chapter one
Paramount Records ad from the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper often circulated by Pullman porters.
(GAB Archive/Contributor)
On February 14 (or maybe August 10: it wasn’t considered important enough to keep notes), 1920, a black vaudeville singer took advantage of another singer’s canceled session to cut a record. Mamie Smith was backed by a band assembled by Perry Bradford, a young black veteran of minstrel shows, songwriter, and what would today be called record producer who’d convinced the fledgling Okeh Records label that black people owned phonographs in sufficient quantity to buy records. He’d worked with Smith before, when she’d recorded two of his tunes, “That Thing Called Love” and “You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down,” and the record had sold between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand copies—a very respectable number. When the opportunity to record her again came along, he grabbed two more of his songs and gave them to her. “Crazy Blues” wasn’t even a blues song, but it was the first song with blues in the title to be recorded. It sold seventy-five thousand copies in a month and over a million copies in its first year, making Smith a star, giving Bradford the chance to work with other up-and-coming stars like Louis Armstrong, putting Okeh Records on the map, and igniting a craze for blues. Female blues singers suddenly appeared on records, singing blues songs that actually were blues songs, and—curiously enough—many of them were named Smith: Bessie, Alberta, Clara, and Trixie, among others. Most of them adopted the elaborate gowns, big hats, and flashy jewelry that Mamie had introduced as blues singer attire, and sang songs in the classic AAB form. They didn’t just come out of the blue; a woman named Gertrude “Ma” Rainey had been singing blues for years, in an act with her husband, as Assassinators of the Blues. At first, the Raineys toured with the famous Rabbit Foot Minstrels, a show in which, much later, young Rufus Thomas began a career that would make him a Memphis icon well into the second half of the century, and then they graduated to a series of tent shows. Ma Rainey didn’t leap on Mamie Smith’s bandwagon, but when she did start recording in 1923, she made over one hundred sides.
The label she recorded for is worth noting: Paramount Records was a spinoff of the Wisconsin Chair Company in Port Washington, Wisconsin, which had started making Victrolas as they became popular. In 1917, they decided to form a record company to make something to play on them. The first Paramount releases were the usual mixed bag of stuff: Hawaiian tunes, Irish novelties, comic routines, and, for some reason, a lot of marimba orchestra records. Then Mamie Smith woke them up, and they announced that they were entering what was beginning to be called the “race market.” Their first star was Alberta Hunter, a genteel vocalist who could do pop as well as blues, and her success alerted a former NFL player and graduate of Brown University, J. Mayo “Ink” Williams, to a possibility. Williams had been hanging around Chicago, doing small-time hustles, and one day he headed to Port Washington to talk to Paramount. He later remembered the walk from the train station, with little kids staring at him and, the more adventurous ones, touching him. They’d never seen a black person before. Williams told Paramount that he knew the black music world well—didn’t he live in Chicago, a mecca of African American music-making?—and when he discovered they needed someone to run their new recording studio in Chicago, a deal was made. Williams went right to work: before long, he’d recorded Papa Charlie Jackson, a popular banjo-playing street performer from Chicago, blues singers Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters, Ida Cox, and further sessions for Alberta Hunter, and jazz musicians, largely but not entirely from New Orleans, who had found a ready audience in Chicago like Fletcher Henderson, Freddie Keppard, King Oliver (with and without Louis Armstrong), and Ferdinand LaMenthe, who called himself Jelly Roll Morton.
Williams didn’t even like blues—he was more partial to classical music—but considered it part of his people’s heritage. This resulted in his being open to blues besides the kind played on the vaudeville stages: a Paramount dealer in Dallas alerted Williams to a street performer who was drawing good crowds, and Williams sent for him. It was a wise investment; Blind Lemon Jefferson was phenomenally popular and recorded close to one hundred sides for Paramount before his mysterious death in Chicago in 1929. Some of his songs became classics, and “Matchbox Blues” was recorded by Carl Perkins and by the Beatles. As if that weren’t enough of a claim on immortality, Jefferson’s “lead boys,” youngsters he’d hire to guide him along the streets, included Aaron “T-Bone” Walker and Joshua White. Jefferson’s success opened the door for other guitar-playing blues performers of a rural bent. Blind Arthur Blake, a guitar virtuoso about whom absolutely nothing is known for certain, recorded close to eighty sides for Paramount before vanishing as mysteriously as he came, preserving a guitar style that has great hunks of jazz and ragtime in it.
Williams really lucked out by forming a relationship with H. C. Speir, a white store owner in Jackson, Mississippi’s black neighborhood who took notice of the fact that there was a lot of black musical talent in the surrounding area. They’d come in and buy gramophones from him, and records, too. Speir’s innovation was to buy a recording machine so that he could cut demos of people who wanted to record and send them on to record companies, who’d pay him a finder’s fee if the artist was of interest. Speir was by no means exclusively dealing with Paramount—he also sent performers to Victor and Decca and, most famously, later got Robert Johnson hooked up with the American Recording Company, which was eventually absorbed by Columbia—but he hit gold with Williams, up until his mysterious departure from Paramount in 1927. The label began sending tickets to many of Speir’s finds to come up to Wisconsin to record, and Speir sent some of the less commercial artists up there, including Charley Patton, who was a bridge between the songster and blues traditions and a great mentor to everyone from Johnson to Roebuck Staples (who later founded the gospel sensations the Staple Singers) and Chester Burnett (later known as Howlin’ Wolf), and Nehemiah “Skip” James, whose career suffered from Paramount’s not promoting his 1931 records and by James getting religion later that year. Speir also sent Williams Patton’s friend and rival Son House, the mysterious King Solomon Hill, Ishman Bracey, Tommy Johnson, and Geechie Wiley and Elvie Thomas, whose identities weren’t confirmed until the twenty-first century, to Paramount’s studios to make records that would be rediscovered thirty years later by a totally different audience from the one they were made for. Country blues like this didn’t sell spectacularly, although some artists like Tommy Johnson and the piano-guitar duo of Scrapper Blackwell and Leroy Carr certainly justified their record companies’ investment in them, and other artists like Patton sold well enough in small regions where they were popular through live performances to be asked back to do further sessions. Hokum and jug band records also did well, with the Mississippi Sheiks, the Memphis Jug Band, and Cannon’s Jug Stompers selling respectably, in part because they were popular with white people in Memphis, where they lived. Essentially, record companies were initiating a tradition: record it and see if it sells.
Paramount was far from the only company getting into the race music market. Most companies that dared going after such an uncertain audience just dipped a toe in, and the usual thing was to treat race music as just one of a number of small markets that might produce a return with a left-field smash like “Crazy Blues.” Okeh, Mamie Smith’s label, was run by a German immigrant named Otto K. Heineman, and was a bit more dedicated to minority music, including Yiddish music, but most race labels concentrated on jazz, because it had a crossover white audience from the start and was beginning a golden era with artists like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. It was also produced in urban centers like New York and Chicago, close to where the record companies were.
It’s really little wonder, then, that it took as long as it did for the nascent industry to investigate rural white music. Actually, they didn’t go to it—it came to them. In 1922, directly after winning a fiddle festival, A. C. “Eck” Robertson, of Amarillo, Texas, and Henry Gilliland, from Virginia, took a train to New York and, dressed in a cowboy outfit (Robertson) and a Confederate uniform (Gilliland), walked into the Victor Recording Company and asked to be recorded. Possibly just to get rid of them, Victor did so, cutting “Arkansas Traveler” and “Sallie Gooden.” It was an odd record, just two fiddles—and two fiddlers from different traditions, at that—but somebody decided to put it out, and, to Victor’s amazement, it sold. Word got out about Victor’s interest, and in 1924, Marion Try Slaughter, a vocalist who had recorded light opera and popular songs, revived his career by taking the name of two Texas towns, Vernon and Dalhart, and recorded “The Prisoner’s Song” for them. It became a huge hit, in part because Slaughter sang with a Southern accent, and made Vernon Dalhart a star. Other, more traditional musicians saw their chance, and Fiddlin’ John Carson, Henry Whittier, Ernest “Pop” Stoneman, and Uncle Dave Macon began their recording careers with repertoires that were at least somewhat traditional.
At this point, Victor saw a chance. Ralph Peer was a Southerner who’d begun his career at Okeh, okaying the recording of “Crazy Blues” and a couple of years later discovering Fiddlin’ John Carson, one of the first commercially successful traditional country artists. Aware of his ear for unusual music, Victor hired him to do a talent search. He picked the city of Bristol, straddling the Virginia and Tennessee borders (the state line actually runs down the center of State Street), mostly because other artists he’d already recorded for Victor, Pop Stoneman and Henry Whittier, lived in the vicinity and could help publicize his call for talent to audition for Victor Records. He announced it for July 25 to August 5, 1927, and when responses were slow, he arranged for the Stoneman Family to do a session and invited a newspaper reporter to watch. The subsequent article emphasized how much money the Stonemans made from records and touring, and Peer was suddenly in business: by automobile, horse, and even on foot, prospective stars came to Bristol to try their luck. On August 1, a trio from Maces Springs, Virginia, sat before the microphone, the Carter Family, A. C. and his wife, Sara, and Sara’s sister, Maybelle. They wound up recording six sides that day and the next. On August 4, a singer Peer had met in Mississippi—who’d been rejected by H. C. Speir—recorded. He’d come to town with his group, the Tenneva Ramblers, but something happened—nobody really knows what—and so Jimmie Rodgers recorded without them, and they recorded later that day with another musician.
The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers weren’t the only discoveries the 1927 Bristol sessions produced—Eck Dunford and Blind Alfred Reed were among the others—but they were by far the most significant. The Carters were almost an overnight success, and Rodgers was asked by Victor to do another session for them that produced the first of his “Blue Yodels,” launching him into stardom. The fact that these two artists were making so much money for Victor made the label decide to open a regional office in Nashville, Tennessee, which had been the home of a successful local radio show, the Grand Ole Opry, since 1925. Although the establishment in Nashville, a city previously best known for insurance and Bible printing, hated the idea at least through the 1980s, country music and the country music end of the record business was largely centered there from then on.
Victor tried Bristol again in 1928, and similar cattle calls were held by other labels—most notably Columbia Records in Johnson City, Tennessee, in 1928 and ’29—but calling the 1927 sessions, as a collection of the complete Bristol recordings did, the “Big Bang” of country music is entirely accurate. The Carter Family mingled songs written by A. C. Carter with folk material prettied up for commercial reasons by rewriting lyrics and adding verses. They also, later in their career, had a black chauffeur to get them from place to place on tour, and he was known to go song hunting for them. As for Rodgers, he was very much in the pop tradition, but influenced by black music he heard as a sickly youth hanging around the railroad yards where his father worked, which produced both his “blue yodel” and his use of a Hawaiian steel guitar on his records. Both acts were self-consciously pop artists, composing and copyrighting their material, a rarity in the “hillbilly” record field. Of course, since they were inventing an entire field of music that hadn’t previously existed, they were free to experiment as they wished, a freedom Rodgers, in particular, took advantage of, recording with the more conservative Carters, and, on a couple of sides, with Victor’s other major success story, Louis Armstrong.
It’s worth noting that the first radio station to play records—and that only on a small segment of its broadcast day—began the practice in 1926, just as all this ferment was happening. The vast majority of music on the radio was live, be it dance orchestras broadcasting from ritzy hotels in New York over network radio or hillbilly bands and gospel quartets getting up early in the morning to draw listeners to the farm report and, via their sponsors, to sell flour or patent medicine on small local stations. Radio was becoming an increasingly important factor in American life, but as a medium for news, drama, comedy, and light entertainment. Country music was beamed by WSM’s Grand Ole Opry and the WLS Barn Dance in Chicago, but those shows were anomalies, albeit ones with enormous listenerships, including black people. There was no blues on the radio, even the most sophisticated stuff like Bessie Smith and Alberta Hunter were recording. After all, who would listen to it?
With radio not yet important for record sales, and with no real feedback on releases other than sales, record companies tried everything. Ethnic communities had thriving entertainment scenes going on in cities like New York and Chicago, so Ukrainian and Yiddish music was easy enough to find and record, and record company catalogs, which were provided to every retail outlet, had those records’ serial numbers in case the retailers wanted to order some. Mexican music was popular in the Southwest and Greek music in New England. And blues, both urban and rural, was in the catalogs’ race section.
Another genre that emerged during this time was Western music. As movies got sound, the singing cowboy entered American popular culture. For the most part, they sang songs written for them by Hollywood songwriters, most of which weren’t particularly memorable, rehashing clichés about the open range and herding cattle. Gene Autry, for instance, started his career by singing songs that sounded a whole lot like Jimmie Rodgers, although some of them were more risqué than anything Rodgers would have recorded, and soon graduated to Hollywood cowboy stuff. But while most singing cowboys were actors first and singers second, one important musician took the opposite route. Bob Wills was born in Limestone County, Texas, and learned to fiddle from his father and grandfather as they farmed cotton on land they’d bought in Turkey, a dot on the map of west Texas. Wills was soon a local celebrity for his fiddling—and as Turkey’s barber—but in 1929, he’d had enough of Turkey and lit out for the big city, Fort Worth. There, he played medicine shows with his friend Herman Arnspiger, and soon ran into the Brown brothers, Milton and his teenage brother, Derwood. This quartet was soon hired by an ambitious hustler (and future Texas governor) W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel for a radio program sponsored by Light Crust Flour. He renamed the band the Light Crust Doughboys, but O’Daniel was no fun to work for (besides his authoritarian personality, he was a staunch Prohibitionist), and soon the Browns jumped ship to concentrate on one part of the Doughboys’ repertoire, a strange hybrid that was influenced by hokum, jazz, and the urban blues of singers like Bessie Smith. They called it Western swing and established a base from which to perform it at Crystal Springs, a resort and recreation area outside of town where the Doughboys had performed despite O’Daniel’s disapproval. Milton Brown’s Musical Brownies recorded a number of sides for Decca between 1932 and 1936, the year Milton died in an auto accident. In 1933, Wills, too, quit the Doughboys and started his own band with a couple of others who’d left, and, just to make his point, got sponsorship from Play Boy Flour. He moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, got a daily broadcast on KVOO, based himself in a large dance hall called Cain’s Dancing Academy, and called his band the Texas Playboys. In September 1935, they did the first of many recording sessions for Vocalion/Okeh, which included “Osage Stomp,” based on the Memphis Jug Band’s “Rukus Juice and Chittlin’,” the Mississippi Sheiks’ “Sittin’ On Top of the World,” and Big Bill Broonzy’s “I Can’t Be Satisfied.” This was not the Carter Family’s country music. It was also wildly popular and spawned many another hot ensemble: Bill Boyd and His Cowboy Ramblers, Jimmie Revard and His Oklahoma Playboys, Cliff Bruner’s Texas Wanderers, and Ted Daffan’s Texans, among many others.
Western swing was also a good thing to have in your band’s book even if you didn’t specialize in it: Adolph Hofner’s orchestra traveled more widely than most Texas polka bands because they could play a non-Czech-Tex crowd with an entire program of swing, and the Sons of the Pioneers, a vocal group led by Roy Rogers and Bob Nolan and best known for pure Western songs like “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” added Texans Hugh and Karl Farr early on in the group’s existence, not only for Karl’s bass singing but for his hot fiddling and duets with his guitarist brother. The Sons, of course, appeared in many of Roy Rogers’s films, and eventually Bob Wills, too, made movies, especially after moving to a large restaurant / dance hall / dude ranch complex he built near Sacramento, California, called Wills Point. Western swing itself, although never a huge genre outside its birthplace (Texas and Oklahoma, and, after the Dust Bowl migrations of the 1930s, California), continued through at least the late 1950s, although it only occasionally hit the country charts.
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The record business was hit hard by the Depression. Although this period gave birth to the economic rule that entertainment does better during hard economic times, the entertainment it refers to is the kind with high production values (e.g., Busby Berkeley film musicals or movies like The Wizard of Oz or Gone with the Wind) or live music. Spending a dollar on an item that at most gave six minutes of music was an insane extravagance next to spending ten or twenty-five cents to go to a dance by a good band. (Even the three-for-a-dollar bargain labels only gave you six songs for your buck, and the records wore out more quickly.) And the sort of people who bought blues and country music had less discretionary spending money than ever, which indirectly killed the recording career of Robert Johnson, now the most famous Delta bluesman of all. Johnson recorded late—his two sessions were in 1936 and ’37—and only his first release, “Terraplane Blues,” sold at all. The rest, although undeniably virtuosic and brilliantly written, mostly languished unsold in the warehouses, causing a legend to build up that he’d sold his soul to the devil in order to play like that. Whether he did or not, he certainly died in 1938, probably poisoned by a jealous husband.
Paramount went under in 1932, announcing to its workers that it was closing during their Christmas party. Some of them celebrated by going to the factory’s rooftop and using the metal record stampers as discuses, sailing them into the river.
Victor created Bluebird, a budget line to compete with ARC and Decca, who were selling three records for a dollar, putting out records by Western swingster Bill Boyd, the Blue Sky Boys, Earl and Bill Bolick, whose “brother harmonies” started a new genre of country music, and Bill and Charlie Monroe, who began recording in 1936. Charlie was tired of working with his cantankerous brother by 1939, and Bill formed an acoustic band emphasizing instrumental virtuosity and tight harmonies, the Blue Grass Boys. Like Western swing, bluegrass was never a lucrative field, but it was popular in the area where it was born; Monroe had almost immediate competition from Ralph and Carter Stanley. Bluegrass would prove very successful in hillbilly ghettoes in the Midwest after the war, as well as in rural areas east of the Mississippi.
Bluebird also had a blues operation going in Chicago, overseen by Lester Melrose, who had the brilliant idea of having the blues artists under contract to Bluebird play in supporting roles on each other’s records. Musicians like Tampa Red and Roosevelt Sykes, Arthur Crudup, Sonny Boy Williamson (the original, not the postwar musician), and Big Bill Broonzy made innumerable records to supplement their income from appearances in Chicago nightclubs, and Bluebird recorded some of the first electric blues. They also had a very important hit with Lil Green’s “Romance in the Dark,” one of the first records that highlighted a growing trend that mixed small-combo jazz with blues. The master of this was Louis Jordan, a diminutive, hyperactive alto saxophonist whose novelty songs lit up jukeboxes practically from the moment he was forced to start his own band after the death of his former employer, drummer / big band leader Chick Webb. Probably because an unknown was better off carrying as few musicians as possible, Jordan and his band, the Tympany Five (who almost always numbered more than five and never featured tympani), downplayed solos (except for the leader) and emphasized slice-of-life comedy and wordplay. The latter was one of his most outstanding features: years later, Chuck Berry would say that when he began writing songs, he was trying to imitate Louis Jordan.
World War II halted all this activity that hadn’t already been halted by declining record sales. Records were pressed on shellac, and the world’s supply was located in the South Pacific, which was under Japanese control. Rubber for tires and gasoline for tour buses were rationed, making it harder for big bands to tour. The American Federation of Musicians, the national musicians’ union, in the person of its leader, James Caesar Petrillo, claiming worry because working musicians were supposedly having their livelihoods taken away by recordings played on the radio, enacted a pair of recording bans in 1942, and in 1947–1948, resulting in some crucial American musical history being lost, most notably the beginnings of bebop. This affected all recording artists, be they orchestras or hillbilly fiddlers: in order to record, you had to belong to the American Federation of Musicians, and Petrillo was very powerful. On a positive note, demographics changed, as skilled workers went to where the jobs were, changing the racial and social makeup of the country’s larger cities. When peace returned, things sounded different indeed.