on Eli Oberstein, 268, 269, 270–71, 272, 274 on Nashville, 294, 295, 395n90 on postwar recording industry, 266, 284, 285, 297–98, 305, 307 records charts in, 143, 266, 308, 351n81, 388–89n5 use of “A&R” in, 20–21, 318n8 use of “record producer” in, 278, 391–92n47 Billboard 1943 Music Year Book, The, 21, 391n46 Billy the Kid, 150 “Billy the Kid” (song), 150 Birmingham, Alabama, 29, 42, 48, 54–55, 62, 71–73, 247, 250. See also Charles, Harry “Birmingham Blues” (song), 220 Black Birds of Paradise, 45 Black Brothers, 195 Black Patti (label), 45, 90, 102, 103, 230, 337n6 “Black Snake Blues” (song), 59, 92, 387n116

430 A&R PIONEERS

Bristol Herald Courier (newspaper), 67 Bristol News Bulletin (newspaper), 56 Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI), 268, 272, 288 Broadway (label), 78, 123, 240 Brock, Karl, 279–80 Brockman, Polk C., 5, 115, 214, 274, 344nn9–10 artists’ contracts and copyrights and, 73, 93, 95, 98–100, 150 background of, 35 “event songs” and, 148–50, 211–13 Rev. J. M. Gates and, 120–22, 126, 135, 343n1 James K. Polk Inc. and, 34, 35, 245, 256 Rev. Andrew Jenkins and, 99, 100, 211–13, 149–50 Mississippi Sheiks and, 55, 329n30 music publishing and, 99, 99–100, 150 OKeh and, 42, 80, 95; record sales and marketing, 35, 110–11, 255–56; recording expeditions and sessions, 35, 53–54, 55–56, 80, 195, 225, 244– 45, 329n30; repertoire selection, 134–35, 150, 348n47 songwriting and, 148–50, 157–58 talent scouting and, 35, 43, 61, 80, 343n1 See also Carson, Fiddlin’ John Brockman Publishing Company, 98–100 Broonzy, Big Bill, 13, 55, 67, 117, 194, 213, 282 Lester Melrose and, 136, 137 Paramount and, 176, 365n79 J. Mayo Williams and, 340n53, 354n114 “Brother Noah Built an Ark” (song), 224

Broven, John, 284–85, 308, 392n56, 398n137 Brown, Ada, 246 Brown, Boyce, 81, 84 Brown, Dick, 271 Brown, James, 305 Brown, Milton, & His Brownies, 182, 193 Brown, Nappy, 273 Brown, Ruth, 310–11 Brown, Wilford J. “Bill,” 64, 176, 181, 199, 330n33 Brown, Willie, 43–45, 176–77 Brown’s Blues Blowers, 280 Brunswick (Canadian) (label), 378n111 Brunswick (label), 9, 19, 84, 105, 237 boundaries among musical genres and, 71, 220, 221–22, 225–26, 377n100, 378n111 foreign-language records and, 29, 227, 228, 377n100 hillbilly artists and, 71, 78, 172, 189, 193–94 Jack Kapp and, 28, 33–35, 101, 221–22, 225–26 Don Law and, 31, 58, 245 race artists and, 64–65, 71, 79, 245 record series of, 2–3, 54, 71, 220–21, 225, 227, 228, 377n100 recording expeditions and sessions of, 29, 48, 49–50, 54, 58, 64, 225–26, 331n54; in Knoxville, Tennessee, 62, 63, 157, 181; in New York, 50, 71, 78, 172, 189, 193–94 recording studios of, 64, 81, 181, 361–62n47 Richard Voynow and, 33, 35, 62, 64, 157, 181 J. Mayo Williams and, 28, 67, 101–3 Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company, 31, 37–38, 50, 101,

246. See also Brunswick (label) Brunswick Ltd. (UK), 50 Brunswick Radio Distributing Company Inc., 245 Brunswick Record Corporation, 69. See also Brunswick (label) Bryan, William Jennings, 6, 22, 52 Buck & His Band, 198 Buffalo, New York, 49–50 Bulleit, Jim, 287, 305–6 Bullet (label), 305–6 Bullet Plastics, 287 Burdette, Lloyd, 207 Buries, George, 85 Burke, Solomon, 284 Burks, Paul I., 13, 42, 43, 137 Burley, Dan, 242, 384n30 Burnett, Richard D., 176 Burnett, Rev. J. C., 39 Burns, Walter Noble, 150 Butcher, Dwight, 78–79 Butt, Lee A., 125–26, 138–40, 206, 207, 243 Butterbeans and Susie, 199 Buzzell, Samuel, 96 C. B. Haynes & Company (Richmond, Virginia), 52–53 “Cabra” (instrumental), 227 Cadena, Ozzie, 273 Cajun music, 48–49, 93, 140, 153, 183 boundaries among musical genres and, 222, 225, 227, 228, 229–30, 377n100, 379n116 See also Falcon, Cléoma (née Breaux); Falcon, Joseph F. “Joe” Calaway, W. R., 154, 178, 208–9, 274 American Record Corporation and, 71–73, 90, 106–7, 157, 189–90 artists’ contracts and copyrights and, 93, 106–7, 108, 111, 355n127

Chatmon, Armenter. See Carter, Bo (Armenter Chatmon) Chatmon, Lonnie, 55. See also Mississippi Sheiks “Chattanooga Blues” (song), 201–3, 202 Chenier, Clifton, 272 Chess, Leonard, 289 Chess (label), 283, 289, 306, 310 Chestnut, Ted, 123, 241, 242–43 Chicago (label), 154, 280 Chicago Cosmopolitans, 27 Chicago Defender (newspaper), 217, 242 advertising and, 37, 102, 237, 246; Columbia, 153, 201–2, 202, 215–17, 216; OKeh, 244–45, 261; Paramount, 238–40, 248–49, 252–54, 253 on vaudeville blues, 115–16, 147, 219–20 Chicago Herald-Examiner (newspaper), 81 Chicago, Illinois, 37, 296 radio stations in, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 108, 194 record sales and marketing in, 242, 259–61, 261, 388n131 recording expeditions and sessions in, 30, 48–49, 51–52, 71–73, 225–26 recording studios in, 50, 61, 361–62n47 See also Dance, Helen Oakley; Melrose, Lester; OKeh (label); Paramount (label); Williams, J. Mayo “Ink” Chicago Music (Publishing) Company, 27, 101, 136–37 Chicago Rhythm Club, 262 Chicago Tribune (newspaper), 260 Chicago Whip (newspaper), 215 Child, Calvin G., 21, 22, 319n11 “Chinaman Blues” (instrumental), 259 Chudd, Lew, 289–90, 297

INDEX

Carson, Fiddlin’ John, & His Virginia Reelers, 217–18 Carter, Benny, 70 Carter, Bo (Armenter Chatmon), 39, 55, 66, 214. See also Mississippi Sheiks Carter, Maybelle, 196–97 Carter, Sara, 196–97 Carter Family, 56, 71, 77, 95, 97–98, 157, 196–97, 267 “Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers in Texas, The” (skit), 197 Cash, Johnny, 293, 306 Castle Recording Laboratory, 291–93, 305 Challenge (label), 213 Champion (label), 65, 74, 79, 92, 139, 209–10, 213, 222. See also Gennett (label); Starr Piano Company “Chantilly Lace” (song), 299 Charles, Harry, 5, 199, 248, 258, 274 background of, 40 Paramount and, 40, 42, 79–80, 90, 254, 258; post-production, 43, 205; record sales and marketing, 258–59, 387n121; recording sessions, 79, 146, 172, 200 songwriting and, 146 talent scouting and, 13, 40, 42, 60, 61, 70, 90, 331n43 Charles, Ray, 284 Charlotte, North Carolina, 79, 259 recording expeditions and sessions in, 48, 64, 109, 141, 179–80, 195–96, 279 See also McCuen, Brad; Sills, Van H.; Therrell, Jason “Jake”; WBT (radio station) Charlotte News (newspaper), 142, 179–80 Charlotte Observer (newspaper), 48, 327n2 Charters, Samuel, 36, 96, 214, 282, 374n56

431

Caldwell, Erskine, 236 “California Kidnapping, The” (sermon), 153 Callahan, Bill, 106, 111 Callahan, Joe, 106 Callahan Brothers, 106 Calloway, Blanche, 27 Calloway, Cab, 83, 84 Calt, Stephen, 258–59, 384n29 on Art Laibly, 42–43, 59–60 on post-production, 370–71n10, 372n32 on J. Mayo Williams, 45, 101, 103, 248, 340n53, 349n51 Camden, New Jersey, 50, 61 Cannon, Gus, 42, 66, 74, 202–3 Capitol (label), 21, 286, 294, 297–98, 391–92n47 Cardinal (label), 147 Carlton, Joe, 265–66, 388n4 Carr, James, 284 Carr, Leroy, 141–42 Carr, Sister Wynona, 271 Carson, Fiddlin’ John, 190, 217–18 Bluebird and, 134–35, 157–58 Polk C. Brockman and: contracts and copyrights, 99–100; record sales and marketing, 35, 110–11, 255–56; recording expeditions and sessions, 35, 53, 110–11, 157–58; repertoire selection and, 134–35, 150, 348n47 OKeh and: contracts and copyrights, 95; record sales and marketing, 244, 255–56; recording expeditions and sessions, 24, 35, 42, 53, 150, 157–58, 195, 244; repertoire selection, 134–35, 348n47 Ralph Peer and, 24, 35, 42, 51, 53, 95, 244 songwriting and, 99–100, 340n44

432 A&R PIONEERS

Cincinnati, Ohio, 49–50, 51–52, 65, 247, 287 Cincinnati Philharmonic Orchestra, 40–41 Cinco Troubadores, 306 “citybilly” singers, 51, 190–91, 192, 194 Claiborne, Lillian, 307 Clarence Williams Music Publishing Company, 26–27, 96, 147 Clark, Walter, 97 Classic Record Company, 267 classical music and opera, 6, 21, 30, 33, 171, 182, 273, 315n15 postwar recording industry and, 273, 274, 279–280, 390n21 race records and, 11, 232 Clayton, Patti, 305–6 Cleveland, Ohio, 51–52 Clinco, Arthur, 178 Cline, Patsy, 292 “Cloudy Sky Blues” (song), 130 Clovers, The, 310 Coffey, Oscar L., 213 “Coffin Blues” (song), 28 Cohen, Leonard, 282 Cohen, Paul, 291, 292 Cole, Nat King, 271, 277, 306 Coleman, Jaybird, 45, 210 Collier’s (magazine), 151, 219 Collins, Floyd, 149–50 Collins, Sam, 45 Columbia (label), 33, 36, 93–94 advertising and, 153, 201–2, 202, 215–17, 216, 237, 240 artists’ contracts and copyrights and, 87–88, 104–105, 108, 117–18, 120–21, 309–10, 341n60, 354n111 boundaries among musical genres and, 201–3, 220, 221, 225, 228, 229–30, 379n124 Cajun artists and, 173–74, 186–87, 225, 228 country music and, 162, 275, 292–94, 293

“event songs” and, 100, 150–52, 153, 211–12, 348n47 foreign-language records and, 8, 30, 52, 375n79 John Hammond and, 25, 70, 81, 85, 105, 173, 280–82, 303–4 hillbilly artists and, 59, 73, 77–78, 108, 128–30, 134, 192–93, 346n30 Dan Hornsby and, 119, 128–31, 170–71, 193, 198, 343n1, 346n30 jazz artists and, 25–26, 70, 81, 85, 105–6, 173, 277 Don Law and, 31, 162, 275, 292–94, 293 J. B. Long and, 39, 90, 111–12 Bob Miller and, 151, 155–56, 171, 193 post-production and, 201–3, 204, 214, 221, 228 postwar recording industry and, 270, 275, 284–85, 286, 292–94, 293 race artists and, 71, 130, 137, 147, 170, 197–98, 230; Barbecue Bob, 129, 130; Rev. J. M. Gates, 119–21, 343n1; Alec Johnson & His Band, 215, 216; Memphis Minnie,117–18 record sales and marketing and, 250–52, 255 record series of, 225, 228, 322n39, 375n79, 379n124; hillbilly series, 2–3, 59, 100, 150, 156, 201, 221, 229, 356n131, 376n86; race series, 201–2, 220, 229, 376n85, 379n124 recording expeditions and sessions of, 49–50, 52, 56–57, 59–60, 162, 174; in Atlanta, 64, 71, 119–20, 128–31, 138, 170–71, 176, 198, 348n45; in Johnson City, Tennessee, 56–58; in New Orleans, 172–73,

183, 184, 186–87; in New York, 25, 77–78, 104–5, 134, 150, 153, 173, 197–98, 348n45 recording studios of, 64, 104, 173, 204 repertoire selection and, 59–60, 77–78, 134, 156–57, 170, 348n45 Clarence Williams and, 26–27, 104, 187, 199, 255 See also Allen Brothers; Dalhart, Vernon; Delmore Brothers; Satherley, Arthur “Uncle Art”; Smith, Bessie; Walker, Frank B. Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), 31, 69, 73, 380n128 Columbia Phonograph Company, 8, 36–37, 38, 69, 117, 228, 245–46. See also Columbia (label) Columbia Recording Corporation, 117, 343n100. See also Columbia (label) Columbia, South Carolina, 54–55 “Come On in My Kitchen” (song), 168 Commercial Appeal (Memphis) (newspaper), 56 Commodore (label), 85–86 Commodore Music Shop (New York), 84–85 Companhia Brunswick de Brasil (Brazil), 50 Condon, Eddie, 85–86 Conqueror (label), 155, 156, 209, 380n128 Conqueror Record Time (radio program), 76 Consolidated Film Industries (CFI), 74–75, 76 Consolidated Talking Machine Company (Chicago), 62–64, 259, 321n27 Continental (label), 79, 273 contracts. See artists’ contracts and copyrights Cooley, Spade, 294

D (label), 299 “Daddy Blues” (song), 239–40 Daffan’s Texans, Ted, 143, 230, 351n77, 380n128 Daily, Harold “Pappy,” 287, 297, 298–300, 304–5 Dalhart, Vernon, 157, 193–94, 230, 347n37 as “citybilly” singer, 51, 190 Columbia and, 100, 150, 151, 354n111 “event songs” and, 140, 131–32, 149, 150, 153, 211–13, 316n36, 353n105 pseudonyms and, 78, 100, 150, 335n103 Carson J. Robison and, 150–51, 354n111 Nat Shilkret and, 33, 131–32, 198, 347n36 Victor and, 14, 33, 131–32, 153, 211–13 Dallas, Texas, 61–62, 64, 80, 162, 166, 175–76, 247. See also Ashford, R. T.; Law, Don Dallas Morning News (newspaper), 61–62 Dance, Helen Oakley, 31, 86, 274, 361–62n47 background of, 33, 35, 81 Master Records Inc. and, 81–84, 82, 180–81, 262

racial dynamics and, 112–13, 198, 226–27 Dance, Stanley, 82, 84 Dandurand, Tommy, & His Gang, 139 “Dangerous Blues” (song), 197–98 “Darkey’s Wail, The” (instrumental), 225 Davenport, Cow Cow, 13, 67, 85, 103–4 Davis, Haskell, 307 Davis, Jimmie, 73, 96–97, 143, 190, 197, 218, 224–25, 379n125 Davis, Joe, 21, 109, 120, 147, 148, 154, 352n97 Davis, Ray, & His Band, 307 Davis, Walter, 65, 137, 282, 332n61 Davis Sales (distribution company), 287 Davison, Wild Bill, 85 DC (label), 307 De Luxe Music Shoppe (St. Louis, Missouri), 31–32, 59, 64–65, 176, 256, 330–31n38 De Vol, Frank, 277 “Dead Man Blues” (instrumental), 246 “Dear Old Girl” (song), 128 “Death of Bessie Smith” (song), 155 “Death of Blind Boy Fuller” (song), 155 “Death of Blind Lemon” (sermon), 155 “Death of Floyd Collins, The” (song), 100, 149–50, 211–12, 348n47 “Death of Jimmie Rodgers, The” (song), 155–56 “Death of Leroy Carr (Dedicated to the Memory of Leroy Carr), The” (song), 155 “Death of Mother Jones, The” (song), 355n127 “Death May Be Your Santa Claus” (sermon), 121 “Death’s Black Train Is Coming” (sermon), 120

INDEX

Cross Road Follies (radio program), 70 Crown (label), 78–79, 267–68, 270, 289 Crudup, Arthur, 282 “Crying in the Chapel” (song), 307 Crystal, Billy, 85 Crystal, Jack, 85 Csida, Joe, 276–77, 278, 318n7 “Cuando Tu Yo Eramos Jóvenes” (song), 227 “Cubanola Glide” (song), 128 Cuerteto Carta Blanca, 183, 330n36 Cugat, Xavier, 289

433

Copas, Cowboy, 298, 305, 306 Copyright Act (1909), 93 copyrights. See artists’ contracts and copyrights Coral (label), 19, 298, 391– 92n47 Corn Cob Pipe Club (radio program), 70 “Corn Licker Still in Georgia, A” (skit), 129–30 Cosby, Bill, 285 Cosnat (distribution company), 287 Costa, Don, 285 Cotton, James, 306 Cotton Belt Quartet, 246 country blues (downhome blues), 4, 11. See also blues; race records; specific artists “country & western,” use of term, 219, 266, 388–89n5 country music, 266, 275, 290–99, 292, 293. See also specific artists; specific record labels Country Music Foundation, 190 Coursey, Farris, 396n103 “Cow Cow Boogie” (song), 104 “cowboy music,” use of term, 266 “Cowboy’s Heaven” (song), 78 Cox, Ida, 28, 136, 215, 240 Craig, Francis, & His Orchestra, 305 “Crawdad Song” (song), 229 Crazy Barn Dance (radio program), 70, 72, 109 “Crazy Blues” (song), 11, 12, 24, 192, 219–20, 351n85 “Crazy Heart” (song), 396n116 Crazy Water Crystals Company, 70, 72, 109 Creatore, Luigi, 279 Creole Jazz Band, 36 Crippen, Katie, 199 Crisis (magazine), 231 Crosby, Bing, 127, 143, 144–46, 167, 302, 311, 351n81 Crosby, Bob, 305–6 “Cross of Gold, The” (speech), 6

434 A&R PIONEERS

Decca (label), 13–14, 27, 156 artists’ contracts and copyrights and, 93, 101–4, 106, 179 boundaries among musical genres and, 221–23, 222, 223, 227 country music and, 291–92, 292 foreign-language records and, 54, 222, 227 Milt Gabler and, 85–86, 217, 277, 278 hillbilly artists and, 50, 71, 78–79, 144–46, 145, 182; Whitey and Hogan, 70, 93, 133, 186 origins of, 9, 38 postwar recording industry and, 19, 20–21, 278, 286, 291–92, 292 race artists and, 45, 59, 62, 67, 103–4, 106, 194, 282 record series of, 54, 221–22, 222, 223, 227, 228, 376n86 recording expeditions and sessions of, 50, 54, 58, 62, 181–82; in New Orleans, 62, 182, 363n70; in New York, 93, 133, 186 repertoire selection and, 133, 140, 141–42, 143, 144–46, 169 talent scouting and, 45, 48, 62, 67, 70, 133 See also Jordan, Louis; Kapp, Dave; Kapp, Jack; Williams, J. Mayo “Ink” Decca Record Company Ltd. (UK), 9, 38 “Deck of Cards” (song), 297 Deep Purple, 393n72 Delany, Tom, 148 “Delfo” (instrumental), 227 Delmore, Alton, 170–71, 176 Delmore, Rabon, 170–71 Delmore Brothers, 128, 170–71, 306, 360n34 “Delta” (instrumental), 227 Delta (label), 306

Delta Twins, 45–46 DeLuxe (label), 290 Deutsche Grammophone Gesellschaft (Germany), 50 Dexter, Al, 143, 144, 273, 351n77, 351n81 Dexter, Dave, 297–98 Dickens, Little Jimmy, 275, 292–93 Dickerson, Aletha, 5, 136, 274 background of, 27 Paramount and, 27–28, 33, 43, 45, 101, 199 songwriting and, 28, 146 Dickerson, Marion, 147 Dickerson’s Record Shop (Chicago), 27 Dickinson, Rev. Emmett, 155, 350n72 Diddley, Bo, 310 “Didn’t It Rain” (song), 146 Diesel Only (label), 293–94 Dillard, Varetta, 273 “Dipper Mouth Blues” (instrumental), 259 Disc (label), 30 Divinity (label), 283 Dixieland Jug Blowers, 196 Dixon, Dorsey M., 109–10, 140 Dixon, Howard, 109–10 Dixon, Robert M. W., 120, 196 Dixon, Willie, 283, 306 Dixon Brothers, 109–10, 140 “Do What You Did Last Night” (song), 133–34 “Dobra Horilka (Fine Brandy)” (instrumental), 227 Domino, Fats, 290 Dominoes, The, 306–7 “Done Gone” (instrumental), 198 “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down Medley” (instrumental), 134 “Don’t Pan Me” (song), 239–40 Dorsey, Jimmy, 192, 302 Dorsey, Thomas A. See Georgia Tom (Thomas A. Dorsey) Dorsey, Tommy, 192, 302 Down Beat (magazine), 81, 104, 178, 262–63

“Down Hearted Blues” (song), 101, 104, 141–42, 350n72 “Down Home Blues” (song), 232 Down South Music Publishing Company, 147–48 downhome blues (country blues), 4, 11. See also blues; race records; specific artists Dozier, Lamont, 311 Dranes, Juanita “Arizona,” 27, 88 “Dream Blues” (song), 252 “Dream of a Miner’s Child” (song), 212, 373n47 Drifters, The, 310 “Driftwood” (instrumental), 227 Driggs, Frank, 162–65, 163, 304 “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-ODee” (song), 280 Driving Miss Daisy (film), 100 “Dry Southern Blues” (song), 4, 42 drugs, 178, 332–33n66 DuBois, W. E. B., 230–31 Duchess Music Company (Corporation), 282–83 “Duck-Yas-Yas-Yas, The” (song), 176 Duke (label), 290 Duke Ellington Inc., 96 Dunn, Bob, 193 Dupree, Champion Jack, 154 Dupree’s Rome Boys, 185 Dupuis, Joswell, 153 Durante, Jimmie, 368n127 Dylan, Bob, 281 E. E. Forbes & Sons Piano Company (Birmingham, Alabama), 40, 248, 258 Eades, Elmer, 301–2 Ebony (label), 280 “Echoes of the Chimes” (song), 194 Edgewater Crows, 45–46 Edison (label), 21, 52–53, 67, 140, 148, 352n97. See also Thomas A. Edison Inc. Edison, Charles, 25–26

See also Bluebird (label); Columbia (label); Mexican music; Polish music; Spanish-language records; Victor (label) Forster, Fred, 275 4 Star (label), 297, 298 “44 Blues” (song), 65 45-rpm singles, 286 Four Hits, The, 269 Foster, John D., 90 Frank Music Corporation, 104 “Frankie” (song), 123 Franklin (label), 273 Franklin, Aretha, 281, 303–4 “Frantic” (song), 307 Freeman, Bud, 85 Freeman, Henry, 154 Freiberg, William, 52 Friedlander, Buddy, 284 Fritzsche, Allan, 260 Frizzell, Lefty, 275, 292–93 “From Spirituals to Swing” concerts, 362–63n60, 392n56 Fruit Jar Drinkers, 172 “Fuhrer’s Face, Der” (song), 268 Fuller, Blind Boy, 77, 90, 106–8, 146, 214, 309, 341n67 Funk Brothers, 283 “G Rag” (instrumental), 195–96 Gabler, Milton “Milt,” 84–86, 198, 217, 262, 277, 278 Gabor, Donald, 273 Gaelic Phonograph Record Company, 9 Gaither, Little Bill, 155 Galehouse, Clark, 287 Gant, Cecil, 306 Gardner, Robert A., 60, 194 Garland, Hank “Sugarfoot,” 396n103 Garner, Erroll, 302 Garon, Beth, 117, 393n62 Garon, Paul, 117, 393n62 Garvey, Marcus, 39 Gates, Rev. J. M., 119–22, 121, 126, 135, 153, 343n1, 350n72

INDEX

“F.D.R. Blues” (song), 154 F. W. Boerner Company, 383n25 Fairfield Four, 305–6

Falcon, Cléoma (née Breaux), 48–49, 140, 172–73, 186, 186–87 Falcon, Joseph F. “Joe,” 48–49, 172–73, 186, 186–87, 228 Famous Hokum Boys, 194 Famous Jubilee Singers, 305–6 “Fast Life” (song), 280 “Fat Man, The” (song), 290 “Fate of Edward Hickman, The” (song), 153–54 Fearn, Elmer Aaron “E. A.,” 259–61, 261, 321n27, 388n131 Federal (label), 306 Ferguson, Bob, 295 Fewkes, Jesse Walter, 16–17 “Fiddlin’ Bootleggers, Parts I and II, The” (skits), 139–40 Fidelity (label), 311 Fields, Arthur, 51, 190, 268 Fiertag, Max, 289 films, 69, 73–77 Fincher, J. W., 70 “Fine and Mellow” (song), 85 “Fisher’s Hornpipe” (instrumental), 229 Fitzgerald, Ella, 277 Flair (label), 307 Flanagan, Taylor, 130, 198 Flatt & Scruggs, 292–93 “Flood Blues, The” (song), 152–53 Floyd, Harmonica Frank, 306 “Floyd Collins in Sand Cave” (song), 150 Flynn, Fred, 194 Foley, Red, 90, 291 “folk music,” use of term, 266 folklorists and song collectors, 13–16 Folkways (label), 30, 303 Ford, Frankie, 290 Ford, Tennessee Ernie, 294 Ford Music, 268 foreign-language records, 6, 7, 8–9, 38, 54, 222, 227–28 boundaries among musical genres and, 227–30, 375n79, 377n100, 378nn111–12, 379n116

435

Edison, Thomas A., 25–26, 53, 233 Edison Shop (Kansas City, Missouri), 32 El Paso, Texas, 247 El Popular Record Shop (San Antonio, Texas), 31–32, 364n74 Elders McIntorsh and Edwards, 152 Electradisk (label), 79 electrical recording. See recording equipment and methods Elite (label), 267 Ellington, Duke, 358–59n20 Helen Oakley Dance and, 31, 81, 82, 83–84, 86, 180–81 Irving Mills and, 90, 96, 261–62 Eli Oberstein and, 113, 279 Ellington, Duke, & His Orchestra, 83–84, 262 Ellsworth, William, 108 Elsasser, Fred, 317n4 Emerson (label), 147 Empress Music Inc., 104 Ertegun, Ahmet, 281, 289, 308–11, 392n56, 398n137 Ertegun, Nesuhi, 281, 289, 308, 392n56 Eskew, Mary Lee, 99 Estes, Sleepy John, 66 eugenics movement, 219, 236 Evans, David, 115, 156, 168–69, 185, 257, 326n74, 387n116 Evans, Joe, 29, 202–3 Evans, Rajah, 45–46 “event songs,” 148–54, 211–13, 212, 237, 353n105. See also specific songs Evon (label), 274 Ezell, Will, 194–95 “Ezra’s Experience at the Recording Laboratory” (skit), 208–9

436 A&R PIONEERS

Geddins, Bob, 286–87 Gee, Jack, 104, 105 Geier, Joe, 125 General Phonograph Corporation, 8, 30, 36, 238, 256, 259, 260. See also Odeon (label); OKeh (label) Gennett (label), 8, 9, 21, 33, 373n43 artists’ contracts and copyrights and, 88–89, 91–92, 114–15, 125 Black Patti and, 45, 103, 230 boundaries among musical genres and, 221, 226, 376n87 hillbilly artists and, 6, 67, 71, 73, 74, 177–78, 207–9, 208, 213, 226 jazz artists and, 6, 27, 29, 36, 124, 198, 368n128 Eli Oberstein and, 267–68, 270, 301 post-production and, 205–6, 207–11, 213, 226, 345n18, 371n18, 373n43 race artists and, 29, 38, 39, 147, 148, 177–78, 199, 213 record catalogs of, 208, 376n87 recording expeditions and sessions of, 16, 16–17, 62; in New York, 29, 200, 206; in Richmond, Indiana, 80, 124–25, 135, 138–40, 170, 172, 185, 198, 199, 368n128; in St. Paul, Minnesota, 38, 49, 49–50, 158 repertoire selection and, 125–26, 138–40, 205–6, 207, 208–9, 213 Harold Soulé and, 29, 49, 125, 170, 185, 209, 210, 345n18 talent scouting and, 29, 71, 73, 90, 124, 199 Dennis Taylor and, 90, 91, 135

See also Jackson, Clayton “Jack”; Roberts, Doc; Starr Piano Company; Wiggins, Fred D. Gennett, Fred, 92, 209, 371n18 Gennett, Harry, 174 George, David Graves, 14 George v. Victor Talking Machine Co., 14 Georgia Music Company (Corporation), 109 Georgia Organ Grinders, 129 Georgia Tom (Thomas A. Dorsey), 136, 141–42, 194, 367n113 Georgia Yellow Hammers, 195–96 “Get ’Em from the Peanut Man (Hot Nuts)” (song), 213 “Get ’Em from the Peanut Man (The New Hot Nuts)” (song), 213 ghost singers, 188–89, 192 Gibbs String Band, Hugh, 200 Gibson, Clifford, 196 Gibson, Don, 295 Gilbert and Sullivan, 279–80 Gillespie, Dizzy, 302 Gillette, Lee, 294, 297 Gilliland, Henry C., 320n22 Gillum, Jazz, 137 Gilmore, Bob, 250 Gioia, Ted, 45, 46, 166, 356–57n1 “Girl I Left Behind Me, The” (instrumental), 139 Girls of the Golden West, 108–9 “Give It to Me, Daddy” (song), 375n70 Glad Music Company, 299 Glenn, Darrell, 307 Glenn, Wilfred, 193–94 Glinn, Lillian, 130, 198 Glover, Henry, 306–7 Godrich, John, 120, 196 Gold Star (label), 299 Gold Star Studios, 299 Golden Echo Quartet, 71 Goldner, George, 289 Good, Dolly, 108–9, 341–42n71 Good, Millie, 108–9, 341–42n71

“Good Mr. Roosevelt” (song), 154 “Goodbye, Little Darlin’, Goodbye” (song), 145–46 Goodman, Benny, 262, 289, 302 Helen Oakley Dance and, 81, 82, 84 John Hammond and, 33, 70, 81, 173, 198 recording sessions and, 33, 70, 105, 173, 192–93, 198 “Goodnight Irene” (song), 306 Gordon, Dexter, 273, 310 Gordon, Robert Winslow, 14–16 Gordon’s Bip Bop Band, Jimmie, 280 Gordy (label), 283 Gordy, Berry, 283–84 gospel music (African American), 27, 71, 94, 124, 220–21, 244 postwar recording industry and, 271, 272, 273, 297–98, 306 See also Black Patti; Norfolk Jazz Quartette / Norfolk Jubilee Quartet; race records; Wiseman Sextette gospel music (white), 2, 133, 141, 193–94, 209, 224. See also Jenkins’ Sacred Singers; Rodeheaver, Homer “Got the Blues” (song), 42 “Got the Kansas City Blues” (song), 171 Grafton, Wisconsin, 31, 61, 174–75, 176–77, 183–85, 204, 205, 338–39n25 Gramophone Company (UK), 52 Grand Ole Opry (radio program), 70, 71, 73, 172, 226, 275, 284, 291, 305 Grant, Roy “Whitey,” 70, 93, 133, 186 “Graveyard Bound Blues” (song), 215 Grayson, G. B., 99–100, 139 Grean, Charlie, 276

Hawkins, Buddy Boy, 172 Hawkins, Coleman, 192, 273, 302 Hay, George D., 71 Hayes, Clifford, 196 Haynes, Charles B., 52–53 Heartbreakers, The, 307 Heebner, Walter, 276 Heindl, Anton, 30, 52, 183 Heineman, Otto, 260 “Hello, Dolly!” (song), 275 Hello World Dog Gone (label), 55 Hemenway, Charles, 267 Henderson, Edmonia, 246 Henderson, Fletcher, 5, 35, 85, 147, 148 Black Swan and, 147, 199, 230, 232, 255 Henderson, Rosa, 148, 246 Henderson, W. K. “Old Man,” 55, 329n30 Herbert, Didier, 183 “Here Comes Santa Claus (Right Down Santa Claus Lane)” (song), 77 Hermanos Hernández, 227 Hernandez Brothers, 227 Herschel Gold Seal (label), 38 Herwin (label), 123 Hess, Cliff, 5, 33, 188, 190 Hibbard, Charles, 260 Hickman, Art, 20 Hicks, Robert (Barbecue Bob), 129, 130 “High Sheriff Blues” (song), 154 Hill, Bertha “Chippie,” 27, 260 Hill, Chris, 148 Hill & Range Songs, 282–83 hillbilly music, 4, 9, 184 boundaries among musical genres and, 10–11, 201–3, 218–19, 221–30, 266 “citybilly” singers and studio musicians and, 51, 189, 190–91, 192–93, 194 “event songs” and, 100, 131–32, 148–51, 153, 154, 211–13 as marketing label, 116-17, 221–22, 222

INDEX

Hager, Fred W., 24, 187, 192, 316–17n37 Haley, Bill, & His Comets, 85 Hall, George, 317n4 Hallstrom, Jack, 276, 277 “Ham Hound Crave” (song), 199 Hamblen, Stuart, 50 Hammond, John, 5, 13, 180, 392n56 artists’ contracts and copyrights and, 104, 105–6, 179 background of, 33, 35

Count Basie and, 25–26, 154, 178, 179, 262, 280–81, 362n59 Columbia and, 25, 70, 81, 85, 105, 173, 280–82, 303–4 “From Spirituals to Swing” concerts and, 362– 63n60, 392n56 Benny Goodman and, 33, 70, 81, 105, 173, 198 Billie Holiday and, 33, 70, 85, 105, 173 on Robert Johnson, 304, 362–63n60 Master Records Inc. and, 262–63 musician selection and, 33, 70, 81, 179, New Masses articles of, 105, 179, 362–63n60 postwar recording industry and, 280–82, 303–4 racial dynamics and, 33, 112–13, 115, 226–27 recording sessions and, 25, 33, 70, 105, 173, 179–80, 198, 281 Bessie Smith and, 104–5, 198 talent scouting and, 25, 70, 173 Teddy Wilson and, 33, 70, 81, 105 Richard Wright and, 25–26, 154 Hampton, Lionel, 85 Handy, W. C., 26 Hanes, Rev. J. O., 254, 387n121 Hanighen, Bernie, 105 Harding, Warren, 22 Harum Scarums, 55 Harlem (label), 280 Harlem Hamfats, 194 Harman, Buddy, 396n103 Harmony (label), 74, 270 Harrell, Kelly, 192 Harris, Wynonie, 306 Harvey, Roy, 77–78 Hattiesburg, Mississippi, 39, 45–46, 54–55, 90 Hawaiian music, 6, 20, 29, 193, 197, 221, 377n100

437

Great Day New Orleans Singers, 199 Great Depression, 7, 286, 294 artists and, 66–67, 123–24 artists’ contracts and copyrights and, 92, 94–95, 98, 117, 342n88 boundaries among musical genres and, 8, 221–22, 226 record companies and, 9, 84, 98, 182, 221–22, 226 record sales and, 9, 48, 94–95, 141, 360n34 recording expeditions and sessions and, 48, 181–82, 204, 226 “Great Speckled Bird, The” (song), 71 Green, Archie, 20, 135, 317–18n5, 382n9 Green, Douglas B., 76 Green, Freddie, 179, 280–81 Green, Jerry, 307 Green, Lil, 358–59n20 Green, Martyn, 279–80 Greene, Allen, 298 Greenwich Music, 272 Grey Gull (label), 74 Grigsby-Grunow Company, 69 Grill, Hy, 298 Grinstead, Saintest Anna, 39 Gross, Mike, 285 “Guitar Rag” (song), 96 “Gulf Coast Blues” (song), 27, 104 Gusto (label), 305 Guthrie, Woody, 30

438 A&R PIONEERS

hillbilly music, continued memorial records and, 155, 155-56 popular music and, 127, 143, 144–46, 351n77 propriety and taste in, 217–18, 373n46, 375n70 record catalogs and brochures, 137, 208, 222, 243, 376n87; Victor, 3, 4, 188–89, 198–99, 224 record series and, 2–4, 221 supergroups and, 193–94 See also country music; honky-tonk music; western swing; specific artists; specific record labels Hilltoppers, The, 273 Hirsch, Bert, 193–94 His Master’s Voice (label), 79, 302–3 Historical Jazz (label), 303 HIT (label), 267, 271 Hodges, Johnny, 84 Hofner, Adolph, 289–90 Hogan, Arval, 93, 133. See also Whitey and Hogan Hokum Boys, 27–28, 194–95 Holiday, Billie, 33, 70, 85, 105–6, 173, 318–19n8 Holland, Brian, 311 Holland, Eddie, 311 Holly, Buddy, & the Crickets, 19 Hollywood, California, 143, 193, 196, 197, 377–78n102 Holmes, Winston, 38–39, 199 “Hometown Skiffle, Parts I and II (skits), 194–95 “Honey Where You Been So Long?” (song), 253 “Honeymoon Blues” (song), 167–68 honky-tonk music, 143–46, 351n77 Honolulu, Hawaii, 29 Hooker, John Lee, 272 Hopi Indians, 6, 16–17 Hopkins, Al, & His Buckle Busters, 194

“horn fright,” 171–72, 360n36. See also “microphone fright” (“mike fright”) Hornsby, Dan, 5, 199 background of, 128, 346n26 Columbia and, 119, 128–31, 170–71, 193, 198, 343n1, 346n30 MGM Records and, 275–76 songwriting and, 128, 129, 146 “Hot Dogs” (instrumental), 184 Hot Springs, Arkansas, 54–55 Hot Springs, Virginia, 22, 52 House, Son, 39, 43–45, 66, 94, 176–77, 183–84 Houston, Texas, 54–55, 297, 298–301. See also Daily, Harold “Pappy”; Starday (label) “How Long—How Long Blues” (song), 141–42 Howard, Rosetta, 194 Howington Brothers & His Tennessee Haymakers, 307 Howlin’ Wolf, 306 “Howling Wolf Blues—No. 1 and 2” (songs), 245 Humes, Helen, 133–34 Hunter, Alberta, 101, 103, 136, 169, 197, 199, 239–40, 350n72 Hurt, John, 123–24, 225 Hutchison, Frank, 195 Hutton, Betty, 269 “I Didn’t Hear Anybody Pray” (song), 109 “I Had the Craziest Dream” (song), 268 “I Want Some of Your Pie” (song), 214 “I Was Afraid of That” (song), 28 “I Wished on the Moon” (song), 173 “I’d Rather Drink Muddy Water (And Sleep in a Hollow Log)” (song), 280 Ideal (label), 289 “If Papa Has Outside Lovin’” (song), 133–34

“If You Want to Keep Your Daddy Home” (song), 197 Imperial (label), 289–90 Imperial Record Company, 267 Impulse! (label), 19 In Old Santa Fe (film), 76 Indianapolis, Indiana, 247 International Novelty Orchestra, 198–99 International Talent Management Inc., 283–84 “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’” (song), 198–99 “It Makes No Difference Now” (song), 143, 145–46 “It’s Dirty But Good” (song), 198 “It’s Right Here for You (If You Don’t Get It ’Taint No Fault O’ Mine)” (song), 11, 12, 24, 192 “It’s Tight Like That” (song), 141–42, 350n72 “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” (song), 275 “I’ve Got to Be a Rug Cutter” (song), 83 Jack Mills Inc., 147–48, 352n95 Jackson, Bo Weavil (James Jackson), 79, 146 Jackson, Bull Moose, & His Buffalo Bearcats, 306 Jackson, Clayton “Jack,” 6–7, 71, 92, 115, 177–78, 206, 209–10, 380–81n135 Jackson, Jim, 66, 332–33n66, 367n113 Jackson, Mississippi, 35, 45–46, 54–55. See also Speir, H. C. (Henry Columbus) Jackson, Papa Charlie, 28, 194–95, 202–3, 225 Jackson, Roddy, 272 Jackson, Shot, 272 “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)” (song), 229–30 James, Elmore, 307 James, Skip, 39, 43–45, 66, 92, 156, 184

Johnson, Robert albums of, 162, 165, 304 John Hammond and, 304, 362–63n60 Don Law and, 64, 161–68, 163, 170, 178, 181, 304, 356–57n1, 357–58n4 Ernie Oertle and, 29, 39, 45, 161 recordings of, 156, 166–69 H. C. Speir and, 39, 45, 161 Johnson, Rosa Lee (née Carson) (Moonshine Kate), 134–35, 157–58, 195, 340n42 Johnson, Tommy, 39, 66, 168–69, 355n122 Johnson Brothers, 195 Johnson City Chronicle (newspaper), 330n33 Johnson City Staff-News (newspaper), 330n33 Johnson City, Tennessee, 56–57, 157, 330n33 Johnston, Jess, 226 Jolly Roger (label), 303 Jones, George, 299, 305 Jones, Grandpa, 306 Jones, Grant, 280 Jones, Jo, 280–81, 362n59 Jones, Johnny, & His Orchestra, 268 Jones, Lewis Wade, 358–59n20 Jones, Maggie, 197–98 Jones, Mamie, 232 Jones, Mother (Mary Harris Jones), 355n127 Jones, Richard M., 5, 27, 28, 146, 199, 260, 321n27 Jordan, Louis, 85, 277, 358–59n20, 384n30 Jordanaires, The, 396n103 Journal and Guide (Norfolk, Virginia) (newspaper), 238–39 Joy, Leonard, 74, 199 Juke Box (label), 271–72 jukeboxes, 142–43, 144, 282, 287, 358–59n20 “Jumpin’ at the Club Blue Flame” (song), 280 “Just Because” (song), 140

INDEX

Jeffries, George, 62 “Jelly Roll Blues” (song), 220 Jenkins, Rev. Andrew, 99, 100, 149–50, 153–54, 211–13, 217–18 Jenkins, Carl, 291 Jenkins Family, The, 99, 340n42 Jenkins’ Sacred Singers, 99, 340n42 Jennings, Waylon, 295 “Jeremiah Hopkins’ Store at Sand Mountain, Parts 1 and 2” (skits), 129–30 “Jeusté Parcqué (Just Because)” (song), 140 “Jim Jackson’s Jamboree— Parts I and II” (skits), 367n113 “Jim Jackson’s Kansas City Blues—Parts 1 and 2” (songs), 332–33n66 “Jimmie Rodgers Visits the Carter Family” (skit), 197 Jobete Music Inc., 283 Joe Davis (label), 154 Joe Davis Music Inc., 148 “John Henry” (song; instrumental), 123, 154, 224, 225, 226 “John T. Scopes Trial, The” (song), 151 Johnson, Alec, & His Band, 215–17, 216 Johnson, Bunk, 85 Johnson, Charles S., 195, 358–59n20 Johnson, Edith North, 31–32, 65, 176, 332n60 Johnson, Eldridge, 22 Johnson, Guy B., 13 Johnson, James “Stump,” 78, 176, 335n103 Johnson, Jesse, 31–32, 92, 176, 256, 330–31n38 talent scouting and, 13, 31–32, 59, 64–65, 287 Johnson, Lil, 213 Johnson, Lonnie, 137, 152, 194, 199, 225, 260, 282, 354n114 Johnson, Louise, 176–77

439

James K. Polk Furniture Company (Atlanta), 35 James K. Polk Inc., 34, 35, 245, 256 Jamison, Thomas, 258 Jaxon, Frankie “Half-Pint,” 194 jazz albums and, 274, 302, 303 boundaries among musical genres and, 220–21 Chicago and, 50, 81, 84, 259, 260 composing and, 25, 154 jam sessions and, 81, 82, 85, 198, 262 New Orleans and, 29, 30–31, 85, 184, 198, 274 postwar recording industry and, 267, 273, 274, 275, 277, 280–81, 284, 302, 307 racial dynamics and, 112–13, 224 racially integrated recording sessions and, 33, 70, 105, 196, 198, 367n116, 368nn127–28 See also Dance, Helen Oakley; Hammond, John; McCuen, Brad; Mills, Irving (Isadore Minsky); race records; specific artists; specific record labels Jazz Panorama (label), 303 J-B (label), 306 Jefferson, Blind Lemon, 60, 80, 257 Paramount and, 152, 326n77, 358n12; advertising, 4, 383n24; Aletha Dickerson and, 27–28; Art Laibly and, 41–45, 154–55, 194–95, 254; record sales and marketing, 154–55, 2 54; recording sessions, 41–42, 184, 194–95 “Jefferson County” (song), 146 “Jefferson County Blues” (song), 79

440 A&R PIONEERS

“K. C. Railroad Blues” (song), 129 Kálmán, Józef, 30 Kansas City, Missouri, 52, 62, 247, 252. See also Holmes, Winston Kansas City Orchestra, 38–39 “Kansas City Railroad Blues” (song), 129 Kapp (label), 275 Kapp, Dave, 148 background of, 36–38 Decca and: artists’ contracts and copyrights, 93; boundaries among musical genres, 222, 227; hillbilly artists, 144–46, 145, 182; postwar recording industry, 20–21, 275, 278; recording expeditions and sessions, 58, 62, 133, 140, 181, 182, 186, 363n70; repertoire selection, 133, 140, 143, 144–46; role of, 38, 62, 144, 222 RCA Victor and, 275, 301–2 Kapp, Jack, 13, 65, 148, 199, 214 background of, 36–38, 74 Brunswick and, 28, 101, 361n40; boundaries among musical genres, 221–22, 225–26; role of, 33–35 Decca and, 85, 179; boundaries among musical genres, 221–22; postwar recording industry, 275, 289; role of, 9, 38; J. Mayo Williams, 28, 45, 101, 169 Vocalion and, 45, 217; advertising, 246–47; boundaries among musical genres, 221–22, 225– 26; musician selection, 367n113; record sales and marketing, 246–47; role of, 22–23, 37–38 Kapp Music Company (Chicago), 37

Kazee, Buell, 189, 192, 193–94 Kemp, Hal, 302 Kendrick, Bob, 279 Kennard, Arbutus M. “A. M.,” 238 Kennedy, Rick, 17, 124, 174, 177, 210 Kenney, William Howland, 28, 32, 59–60, 103, 110, 341n60 Kentucky Thoroughbreds, 241, 242–43 Keyes, Joe, 179 Keynote (label), 30–31, 85, 280 Kilpatrick, Walter “Dee,” 294 Kimbrough, Lottie, 39, 199 Kincaid, Bradley, 6, 71 King (label), 280, 289, 306–7, 390n21 King, B. B., 306 King, Claude, & His Hillbilly Ramblers, 272 King, Edward T. “Eddie,” 20, 22, 49, 132, 211–12, 317n4 King, Pee Wee, 305 King Records Company, 271, 287, 305, 307. See also King (label) Kingston Trio, 285 Kirchstein, Harold M., 21 Kitt, Eartha, 275 Klopp, Walter, 371n14 Knoxville, Tennessee, 62, 63, 64, 71, 157, 181 Knoxville News-Sentinel (newspaper), 63, 181 Koester, Bob, 148 Korean War, 270 Korn, Edward, 279–80 KOWL (radio station), 288 Kramer, Fred, 345n22 Krogan, Arthur, 288 Krueger, Bennie, & His Orchestra, 351n85 Krupa, Gene, 81 Ku Klux Klan, 6–7, 219 Kubies, Hans, 30, 183 KVOO (radio station), 74 KWKH (radio station), 55 label copy notices, 369–70n5 Lacy, Rube, 199

“Lafayette (Allon a Luafette)” (song), 172–73, 228, 361n41 Laibly, Arthur “Art,” 5, 41, 274 background of, 40–41 Paramount and, 79, 250, 344n12; advertising, 242–43, 383n24; artists’ contracts and copyrights, 80, 86, 92, 125; hillbilly artists, 80, 86, 92, 122–23, 125, 254; post-production, 204, 205, 372n32; race artists, 41–45, 92, 154–55, 176–77, 184, 194–95, 254–55; racial dynamics, 113; record sales and marketing, 254–55; recording sessions, 174–75, 176–77, 183–84, 194–95; repertoire selection, 80, 122–23, 154–55, 156; role of, 40, 42–43, 205, 240; talent scouting, 40–45, 59– 60, 74 Laine, Frankie, 271, 280–81 Lamb, Charlie, 300 Lang, Eddie, 192, 302 Lanin’s Roseland Orchestra, Sam, 232 “Laughin’ and Cryin’ Blues” (song), 201–3, 202 Law, Don, 5, 35, 245 American Record Corporation and, 7, 58, 64, 161, 168, 199 background of, 31 Columbia and, 31, 162, 275, 292–94, 293 repertoire selection and, 166–69 See also Johnson, Robert Layne, Bert, 346n30 Lazare, Paul, 279–80 Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter), 14, 26, 30, 306 Leader (label), 275 Leahy, Joe, 284 “L’Eau Haute (High Water Waltz)” (song), 153

M. Witmark & Sons, 268 “Ma Rainey” (song), 155

“Ma Rainey’s Mystery Record” (song), 253, 253–54 “‘Ma’ Rainey’s Souvenir Record” (record), 252 Mac and Bob (Lester McFarland and Robert A. Gardner), 60, 194 Macdonald, John S., 21, 319nn11–12 Macdonough, Harry, 319n12 MacKenzie, John K., 60, 206, 210–11, 345n18 Macon, Uncle Dave, 153, 172, 184 “Madison Time, Parts 1 and 2, The” (dance tunes), 281 Magid, Lee, 273 magnetic tape and multitracking. See recording equipment and methods Mainer, Wade, 109–10, 129 Mainer’s (Crazy) Mountaineers, J. E., 109–10, 141 Majestic (label), 280, 301 Majestic Radio Company, 270 Malcolm, Horace, 194 Malloy, Martin, 195 Maltby, Richard, 302–3 “Mama Blues” (instrumental), 230 Maple City Four, 71 “Maple on the Hill” (song), 140 Mares, Paul, 81, 84 Marigold (label), 311 Marroquín, Armando, 289 Marsh, Orlando, 361–62n47 Marsh Laboratories Inc., 361–62n47 “Martha Campbell” (instrumental), 139 Martin, Asa, 90, 138–40, 207 Martin, Grady, 294, 396n103 Martin, Sara, 27 Martínez, Narciso, 58, 227, 379n116 Marvin, Frankie, 51 Marvin, Johnny, 74 Mascot Pictures, 76 Mason, Rev. Moses, 153

INDEX

London, Johnny, 306 “London Suite” (instrumental), 302–3 Lone Star Cowboys, 229–30, 379n125 “Lonesome Day Blues” (song), 169 “Lonesome John” (song), 229 “Lonesome Road Blues” (song), 78 “Lonesome Whistle” (song), 396n116 Long, James Baxter “J. B.,” 107, 274 background of, 39–40 Blind Boy Fuller and, 77, 90, 106–8, 146, 214, 309, 341n67 Brownie McGhee on, 111–12 Long, Jimmy, 75–76 “Long Lonesome Blues” (song), 42 long-playing (LP) albums, 286, 301–5 “Lord I’m Coming Home” (song), 200 Los Angeles, California, 50, 245, 272, 286, 296 record companies in, 271–72, 289–90, 297, 298 recording expeditions and sessions in, 20, 22, 317n4, 317–18n5 See also Starday (label) “Lost Wandering Blues” (song), 252 Louis, Joe, 154 “Louis Collins” (song), 123 Louisville, Kentucky, 42, 54–55, 70, 196–97. See also Burks, Paul I. Louisville Jug Band, 196 Lubinsky, Herman, 272–73, 289, 308–9 Luman, Bob, 289–90 Lunsford, Bascom Lamar, 68 Luther, Frank, 51, 190

441

Led Zeppelin, 308 Ledbetter, Huddie (Lead Belly), 14, 26, 30, 306 Lee, Peggy, 85 Leiber, Jerry, 279, 305 Lembo, Ralph, 61, 199, 329n30 “Lena Acarreada por al Agua” (instrumental), 227 Leslie Brothers, 271 “Let’s Get Drunk and Truck” (song), 194 Levine, Nat, 76 Lewis, Ed, 179 Lewis, Edward R., 9, 38 Lewis, Jerry Lee, 306 Lewis, Meade Lux, 27–28 Lewis, Noah, 226 Lewis, Smiley, 290 Lewis, William, 108 Library of Congress. See Archive of American Folk Song (Library of Congress) Liebler, Vincent J., 164, 165, 166, 181, 356–57n1 Life (magazine), 143, 262 “Life of Jimmie Rodgers, The” (song), 155–56 “Life of Leroy Carr” (song), 155 Liggins, Jimmy, 272 Light Crust Doughboys, 55 “Like I Want to Be” (song), 226 Lilley, Joe, & His Orchestra, 269 Lim, Harry, 30–31 LIN Broadcasting Corporation, 305 Linderman, William J., 317n4 Little, Harold M., 138–39, 140, 371n18 “Little Marion Parker” (song), 153 “Little Mary Phagan” (song), 150, 340n44 “Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane, The” (song), 24 Little Richard, 272 Little Son Joe (Ernest Lawlars), 136 Lomax, Alan, 13–14, 26, 282, 358–59n20 Lomax, John A., 13, 26

442 A&R PIONEERS

Massey, Guy, 132 Master (label), 81, 82, 83–84, 261–62 Master Records Inc., 81, 82, 83–84, 180, 261–62 “Match Box Blues” (song), 80 May, Brother Joe, 272 Mayfield, Percy, 272 Mazor, Barry, 68, 95, 96–97, 98, 377–78n102 MCA, 267, 310 McAuliffe, Leon, 193 McCann, Bee, 31–32, 364n74 McCarthy, Bob, 306 McClain, Arthur, 29, 202–3 McClennan, Tommy, 67, 358–59n20 McCluskey, Bill, 341–42n71 McCluskey, Millie (née Good), 108–9, 341–42n71 McCormack, John, 319n11 McCoy, Austin, 298 McCoy, Charlie, 194 McCoy, Kansas Joe, 67, 152, 194, 354n114 McCoy, Viola, 148, 352n97 McCoy, William, 230, 379n126 McCrary, James, 130 McCuen, Brad, 113, 301–3, 304–5 McDaniel, Hattie, 27, 39 McDaniel, Sleepy, & His Radio Playboys, 307 McDonald, Earl, 196 McFarland, Lester, 60, 194 McGee, Dennis, 48–49, 225 McGee, Kirk, 172, 361n40 McGhee, Brownie, 111–12, 155, 230, 380n128 McGhee, John, 73 McGhee, “Stick,” 280 McIntire’s Hawaiians, Lani, 198 McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, 35 McMichen, Clayton, 129, 134, 348n45, 346n30 McMichen’s Melody Men, 129 McNamara Trio, P. J., 207 McNeely, Big Jay, 273 McNutt, Randy, 124, 174, 177 McTell, Blind Willie, 24, 169, 170, 230 “Mean Red Spider” (song), 280

Meche, Leon, 172–73 “Medicine Show—Acts I–VI, The” (skits), 195 Mel-O-Dy (label), 283 Melody Maker (London, UK) (newspaper), 130 Melotone (label), 79, 106, 213, 380n128 Melrose, Lester, 5, 136, 137, 194, 206–7, 393n62 artists’ contracts and copyrights and, 117–18 background of, 36 “Bluebird Beat” and, 36, 118, 282, 343n102 music publishing and, 36, 148, 282 postwar recording industry and, 282–83, 306 talent scouting and, 36, 67, 118, 282 as template for “record producer,” 118, 194, 282–83 Melrose, Walter, 36 Melrose Brothers Music Company (Chicago), 36 Memphis, Tennessee, 48–49, 54–55, 56, 62, 66–67, 123–24, 247, 288. See also Sun (label); Watson, Loren L. “Memphis Bound” (song), 352n97 Memphis Jug Band, 96 Memphis Minnie (Lizzie Douglas), 67, 117, 137, 152, 155, 282 Memphis Recording Service, 306 Mendlesohn, Fred, 273 Mendoza, Lydia, 57, 58, 183, 330n36, 364n74 Mercury (label), 27, 267, 280, 284, 287, 298, 299, 300 Meridian, Mississippi, 42–43 Meritt (label), 39 Metronome (magazine), 147 Metropolitan Opera House Orchestra, 33 Mexican music, 54, 58, 62, 222, 306, 357–58n4, 378n112.

See also Mendoza, Lydia; Martínez, Narciso Mezzrow, Mezz, 192, 262 MGM (label), 229–30, 289 MGM Records, 275–76, 291 “microphone fright” (“mike fright”), 162–63, 171, 172–73, 360–61n37. See also “horn fright” microphones. See recording equipment and methods Middleman, Al, 271–72 Mikado, The (album), 279–80, 299 Miles, Josie, 148, 199 “Milk Cow Blues” (song), 141–42 Miller, Bob, 199 as “citybilly” singer, 51, 190 Columbia and, 151, 155–56, 171, 193 songwriting and, 141, 146, 151, 152, 155–56 Miller, Doc, 197–98 Miller, Emmett, 195 Miller, Glenn, 84 Miller, Karl Hagstrom, 52, 224, 344n10 Miller, Mitch, 280, 284–85 Miller, Polk, & His Old South Quartette, 52–53 Miller, Sister Ora, 39 Miller, Walter, 233 Mills, Irving (Isadore Minsky), 90 Master Records Inc. and, 81, 82, 83, 84, 261–62 music publishing and, 96, 147–48, 352n95 Mills Music Inc. See Jack Mills Inc. Milton, Roy, 272 Milton, Roy, & His Solid Senders, 271 Minerva (label), 79 Ming, Floyd, & His Pep Steppers, 364–65n78 Ming, Rozelle, 364–65n78 “Minuet in Jazz” (instrumental), 83 Miracle (label), 283

“Nad Richkoju (At the River)” (instrumental), 227 Napoleon, Phil, 192 Narmour, W. T. “Willie,” 124, 195 Nashboro (label), 306 Nashville, Tennessee, 73 country music and, 291–96, 292, 293

postwar recording industry and, 275, 290–96, 299, 305–6, 395n90 recording expeditions and sessions in, 226, 291–93, 294, 295 recording studios in, 291, 292, 293 See also WSM (radio station) Nashville Tennessean (newspaper), 71 Nathan, Syd, 271, 287, 289, 290, 305, 306–7, 390n21 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 33, 215, 240 National Barn Dance (radio program), 70, 71, 76, 193–94 National Prohibition, 133, 142, 176, 282 Nawahi, Benny, 193 “Near You” (song), 305 “Need of Prayer” (sermon), 120 Neely, Hal, 305 Nelson, Dick, 297 Nelson, Ken, 294 Nelson, Ricky, 289–90 Nelson, Willie, 295 Nennstiel, Gus, 60 “New East St. Louis Toodle-O, The” (instrumental), 83 New Masses (journal), 105, 179, 362–63n60 New Orleans Jazzmen, 89 New Orleans, Louisiana, 26, 39, 245, 255, 290 Cajun music and, 48–49, 153, 172–73, 183, 186–87, 225 distributors in, 35, 248, 256 jazz and, 29, 30–31, 85, 184, 198, 274 recording expeditions and sessions in, 30–31, 35, 48–49, 51–52, 54, 153; Decca and, 62, 182, 363n70 talent scouting and, 42, 62, 250, 290 See also Columbia (label); Oertle, Ernie

INDEX

Morín, Beatriz, 183, 364n74 Morse, Ella Mae, 104 Morton, Jelly Roll, 24, 36, 89, 192, 246 Gennett and, 29, 124, 198, 368n128 Moten, Bennie, 38–39 motion pictures, 69, 73–77 Motley, Frank, & His Crew, 307 Motown (label), 283–84, 311 Motown Records Corporation, 283 “Mountain Goat” (instrumental), 227 Mullican, Moon, 306 Munson-Raynor Corporation (San Francisco), 38 music publishing, 135–37, 147–48 sheet music and, 12, 15, 99, 100, 131, 132, 139, 147, 212 song folios and, 72, 99, 100, 152 See also Mills, Irving (Isadore Minsky); specific music publishing companies Music Reporter (magazine), 300 Music Trade Review (magazine), 16–17, 21 Music Trades (magazine), 30 “My Blue Heaven” (song), 188 “My Blue Ridge Mountain Home” (song), 230 “My Crime Blues” (song), 146 “My Good Gal’s Gone Blues” (song), 196 “My Lord’s Gonna Move This Wicked Race” (song), 94 “Mysterious Coon” (song), 216 “Mystery of Old Number Five” (song), 78

443

“Miss Brown to You” (song), 173 “Miss Martha King” (song), 306 “Mississippi Boweavil Blues” (song), 94, 254–55 “Mississippi Flood” (song), 230 Mississippi Jook Band, 45–46 Mississippi River Flood (1927), 151–53 Mississippi Sheiks, 55, 225, 329n30 Mobile, Alabama, 42–43 Modern (distribution company), 287 Modern (label), 289, 298, 307 Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (album), 284 Moeser, Otto E., 43 Mogull, Artie, 285 Mole, Miff, 192 “Mona Lisa” (song), 306 “Monday Morning Blues” (song), 220 Monroe, Bill, 258, 279, 292–93 Monroe, Charlie, 279 Monroe, Vaughn, & His Orchestra, 285 Monroe, W. G., 187 Monroe Brothers, 141, 279 Montana, Patsy, 97 Montet, Bartmon, 153 Montgomery, Rev. C. D., 229 Montgomery Ward (label), 79, 109 Montmartre Café Orchestra, 20 Moonshine Kate (Rosa Lee Carson), 134–35, 157–58, 195, 340n42 Moore, Bob, 396n103 Moore, Bobby, 179, 362n59 Moore, Byrd, 153 Moore, Monette, 136, 148, 173 Moore, Willie, 167 Moore’s Three Blazers, Johnny, 271 Morand, Herb “Kid,” 194 Morehouse, Chauncey, & His Swing Six, 84 Morgan, Jane, 280 Morganfield, McKinley (Waters, Muddy), 14, 280, 310

444 A&R PIONEERS

New Orleans Rhythm Kings, 124, 198, 368n128 “New San Antonio Rose” (song), 127, 145–46, 345n22 New York, New York, 116, 268, 296 as center of recording industry, 4, 50, 191, 296 recording sessions in, 48–49, 50, 61–62, 185–86, 192–94, 281 recording studios in, 50, 61, 104, 173, 186, 197, 204, 239; Master Records Inc., 82, 83, 261–62 See also “citybilly” singers; studio musicians; specific music publishing companies; specific record companies and labels New York Philharmonic Society, 33 New York Recording Laboratories (NYRL), 8, 50, 101, 239–40, 371n14. See also Paramount (label) New York Symphony Orchestra, 33 New York Times (newspaper), 281 New York World (newspaper), 255 newspapers advertising and, 237, 238–40, 248–49, 381n8 recording expeditions and, 48, 55–58, 56, 57, 63, 327n2, 330n33, 330n36 See also Chicago Defender (newspaper) Newton, Frank, & His Uptown Serenaders, 84 “Night in a Blind Tiger, Parts 1 and 2, A” (skits), 129–30 “No Money in This Deal” (song), 298 “No More Jelly Bean Blues” (song), 59, 92 “Noah and the Flood” (song), 153

Noble, Johnny, 29 “Nobody’s Dirty Business” (song), 123 Noell, Charles, 316–17n37 nom de disques. See pseudonyms Nordskog, Andrae, 29 Nordskog Phonograph Recording Company, 29 Norfolk Jazz Quartette / Norfolk Jubilee Quartet, 94, 113–14, 173–74, 220, 338n23 Northwestern Phonograph Supply Company (St. Paul, Minnesota), 38, 49 notices of coupling and assignment, 369–70n5 “O, Susanna!” (song), 128 Oakland, California, 50, 317n4 Oakley, Helen. See Dance, Helen Oakley Oaks, Charley, 60 Obaugh, Clarence, 133 Oberstein, Eli, 5, 57, 199, 269 Bluebird and: artists’ contracts and copyrights, 108, 109, 110; boundaries among musical genres, 221, 227, 228, 378n112, 379n116; hillbilly artists, 70, 78–79, 108, 109, 140–41, 179–80, 279; race artists, 214; recording expeditions and sessions, 109, 141, 279, 364n74, 378n112; role of, 74, 78–79, 270 postwar recording industry and, 265–66, 267–74, 279–80, 286, 289, 297, 299 Victor/RCA Victor and, 98, 269, 271, 274, 277; firings and resignations from, 265–66, 267, 270, 279; hillbilly artists, 74, 79; racial dynamics, 113, 279; recording expeditions and sessions, 57, 58, 113, 182, 272, 279; Victor

records and, 78–79, 379n116 songwriting and, 268–69 Odeon (label), 8–9, 23–24, 30, 245 Odum, Howard, 13 Oertle, Ernie, 29, 39, 45, 161, 356–57n1 “Oh Daddy” (song), 232 “Oh! Red” (song), 194 “Oh! Yes!” (song), 229 O’Keefe, Jimmy, 189, 193–94, 199, 227 O’Keefe, Lester, 193–94 OKeh (label), 9, 30, 33, 36, 73, 148, 228 advertising and, 238, 244–45, 382n11 artists’ contracts and copyrights and, 88, 92, 95, 96 boundaries among musical genres and, 123–24, 220, 221, 225 Perry Bradford and, 12, 26–27, 260 E. A. Fearn and, 259–61, 261, 321n27 hillbilly artists and, 14, 67, 68, 100, 108, 131–32, 150 jazz artists and, 27, 38, 259, 260, 321n27, 367n116 Jesse Johnson and, 59, 64–65 Richard M. Jones and, 27, 199, 321n27 propriety and taste in music and, 217–18, 374n68 race artists and, 53, 65, 115, 152–53, 148, 187, 244–45; Rev. J. M. Gates, 120–21, 121; Mississippi John Hurt, 123–24; Mamie Smith, 146–47, 192, 220; Victoria Spivey, 59, 61, 64, 92 record sales and marketing and, 23–24, 245, 255–56, 259–61, 261 record series of, 2–3, 124, 220, 221, 225, 239

P. I. Burks & Company (Louisville, Kentucky), 42 Pace, Harry H., 115–16, 230–33, 246, 249, 254, 255, 352– 53n98, 374n60 Pace & Handy Music Company, 147, 352–53n98 Pace Phonograph Corporation, 147, 230–33, 249, 352–53n98, 374n60. See also Black Swan (label) Page, Hot Lips, 84 Page, Patti, 280 Page, Walter, 280–81 Paine Webber & Company, 267 Palitz, Morty, 20–21 Palm Club (label), 303 Pampe, Bob, 58 Pan American (distribution company), 287 Panachord (label), 79 Panhellenion (label), 31 Panhellenion Phonograph Record Company, 9 “Papa’s Billy Goat” (song), 374n67 Paramount (label), 8, 9, 94 advertising and, 4, 238–40, 241, 242–43, 248–49, 252–55, 253, 383n22 artists’ contracts and copyrights, 80, 86, 87–88, 94, 101–3, 113–14, 338n23, 342n88 R. T. Ashford and, 41, 43, 60, 113, 326n77

boundaries among musical genres and, 220, 221, 228, 383n21 Chicago Music (Publishing) Company and, 27, 101, 136–37 Aletha Dickerson and, 27–28, 33, 43, 45, 101, 199 hillbilly artists and, 78, 122–23, 200, 242–43, 254 jazz artists and, 27 Eli Oberstein and, 267–68, 270 Pace Phonograph Company and, 374n60 post-production and, 43, 204, 205, 209, 371n14, 372n32 race artists and, 43–45, 65, 79, 176–77, 184, 194–95, 199–200, 365n79 racial dynamics, 112, 169, 215, 240, 248, 374n60 record catalogs and brochures, 43, 44, 240, 243, 383nn23–24 record sales and marketing and, 154–55, 238–40, 249, 252–55, 253, 258–59, 387n121 record series of, 2–3, 220, 221, 228, 239, 243, 254 recording sessions of, 194–95, 200; in Chicago, 41–42, 79, 80, 123, 176, 199–200, 204, 250, 365n79, 369n139; in Grafton, Wisconsin, 176–77, 184, 185; in New York, 78, 94, 173–74, 197, 204, 239; in Richmond, Indiana, 94, 172, 338–39n25 recording studios of, 50, 174–75, 204, 205, 239, 338–39n25 repertoire selection and, 43, 44, 80, 122–23, 135–37, 154–55, 156, 169 Homer Rodeheaver and, 33, 199–200, 369n139

INDEX

Orange, New Jersey, 50 Orbison, Roy, 306 “Organ-Grinder Blues” (song), 218 Original Kings of Harmony, 273 Original Memphis Five, 197 Original New Orleans Jazz Band, 368n127 Oriole (label), 213, 380n128 Orioles, The, 307 Osborne, G. C., 226 Owen, Margaret, 31–32 Owens, Willie “The Scarecrow,” 213

445

recording expeditions and sessions of, 2, 39, 49–50, 51–52, 53–54, 55, 56, 150, 183; in Atlanta, 24, 35, 42, 51–52, 53, 80, 195, 244–45; in Chicago, 27, 51–52, 62–64, 152–53, 321n27; in Memphis, 123, 124; in New York, 65, 67, 95, 123–24, 133–34, 192, 244; in Shreveport, Louisiana, 55, 329n30; in St. Louis, Missouri, 59, 64–65 recording studios of, 53, 59, 62–64, 321n27 repertoire selection and, 123–24, 133–34, 135, 348n47 Tommy Rockwell and, 38, 80, 123–24, 133–34, 153, 195, 321n27 talent scouting and, 24, 35, 54, 55–56, 67, 68, 80 Clarence Williams and, 26–27 See also Brockman, Polk C.; Carson, Fiddlin’ John; Peer, Ralph S. OKeh Phonograph Corporation, 238. See also OKeh (label) Old Dominion Barn Dance (radio program), 70 “Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster’s Going to Crow, The” (OKeh 4890) (song), 24 “Old K-C, The” (song), 129 Old Southern Sacred Singers, 193–94 Oliver, Joe “King,” 6, 29, 36, 192, 246 Oliver, King, & His Dixie Syncopators, 246 Oliver’s (Creole) Jazz Band, King, 124, 240, 259 Oliver, Paul, 65, 115, 214 Once Upon a Time (album), 285 opera. See classical music and opera

446 A&R PIONEERS

Paramount (label), continued H. C. Speir and, 42, 174–75, 185 Maurice Supper, 41, 45, 238–40, 248–49, 252–54 talent scouting and, 40–45, 59–60, 64, 74, 90 See also Charles, Harry; House, Son; Jefferson, Blind Lemon; Laibly, Arthur “Art”; Norfolk Jazz Quartette / Norfolk Jubilee Quartet; Patton, Charley; Rainey, Ma; Roberts, Doc; Satherley, Arthur “Uncle Art”; Williams, J. Mayo “Ink” Paramount Pictures, 262 Parham, Tiny, 136 Parker, Charlie, 273 Parker, Chubby, 71 Parker, Little Junior, 306 Parman, Dick, 123, 241, 242–43 “party records,” 267 patents, 8 Pathé (label), 30, 147, 148 Patton, Charley, 39, 55, 66, 152, 169 American Record Corporation and, 154, 178, 370–71n10 Paramount and, 43–45, 94, 176–77, 254–55 songwriting and, 154, 355n121 “Pawn Shop Blues, The” (song), 53 “Pay Your Furniture Man” (sermon), 121 Peacock (label), 290 Pearl, Minnie, 298, 305 Pease, James, 279–80 Peer, Ralph S., 5, 23, 97 artists’ contracts and copyrights and, 73, 77, 78–79, 93, 95–98, 110–11 background of, 36 boundaries among musical genres and, 169–70, 219, 220, 222–23, 225, 226, 227–29, 377–78n102

Polk C. Brockman and, 35, 42, 110–111 contracts and income of, 95–97 on Vernon Dalhart, 190 on “hillbilly” music, 116–17 OKeh and, 36; advertising, 244; boundaries among musical genres, 220, 225; hillbilly artists, 14, 48, 67, 68; jazz artists, 38–39, 321n27; race artists, 24, 53, 152–53; record sales and marketing, 23–24, 245; recording expeditions and sessions, 24, 35, 38–39, 51–53, 67–68, 244–45, 321n27; role of, 23–24, 67, 149, 245, 321n27 postwar recording industry and, 267, 268, 276, 297 racial dynamics and, 68, 116–17, 169–70, 219 Jimmie Rodgers and, 24, 77, 97, 97–98, 169, 196–97, 267, 367n116; Bristol Sessions, 56, 68, 95, 157 Southern Music Publishing Company and, 24, 95–98, 250, 268, 276, 339n35 Victor/RCA Victor and: artists’ contracts and copyrights, 95, 97–98; boundaries among musical genres, 169–70, 226, 227, 228– 29; hillbilly artists, 228–29; jazz artists, 196, 321n27, 367n116; race artists, 66, 96, 266; record sales and marketing, 250; recording expeditions and sessions, 48, 55–56, 61–62, 64, 66–68, 182–83, 195–97, 226, 364–65n78; repertoire selection, 169–70, 196–97, 228–29; role of, 14, 24, 95, 250

See also Carson, Fiddlin’ John; Carter Family; Rodgers, Jimmie Peer Supply Company (Independence, Missouri), 36 Penny, Hank, 306 Peretti, Hugo, 279 Perez, Ralph (Rafael Gómez Pérez), 29, 58, 289, 356–57n1 Perfect (label), 213 Perkins, Carl, 306, 309 Perry Bradford Music Publishing Company, 12, 147 Peters, Teddy, 246 Petrillo, James C., 268 “Pharaoh’s Army Got Drownded” (song), 224 Phillips, Sam, 306, 309 Phonograph and Talking Machine Weekly (journal), 147–48 “phonograph fright,” 171. See also “horn fright”; “microphone fright” (“mike fright”) phonographs, 8, 35, 36, 210, 254, 256 sales of, 9, 219, 236 Pickard, Obed “Dad,” 71 “Picking My Tomatoes” (song), 230 Pierce, Don, 267, 287, 297–301, 300, 304–5, 394n76 Pierce, Jack, & the Oklahoma Cowboys, 227, 378n112 Pilgrim Travelers, The, 271 Pirate (label), 303 “Pistol Blues” (song), 146 “Pistol Packin’ Mama” (song), 143, 145, 351n81 Pittsburgh Courier (newspaper), 25, 50, 238–39, 255 Pittsburgh Gazette Times (newspaper), 171–72 Plaza Music Company, 74 “Please Warm My Weiner” (song), 214 Polish music, 6, 8–9, 22, 52, 201, 227 Pollard, Frederick Douglas “Fritz,” 21, 318–19n8

QRS Music Company, 31, 74, 176, 200, 373n46 Queen (label), 280 Quillian, Rufus and Ben, 130, 198

Quinn, Bill, 299 Quonset Hut Studio, 291–93 “R. M. Blues” (song), 271 race records boundaries among musical genres and, 9, 10–11, 201–3, 218–27, 228–30, 266, 379n124 “event songs” and, 151–54 memorial records and, 154–55 postwar recording industry and, 266 propriety and taste in, 213–17, 216, 374n56, 374n68 record catalogs and brochures and, 43, 44, 121, 223, 240, 246, 376n87, 383nn23–24 record series and, 220–21 See also blues; gospel music (African American); vaudeville blues (classic blues); recorded sermons; specific artists; specific record companies and labels Rachell, Yank, 66 racial dynamics in A&R advertising and, 201–3, 240–42, 248–49 artists’ contracts and copyrights and, 112–15, 116–17 boundaries among musical genres and, 10–11, 116–17, 201–3, 218–27, 228–30, 266, 379n124, 380n128 postwar recording industry and, 307–8 pseudonyms and, 226, 232 recording sessions and, 166, 168–70, 173–74, 177–78, 195–98 talent scouting and, 65, 67, 68 racism, 113–15, 116–17, 177–78, 215–17, 216, 232, 233, 279, 352–53n98 Raderman, Lou, 132

INDEX

Powers, Ada, 189 Powers, Charles, 189, 365– 66n90 Powers, Fiddlin’, & Family, 188–89, 192 “Prairie Lullaby” (song), 78 “Prayer of Death” (song), 94 “Praying on the Old Camp Ground” (song), 123 “Preacher Man Blues” (song), 220 Prensa, La (San Antonio, Texas, newspaper), 330n36 Prescott, John O., 16–17 Presley, Elvis, 277, 306 Presto (magazine), 36 Price, Lloyd, 272, 285 Price, Ray, 292–93, 305 Price, Sam, 326n77 Prima, Louis, & His Orchestra, 267 Prisonaires, The, 306 “Prisoner’s Song, The” (song), 14, 33, 131–32, 316n36, 347nn36–37 “Prohibition—Yes or No, Parts 1 and 2” (skits), 129–30 Pruitt Twins, 252 pseudonyms artists’ contracts and copyrights and, 77–80, 92, 93, 185, 299 foreign-language records and, 227–28, 378nn111– 12, 379n116 Gennett and, 92, 209–10 hillbilly artists and, 51, 74, 78–79, 123, 210, 227, 242, 335n103 race artists and, 65, 79, 94, 130, 210, 335n103 racial dynamics of, 226, 232 Puckett, Riley, 99–100, 225 Puritan (label), 240

447

Polonia Phonograph Company, 9 Polskie Kwartet Instrumentalny, 227 Pomus, Doc, 279 “Pony Blues” (song), 94, 372n32 Poole, Charlie, 77–78, 134, 190 Poole, Charlie, & the North Carolina Ramblers, 77–78, 134, 190 “Poor Boy Blues” (song), 79 “Poor Me” (song), 370n10 Porter, Bill, 295 Portland, Oregon, 245, 291 post-production assignment of series, 201– 3, 218–30, 377n100, 378nn111–12, 379n116, 379n124 propriety and taste in, 211–19, 373n46, 374n56 racial dynamics of A&R and, 201–3, 202, 215–17 selection of takes and coupling of sides in, 203–11 See also specific record labels postwar recording industry albums and, 286, 301–5 artists’ contracts and copyrights and, 308–12 boundaries among musical genres and, 266, 307–8, 388–89n5 country music and, 266, 275, 290–99, 292, 293 record producers and, 25, 118, 121–22, 130, 179–80, 187, 277–85 rhythm & blues, 266, 271–72, 273, 280, 289–90, 306–8 rise of independent labels and, 286–90, 296–301, 305–7 transitional figures in, 265–78 See also specific record labels “Pot Licker Blues” (instrumental), 195 Powell, Harvey, 207

448 A&R PIONEERS

radio barn dances, 70–72, 72, 76, 109, 193–94, 226. See also Grand Ole Opry (radio program) Radio Corporation of America (RCA), 14, 69, 274, 339n35. See also RCA Victor radio stations, 255 ASCAP and, 268–69 growth of, 287–88 talent scouting and, 53, 68–77 See also radio barn dances; specific radio stations Rainbow (label), 33, 199, 369n139 Rainey, Ma, 27–28, 240, 252–54, 253, 259 Ralph S. Peer Inc., 24, 95 Ram, Buck, 273 Rand, Odell, 194 Raney, Wayne, 306 Razaf, Andy, 148 RCA Victor, 66, 70, 113, 129, 196, 250 artists’ contracts and copyrights and, 89, 97–98, 108, 109 Chet Atkins and, 295–96 Great Depression and, 9, 98, 226 Dave Kapp and, 275, 301–2 Lester Melrose and, 137, 206–7, 282 postwar recording industry and, 276–77, 286, 301–3, 307 recording expeditions and sessions of, 61–62, 64, 66, 181–83, 195–97, 226, 279, 377–78n102; Mexican music and, 57, 58, 227, 364n74 recording studios of, 64, 196 Steve Sholes and, 295, 296–97, 301–2, 307 Frank Walker and, 29, 229–30, 275 See also Bluebird (label); Oberstein, Eli; Peer, Ralph S.; Victor (label)

record catalogs and brochures, 3, 44, 121, 208, 222, 223. See also specific record labels Record Corporation of America, 274 Record Making with Duke Ellington and His Orchestra (film), 262 record producers emergence of, 266, 277–85 magnetic tape and, 25, 278 precursors of, 118, 121–22, 130, 179–80, 187 use of term and, 278, 391–92n47 record sales and marketing advertising and, 201–3, 202, 235–45, 246, 248–49, 252–55, 253 distribution deals and, 23–24, 245–52, 262 promotional activities and, 252–63, 253, 261 See also record catalogs and brochures; specific record labels record series, 2–4, 8–9, 219, 220–21, 380n128. See also specific labels record stores. See regional distributors and retailers; specific stores recorded sermons, 119–22, 121, 153, 155, 221, 229, 254, 350n72, 387n121 recording engineers and crafting the sound of recordings, 18, 125, 127, 184–85, 189, 278 as de facto A&R men, 22, 125, 317n4, 317–18n5 postwar recording industry and, 291, 292, 294, 295 role of, 170, 174, 183, 185 See also specific recording engineers recording equipment and methods acoustical recording and, 10, 120, 157–58, 185, 188, 213, 316n36

electrical recording and, 10, 49, 51, 120, 157–58, 171, 185–87, 316n36 magnetic tape and multitracking and, 25, 278, 279–80, 299 See also “horn fright”; “microphone fright” (“mike fright”); recording engineers; recording studios recording expeditions assembly-line model and, 181–83, 363n70 impact of Great Depression on, 48, 181–82, 204, 226 multipart ensemble records and, 195, 367n113 newspapers and, 48, 55–58, 56, 57, 63, 327n2, 330n33, 330n36 racially integrated recording sessions and, 195–98 repertoire selection and, 138–40 talent scouting and, 47–64, 56 See also recording equipment and methods; recording sessions; recording studios; specific cities; specific record companies and labels recording sessions acoustical and technical challenges of, 62–64, 174–75, 181–82, 191–92, 361–62n47 alcohol and, 171, 176–77, 362n55 creative interventions of A&R managers and, 122–35, 139–40, 187–90, 191–200 assembly-line model of, 181–83 Robert Johnson and, 161–68, 170, 181, 357–58n4 multipart ensemble records and, 194–95, 367n113

Richmond, Virginia, 35, 48, 52–53, 70 “Riders in the Sky (A Cowboy Legend)” (song), 285 Riley, Billy Lee, 306 Ring, Justin, 59 Ritter, Tex, 294 RKO-Unique (label), 284 Robbins, Marty, 275, 292–93 Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers (album), 162 Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers, Vol. 2 (album), 165 Roberts, Caughey, 179 Roberts, Doc, 13, 90, 137 American Record Corporation and, 157, 189–90 Gennett and, 80, 90, 91; contracts and copyrights, 88–89; post-production, 205–6, 207; record sales and marketing, 243; recording sessions, 80, 122–23,135, 138–40, 207; repertoire selection, 125–26, 138–40 Asa Martin and, 90, 138–40, 207 Paramount and, 42, 137; advertising, 241, 242–43; contracts and copyrights, 80, 86, 92, 125; recording sessions, 122–23; repertoire selection, 80, 122–23 Robertson, Alexander Campbell “Eck,” 198, 320n22 Robeson, Paul, 154 Robey, Don, 290, 395n89 Robinson, Alexander J., 27, 136 Robison, Carson J., 198, 230 as studio singer and musician, 51, 132, 189, 190, 192 Vernon Dalhart and, 150–51, 354n11 songwriting and, 150–51, 153–54, 212

INDEX

“Red Cross the Disciple of Christ Today” (sermon), 153 Red Robin (label), 306 Redding, Otis, 284 Reeves, Jim, 295 Reeves, Martha, 283, 311–12 Rega Orchestra, 192 Regal-Zonophone (label), 79 regional distributors and retailers advertising and, 236, 237, 247–48 record sales and marketing and, 256–61 rise of postwar independent labels and, 287 talent scouting and, 40–46, 47–48, 53–54, 61–62, 64–66 See also specific distributors and retailers; specific stores Reig, Teddy, 273 Reinhardt, Django, 85 Reneau, George, 60, 99–100, 188 Renfro Valley Barn Dance (radio program), 70 repertoire selection, 133–46, 168–70. See also specific A&R managers and officials; specific record labels Republic Pictures, 74–75, 76 Reser, Harry, 192 Resnik, Regina, 273 “Revenue Man Blues” (song), 355n121 Reynolds, Blind Joe, 66 Reynolds, George, 291 Rhodes Orchestra, Todd, 306–7 rhythm & blues, 266, 271–72, 273, 280, 289–90, 306–8 use of term, 219, 266 See also specific artists; specific record labels Rhythm & Blues Foundation Inc., 310–11 Richardson, James E., 14–15 Richmond, Indiana, 29, 61, 94, 172. See also Gennett (label); Starr Piano Company

449

musical contributions of A&R managers at, 27, 28, 148, 194, 198–200, 232, 346n30, 352n97 musician selection and, 130, 179–81, 188–89, 191–98, 367n113, 367n116 racial dynamics of, 166, 168–70, 173–74, 177–78 racially integrated sessions and, 33, 173, 195–98, 225, 262, 367n116, 368n128, 369n139 session supervision and, 161–68, 170, 173–74, 181, 183–85 studio singers and musicians and, 51, 130, 132, 188–89, 190–94, 197–98, 228 supergroups and, 193–94 See also recording engineers; recording equipment and methods; recording expeditions; recording studios; specific cities; specific record companies and labels recording studios, 24, 50–51, 61, 185–6, 191–92, 204 acoustical and technical challenges and, 62–64, 174–75, 181–82, 191–92, 361–62n47 photographs of, 82, 91, 145, 292, 293 postwar and, 291–93, 292, 293, 299 promotional activities and, 82, 261–62 recording expeditions and, 62–64, 174, 181–82, 185, 186–87, 321n27 See also recording engineers; recording equipment and methods; recording expeditions; recording sessions; specific cities; specific record companies and labels

450 A&R PIONEERS

Rock Hill, South Carolina, 182 “Rock It” (song), 299 “Rocket 69” (song), 306–7 “Rocket to the Moon” (song), 306–7 “Rockin’ and Rollin’ with Grandmaw (On Saturday Night)” (song), 354n111 Rockwell, Tommy, 38, 80, 123– 24, 133–4, 153, 195, 321n27 Rodeheaver, Homer, 33, 199–200, 369n139 Rodgers, Jimmie, 45, 190, 218 Louis Armstrong and, 196, 367n116, 377–78n102 bluesmen and, 167, 168, 196 boundaries among musical genres and, 169, 196, 197, 224–25 memorial records and, 155, 155–56 Ralph Peer and, 24, 97; contracts and copyrights, 77, 95, 97–98; recording expeditions and sessions, 56, 68, 95, 157, 196–97, 367n116, 377–78n102 “Rollin’ Mama Blues” (song), 169 Rolling Stones, 308 Romeo (label), 213, 380n128 Rondo (label), 274 Rondo-lette (label), 274 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 154 Roosevelt, Theodore, 22 “roots music,” definition of, 6. See also blues; Cajun music; foreign-language records; gospel music (African American); gospel music (white); hillbilly music; jazz; Mexican music Rose, Biff, 285 Rose, Fred, 73, 291 Rose, Vincent, 20 Rowe, Mike, 137, 283 Rowe, Monk, 180 Roy, William G., 218–19, 224 Royal Plastics, 287 Royale (label), 267, 270–71, 273

royalties. See artists’ contracts and copyrights Rucker, Laura, 27–28 Rupe, Art (Arthur Goldberg), 271–72, 279, 286, 289, 297, 307 rural drama skits. See skit records Russell, Pee Wee, 85 Russell, Tony, 48, 49, 54, 90, 123–24, 192–93 “rustic music,” use of term, 266 Rutherford, Leonard, 176 “Sad Lover” (song), 230 Sajewski, Alvin, 183 “Sallie Johnson and Billy in the Low Ground” (instrumental), 198 Salt Lake City, Utah, 49–50 “Salty Dog Blues” (song), 225 San Antonio Express (newspaper), 54, 58, 364n74 San Antonio Light (newspaper), 29, 57, 58, 364n74 “San Antonio Rose” (instrumental), 126–27, 345n22 San Antonio, Texas music shops in, 31–32, 364n74 recording expeditions and sessions in, 35, 48–49, 54–55, 279; Mexican music and, 57, 58, 62, 183, 227, 357–58n4, 364n74 See also American Record Corporation (ARC) San Francisco, California, 52, 286–87 Santiago, Al, 289 Sarah & Her Milk Bull, 45–46 Satherley, Arthur “Uncle Art,” 5, 13, 75, 142, 178 American Record Corporation and, 31, 156, 230; advertising, 156; artists’ contracts and copyrights, 87–88, 106–8; hillbilly artists, 73–77, 75, 108, 156;

post-production, 156, 213, 214, 370–71n10; race artists, 106–7, 370–71n10; recording expeditions and sessions, 54–55, 175– 76, 356–57n1; Vocalion and, 54–55, 213; western swing bands, 116, 126–27, 175–76, 345n22 background of, 31 Columbia and, 31, 143, 214; artists’ contracts and copyrights, 87–88, 93–94, 108, 117–18; country music, 275, 292–93; hillbilly artists, 73, 73–77, 75, 156, 184; honky-tonk artists, 143, 144; postwar recording industry, 275, 292–93; race artists, 117–18; recording expeditions and sessions, 73, 77, 126–27, 184; role of, 21, 275; songwriting, 126–27, 345n22; western swing bands, 116, 126–27, 345n22 on “hillbilly” music, 116–17 Paramount and, 79, 238–39, 371n14; artists’ contracts and copyrights, 87–88, 94, 113–14, 338n23, 342n88; race artists, 94, 113–14, 173–74, 338n23; record sales and marketing, 249–50; recording sessions, 173–74, 197; role of, 31, 249–50; talent scouting, 79–80 QRS and, 31, 176 racial dynamics and, 113–14, 173–74 “Satisfaction Blues” (song), 198 Saturday Evening Post (magazine), 93–94, 184 Savoy (label), 85, 272–73, 289 Sawyer’s Jazz Band, Bob, 198 Scarborough, Dorothy, 13 Schneider, Leonard, 156

skit records in hillbilly field, 77–78, 129–30, 139–40, 195, 197, 208–9, 346n30 in race field, 11, 194–95, 367n113 Skylar, Sunny, 269 Skyles, Bob, & His Skyrockets, 279 Slack, Freddie, & His Orchestra, 104 Sledge, Percy, 284 Slim, Bumble Bee, 155, 311 Slover, Otho C., 62 Slovetsky, Grace, 49 Small, Mary, 271 Smeck, Roy, 192 Smith, Arthur, 279, 378n112 Smith, Bernard “Slim,” 192–93 Smith, Bessie Columbia and: A&R men and, 27, 104–5, 187, 198, 199, 229, 255, 379n124; contracts and copyrights, 104–5, 111, 341n60; postproduction, 229, 379n124; recording sessions, 104, 198; recordings of, 27, 104, 141, 152, 153, 187, 354n114; repertoire selection, 141–42 Smith, Cal, 275 Smith, Carl, 179, 275, 292–93 Smith, Ivy, 213 Smith, J. T. “Funny Paper,” 245 Smith, Mamie, 11, 12, 24, 146–47, 192, 219–20 Smith, Mamie, & Her Jazz Hounds, 12, 192 Smith, S. W. “Shell,” 195 Smith, Trixie, 199, 240 Smith, Willie “The Lion,” 27 Smithsonian Folkways (label), 30 Smithsonian Institution, 16–17 Smoky Mountain Ballads (album), 316n33 Snow, Hank, 295 Sodja’s Swingtette, Jo, 84 Soileau, Leo, 48–49

INDEX

Shelton Brothers, 140 Shepherd, Bill, 207 “She’s a Truckin’ Little Baby” (song), 214 “She’s My Curly Headed Baby” (song), 106 “She’s Your Cook But She Burns My Bread Sometimes” (song), 214 Shilkret, Nathaniel “Nat” (Naftule Schüldkraut), 5, 131 background of, 33 songwriting and, 131–32, 146, 347n36 Victor and: Vernon Dalhart, 131–32, 347n36; foreign-language records, 22, 228; hillbilly music, 131–33, 188–89, 190, 198–99, 320n22, 348n40; postproduction, 204–5; recording sessions, 131– 32, 188–89, 198, 320n22; repertoire selection, 131–33, 348n40; role of, 7, 33, 74, 198–99 Shines, Johnny, 167 Shirley & Lee, 290 Sholes, Steve, 276, 277, 295, 296–97, 301–2, 307, 396n116 Shores, Bill, 185 Shreveport, Louisiana, 55, 329n30 Shuman, Mort, 279 Sieber, John A. “Jack,” 238, 382n11 Siegel, Sidney, 289 Siegert, Ben, 271 Signature (label), 19, 85 Sills, Van H., 13, 70, 133, 142 “Silver Haired Daddy of Mine” (song), 75–76 Silvertone (label), 209 Simon, Joe, 284 Singleton, Shelby, 287 “Sitting on Top of the World” (song), 55 “Sixty-Minute Man” (song), 306–7

451

Schnelle, William, 62 Schoenfeld, Herman “Herm,” 277, 279, 284–85 Schubert, Adrian, 78, 199 Schultz, Alfred, 344n12, 371n14 Scott Quintette, Raymond, 83 “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues” (song), 94, 254–55 Scruggs, Irene, 246 Sears, Roebuck & Company, 76, 156, 209, 213, 373n43 Seeco (label), 289 Seeger, Mike, 229 Seeger, Pete, 281 segregation record stores and, 218–19, 248 recording industry and, 10, 65, 154, 225 southern society and, 4, 65, 115, 164, 177, 201–2, 203 Segura, Dewey, 183 Sepia Tones, The, 271 “Serenade” (instrumental), 227 “Serenata” (instrumental), 227 sermons. See recorded sermons Sesma, Lionel “Chico,” 288 “Sewing Machine Blues” (song), 218 sexism, 32–33, 112, 115–16, 117–18 Shade, Will, 66–67, 96 Shades of Deep Purple (album), 393n72 Shapiro, Bernstein & Company Inc., 100, 132 Shaw, Artie, 82, 262 Shay, Jeff, 76 “She Didn’t Lay That Pistol Down” (song), 273 sheet music. See music publishing Sheet Music News (magazine), 187 “Shelby Disaster, The” (song), 128 shellac, 31, 373n43, 391n46 Shelley, David, 21 “shells” (“stampers”), 204 Shelly Products Pressing Plant, 287 Shelton, Aaron, 291

452 A&R PIONEERS

“Soldier’s Sweetheart, The” (song), 95 “Some Day, Sweetheart” (instrumental), 246 song folios. See music publishing songwriting, 135–37, 146–59. See also specific A&R managers and officials Sonora (label), 270 Sons of the Pioneers, 50 Sooy, Charles, 319n12 Sooy, Harry O., 22, 52, 317n4, 317–18n5 Sooy, Raymond, 182, 319n12 Soul Stirrers, 271, 272 Soulé, Gordon, 29 Soulé, Harold, 29, 49, 125, 170, 185, 209, 210, 345n18 Soulé Brothers Music Company (Portland, Oregon), 29 Southern (label), 280 Southern Music Publishing Company, 24, 95, 96–98, 250, 268, 276, 339n35 Southern Radio Corporation (Charlotte, North Carolina), 70, 142, 257–58 Sovine, Red, 305 Spain, Irene, 99, 100, 149–50, 217–18, 340n42, 340n44, 374n68 Spand, Charlie, 194–95 Spanish-language records, 8–9, 29, 52, 62, 227, 375n79. See also Mexican music “Spanish Two Step” (instrumental), 126 Specialty (label), 271–72, 289, 307, 311 Speckled Red (Rufus George Perryman), 367n113 Speir, H. C. (Henry Columbus), 5, 146, 274 American Record Corporation and, 39, 45–46, 90 artists’ contracts and copyrights and, 94, 332–33n66 background of, 39, 115

contracts and income of, 45–46, 90 Art Laibly and, 40, 42, 43–45, 174–75, 250 Ernie Oertle and, 39, 45, 161 Paramount and, 42, 174–75, 185 race artists and, 39, 45–46, 66, 146, 153, 177, 355n122 Robert Johnson, 39, 45, 161 racial dynamics and, 115, 177, 214 record sales and marketing and, 32, 61, 110–11, 115, 256–57, 257 recording expeditions and sessions and, 39, 45–46, 90, 174–75, 185 Speir Phonograph Company and, 39, 256–57, 257 talent scouting and, 13, 39, 42, 45, 60, 61, 62, 65–66 Speir Phonograph Company (Jackson, Mississippi), 39, 256–57, 257 “Spike Driver Blues” (song), 123 Spivacke, Harold, 13–14 Spivey, Victoria, 59, 61, 64, 92, 199, 330–31n38 Springsteen, Bruce, 282 St. Louis Jimmy (James Oden), 136 St. Louis, Missouri, 42, 247, 248 recording expeditions and sessions in, 38–39, 54, 59, 61, 62, 64–65, 146 See also De Luxe Music Shoppe (St. Louis, Missouri); Johnson, Jesse St. Paul, Minnesota, 49–50, 50, 247 “Stack O’ Lee Blues” (song), 123 Stacy, Jess, 81 “Stampede in G Minor” (instrumental), 25–26 “stampers” (“shells”), 204 Standard Phono Company, 21 Stanley, Aileen, 232 Stanley Brothers, 292–93

Starday (label), 267, 287, 297, 298–301, 300, 304–5 Starday-King Records Inc., 305 Starnes, Jack, 298 Starr, Milton, 255 Starr Piano Company, 8, 175, 209 artists’ contracts and copyrights and, 88–89 recording studios of, 91, 174, 198, 338–39n25 Fred Wiggins and, 124–25, 205–6 See also Champion (label); Gennett (label) Starrite Publishing Company, 297, 298 State Street Music Publishing Company, 101, 104 Staton, Candi, 284 “Step It Up and Go” (song), 146 Stephany, Henry, 205, 238–39, 240, 243, 254 Sterchi Brothers Furniture Company, 60 Sterling (label), 271 Stevenson, William “Mickey,” 283, 284 Stewart, Priscilla, 146 Stewart, Rex, 84 Stokes, Frank, 42, 74 Stokes, Lowe, 134, 348n45 Stokes, Lowe, & His North Georgians, 129 Stoller, Mike, 279, 305 Stone, Cliffie, 294 Stone, Jesse, 308 Stoneman, Ernest V., 13, 56, 67 Stove Pipe No. 1 (Sam Jones), 229 Stover, Everett, 126 Stover, Smokey, 307 “Strange Fruit” (song), 85 Stuart, Uncle Am, 188 studio musicians, 130, 132, 188–89, 190–94, 197–98, 228 “Sugar in the Gourd” (song), 217–18, 374n67 “Suicide Blues” (song), 197–98 Sullivan, Joseph A., 382n11 Sun (label), 277, 306, 309

Tepper, Jeremy, 293–94, 299–300 “Terraplane Blues” (song), 168 Tetragrammaton (label), 285, 393n72 Tex, Joe, 284 “Texas Moon” (song), 108 Texas Radio Sales Company (Dallas, Texas), 62 Thallmayer, Albert, 30, 183 “That Black Bottom Dance” (song), 213 “That Man Is Here Again” (song), 83 “That Thing Called Love” (song), 24, 192 Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA), 255 “Themes from ‘The Man with the Golden Arm’” (instrumental), 303 Therrell, Jason “Jake,” 257–58 “They’re Red Hot” (song), 167–68 Thiele, Bob, 19–20 “32-20 Blues” (song), 156 Thomas, Hersal, 260 Thomas, Jesse “Babyface,” 60, 61 Thomas, John, 176 Thomas, Willard “Ramblin’,” 60 Thomas A. Edison Inc., 8, 10, 31, 50, 149, 233. See also Edison (label) Thompson, Hank, 294 Thorn in Mrs. Rose’s Side, The (album), 285 Thornhill, Claude, 84 Three Jazz Wizards, The, 27 Three Tobacco Tags, The, 153 Tico (label), 289 Tillis, Mel, 275 Tillman, Floyd, 351n77 Time (magazine), 127, 144 “Times Am Gittin’ Hard” (song), 194 Titon, Jeff Todd, 59, 66, 110, 382n9 Tivoli Dance Orchestra, 232 “Tom Cat and Pussy Blues” (song), 218

INDEX

Taft, William Howard, 22, 52–53 “Tain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness” (song), 197 talent scouting musical artists involved in, 13, 64–68 radio and, 53, 68–77 recording expeditions and, 47–64, 56 regional and local talent scouts and, 13, 40–46, 47–48, 61–62, 64–66, 183 rerecording established artists and, 77–86 women and, 31–32, 183, 364n74 See also specific A&R managers and officials Talking Machine Journal (journal), 10, 248 Talking Machine World (journal), 32, 34, 206

on A&R managers and officials, 20, 23–24, 38, 245, 246–47 on promotional activities, 256, 259–60 on race records, 10, 62, 120, 244, 246–47 on record companies and labels, 50, 62; Columbia, 38, 52; OKeh, 23–24, 51–52, 64, 244, 245, 256, 321n27, 382n11; Victor, 20, 21, 23–24, 211; Vocalion, 22–23, 246–47 on record sales and marketing, 23–24, 32, 245, 246–47 on recording expeditions, 20, 38, 51–52, 62, 149, 317n4, 317–18n5 Tamla (label), 283 Tampa Red (Hudson Woodbridge), 137, 141–42, 367n113 Tampa Red & the Chicago Five, 194 Tanner, Gid, 130, 302 Tanner, Gid, & His SkilletLickers, 128, 129–30, 134, 301–2, 346n30 “Tappin’ the Commodore Till” (instrumental), 85 Targ & Dinner, 267 Tate, Erskine, & His Vendome Orchestra, 259 Taylor, Alf, & His Old Limber Quartet, 224 Taylor, “Big Road” Webster, 225–26 Taylor, Dennis, 61, 90, 91, 135 Teagarden, Jack, 198 “Teddy Bear” (song), 305 television, 287–88 Temple, Johnnie, 45, 169, 194 Tempo (magazine), 262 Temptations, The, 283 Tennessee Recording and Publishing Company, 305 Tennessee/Republic (labels), 306

453

Sunday, Rev. Billy, 33 “Sunny Southern Blues” (song), 225–26 “Sunset March” (instrumental), 134 Suntan Studios, 318–19n8 supergroups, 193–94 Superior (label), 209 Supertone (label), 209, 213 Supper, Maurice A., 41, 45, 238–40, 248–49, 252–54, 371n14, 383n21 Supper, Viola, 31–32 Supremes, The, 284 Supremes Sing Country, Western & Pop, The (album), 284 Sutphin, R. C., 207 Sutton, Allan, 30, 148, 337n6, 368n127 Swan Silvertones, 271, 272 “Sweet Honey Hole” (song), 214 “Swing, Swing, Swing” (song), 83 Sykes, Roosevelt, 13, 65, 136, 137, 194, 282 “Symphony of Calls, A” (sermon), 254

454 A&R PIONEERS

Toomey, Welby, 91 Top Hat (label), 267 Toscanini, Arturo, 33 “Train Imitations and the Fox Chase” (instrumental), 230 Travis, Merle, 294, 306 Triangle Music Publishing Company, 120, 148 Tribble, T. N. T., 307 “Trip to New York, A” (skit), 77–78 Tristano, Lennie, 302 Troutt’s Melody Artists, Charlie, 130 Tubb, Ernest, 143, 145, 291, 351n77 Tucker’s Band, Teddy, 273 Tumbling Tumbleweeds (film), 75, 76 “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” (song), 76, 145–46, 167 Turner, Big Joe, 310 Turner, Herbert A., 215 20th Century (label), 280 “22-20 Blues” (song), 156 “Twilight in Turkey” (instrumental), 83 Twin (label), 79 Twin City Sentinel (WinstonSalem, North Carolina) (newspaper), 2 Two Poor Boys, 55 Tyler, Johnny, 272, 307 Umbrian Glee Club, 246 Underwood, Pete, 130, 198 Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins (album), 393n72 United (distribution company), 287 United Artists (label), 285, 304–5 United Dollar Store (Kinston, North Carolina), 39–40, 107 United Hot Clubs of America (UHCA) (label), 85 United Record, 272, 286 Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), 39 US Record Corporation, 267

Van Dyke, Leroy, 275 Van Eps, Fred, 134 Vanguard (label), 280–81 Variety (label), 81, 82, 83–84, 180–81, 261–62 Variety (magazine), 113, 190, 220, 247 on postwar recording industry, 277, 279, 284–85 use of “A&R” in, 318n6 Varsity (label), 79, 267–68, 269–70, 388n4, 390n21 vaudeville blues (classic blues), 11, 24, 145, 191, 192 boundaries among musical genres and, 220–21, 379n124 racial dynamics and, 215, 219–21, 229, 352–53n98, 379n124 songwriting and, 135–37, 147–48 studio musicians and, 130, 192, 197–98 See also blues; race records; specific artists Vaughan, Sarah, 277 Vaughan, Stevie Ray, 282 Velvet Tone (label), 74 Venice Music, 272 Venus (label), 274 Vicksburg, Mississippi, 42–43, 250 Victor (label), 27, 319n11 advertising and, 237 artists’ contracts and copyrights and, 95, 97–98 boundaries among musical genres and, 169–70, 220–21, 226, 227, 228–29, 379n116 foreign-language records and, 7, 8, 22, 227–28, 379n116 Robert Winslow Gordon and, 14–16 hillbilly artists and, 67, 74, 78–79, 188–89, 198, 228–29, 320n22

Eddie King, 20, 22, 49, 132, 211–12, 317n4 post-production and, 204–5, 211–12 race artists and, 59, 60, 65, 66–67, 96, 266 record catalogs and brochures of, 3, 4, 188–89, 198–99, 224 record sales and marketing, 250 record series of, 2–4, 7, 54, 220–21, 227, 315n15 recording expeditions and sessions of, 48, 49–50, 52–53, 65, 182–83, 226; in Bristol, Tennessee, 55–56, 62, 64, 67–68, 157, 195; in Charlotte, North Carolina, 48, 195–96; in Hollywood, California, 196, 197, 367n116, 377–78n102; in Los Angeles, 20, 317n4, 317–18n5; in Louisville, 54, 196–97; in Memphis, 66, 364–65n78; in New York, 74, 131–32, 188–89, 198, 211–13, 320n22 recording studios of, 20, 64, 204 repertoire selection and, 131–33, 169–70, 196–97, 228–29, 348n40 talent scouting and, 24, 48, 56, 60, 64, 66, 67, 74 See also Bluebird (label); Carter Family; Dalhart, Vernon; Oberstein, Eli; Peer, Ralph S.; RCA Victor; Rodgers, Jimmie; Shilkret, Nathaniel “Nat” (Naftule Schüldkraut) Victor Talking Machine Company, 8, 50, 69 Artists and Repertoire Committee at, 21–22, 204–5 Artists’ Department at, 21–22, 319n11

See also Allen Brothers; Smith, Bessie Walker, T-Bone, 84 “Walking the Floor over You” (song), 143, 145–46 Wall Street Journal (newspaper), 142 Wallace, Sippie, 152–53, 260, 354n114 Waller, Thomas “Fats,” 27, 35, 148, 192, 302–3, 318–19n8 Walter S. Gray Company (San Francisco), 23–24 Walton, Lester A., 255 “Waltz That Carried Me to My Grave (La valce qui ma portin d ma fose), The” (song), 172–73, 228 “Waltz the Hall” (instrumental), 139 Wardlow, Gayle Dean, 45, 248, 258–59, 384n29 on Art Laibly, 42–43, 59–60 on post-production, 370–71n10, 372n32 on H. C. Speir, 32, 66, 332n66, 387n116 Warner Bros., 9. See also Brunswick (label); Vocalion (label) Warner’s Seven Aces, 53 Warrant, Earle, 179 Washboard Sam (Robert Clifford Brown), 136, 137 Washboard Walter (Walter Taylor), 155 Washington, Booker T., 155 Washington, DC, 288, 307 “Wasn’t It Sad about Lemon” (song), 155 Waters, Ethel, 115–16, 199, 232, 255 Waters, Muddy (McKinley Morganfield), 14, 280, 310 Watson, El, 195 Watson, Loren L., 42, 74, 332–33n66 Watson & Company (Memphis), 42 “Wayward Girl Blues” (song), 199

INDEX

“Wabash Cannon Ball” (song), 71 Wabash Music Company, 282–83 Walker, Billy, 162 Walker, Frank B., 5, 13, 251 background of, 29 Columbia and: advertising, 201–3, 202, 237; artists’ contracts and copyrights, 104–5, 111, 120, 354n111; boundaries among musical genres, 201–3, 221, 222–23, 228, 229–30, 379n124, 379n126; Cajun artists, 172–73, 186–87, 228; “event songs,” 148–49, 150–51; hillbilly artists, 59, 77–78, 130, 134, 150, 346n30; Dan Hornsby and, 128–29, 130, 346n30; post-production, 201–3, 202, 204, 221, 228, 229, 379n124, 379n126; race artists, 119–20, 170, 197–98, 229, 230, 255, 379n124, 379n126; record sales and marketing, 250–52, 255; record series, 221, 228, 229, 376n85, 379n124; recording expeditions and sessions, 56–58, 59–60, 77–78, 119–20, 134, 138, 150, 157, 172–73, 174, 176, 184, 186–87, 197–98, 228, 330n33, 348n45; repertoire selection, 59, 77–78, 134, 138, 157, 170, 348n45; skit records, 129–30, 346n30; songwriting, 150–51, 157 MGM Records and, 229–30, 275–76, 289 postwar recording industry and, 275–76, 289 RCA Victor and, 29, 229–30, 275, 276, 277 talent scouting and, 57–58, 59–60

455

Calvin G. Child and, 21, 22, 319n11 Eddie King and, 20, 22, 49, 132, 211–13 record sales and marketing and, 245–46 See also Peer, Ralph S.; RCA Victor; Shilkret, Nathaniel “Nat” (Naftule Schüldkraut); Victor (label) Vik (label), 303 Vincent, Johnny, 272 Vinson, Walter, 55. See also Mississippi Sheiks VIP (label), 283 Virginia Female Jubilee Singers, 244 Vocalion (label), 73, 246 advertising and, 246–47 American Record Corporation and, 9, 71, 81, 84 boundaries among musical genres and, 71, 220, 221, 222, 225–26, 227, 380n128 Cliff Hess and, 33, 188 hillbilly artists and, 71, 76, 108, 188 race artists and, 45, 59, 65, 67, 71, 79, 148, 168; Jim Jackson, 332–33n66, 367n113 record catalogs and brochures, 137, 246 record sales and marketing, 217, 245, 246–47 record series of, 2–3, 220, 221, 227 recording expeditions and sessions of, 79, 188, 367n113 repertoire selection and, 137 Art Satherley and, 54–55, 213 J. Mayo Williams and, 45, 67, 103–4, 367n113 See also Brunswick (label); Kapp, Jack “Voo-it! Voo-it” (song), 271 Voynow, Richard “Dick,” 33–35, 62, 64, 157, 181, 331n54

456 A&R PIONEERS

WBT (radio station), 68, 70, 72, 109–10 WDIA (radio station), 288 “Wdowka” (instrumental), 227 Weaver, Sylvester, 96 Webb, Chick, 82, 84, 262 Webb, R. Carlos, 154 Weintraub, Charlie, 83 Welling, Frank, 73, 209 Wells, Kitty, 291 “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” (song), 85 Wertham, Fredric, 25–26 West Virginia Mountaineers, 208–9 western swing, 116, 193. See also specific bands Wettling, George, 81 Wexler, Jerry, 308 WGM (radio station), 53 WGNC (radio station), 70 WGST (radio station), 70, 128 WHAS (radio station), 70 “What Would You Give in Exchange?” (song), 140 “What Would You Give in Exchange?—Part 2” (song), 140 “What Would You Give (In Exchange for Your MotherIn-Law)” (song), 140 “Whatta Ya Gonna Do” (song), 269 Wheat Street Female Quartet, 229 “Wheel in a Wheel” (song), 229 “When Lulu’s Gone” (song), 218 “When the Deal Goes Down” (song), 280 “When You and I Were Young, Maggie” (song), 227 “When Your Baby Packs Up and Goes” (song), 306 “Wherever There’s Me There’s You” (song), 269 “Whiskey Head Man” (song), 358–59n20 Whistlin’ Pete and Daddy Stovepipe, 29 White, Josh, 230 White, Ronnie, 283

Whitey and Hogan, 70, 186. See also Grant, Roy “Whitey”; Hogan, Arval Whitman, Slim, 289–90 Whitter, Henry, 14, 15, 67, 99–100, 131–32, 138–39, 140 “Who Was Job? Parts 1 and 2” (sermons), 229 “Why Baby Why” (song), 299 “Why Don’t You Haul Off and Love Me” (song), 306 “Why There’s a Tear in My Eye” (song), 196–97 “Wicked Blues” (song), 220 Wickemeyer, Ezra C. A., 6–7, 16–17, 29, 125 Wiggins, Fred D., 124–25, 127, 138–39, 205–6, 207–11, 213, 226, 345n18 Wigler, Sam, 268 Wijskowa Orkestra, 227 Wiley, Arnold and Irene, 27–28 “William Jennings Bryan’s Last Fight” (song), 151 Williams, Anne, 76 Williams, Big Joe, 282 Williams, Clarence, 5, 260 artists’ contracts and copyrights and, 96, 104, 105, 112, 148 background of, 26–27 Columbia and, 26–27, 104, 187 music publishing and, 26–27, 96, 136, 147 OKeh and, 26–27, 96, 148, 199 songwriting and, 27, 146, 191 Williams, Claude, 179 Williams, Cootie, 84 Williams, Hank, 73, 229–30, 275, 291, 396n116 Williams, J. Mayo “Ink,” 5, 13, 154 artists’ contracts and copyrights and, 73, 91–92, 101–4, 106, 110, 112 background of, 28, 374n60

Black Patti and, 45, 90, 102, 103, 230, 337n6 Brunswick and, 28, 65, 67, 101–3 Chicago Music (Publishing) Company and, 27, 101, 136–37 contracts and income of, 90–91, 101 Decca and, 45, 277, 392n54; artists’ contracts and copyrights, 101–4, 106; music publishing, 101, 103–4; post-production, 217; race artists, 103–4, 106, 194, 384n30; repertoire selection, 141–42, 169; role of, 28; talent scouting, 45, 67 nickname of, 29, 321n29 Paramount and, 27, 33, 40, 43, 90, 209; advertising, 240, 242, 248, 383n22; artists’ contracts and copyrights, 101–3, 112; music publishing, 101–4, 136–37; race artists, 28, 41, 101, 103, 136, 358n12; racial dynamics, 112, 169, 240, 248; record sales and marketing, 249, 254, 383n22; recording sessions, 28, 176; repertoire selection and, 43, 44, 135–37, 142, 169; role of, 28, 41, 337n6; songwriting, 101, 136–37, 354n114; talent scouting, 60 Fritz Pollard and, 318–19n9 postwar recording industry and, 280, 289 State Street Music Publishing Company and, 101, 103–4 Vocalion and, 45, 67, 103–4, 367n113 Williams, Larry, 272 Williams, Spencer, 148 Williamson, Sonny Boy, 137, 282

WVG (radio station), 255 WWNC (radio station), 68, 106 Yates, Herbert J., 74–75, 76, 81 Yeager, Charlie, 177–78 Yes, 308 “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” (song), 167, 188 York Brothers, 305, 306–7 “You Ain’t No Good Blues” (song), 176 “You Are My Sunshine” (song), 145–46 “You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down” (song), 24, 192 “You Know That Ain’t Right” (song), 176 “You Will Never Miss Your Mother Until She Is Gone” (song), 157–58, 188 “You’ll Never Miss Your Mother Until She’s Gone” (song), 99 Young, Lester, 85, 262, 273 Young, Vicki, 391–92n47 Young’s Tennessee Band, Jess, 129 “Your Biscuits Are Big Enough for Me” (song), 214 “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law” (song), 173 “You’re in My Heart” (song), 298 Zolotow, Maurice, 184

INDEX

gender discrimination and, 32–33, 115–16, 117–18 See also Dance, Helen Oakley; Dickerson, Aletha; specific artists Wonder, Little Stevie, 283 “Wonderful City, The” (song), 196–97 WOOK (radio station), 288 World (label), 306 “World in a Jug” (song), 225–26 World War I, 8, 52 World War II, 7, 84, 144, 268, 286, 391n46. See also postwar recording industry WPTF (radio station), 68 “Wreck of the Old 97” (song), 14, 33, 131–32, 149, 316n36, 347n35 “Wreck of the Shenandoah” (song), 211–12, 212, 213, 373n46 “Wreck on the Southern 97, The” (song), 188 “Wreck on the Southern Old 97, The” (song), 14–16, 15, 347n35 Wright, Billy, 273 Wright, Richard, 25–26, 154 Wright Record Corporation, 270 WROL (radio station), 71 WRVA (radio station), 70 WSB (radio station), 53, 70, 128 WSM (radio station), 70, 71, 226, 291

457

Willis Brothers, 305 Wills, Bob, 77, 142, 175–76, 178, 224–25, 292–93, 345n22 Wills, Bob, & His Texas Playboys, 55, 116, 126–27, 175–76, 193 Wilson, Edith, & the Original Jazz Hounds, 220 Wilson, Colonel Jim, 306 Wilson, Teddy, 33, 70, 81, 105, 173 Winston Holmes Music Company (Kansas City, Missouri), 38 Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 35, 48–49, 54 Wirges, Bill, 193–94 Wisconsin Chair Company, 31, 40, 43, 101, 239, 371n14 Wise, Louise, 128 Wiseman Sextette, 199–200, 369n139 WJJD (radio station), 74, 75 WLS (radio station), 70, 71, 75, 76, 108, 194 WLW (radio station), 70 WMAQ (radio station), 70 WNOX (radio station), 64, 71, 181 Wolfe, Charles K., 59, 60, 135, 156, 191, 369n1 Wolverines, The, 33–35 women, 32–33, 42, 112, 375n70 as A&R managers and talent scouts, 5, 31–33, 35, 43, 81–84, 183, 364n74