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Record Cultures
 Record Cultures
The Transformation of the
U.S. Recording Industry

KYLE BARNETT

UN I V E R S I T Y O F M I CH I G A N P R E S S • AN N ARB O R
First paperback edition 2021
Copyright © 2020 by Kyle Barnett
All rights reserved

For questions or permissions, please contact [email protected].

Published in the United States of America by the

University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-­free paper

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication data has been applied for.

First published in paperback July 2021.

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Names: Barnett, Kyle, author.

Title: Record cultures : the transformation of the U.S. recording industry / Kyle
Barnett.
Description: Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2020. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019039017 (print) | LCCN 2019039018 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780472131037 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780472124312 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Sound recording industry—­United States—­History. |
Popular music—­Social aspects—­United States—­History.
Classification: LCC ML3790 .B27 2020 (print) | LCC ML3790 (ebook) |
DDC 384—­dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039017
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039018

ISBN: 978-0-472-03877-0 (pbk : alk paper)

For Lisa
 Acknowledgments

I lived with this book a long while and I am deeply grateful for those that
helped along the way. This project began while I was a graduate student
at the University of Texas Department of Radio-­Television-­Film. When I
brought Tom Schatz my proposal to frame the story of the recording in-
dustry as a media industry during a crucial, transitional era, he immediately
embraced the idea. Without his support and friendship, this book would
likely not exist. At Texas, I was fortunate to find a committee of brilliant
and supportive scholars: Jim Buhler, John Downing, James Hay, Mary Ke-
arney, and Craig Watkins. I am so thankful for the friendship, camaraderie,
and critical eye of my friends and colleagues at Texas, who read various
versions of what appears here: Christopher Lucas, Afsheen Nomai, Allison
Perlman, Jennifer Petersen, and Avi Santo.
At Bellarmine University, I found lasting friendship and support from
Ruth Wagoner and Gail Henson, who supported my research and assisted
me in navigating the learning curve endemic to life as a junior profes-
sor. My fellow faculty in Bellarmine’s Department of Communication
have helped this come together, among a blur of classes, meetings, and
campus changes big and small. I am especially grateful to the friendship
and collegiality of Moira O’Keeffe, who offered writing advice and sup-
port with great patience and kindness. I benefited in no small way from
the assistance of Sue Mauldin, our administrative assistant in Bellarmine’s
Department of Communication, who fuses optimism and care for students,
faculty, and staff, with a practical disposition perfect for the role. Thanks
to numerous undergraduate work-­study students who assisted me, under
Sue’s tutelage, over the course of this book project. I am indebted for the
help of Bellarmine’s first-­rate reference librarians: Daniel Bays, John Boyd,
 viii • Acknowledgments

Kevin Peers, and Martha Perry-­Lundgren for their tireless work in track-
ing down hard-­to-­find sources and answering my arcane questions. Thanks
to my undergraduate and graduate students over the years, at Bellarmine
and elsewhere, whose discussions with me about music, media, and history
are reflected here in meaningful ways. Those students could attest to my
writing time in the coffee houses of Louisville, and I am accordingly thank-
ful for the (past and present) baristas of Sunergos Coffee on Norris Place
and Quills Coffee on Baxter Avenue.
At the University of Michigan Press, Mary Francis proved to be the
ideal editor for a book that stands at the intersection of music, media, and
culture. Mary assisted and supported this project at various stages with in-
sight and patience. Thanks to all at the University of Michigan Press who
helped me along: Sara Cohen, Susan Cronin, Mary Hashman, Carol Reed,
and Samuel Killian.
I am thankful to the archivists and librarians who assisted me in no
small way. Their assistance in this detective work was and is a pleasure. I am
grateful for the help of archivists and librarians at the Starr-­Gennett Foun-
dation (then curated by Elizabeth Surles) and the Wayne County Histori-
cal Society in Richmond, Indiana. Thanks to Deborah Gillaspie of the Chi-
cago Jazz Archive at the University of Chicago, as well as Matt Holdzkom,
Jordan Ryan, and the staff of the Indiana Historical Society (IHS) in India-
napolis. My deepest thanks to the family of the late John MacKenzie, who
made sure his Gennett Records research was made available to researchers
at the IHS. In Nashville, I benefited from the advice of senior historian
John Rumble of the Country Music Hall of Fame. Thanks to a tip from
the late author and collector Raymond Wile and the help of archivists at
the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts’ Rodgers and Ham-
merstein Archives of Recorded Sound, I researched OKeh and Columbia
Records materials that to my knowledge have yet to be cataloged. I’m also
thankful to the staff of the Camden County Historical Society in Camden,
New Jersey, where I researched RCA-­Victor history and the Port Wash-
ington Historical Society and Ozaukee County Historical Society in Wis-
consin, where I researched Paramount Records. The holdings of such city
and county historical societies hold untold treasures, of which we remain
largely unaware. At Kentucky’s Berea College, I was greatly assisted by ar-
chivist Harry Rice in researching the Southern Appalachian Collection in
the Hutchins Library Special Collections and Archives. Various trips to the
Library of Congress’ Recorded Sound Reference Center were crucial for
this research, where I benefited from the expertise of Bryan Cornell, Karen
 Acknowledgments • ix

Fishman, and David Sager. I was granted access to archival audio inter-
views of musicians and talent scouts in the Southern Folklife Collection
thanks to Steven Weiss and staff at the University of North Carolina’s Wil-
son Library, and from Martin Fisher and Greg Reish at Middle Tennessee
State University’s Center for Popular Music. I am also deeply grateful to
the collectors, fans, and amateur researchers from whom I have learned
much over the years. Their work has been crucial to media research and
deserves to be recognized.
I am thankful for the anthology editors that commented on several
book chapters that were precursors to what I present here. Some of my
work on Gennett in chapter 1 first appeared in “The Recording Indus-
try’s Role in Media History,” in Convergence Media History, edited by Ja-
net Staiger and Sabine Hake (Routledge, 2009). Some passages focused
on scouts as cultural intermediaries in chapter 2 were first published in
“Record Men: Talent Scouts in the U.S. Recording Industry, 1920–­1935,”
in Making Media Work: Cultures of Management in the Entertainment Indus-
tries, edited by Derek Johnson, Derek Kompare, and Avi Santo (New York
University Press, 2014). Thanks to the Berea College Special Collections
and Archives, the Library of Congress, the Country Music Hall of Fame,
and the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library of
the Performing Arts for images reproduced here. I am fortunate to have
Chicago’s Halloween Martin gracing the cover of this book, who many
believe to be the first female radio disc jockey in Chicago, and quite pos-
sibly the United States. (Her life and career deserve more attention.) The
image first appeared (without a photographer’s credit) in the November
1932 issue of The Chicagoan and appears here thanks to Quigley Publishing
Company, a division of QP Media, Inc.
I received several fellowships that assisted in the research and writing
of this book. At the University of Texas, I received a Jesse Jones Fellowship
that afforded me resources and time to work. Thanks to Bellarmine Uni-
versity for several Faculty Development Fellowships that supported this
research, which allowed funding to visit archives. Thanks to Bellarmine for
the sabbatical in which I was able to focus on research without the teach-
ing and administrative responsibilities of a college professor at a liberal arts
college. Finally, I am grateful for the generous support of the American
Musicological Society for a grant in support of this research.
This book was given new purpose by the late David Sanjek’s presenta-
tion, “First I Look at the Purse: The Contamination of Popular Music
Studies by Agoraphobia,” at the 2011 Experience Music Project pop music
 x • Acknowledgments

conference at UCLA. In his presentation, Sanjek called for popular music

scholars to write the kind of books more common in film studies, in which
detailed analyses of a given period in film history was given book-­length
treatment.* Sanjek wondered aloud why popular music histories were envi-
sioned as epic narratives, meant to define (or redefine) the field into a less
precarious existence. I do not claim this is the book Sanjek had in mind, but
I hope that it contributes to such a mission. Thanks to Ned Raggett and
Eric Weisbard, who helped confirm my memory of Sanjek’s presentation.
Thanks to all who facilitated this writing in various ways: Chris Chinchar,
Charlie Dahan, Adele Deaton, Leonard DeGraaf, Christine Ehrick, Evan
Finch, Hollis Griffin, Eric Harvey, Michele Hilmes, Paul Israel, Chris Jen-
nings, Rick Kennedy, Gary Koehl, Dale Lawrence, Pam Lindroos, David
and Sue Long, Karl Hagstrom Miller, Michael Newman, Mike O’Connor,
Alisa Perren, Diane Pecknold, Nolan Porterfield, Malcolm Rockwell, Rene
Rodgers, Tony Russell, Alex Russo, Nathan Salsburg, Jeff Schwartz, Yan
Shuang (闫爽), Heather Murphy Sloane, Rob Sloane, Jacob Smith, Janet
Staiger, Jonathan Sterne, Kevin Trogden, Jennifer Waits, and Eric Weis-
bard. I am especially thankful for the suggestions of Kathryn Fuller-­Seeley
and Charles McGovern, whose careful reading of this book in its later
stages greatly improved the final result.
I am fortunate beyond measure to be spending my life with Lisa Bar-
nett, who has supported this project in every possible way. She read various
drafts of this manuscript, helped me deal with conceptual and logistical
issues, and provided me with time to research and write. I am grateful be-
yond words for the life we have built together, first as a duo and later as a
trio with our daughter Leila (龚乐洋). I am so grateful to have them both
at the very center of my life.

*David Sanjek, “First I Look at the Purse: The Contamination of Popular Music Studies by
Agoraphobia,” presented at the Experience Music Project Pop Conference, UCLA, February
26, 2011.
 Contents

Introduction : Phonograph Boom:

The Expansion of the U.S. Recording Industry 1

one : “What Do You Think about Jazz?”:

Niche Genres and Recording Culture 41

two : “Are These Not Great Artists?”:

Race Records and Genre Discourse 67

three : “Uninvited and Unannounced”:

Old-Time Music and Radio 108

four : “On with the Dance”:

Media Industries’ Jazz-­Age Convergence 147

five : “The Trademark Dog’s Stubby Tail”:

Depression and Resurgence 192

Notes 231

Bibliography 275

Index 293

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform
via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9901441
 Introduction

Phonograph Boom
The Expansion of the U.S. Recording Industry

The unprecedented expansion of the U.S. recording industry that began

almost a century ago fundamentally changed the shape and scope of the
country’s popular music. This expansion was sparked by smaller labels’ in-
ability to compete with the industry’s most established labels and ended
with the first major consolidation of media entertainment industries at
the close of the decade. It all felt so speculative and provisional; how long
would the public find this or that sound appealing? Recording directors
and talent scouts did the best they could to keep up. As freelance talent
scout Harry Charles noted, “you had to grab what you could get.”1 This
book frames U.S. recording companies as media industries, with deep and
abiding ties to other such industries. The recording companies’ ties to
radio would increase so dramatically by the end of the 1920s that it re-
shaped both industries, in what was the first major consolidation between
entertainment industries in the twentieth century. With radio as the “new
national fad,” recording companies large and small sought to experiment
in the depth and breadth of what they recorded, the technologies through
which they recorded, and in connection to the other key entertainment
media of the era, most importantly radio and film, in what would be the
recording industry’s “most turbulent and productive” era to date.2
While all sources agree that the recording industry expanded dra-
matically during the 1910s, estimates vary given gaps in the historical re-
cord as well as the recording industry’s traditionally low barrier to entry
when compared to other media industries. Roland Gelatt’s foundational
 2 • record cultures

book The Fabulous Phonograph, 1877–­1977 notes just three phonograph-­

producing companies in 1913 and 73 by 1916.3 More recently, Rick Ken-
nedy has noted a similar expansion of recording companies between 1914
and 1917, as the number of recording companies went from a few dozen
to more than 150.4 The 1919 Census of Manufactures (published in the 1920
Census) listed the “phonograph and graphophones” businesses among its
“principal industries” (ranked fiftieth overall) making “products valued at
$100,000,000 but less than $500,000,000.”5 Comparatively, motion pictures
appeared in the table with “photograph materials,” ranked eightieth over-
all, while “musical instruments, pianos,” ranked ninetieth.”6 The absence of
radio from this list was understandable, given its nascent status as well as
President Woodrow Wilson’s banning of U.S. amateur radio stations from
transmitting for the course of the war unless they served military purposes
(the ban was lifted in 1919).7 While the pages of Talking Machine World of-
ten exhibited a booster’s enthusiasm for the phonograph trade, the paper’s
enthusiasm during the late 1910s was well founded.
While the Big Three had asserted their dominance a decade before,
this did not prevent competition from new companies entering the mar-
ket. By the 1910s, companies were making their own phonographs (often
discount models) and recordings, modeled after the “vertical cut” disc re-
cords process established in France by Páthe Frères in 1909.8 The prob-
lem for consumers—­a perennial one in media—­was that consumers had
to choose between the lateral-­cut discs playable on the Big Three’s ma-
chines or choose the vertical-­cut format offered up by newer companies,
including Starr (later Gennett), OKeh, Paramount, Aeolian-­Vocalion,
and Pathé’s American division.9 By the end of World War I, many of the
key companies here—­big and small—­were already in existence, but new
companies began to emerge, while existing companies created new la-
bels. The impetus was a 1918 battle between Victor and the Starr Piano
Company, an unlikely challenger that would battle Victor’s proprietary
right to lateral-­cut recordings, and win. As Sutton and Nauck suggest,
it took a 1922 Supreme Court decision to settle the matter, but lower
court decisions emboldened companies to develop lateral-­cut disc lines,
an “industry-­wide” media transition in 1919 and 1920, that allowed con-
sumers to play a much larger variety of discs on their previously pur-
chased talking machines.10
Sales of sound recordings surged with “returning troops, wartime work-
ers flush with cash, and music fans whose collections had been depleted by
 Introduction • 3

contributions to the Slacker Record Drives,” which gave records to soldiers

to listen to in sometimes far-­flung locales, a kind of aural trip back home.11
The wartime slowdown was replaced with a boom, putting those com-
panies most involved in war-­effort production (especially Victor, with its
impressive Camden works) at a temporary disadvantage.12 Companies old
and new began making discs for what was a new, broader market, creating
a boom that would lead to a dramatic expansion of recording culture in the
United States. Roughly two months after the November 11, 1918, armi-
stice that marked the close of the Great War, a January 15, 1919, Talking
Machine World headline read: “Our National Victory Should Make Busi-
ness Men Optimistic.”13 Both the recording and playback process remained
mechanical, but the phonograph boom came as old patents expired, court
decisions opened up the industry, and new companies sought to compete
against the industry’s established leaders. A year later, industry predictions
were coming true. The trade journal’s January 15, 1920, issue was full of
advertisements from companies like Aeolian-­Vocalion, Brunswick-­Balke-­
Collender, Gennett, OKeh, Pathé and others, labels that, as Allan Sutton
has suggested, were all producing their own lateral-­cut recordings in what
was a new competitive context.14 An April 1919 advertisement declared,
“There Has Never Been Such a Boom in the Record Business,” telling
retailers that it wasn’t a matter of how many records that could be sold,
but a question of “Where Can you Get Enough Popular Records Right
Away?”15 While the Victor phonograph works was still being restored from
its wartime role as arms manufacturer, the domestic U.S. market for sound
recordings was so great that the company couldn’t keep up. And in the
month of August 1919, no new Victor recordings were released so that the
company could fill its many back orders.16 Edison’s ability to respond to re-
cording industry changes was already a problem before World War I, when
Edison himself professed technological quality and clarity over the use
of celebrity, an increasingly important dynamic in both sound recordings
and cinema in the 1910s.17 To make matters worse, Edison himself became
the company’s de facto music director and found himself alienated by the
emerging music of the World War I era, especially jazz.18 Increasing atten-
tion was given to both rural—­and more specifically southern—­consumers
at a time when the recording industry was expanding from its traditional
center in the American Northeast.19 Industry trade papers offered tips for
attracting consumers while keeping up with demand, through novel and
eye-­catching window displays or having just the right mix of newly re-
 4 • record cultures

leased recordings. The June 14, 1919, issue of Music Trade Review, written
by OKeh Records’ advertising manager, announced that “The Phonograph
Industry Has Become an Ideal Musical-­Commercial Power.” The article
noted that “the phonograph and record industry is decidedly not a fad in-
dustry” but one imbued with a “lasting power . . . as vital to the progress of
mankind as the telephone, telegraph, the printing press, and several other
epoch making inventions of man.”20 On the same page, it was noted that
a Pathé Records advance list used an increasingly common approach by
companies to fill orders accurately and quickly: retail dealers and wholesal-
ers used telegraph codes and technology to ensure speed and accuracy in
filling rush orders.21
It was the emerging recording companies that first began recording
a wider swath of vernacular American musical and spoken-­word perfor-
mances in an attempt to identify niches through which they could com-
pete with the Big Three oligopoly: Victor, Columbia, and Edison. It was
through this search that the naming, defining, and categorizing of jazz, race
records, and old-­time music impacted the industrial practices of record
companies who defined those genres for the buying public. This isn’t to
say all the music represented in these genres became central to popular
music culture. Each genre’s music existed both at the center and along the
margins of the decade’s popular music. Countless other recordings, some
of which constituted vital genres and subgenres all their own, continued
despite changes that would slow or stop the expansion of the industry’s
recordings by decade’s end.
It is not that recording companies weren’t already busy recording vari-
ous aspects of the American vernacular at the start of the 1920s. It’s that
the breadth and depth of that activity expanded greatly during the decade,
through industrial organization and cultural circulation of sound media, in
constant negotiations between musicians and audiences, scouts, wholesal-
ers and retailers, recording engineers, and recording directors. These em-
ployees worked in several registers at once: (1) they managed the selection,
manufacturing, circulation, and sale of sound recordings for the companies
with which they were affiliated, (2) they managed audiences by gauging
tastes and participating in the construction of genres, and (3) they neces-
sarily managed a range of social and cultural realities across huge swaths of
American society as part of their everyday work.22
But even larger dynamics were at work: The convergence of U.S.
media industries that began in the late 1920s meant that the recording
industry, largely its own industrial entity since its origins in the 1890s,
 Introduction • 5

would cease to stand alone as a discrete entity. They would become part
of larger radio (and, to a lesser extent, film) companies in what was the
first major consolidation of entertainment media industries in the twen-
tieth century. It is not that recording companies were enveloped alto-
gether, though it may have seemed that way to some in the early 1930s.
In subsequent years—­even during the Great Depression—­new labels (or
revamped ones) would continue to exist as stand-­alone entities. The re-
cording business’s low barrier to entry helped ensure that. But it would
no longer be the same as it had been when the leading recording compa-
nies stood alone. As is often the case, the changes were not always wel-
come by those most invested in how companies had operated, nor were
the changes always fully spelled out in its trade papers. Many of those
who had been financially and emotionally invested in the U.S. recording
industry in its heyday did not come to terms with its shifting fortunes
until the realities could no longer be ignored. And while the recording
industry declined in many ways amidst the rise of radio, it also expanded
its breadth and scope in such a way that would help ensure its long-­term
economic and cultural impact. This change came as the foundational
genres of U.S. popular music were shaped and reshaped, before and af-
ter many of the recording industry’s labels became part of entertainment
conglomerates in the first major of wave of entertainment media consoli-
dation in the twentieth century.
That these myriad changes took hold in the 1920s does not seem ac-
cidental. The broader context was a roiling set of contradictions, with new
freedoms coming up against repressive and violent backlashes. As Kathleen
Drowne and Patrick Huber wrote:

A newly urbanized population clamored for the modern technolo-

gies of automobiles, refrigerators, radio, and electric appliances yet
at the same time longed for the simpler lifestyles of rural America.
Most Americans’ standards of living rose, but so, too, did the number
of violent, repressive clashes during the decade. Americans reveled
in the newfound freedoms afforded them by the automobile, suf-
frage, consumer culture, yet simultaneously they sought to repress
other freedoms through Prohibition legislation, Klan night riding,
and religious Fundamentalism. The liberated “flapper” was lauded
in music, movies, but . . . was nonetheless expected to settle down
and adopt the lifestyle of a traditional married woman. All in all, the
1920s signified a profound shift in behaviors, attitudes, and lifestyles
 6 • record cultures

of ordinary Americans, who found the modern world exciting but

also extraordinarily complicated.23

Media in the 1920s, T. M. Kando wrote decades later, offered a “hedo-

nistic, glamorous, and make-­believe world,” while cultural critic Gilbert
Seldes suggested (in 1923) that the “seven lively arts” were at work creat-
ing a new American culture, in which he included popular song but only
obliquely referenced sound recordings. He noted that tunes of the day
expressed a broad array of current cultural attitudes, presenting “rather
like contemporary fiction in giving form to social phenomena without ex-
pressing approval or disapproval.”24 The “Jazz Age” may have been given
resonance via F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age, but the terms had
already been in circulation as changes (musical and otherwise) seemed to
speed up everyday life.25 Robert and Helen Lynd noted that residents of
Muncie, Indiana—­dubbed “Middletown” in their unprecedented 1929 so-
ciological study—­noted that “Mechanical inventions such as the phono-
graph and radio are further bringing . . . more contacts with music than
ever before.”26
By the start of the 1920s, the recording industry’s focus on popular
music (as opposed to spoken word recordings, re-­enactments, skits, ser-
mons, and so on) served to obscure for some its role as a media industry.
There are many reasons for this, including the cultural slippage between
our conceptions of musical recordings and musical performances, also a
problem for cinema, for instance, in distancing its relationship to theat-
rical performance. By the end of the 1920s, it was no longer possible to
ignore the recording industry’s role as media industry, due to the complete
recalibration of its relationships with other media industries, most notably
radio. Radio’s emergence during the 1920s is breathtaking in scope, even
from the vantage point of commonly known touchstones: Frank Conrad’s
launch of Pittsburgh’s KDKA in 1920s; the 1921 broadcast of the Jack
Dempsey vs. Georges Carpentier boxing match (matches also appeared
on 78 rpm records); bandleader Vincent Lopez’s debut on WJZ in 1921,
with Paul Whiteman following a year later, along with the debut of Bertha
Brainard’s Broadcasting Broadway; the first coast-­to-­coast radio broadcast
in 1924; the rise of fictionalized radio narrative serials like Rise of the Gold-
bergs in 1929; and the transformation of radio news via the Lindbergh baby
kidnapping case in 1932.27 Radio’s newly found cultural power and reach
led the recording industry to first resist and then to collaborate in varying
ways, in hopes of benefiting from radio’s vast simultaneous reach, espe-
 Introduction • 7

cially after the tentative emergence of network radio in November 1926.

Radio needed the recording industry after its conceptual tendency toward
liveness became increasingly untenable as programming grew. Meanwhile,
after years of experiments involving film and sound combinations, the mo-
tion picture industry began its sound-­on-­film transition with a focus on
movies that sang as much as they talked. The first half-­decade or so of
talking motion pictures were defined by musicals, in the form of backstage
musicals and revue films of the late 1920s and early 1930s.
The convergence was not only based on content. Technological
change played a part in the new closeness, determined by various cultural,
industrial, and legal forces. The shifting needs of the three industries—­
the recording, radio, and film industries—­came together in new tech-
nological practices. Electrical recording would reshape the role of the
recording industry as an increasingly important supplier of aural raw ma-
terial in the face of radio and cinema’s demands. All three industries were
deeply impacted by the adoption of electrical recording, which brought
the radio and film industries together with the recording industry like
never before. Both radio and film increasingly relied on the recording
industry, while the recording industry itself would become increasingly
linked to those industries in turn. Having these companies more closely
related did not change the regulatory structures that had emerged around
discrete industries, as radio was above all seen as a communicative medium
and sound recordings and film were more commonly understood discur-
sively as entertainment media, a distinction at work in Starr’s analysis as
well as in the academic institutionalization of media and music studies in
the United States and elsewhere. But as I hope this research shows, such
distinctions points more to the limits of our own understandings of these
media industries rather than the beliefs and dispositions held by those
most closely involved.
Between the close of the First World War and the mid-­1930s, the cen-
tral organizing categories of twentieth-­century American popular music
solidified: jazz (in its first incarnation), “race records” (later blues), and
“old-­time music” (later “hillbilly,” then “country”). Each developed numer-
ous subgenres and styles. Many of the subsequent genres that have emerged
relate back directly or indirectly to these three categories, particularly in
the social and cultural contexts and values assigned to each. To understand
these sociocultural aspects of the industry is to have a good grasp of the
historical arc of the recording industry’s organizational schema, in which
social issues play out through aesthetic categories and questions of taste.
 8 • record cultures

This book maps the recording industry’s historic role in the categorization
of popular music through one of the industry’s central means of organizing
music: genre. Genre as I use the term here is understood in its industrial
function, a marketing category, shaped and reshaped along the cultural cir-
cuit of production, distribution, and consumption. I have no interest here
in parsing out the contours of genre in terms of stylistic approaches and
lineage. Genres most commonly use aesthetic categories to mask, however
thinly, social ones, though those doing so in their everyday work may not
have always been aware they were doing so, given deeply ingrained beliefs
and dispositions. Any brief aesthetic conversations herein should be read
accordingly. That recording companies were unable (or unwilling) to parse
out the differences between their aesthetic delineations with a constella-
tion of social and cultural ones should not encourage us to do the same.
There is at least some evidence in what follows that scouts were aware that
their aesthetic differentiations were born out of social structures and reali-
ties more than anything else, and since they were in the business of selling
sound recording, they put those understandings and misunderstandings to
use. Genre categories, and their social and cultural distinctions, were (and
are) created and operationalized by recording companies to sell recorded
music as commodities. As such, genres are imbued with a constellation of
social, cultural, and aesthetic designations with their own set of specific
values, attitudes, beliefs, and dispositions.
By the 1920s, established major labels like Victor and Columbia were
outpaced by smaller companies like Gennett, OKeh, and Paramount in
their ability to delineate new talent and define new taste cultures. These
genre categories functioned as a means for the industry to structure these
“new” types of music for specific audiences through linking specific aes-
thetic styles with social attitudes and beliefs connected to the music. Re-
cording companies commodified the music and artists down through genre
categories, the narratives about the music, the performers, and even the
details around a given performance or recording session. The key figures in
developing these genre categories were the recording directors and talent
scouts that functioned as intermediaries between artists, audiences, and the
companies for which they worked, either as staff employees or freelancers.
Talent scouts, along with recording engineers and some company execu-
tives, coordinated the day-­to-­day business of record making, distribution,
and sales, while simultaneously discerning listeners’ tastes for this or that
niche.28 These labels traversed rigid and often dangerous social and cul-
tural divides to record ignored or disparaged music by marginalized and
 Introduction • 9

often vilified people.29 The music and the people associated with it (listen-
ers as well as performers) were represented in catalogs, advertisements, and
the trade press, all of which reified these genres in various ways.
The attention to genre’s importance here is ultimately in service of this
book’s larger focus: to explore recording companies’ institutional cultures
and their role in reshaping American popular music. This reshaping was
due in large part to industry expansion in search of market niches, followed
by recording and radio company mergers in the century’s first wave of en-
tertainment industry conglomeration. A cultural circuit of producers, con-
sumers, and intermediaries defined genres and audiences in various ways.30
Though profit was the first motive, recording companies were also in the
business of making culture, while being cultural institutions all their own.
Those institutional cultures were also reproduced in the recordings they
made, in the advertisements that sold the recordings, and in the stories
they told and retold for decades after the fact.

Social Contexts: Genre Formations and Technological Origins

The narratives represented here weave in and out of the arc of U.S. record-
ing companies’ fortunes during the 1920s and 1930s. In the macro narra-
tive, the U.S. recording industry sales peaked in 1921 at $106 million, a
pinnacle not reached again until 1945.31 An early 1920s recession kept sales
flat for many companies; it was followed by a recovery of sorts after 1925,
then by the stock market crash and coming of the Great Depression in the
early 1930s. Though some companies found their place, profiting amidst
various social, industrial, and technological changes in the 1920s and 1930s,
overall sales ebbed throughout this period, finding bottom in 1933, after
which the industry’s fortunes began to slowly climb once again.32 But this
book attempts to provide contexts for what was happening within these
industrial and economic realities, as recording companies began to experi-
ment in unprecedented ways in recording a broader range of American
music, while also interacting with other media industries in new ways.
The rise of the U.S. recording industry and its subsequent consolida-
tion into the radio and film industries in the late 1920s and early 1930s rep-
resents the earliest consolidation of entertainment media (predated only
by the telecommunication consolidation of the telegraph and telephone
industries). Both the dramatic expansion into new niches of the recording
industry through the 1920s and its consolidation and reconstitution in the
face of radio’s rise in the mid-­to-­late 1920s and the Great Depression of
 10 • record cultures

the early 1930s, is reminiscent of what Paul Starr has called “constitutive
choices” in the history of media “that create the material and institutional
framework of fields of human activity.”33
In Starr’s use of the term, he means to map the initial emergences of
new media, moments in which “ideas and culture come into play, as do
constellations of power, pre-­ existing institutional legacies, and models
from other countries,” Here I extend the concept in two ways: First, Starr
34

largely limits media to “the press, postal and telecommunications net-

works, cinema and broadcasting,” while phonography gets scant mention
in the book’s almost five hundred pages.35 Second, Starr limits his research
to initial moments in which a media is created, defined, regulated, and cir-
culated through a given society.
Media studies continues to have an odd relationship with sound re-
cordings as media. Despite the de rigueur sound recording and popular
music chapter in introductory media studies texts, the subject is relegated
to cameo appearances in subsequent books and courses. Is it that pho-
nographic media’s traditional marginalization in mass communication
research was due to deep links between the rise of broadcasting and the
emergence of mass communication research? At that point, phonography’s
revolutionary impact had faded with its ubiquity, especially given radio’s
unprecedented scope and reach? Sound recordings have long been both
the raw material used by and for other media of the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries, and an industry all its own, a dual, defining role of lasting
importance. But one of the most important contributions of media indus-
tries research has been its ability to define intermedial relationships across
contexts. These intermedial connections extend well beyond early cinema
and early phonography to the present day. In addition to the focus on the
recording industry’s transformations of the early 1920s, intermedial con-
cerns accelerate via consolidations and collaborations across sound record-
ing, radio, and film cultures in the late 1920s and through the 1930s. The
transition from acoustic to electric recording and playback technologies
was key in this regard, a technological shift that was negotiated through a
comprehensive restructuring across media industries. But the impacts go
far beyond this, intersecting industrial ownership, intertextuality, and the
strategies and tactics of those participating along media’s cultural circuit. A
strength of media industries histories has been in bringing these interme-
dial relationships into view, as I do here, through integrating the recording
industry into larger media histories, first as a discrete industry in the early
 Introduction • 11

decades of the twentieth century to one inexorably tied to the radio and,
to a lesser extent, film industries thereafter. Part of this task is the constant
reminder that the recording industry was connected to other media indus-
tries, in varying ways, all along.
Sound recording entered a society in which foundational social and
economic changes were taking place. “The development of sound repro-
duction into recognizable media occupies a place among a whole range of
social transformations in turn-­of-­the-­century America,” Jonathan Sterne
writes in The Audible Past. “The very possibility of sound media was struc-
tured by the changing economics and social organization of invention, the
growth of corporate-­managerial capitalism, and the concurrent move from
Victorian to consumerist forms of middle-­class everyday life.”36 The fun-
damental changes in American business in the latter half of the nineteenth
century set the stage for the recording industries that expanded in the first
decades of the twentieth century. The railroad and the telegraph both were
key in the development of modern approaches to production, distribution,
and consumption, as well as the rise of marketing as a key element in an
increasingly national (and shortly after, transnational) network.37 The tra-
ditional “single-­unit business enterprise,” in which one owner or a handful
of co-­owners ran a given company (a shop, factory, etc.) did not disappear.38
But it was superseded in various ways by highly organized companies that
moved from strictly local or regional concerns to places far beyond. Such
operations required a much broader bureaucratic structure in which all-­
important middle managers as well as an emerging executive elite increas-
ingly defined what “business” would mean moving forward.39 None of
this was instant or automatic. The new managerial structures of Ameri-
can business came about within a specific social and historical series of
contexts. Changes to these new administrative and managerial structures
included greater productivity and profits at lower cost, a single unit under
which a variety of complicated enterprises functioned, and a hierarchy that
propelled a given company overseeing it all.40 “The coming of the large
vertically integrated, centralized, functionally departmentalized industrial
organization altered the internal and external situations in which business
decisions were made.”41 The upstart labels of the 1910s and 1920s found
a place in the gaps of what the Big Three had recorded, focused on “han-
dling local and more specialized aspects of the business.”42 “The new speed,
regularity, and dependability of transportation” meant that wholesalers
became “jobbers,” who purchased goods from manufacturers outright (or
 12 • record cultures

sold on commission), while tying into a given company’s marketing brand

and building a network of retailers and filling the racks of music stores in
far-­flung locales.43
It was the “record men” of the era—­sometimes talent scouts, jobbers,
and salesmen all in one—­that were so vital to recording companies, first
located in a small portion of the American Northeast. As new companies
started up in the Great Lakes Midwest, they mimicked the Big Three in
their corporate structures, though they relied even more heavily on the
knowledge of their employees (broadly defined) in the field. “They re-
ported on changing demand, items particularly desired, the general eco-
nomic conditions of different sections, and, above all, the credit ratings
of local storekeepers and merchants. The salesmen also assisted the store-
keepers in keeping a stable inventory, in improving their accounting, and
even in enhancing their merchandising displays.”44 As I have argued else-
where, those who recorded and scouted and sold this music, on behalf of
companies in search of viable market niches, crossed vast cultural divides
of race, class, gender, and geography, producing sounds by and for often
ignored, ridiculed, and marginalized people. This came in the midst of
convulsive changes in American society, as the Victorian era gave way to an
increasingly liberatory and reactionary age all at once.45 The way releases
were organized—­however tentatively—­had, in some cases, deep impact
over time. The era’s cycles of production, categorization, distribution, sale,
and consumption of sound recordings had lasting impacts: the reification
of existing social and cultural beliefs, attitudes, and prejudices, as niche
styles and tastes were shaped into genres.
U.S. recording companies were already busy recording a broad pop mé-
lange, indebted to what William Howland Kenney calls the “Coney Island
crowd” tradition, or songs, monologues, and dialogic skits that would have
played in the phonograph parlors and penny arcades that would have been
part of amusement park culture up to World War I.46 Some of what was
popular in the post-­World War I and early jazz age years included a broad
mix of “light” or popular takes on classical music via Alma Gluck, who in-
congruously made her name with a hugely popular version of “Carry Me
Back to Old Virginny”; novelty tunes by vaudevillian singer Billy Murray;
mainstream dance band music by Paul Whiteman, Isham Jones, and Ben
Selvin; popular adaptations of religious songs like “The Great Judgment
Morning,” via Homer Rodeheaver; Arthur Collins’ vaudevillian trade in
racist minstrel-­era “coon songs” and Al Jolson’s update of minstrelsy with
“Swanee”; and Tin Pan Alley numbers like Nora Bayes’ take on Richard
 Introduction • 13

Whiting and Raymond Egan’s Orientalist tune “Japanese Sandman.” For

better or for worse, U.S. recording companies already included a wide va-
riety of musical approaches and cultural portrayals.
Genres, like classifications in general, are used in a variety of ad hoc
ways, on a daily basis. “We all spend large parts of our days doing classifi-
cation work,” Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star write, “often tacitly,
and we make up and use a range of ad hoc classifications to do so.”47 Those
who produce, distribute, and consume music—­musicians, fans, and the
recording companies that are the focus of this book—­shape and reshape
borders, often reinforced when we cross them. We participate in the shap-
ing and reshaping of these classifications and conventions (or in this study,
genre categories) and they shape our everyday lives in often invisible ways,
until they “break down or become objects of contention.”48 This makes the
work of excavating genre work of the past easier, given that the ideologies
have decayed in certain ways while remaining doggedly steadfast in others.
It is nearly impossible for us to think outside these categories, which we
reify even while we critique them in various ways.
Genre is a central component of this book in that it opens up to a num-
ber of important social and cultural functions of media industries’ role
along the cultural circuit. Like David Brackett (by way of Franco Fabbri),
I see genre as fundamentally relational. This notion is based in a “system of
difference,” in which genres function within ever-­changing contexts of cul-
tural production as opposed to the mapping of “a trait-­based approach.”49
Genres circulate as ever-­changing “articulations” and “assemblages” in
which popular music genres become recognizable in their dialogic rela-
tionship to other genres.50 As genres emerge, they become iterative, ex-
tending genre formations through the citing of musical (and social and
cultural) conventions. This approach rightly emphasizes the deeply dia-
logic nature of genres, not as “quasi-­mechanistic” formations in their own
“hermetically sealed world,” but in a world in which such formations rise,
shift, and change.51
Genres are not devised by any one actor. As Jennifer Lena has suggested,
“music is in need of thick histories,” in which genre formations are not
solely attributed to “individual genius or serendipity” but formed through
“collaborative links with skilled practitioners” of varying sorts, in which
music and its circulation is part of a “participatory, community-­based ac-
tivity.”52 These activities can be usefully mapped by an analytical approach
based in cultural studies research, which has sought a fuller accounting
of the interrelated “cultural processes”—­representation, identity, produc-
 14 • record cultures

tion, consumption, and regulation—­along the “circuit of culture,” in which

these poles come into relation in ways that shift and transform over time.53
Not surprisingly, all these analytical categories are represented here. But
choices must be made, in light of previous research and the agenda of this
book, which focuses on recording companies as institutional cultures, first
through their role in genre formations and later in the conflicts and col-
laborations that emerged as many of those same companies changed in
various ways with the rise of radio.
Having said that, audiences, in all their myriad complexities, are central
to the shaping and reshaping of generic conventions and ever-­shifting lis-
tener identifications, in the twists and turns of their cultural circulation and
tied to constellations of social and cultural formations.54 As Thomas Schatz
has argued, the study of media industries must not lose sight of the roles
of creativity, authorship, and cultural production research based in both
film studies and cultural studies, amidst ever-­shifting relational concerns
about the shape of media industries, concentrations of ownership, and
mechanisms of control.55 While this book focuses on recording companies’
roles in genre formations, it is the larger set of participants—­sometimes
understood as communities—­that play no small part in a given genre’s
emergence, sustainability, and malleability over time. The kaleidoscope of
cultural distinctions that make up genre formations are often arbitrary, but
it does not then follow that they are of no importance, because our every-
day experience suggests otherwise, when for instance we are insulted by a
friend’s rejection of our own tastes, affinities, and dispositions tied to this
or that genre. Even as we critique these distinctions, we continue to live
with them. As Simon Frith suggests, “the essence of popular culture prac-
tice is making judgments and assessing differences.”56 And as Keith Negus
has argued, that process goes on across popular music media culture, in-
cluding within those recording companies that scout, record, classify, and
sell to the larger public. In that sense, I share Negus’ intention to move
beyond describing a cultural product via “technical and routine processes
and institutionalized practices,” to “understand[ing] the meanings that are
given to both the ‘product’ and the practices through which the product
is made.”57
In focusing on the expansion of folk and pop scouting in the Ameri-
can South, Karl Hagstrom Miller convincingly argues that it was “scholars
and artists, industrialists and consumers” that began to segregate what had
not been segregated previously, as “a fluid complex of sounds and styles in
practice was reduced to a series of distinct genres associated with particu-
 Introduction • 15

lar racial and ethnic identities.”58 While this book greatly benefits from
such insights, I will not try to replicate that here, focusing instead on the
institutional cultures, discourses, and contexts that exhibited much of what
Hagstrom Miller has identified. When possible, I have tried to also provide
glimpses of consumers of recordings where possible. Much of the work
here focuses on genres’ industrial contexts and sociocultural circulations,
via the nascent recording companies of the era as well as via recording
companies’ increasingly close relationships with radio and film. But I do
so with the foundational recognition that many of the social and cultural
tropes and dispositions date back to colonial America. Genre furthered
these existing dynamics as a central organizational (and sales) strategy in
media, as an explanatory and narrative model through which a set of pro-
posed distinctions and differences are made “real.” Some of those niches
emerged into lasting genre categories, lasting through companies’ dissolu-
tion or absorption into other media industries, while others served more
ephemeral importance, at least to the companies involved.
The start of this book focuses on the expansion of U.S. recording
companies beyond the Northeast into the Great Lakes Midwest and then
maps the aftermath in which they turned to new niches when their initial
attempts at mimicking the Big Three’s repertoire failed. They turned to
the music around them, including that of newly arrived musicians from
the American South, which in turn led to recording expeditions there,
as well as to points around the United States in years to come. And as
Karl Hagstrom Miller has noted, talent scouts and folklorists, invested in
the purity of the country’s regional vernacular music, were crestfallen to
find “Broadway in the backwoods,” which had arrived decades before via
sheet music, the vaudeville performing circuit, and the easy portability of
sound recordings from people and places culturally, if not geographically,
far away.59
Not surprisingly, some of the musical styles came in with built-­in distor-
tions and prejudices inherent in the structures of American racism, which
would show up in genre classifications with no small implications for the
everyday work of the industry. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in
the form that gave birth to both American popular music and the central
importance to authenticity in its production, reception, and circulation:
minstrelsy and its cruel depictions in working-­class theaters in the white
urban North.60 As Hagstrom Miller suggests, the “cultural component of
segregation” was “in some ways more successful than its legal counterpart”
in that its “narrative of discrete racial and regional cultures remaining en-
 16 • record cultures

sconced long after the doctrine of separate but equal ceased to be the law
of the land.”61
This cultural segregation has led to differing accounts of how compa-
nies negotiated the processes of scouting, recording, manufacturing, dis-
tributing, and selling sound recordings. This not only meant “the business
side,” but also the varying cultural barriers that those involved crossed with
care and regularity. The music they found, however divided and subdivided
by recording scouts, folklorists, and scholars after the fact, were hybrid-
ized when “discovered.” “Standard approaches,” Hagstrom Miller writes,
“assume that the commodification is a problem that must be investigated,
that music bought is somehow less true than music made,” but I share his
notion that music is shaped less by “who they were” but by “what they
had the opportunity to hear.”62 This famous dichotomy stubbornly remains
common in the present day, though Simon Frith argued decades ago that
the music-­as-­expression vs. music-­as-­commodity distinction was a deeply
flawed way of thinking about popular music. Frith rightfully argued that
in the age of sound media, a given media commodity (a sound recording)
is often a creative starting point in the hands of others rather than the
compromised end of an otherwise pure cycle.63 At the same time, while the
cultural categories that impacted genre formations are arbitrary at their
core, their impacts are nonetheless responsible for very real consequences
in the lives and careers of those involved.64
Technological change is never simple or straightforward, but it is impli-
cated in a constellation of shifting social, economic, regulatory, and cultural
contexts. Authors commonly write about technology as an “autonomous”
force in society, in no large part due to the difficultly in assigning spe-
cific agencies to technological change, as Lisa Gitelman has suggested.65
Media histories “must be social and cultural, not the stories of how one
technology leads to another, or of isolated geniuses working their magic
on the world.”66 Nor are technologies as stable as we often suggest, not
“the phonograph” nor “the radio” as we sometimes write, taking a “heuris-
tic” approach that cites a “coherence” that falls apart with scrutiny.67 The
definitional instability of technological media is further complicated by the
unstable nature of the “social.” Derived from widely held practices in soci-
ology, common definitions of “society” treat it as a macro state, which we
all inhabit. “Problems arise, however,” Bruno Latour writes, “when ‘social’
begins to mean a type of material,” a beginning rather than the result of
“actors” (human and nonhuman in Latour’s formulation) in which the “so-
cial” is the ever-­shifting end result of actors and assemblages and networks
 Introduction • 17

and so on.68 Through Latour’s development (with Michel Callon) of actor-­

network theory, he sought to contextualize people on a less hierarchical
plane in relationship to technological artifacts and formations. Just as the
urge to escape technological determinism is easier said than done, Latour
outlines the many difficulties in reformulating the social in the ways he
suggests. In this book, I have tried to resist assigning agency to large, amor-
phous “social” trends and have tried to rely on specific actors, relations, and
contexts so as not to make claims so broad as to be meaningless.
Thus the emergence of a range of phonographic technologies was in
no way preordained. The paths to adoption were tentative and circuitous
for long periods of time, only really recognizable as a narrative after the
fact (and even then, we have often got it wrong). To begin: It was in no way
preordained that the recording industry would be focused on music. Of all
the many inventors who had experimented with sound in different ways
(Éduoard-­Léon Scott de Martinville, Charles Cros, and Alexander Graham
Bell, among others), it was Edison that got credit for the “phonograph.”
The name for his cylindrical recording device was already in circulation as
a system of phonetic shorthand stenography invented by Sir Isaac Pitman
by the 1840s.69 Edison’s August 3, 1877, experiment with machinist John
Kruesi, almost a year after Alexander Graham Bell’s successful telephone
experiment, is marked as a beginning of sorts. A patent for Edison’s new
device was granted on February 19, 1878. The inventor first tried to sell
his new technology via lectures in which the inventor or his employees
would demonstrate and discuss the phonograph’s abilities and possible
uses. These spectacle-­like demonstrations were meant to garner interest
in the technology, but any initial amazement regarding the phonograph’s
ability to separate human voices from bodies had largely waned, as the
Edison ledgers suggest.70
“In our own times it has become fashionable to declare that music has
become a commodity,” David Suisman writes. “Like many truisms, this
claim obscures as much as it reveals.” Commodification, he adds, is a “so-
cial and political process, populated by human actors, and one that includes
various dimensions and phases.”71 There is no better proof of this than Edi-
son’s much-­cited trial balloon, in the form of an article published on May
1, 1878, “The Phonograph and Its Future” in The North American Review,
in which he suggested various possible market uses for the device, includ-
ing use in alarm clocks, talking dolls, and in the creation of wills, among
other uses.72 As Leonard DeGraaf writes, “The lack of a clearly defined
application for the phonograph affected the company’s ability to promote
 18 • record cultures

it.”73 And while Edison’s 1878 essay is sometimes held up to suggest Edi-
son’s failure, most of the uses he predicted came to pass in time. Although
recorded music would become phonography’s focus, other strands contin-
ued on successfully with relatively little attention. The earlier initiative to
make phonographs business devices later found success via dictation ma-
chines. But after early business applications failed, Edison gave the rights
to develop the technology for use in toys and dolls or as music boxes, but
such initiatives never amounted to a viable plan for the phonograph writ
large, even if both uses for recorded sound would come into use. But after
Edison’s entrepreneurial efforts failed, the inventor largely abandoned the
phonograph during work on the technology and infrastructure surround-
ing electric light, among other projects.74
It was the work of Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter that
prevented the new sound technology from drifting into obscurity. Funded
by Alexander Graham Bell (Chichester’s distant relative) and encouraged
by financier and lawyer (and Graham Bell’s father-­in-­law) Gardiner Hub-
bard, Bell and Tainter found funding and a place to work at the telephone
inventor’s new Volta Laboratory.75 During a period in which Edison was
distracted by ongoing projects (primarily electric lighting and iron-­ore ex-
traction), Bell and Tainter’s patented improvements and the launch of their
“graphophone” jolted Edison back into improving his phonograph.76 After
experiments with disc technology, Bell and Tainter decided on an improved
cylinder phonograph, with replayable wax cylinders, while also avoiding
the wobbling common to Edison’s mandrel-­style phonographs.77 This re-
search would lead to formation of the American Graphophone Company
(an ancestor of the Columbia Phonograph Co.), both using cylinder tech-
nology, after attempts at merging interests with Edison failed.
After weighing the viability of different uses for the phonograph, Edi-
son and others focused on business applications. This makes sense, as Paul
Israel suggests, given the biographies of many of those involved: “Edison
and the other major figures in the early phonograph industry shared a back-
ground in telecommunications” and thus “were ill prepared to imagine and
create an entertainment industry.”78 To launch his phonograph business,
Edison partnered with Jesse Lippincott, a Pennsylvania industrialist who
had made his fortune in glass. The North American Phonograph Compa-
ny’s main charge was to popularize the phonograph as business device. Edi-
son and Lippincott largely built its business model on the telephone indus-
try: regional companies served its areas by leasing cylinder phonographs
as a technological replacement for stenographers, who quickly organized
 Introduction • 19

against the technology. But the early phonograph was not fit for such busi-
ness purposes, given the technology’s fragility. Repairing machines was a
logistical problem, especially for those local companies farthest west that
had to send machines back east for service. This in turn made the leasing
model borrowed from the telephone industry untenable for the phono-
graph, as lessors were not renewing after their initial agreements expired.79
In a closed-­door 1890 meeting of phonograph manufacturers, the na-
scent industry’s assumptions were laid bare. Lippincott brought all the
local phonograph companies together at Chicago’s Auditorium Building to
discuss present difficulties and future prospects. Attendees revisited tech-
nological and business assumptions about the new technology and revis-
ited technological and business models in relation to the design and sale
of telephones, typewriters, and sewing machines.80 Raising these questions
again was more urgent than fanciful, as the industry’s focus on the talking
machine as a business device was facing collapse. While thirty-­three com-
panies were represented at the 1890 meeting, only nineteen labels returned
in 1891.81 On the second day of the conference, the agenda turned to talk-
ing machines for public exhibition, at which point Louis Glass of San Fran-
cisco’s Pacific Phonograph Company spoke. “Gentlemen, I have very little
to say except, that all the money we have made in the phonograph business
we have made out of the nickel-­in-­the-­slot machine. . . . I will state that the
first one we put out was placed in the Palais Royal saloon on November
23rd, 1889, and we have taken in from that machine, up to May 14th, last,
$1,035.25.”82 Only Glass and a few other representatives spoke up in favor
of the entertainment phonograph, a move that flew in the face of what
Edison and Lippincott wanted. Paul Starr notes that it was distributors like
Glass who first recognized “more of a market as an entertainment medium
than as a business apparatus,” for use in “storefront phonograph parlors as
well as in such venues as hotel lobbies and train stations.” These parlors be-
came the “penny arcades” in which a variety of amusements and automata
were also featured.”83
Edison would never have the same amount of control over the record-
ing industry that he had in those early years, particularly when compared
to his control of later technologies, most notably the motion picture. Com-
pared to the sweeping control Edison had with the Motion Picture Patents
Co., Edison never had the kind of control in the phonograph business he
was able to exert in motion pictures, especially after his partnership with
Lippincott dissolved and the business model built around the phonograph
as a business device collapsed. And by 1915, Edison’s short-­lived trust was
 20 • record cultures

ruled in violation of the Sherman Anti-­Trust Act, around the same time
his phonograph patents were expiring and a new wave of talking machine
manufacturers would enter the industry.84 There are convergences and dis-
junctures when tracking the development of recorded sound and motion
picture technologies in light of Thomas Edison’s entrepreneurial attempts
to develop both.
“If at first the phonograph record was little more than a novelty, the
stuff of entertainment arcades and ‘educational’ lectures,” Michael Chanan
writes, “it was also an entirely novel commodity: it turned the performance
of music into a material object, something you could hold in your hand,
which could be bought and sold.”85 But what that object meant—­what it
could do—­was still being tested in a variety of ways. The growing popular-
ity of recorded sound as entertainment encouraged companies to transform
their playback machines from public amusements to domestic devices sold
in newly aestheticized cabinets that mimicked furniture styles of the day.
This is not to say that other uses were not being pursued, as evident in the
abecedary series that appeared in Phonogram between May 1900 and June
1901. Each month, another use for Edison’s phonographs (ranging from
the possible to the improbable) was introduced: an alarm clock; an alert
on buoys to warn ships at sea; built-­in phonographs on bicycles.86 Pho-
nographs were increasingly ubiquitous in public spaces. But another ar-
ticle that appeared in the Phonogram’s June 1901 issue strongly encouraged
consumers to adopt the technology into the home: “The importance—­we
might say the absolute necessity—­of music in the well-­ordered home is
now generally admitted.” The article suggested the talking machine as a
replacement for both the piano and music box and as an aid to digestion at
dinnertime.87
The dissolution of the National American Phonograph Company in
1894 allowed existing companies like Columbia and Edison to focus on
the entertainment market, while some of those already in the music busi-
ness founded labels of their own. Performers like J. W. Myers and Russell
Hunting first recorded themselves and associates before formalizing the
business into labels.88 Myers recorded under the Globe and then the Stan-
dard moniker, while Hunting (also publisher of the Phonoscope from 1896)
worked at the Universal Phonograph Company, owned by Joseph W. Stern
& Company, a sheet music company that made sure to record many of its
artists.89 The Stern/Universal relationship stands as a tantalizing early ex-
ample of what might have been if a closer organizational structure between
song publishing and sound recording had formed, while also pointing out
 Introduction • 21

the largely unmapped relationship between the two fields to date. Stern’s
activities in the sound recording business ended when Edison stopped sup-
plying cylinders, out of what Dave Laing suggests were growing fears of
competition.90 A symbol of the song as selling point in Tin Pan Alley was
reflected in recording companies (most notably Edison) not listing per-
formers on record labels.
But with the increased sale of player pianos and piano rolls on the one
hand, and talking machines and sound recordings on the other, tensions
regarding composers’ copyright claims to music being released in these
formats reached the Supreme Court.91 The Copyright Act of 1831 had
extended copyright protection to written musical compositions but had
no stipulations regarding the mechanical playback of sounds via machines
such as the player piano or phonograph.92 Concerns were great enough by
1895 that song publishers created the Music Publishers’ Association (MPA)
to address the changing technological contexts in which they worked. So
when Congress began to revise the 1870 Copyright Act, the focus was on
making sure that new laws addressed the concerns of both song publishers
and composers regarding a lack of compensation for music played on these
new technological platforms.93
While Congress was already at work, the Supreme Court had received
White-­Smith Co. vs. Apollo Co., in which the White-­Smith Music Pub-
lishing Company had sued Apollo Company, maker of pianos, player pi-
anos, and piano rolls. White-­Smith had published Adam Geibel’s songs
“Little Cotton Dolly” and “Kentucky Babe” in 1897, and it was the use of
the songs by the Apollo Company, maker of player pianos and piano rolls,
that had led to the case.94 The case was argued on January 16 and 17 and
decided in favor of Apollo on February 24, 1908, with the Court deciding
that White-­Smith had not been infringed upon given the differing tech-
nological context.95 This allowed phonograph and piano roll companies
to reproduce songs with impunity, which incensed music publishers, who
redoubled their efforts to ensure a positive outcome in Congress’s ongoing
copyright revisions. Another concern moving forward from the Supreme
Court decision was this: Aeolian Company both helped financially support
White-­Smith’s court case and bought rights to mechanical reproduction of
music from those publishers involved in the Music Publishers’ Association.
Thus Aeolian had ensured themselves a victory no matter which side won,
which led to congressional concerns that Aeolian would create a monopoly
in the player piano and piano roll market.96 These concerns left congres-
sional representatives pondering a future of collusion and a potential Aeo-
 22 • record cultures

lian monopoly, in which the company might control song publishing rights
to such a degree that they could control the phonograph and piano roll
markets.97 Those dissatisfied with the Supreme Court outcome redoubled
their efforts to influence Congress’s ongoing copyright debates. Songwrit-
ers and publishers relied on testimony before Congress from celebrities of
the day, including composers Victor Herbert and John Philip Sousa, the
latter of whom had been an outspoken opponent of “canned music.”98
In the 1909 Copyright Act, Congress rejected the Supreme Court deci-
sion and came up with a plan that became known as compulsory licensing,
designed to give song publishers the right to decide on how or whether
their music would be licensed for mechanical reproduction, while not al-
lowing that exclusive right in perpetuity. As Edward Samuels writes, “com-
posers could choose whether or not to allow recordings to be made of their
works,” while charging a price they deemed fair. “But thereafter, any other
record companies would be allowed to make their own recordings of the
song by paying a fix rate, set in the statute at 2 cents per copy.”99 While
the first provision for mechanical playback (via phonographs and player
pianos) garnered the most attention upon the Copyright Act’s passing, the
additional provision for public performance would be more impactful, par-
ticularly with the coming of sound film. As Katherine Spring writes, “In
the two decades following the Act’s inauguration, the economic potential
of the second provision became especially apparent to publishers and song-
writers, who discovered that handsome sums could be earned by licensing
performing rights to venue proprietors.”100 But in the first years follow-
ing the Copyright Act of 1909, the issue of performing rights remained a
thorny one due to great difficulties in enforcement and the arduous task
of monitoring businesses that used music without the rights clearance
that music composers and publishers so desired. Attorney Nathan Burkan,
with the support of Victor Herbert, John Philip Sousa, and others, had
been instrumental in the formation of the American Society of Compos-
ers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) in 1913. But enforcement remained
an issue, so after attempts at negotiating licenses with individual New
York restaurants bogged down, Burkan in 1914 filed a lawsuit on behalf of
Sousa, which failed.101 That failure led to another case, this time brought by
composer-­musician Victor Herbert, who had heard his song “Sweethearts”
at Shanley’s Restaurant, down the street from the Broadway opera in which
Herbert performed the song with each performance.102 In January 1917,
the case was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, which reversed the deci-
sions of the lower courts. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in favor
 Introduction • 23

of the plaintiff and on behalf of a unanimous court, saying, “If the rights
under the copyright are infringed only by a performance where money is
taken at the door, they are very imperfectly protected. Performances not
different in kind from those of the defendants could be given that might
compete with and even destroy the success of the monopoly that the law
intends the plaintiffs to have.”103 The court had decided that music played
in restaurants and other commercial spaces was played for profit as part
of what consumers were buying. The ruling gave ASCAP a legal basis on
which to collect fees on behalf of its membership, which the organization
quickly pursued. “From the beginning,” Paul Goldstein writes, “the central
collecting mechanism was a blanket license that would give the licensee
carte blanche to perform any composition in the ASCAP repertory as often
as it wished for a flat fee.”104 “Performances,” as defined in the decision,
considered sound recordings and radio to be the same as live performance.
And while live performance in early radio reached relatively few listen-
ers and was seen by many as a way to promote performances, sound re-
cordings, and sheet music, the medium’s increasing reliance on recordings
would lead to increased tensions that would flare up throughout the 1920s,
1930s, and beyond. While the emerging events of the 1920s will focus on
the recording industry’s expansion and transformation with radio’s rise, this
book will necessarily return to questions of royalties and compensation as
the radio industry buys up the leading recording companies at the end of
the 1920s and start of the 1930s.
What the White-­Smith case, the congressional debates regarding copy-
right, and the formation of institutions like the MPA and ASCAP made
clear was that music could be “composition, performance, sound, and
object” all at once, while the importance of any one of these would shift
depending on the specific economic or institutional context.105 This was
further complicated by the advent of radio, which was first understood as
a valuable tool for the promotion of musical artists. Music, newly “free”
to radio consumers who increasingly adopted the technology through the
1920s, spread in even broader ways, reaching larger and larger groups of
the public simultaneously, as opposed to the largely asynchronous listening
habits of phonograph listeners.
If sound recordings represented a challenge to the song publishing
industry’s grasp on copyright, sound phonographs and other playback
technologies meant a battle for nascent recording companies in terms of
patents. The first decades of the recording industry saw collaboration and
conflict between the emerging Big Three: Edison, Columbia, and Victor,
 24 • record cultures

as well as various new companies entering the recording market. As early

as the 1890s, Columbia and Edison agreed to license each other’s patents,
which made sense given the close history between the two companies and
their sound playback technologies, as well as their shared early focus on
the talking machine as a business device. By the 1890s, both Edison and
Columbia had debuted entertainment cylinders for the burgeoning home
phonograph market.106 But unlike Edison’s phonograph and then Ameri-
can Graphophone Company’s (renamed Columbia in 1897) graphophone,
Emile Berliner’s gramophone debuted in 1895 with a primary focus on the
entertainment market. Berliner had understood the difficulties faced by
the phonograph and graphophone as a business device and the problems
caused by the early gramophone recordings’ roughly two-­minute playing
time. Berliner’s gramophone company not only embraced a disc technol-
ogy rather than a cylinder playback system (such an approach had been a
subcurrent in recorded sound research for decades).107 It also shifted em-
phasis away from the largely failing business phonograph toward musi-
cal (and spoken word) entertainment. The technology and its new focus
created both turmoil and opportunity as shifts in playback technologies
redefined how recorded sound was produced, circulated, and consumed.
A year after the Berliner disc’s debut, his Berliner Gramophone Com-
pany entered into an agreement with a Camden, New Jersey, machine shop
operator named Eldridge Johnson, who began making entire gramophones
for the inventor’s company soon afterwards108 Not long after, Johnson dis-
tanced himself from Berliner. In addition to developing his own recording
processes, Johnson had good reason to avoid the association. In June 1900,
Frank Seaman of the Universal Talking Machine Company sued Berliner
for copyright infringement based on discs already being produced by Sea-
man’s Zon-­O-­Phone (later Zonophone) label, which meant “an end to his
American operations.”109 Johnson’s gramophone company had worked un-
der various names (Consolidated Talking Machine Company, Improved
Gramophone, Improved Record) eventually distancing his own company
from Berliner’s, buying out the inventor’s remaining U.S. holdings and
settling on a new name for his company: Victor.110 The company’s new
format, tied to an emphasis on musical and spoken-­word entertainment re-
cordings, proved successful. While Edison remained dedicated to his cylin-
der format, other companies were interested in the emerging disc business,
as varying inventors and companies fought it out in court.
The skirmishes that would lead to the industry’s dramatic expansion
wouldn’t come from battles between industry leaders, but from upstart
 Introduction • 25

companies seeking the advantages afforded by the most popular playback

formats. Claiming patent infringement in July 1904, Columbia sued Leeds
& Catlin, disc producers who were supplying lateral-­cut disc recordings
to smaller record labels as well as a few of their own.111 The company,
founded by Loring Leeds, was in court regularly, the first major case being
a suit filed by American Graphophone Co. (Columbia) in 1898.112 Many
more suits would follow. In 1909’s Leeds & Catlin v. Victor Talking Machine,
Leeds’ company argued that because Victor had not extended one of its
patents in the Canadian market (the Berliner-­Suess patent of 1899), U.S.
Victor patents were null and void.113 As David Suisman writes, “The Su-
preme Court ruled in Leeds and Catlin Company v. Victor Talking Machine
Company in 1909 that Victor’s patented technology comprised the machine
and the records, thus making it an infringement for another company to
produce records playable on Victor phonographs.”114 Because Victor con-
trolled both phonographic media’s most successful hardware and soft-
ware (to borrow contemporary terminology), it allowed the company to
dominate the U.S. recording industry like no other: “This was the cultural
equivalent of the absolute authority initially claimed over both the physical
rails and the means of conveyance . . . and it was not until key phonograph
patents expired in the second half of the 1910s that independent cultural
producers, in this case, record companies . . . could operate in the business
with any kind of reliable legal foundation.”115
Victor and Columbia then entered into a patent pool agreement, while
the Edison company was steadfast in its commitment to the patented tech-
nologies of its namesake. This was a huge mistake for Edison, as a Victor-­
Columbia patent pool ensured its control of the markets for disc and ma-
chines. As the only company in the Big Three not directly associated with
an inventor, Columbia came to be defined by lawyers and businessmen.
Columbia’s then-­parent company, American Graphophone, controlled the
Bell and Tainter patents, signed a cross-­licensing deal with Edison by 1896,
and “handled and licensed” other companies’ talking machines as early as
1897 (the year they launched their own machine).116 In October 1901, Co-
lumbia was able to get into the disc business through the sale of the Globe
Record Company’s Climax series, while former Berliner employee Joseph
W. Jones was working with attorney Philip Mauro to get a patent on his
wax recording technology, also crucial to Victor’s business.117 Once the
patent was granted on December 10, 1901, “The Jones patent put Victor
and Columbia on equal legal footing, with each company holding a pat-
ent crucial to the other’s continued operation.”118 Victor’s Eldridge John-
 26 • record cultures

son responded by purchasing the Globe Record Company, which ended

Columbia’s disc business via Climax, while Columbia readied a patent in-
fringement suit against Victor based on the Jones patent.119 Negotiations
ensued between Johnson and Columbia’s Edward Easton, which led to the
first co-­licensing agreement between two of the Big Three’s most formi-
dable companies.120 As David Suisman suggests, “Through agreements to
share their patents, large firms both minimized costly conflict of uncertain
outcome and shored up their own position as industry giants.”121
These legal conflicts and collaborations allowed the recording indus-
try to challenge Tin Pan Alley in ways it could not before, as companies
courted new listeners through more affordable phonographs and, however
tentatively at first, expanded repertoire. But this did not mean that Tin Pan
Alley’s structuring influence dissipated quickly. Like vaudeville, Tin Pan
Alley’s malleability as a form has meant that its influence is with us still,
and not just during baseball game sing-­alongs of “Take Me Out to the Ball
Game” during the seventh-­inning stretch. Rather, recording companies
entered an entertainment environment largely shaped by practices estab-
lished by Tin Pan Alley, which had commercialized music decades before.

Tin Pan Alley, Phonographic Media, and Commercial Culture

Tin Pan Alley’s commercial function had a dramatic impact on popular
music and entertainment media writ large. That impact, David Suisman
writes, “lay not in aesthetic innovation but in the relation between aes-
thetic forms and the industry’s modern capitalist structure,” which made
songwriters into laborers and songs into products, organizing American
popular music into a recognizable “variety of genres and idioms.”122 Com-
pared to the music that would follow it, some Tin Pan Alley fare seems
calculated towards the maudlin, designed to pull on the heartstrings to
encourage sales of sheet music in this newly industrialized formation. But
it also brought in decidedly new and cosmopolitan influences to the Ameri-
can songbook, borne in part out of the experiences of Jewish immigrants
from Eastern Europe, who added their own musical influences. These pub-
lishing companies also brought a “brash sophistication that eschewed the
schmaltzy excesses of the past century and most of the Italianate ornamen-
tation, relying for spice on borrowings from brass bands, South American
dances, the emerging jazz and European modernism.”123
The music publishing houses of the 1910s were so powerful by 1920
that the key firms—­M. Witmark & Sons, Irving Berlin, Inc.; Leo Feist,
 Introduction • 27

Inc.; T. B. Harms & Francis, Day & Hunter, Inc.; Shapiro, Bernstein &
Co.; and Waterson, Berlin & Snyder, Inc.—­were named in an antitrust suit
for controlling 80 percent of songs that appeared on “phonographs, player
piano rolls and other musical reproducing instruments,” while fixing prices
on recordings and piano rolls sold. The companies formed a joint licensing
operation called Consolidated Music Corporation, the entity named in the
suit.124 Consolidated only existed for a few weeks, quickly folding in the
aftermath of the federal antitrust suit (quietly dismissed in 1922).125 The
power of the music publishing houses had shaped the U.S. music industry
in the first decades of the twentieth century, and they were now jockeying
for a place in which the phonograph, the player piano, and other playback
technologies were changing some basic assumptions about how music was
created, distributed, consumed, and stored. The talking machine entered a
commercial environment in which the Tin Pan Alley mode of production,
distribution, and performance were steadfast organizing principles.
U.S. journalists often reported on the changes in derisive terms. A 1910
New York Times article articulated the how Tin Pan Alley industrialized
American popular music, which was as evident in consumers’ music hab-
its as it was in songwriting. Music consumption, the article began, “is as
constant as their consumption of shoes, and the demand is similarly met
by factory output . . . manufactured, advertised, and distributed in much
the same manner as ordinary commodities.”126 The talking machine was
initially seen by song publishers as a new and novel way to sell sheet music
rather than as a threat to Tin Pan Alley’s mode of production. In fact, the
recording industry adopted many of the same practices already common
among Tin Pan Alley song pluggers. They sold sheet music through music
shops and department stores, the theatrical and cinematic stages, and res-
taurants and bars.127 The business of sound recording would transform the
production, consumption, and distribution of popular music completely,
even as it adopted key aspects of its business model, including the use of
jobbers, who began distributing sound recordings as well as sheet music. In
terms of sales, the incorporation of sound recordings in addition to sheet
music meant another abstracted means of music (or, more broadly, sound)
delivery. As David Suisman rightly notes, “publishers at that time made
their money from selling objects (sheet music) that represented something
intangible and ephemeral (sounds).”128 Musicians heard on sound record-
ings might not know how to write sheet music, as performers played “by
ear.” In retail music stores, talking machines were added to the showroom
floor, alongside pianos, player pianos, and other musical instruments.
 28 • record cultures

But the phonograph was also recognized as a “champion of song pro-

motion,” as Katherine Spring notes, citing a Billboard article that outlined
the extended life of popular songs that had already “earned their share
of popularity on the regular sheet music market.” It “repopularizes them
in a field far more far-­reaching and profitable. It also takes songs which
would never experience spirited counter sales and popularizes them over
the instrument.”129 In the second half of the 1910s, the Peerless Quartet’s “I
Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,” the American Quartet’s “Over There
(released the same year as the U.S. entry into World War I),” Marion Har-
ris’s “After You’ve Gone,” John Steel’s “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” and
Charles Harrison’s “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” were all popular titles.
Tin Pan Alley had already developed cross-­ promotional opportunities
with Hollywood for popular music’s inclusion in silent film, which added
fundamental value to cinema’s narrative and affective depth while help-
ing to affirm popular music’s uses across media. “Whether disparaged as
ephemera or valorized as products of great artists who resuscitated popular
music for mass culture, songs of the 1920s became bankable commodities
whose musical features were exploited to suit the narrative functions of an
established classical cinema.”130 Accompanists became customary as films
included a thematic song repeated at key intervals in the film narrative,
while sheet music covers promoted connections with the latest films. And
with the rise of sound recordings as entertainment, those same songs al-
lowed film fans to purchase an object that harked back to the ephemeral
cinematic experience, sometimes including a vocal performance by the star
of the film. And as radio developed, that medium would become even more
important to the circulation of a much broader repertoire of 1920s and
1930s popular songs. But the radio of the 1910s had yet to enter its mete-
oric rise of the 1920s or its media dominance of the 1930s.
Back on the shop floors, song pluggers’ roles waned over time, since
a clerk with no musical abilities could help customers preview a given re-
cording. Recordings were often (but not exclusively) sold in music shops
alongside sheet music, pianos, player pianos, and other musical instru-
ments, where customers would come in to speak with clerks about the lat-
est releases. Records were also sold in general stores, pharmacies, appliance
and department stores, even in funeral homes for mourners in need of
musical accompaniment. The pages of the trade journals offered weekly
advice on how to attract customers with eye-­catching retail window dis-
plays and hypothetical scenarios between clerk and customers, to be stud-
ied for successful strategies for future sales. A March 13, 1919, article in
 Introduction • 29

Talking Machine World suggested that dealers should capitalize on testimo-

nial letters from satisfied listeners. One such listener wrote in to say that
he hadn’t been a phonograph fan heretofore, but after one long day at
work, he obliged his daughter and listened to Manuel Romain’s version
of the Tin Pan Alley standard, “I Will Love You When Silver Threads Are
Shining among the Gold.” “All at once,” the listener reported, “my mind
rose upon enchanted wings and swung heavenward to the bosom of a rosy
cloud. You have read tales about the effects of opium upon the nervous
system,” he continued, “Well, Mr. Romain’s song must have had the same
effect on me.” Don’t clerks realize, the article continued, that such “ecsta-
sies” coming “streight [sic] from the heart of a wonderstruck patron—­make
corking advertisements?”131
The recording industry’s reliance on the cylinder was becoming a ves-
tige of the past as companies switched to disc methods by the 1910s.132 By
the close of the 1910s, trade journals discussed concerns that some shops
had too few clerks on the floor to keep up with customer demand, particu-
larly in smaller stores not equipped with listening booths. Several articles
suggested a solution: self-­service talking machines for customers to lis-
ten to the latest recordings. A January 1919 article in Music Trade Review
magazine reported that Victor was recommending self-­service stations to
their retailers, especially in those shops with a single clerk (sometimes the
owner). As the article suggested, “Shortage of clerks first led to its incep-
tion, though like many other schemes devised to meet war-­time conditions
it will likely become a fixture in those departments where it is now be-
ing used.”133 A southeast Washington, D.C., shop described “as especially
crowded in the evening” served as example in a February 1919 article titled
“Let The Customer Play the Records.” “The proprietor knows only that
he has more customers than he can wait on,” the article suggests, “and that
too many of them only want to hear records which they ask for and have
no intention of buying.”134
With retail shops like these, the U.S. recording industry’s dominant
companies sought out consumers in different ways: through the dominant
labels’ chasing a given trend in audience taste until interest waned and
through emerging labels fighting for niches, in a broad array of largely
unrecorded styles, after head-­on competition with the majors proved fruit-
less. Changes made by industry giants (Victor, Columbia, Edison) and the
tactics of smaller labels (Gennett, Paramount, OKeh, Brunswick, and oth-
ers) helped develop a new broader mode of production, as many recording
companies paradoxically became increasingly national (and international)
 30 • record cultures

in reach by focusing on regional niches and contexts. That expansion be-

gan to close by the end of the decade as the recording industry moved from
one that largely dictated its own course to being part of a larger media
industry formation, tied to the rise of radio and the increased importance
of film. The connection between the recording industry and radio, which
was still in its infancy during the 1920s, would increase dramatically into
the mid-­1930s.
Through all these changes in the recording industry, its reliance on
genre remained constant. This relationship between genre (understood as
a configuration of social, cultural, ideological, and aesthetic beliefs) and
mode of production (in its most concrete sense, how a given company
operates) has continued to be an important one to the record industry,
because with each new genre and subgenre the industry has the poten-
tial to connect with underserved or unrecognized audiences. My analysis
begins in 1920, by which time these new labels had asserted themselves
through recording previously unheard music and developing new sales and
marketing approaches. The musical foundations of the genres discussed
here predate 1920, but the start of the 1920s marks the period in which
the foundational genres of twentieth-­century popular music emerge as in-
dustry categories. Importantly, this was made possible in large part by the
emergence of smaller labels in the late 1910s that sought out new genres
and niche markets to successfully compete with larger labels. This study
closes in 1935 or so, by which time enough had changed in the record
industry to make it look like an altogether different proposition than a
decade before, as the dual forces of radio and the Great Depression had
forced the upstart independents to merge with majors or get out of the
record business altogether. The recording industry emerged out of this
period of experimentation, consolidation, and economic depression as no
longer part of a relatively autonomous phonograph industry but as part of
a larger media formation that included film and radio. The story recounted
here details the ground-­shifting transformations that the recording indus-
try faced as its genre boundaries expanded and its industrial formation un-
derwent great change.
Those companies most likely to serve these audiences first are not likely
to be industry leaders. In the 1920s, the two clear industry leaders were
Victor and Columbia. Victor, with its ubiquitous “His Master’s Voice” ads
featuring the omnipresent dog and Victrola in what would become a domi-
nant twentieth-­century American brand, had a genealogy that traced back
to Emile Berliner and the invention of disc phonography. Victor played
 Introduction • 31

no small part in how advertisers “encouraged consumers to understand

themselves through their possessions and to fabricate their identities in
and through things.”135 Columbia, the oldest of all U.S. record companies,
had a history that dated back to the 1890s, when the company sold cylinder
phonographs for business communication in Washington, D.C. Having the
most to lose as industry leaders, Columbia and Victor therefore had little
interest in experimenting with new musical styles. The other major player
of the early twentieth century, Edison, was in serious decline by the 1920s
due to a reticence to abandon Edison’s proprietary phonograph technol-
ogy, an uneven attention to the quality of music released, and Edison’s own
peripatetic ambitions. Together, they were the original Big Three.
For a time in the 1920s, major labels like Victor and Columbia found
themselves outpaced by smaller companies like Gennett, OKeh, and Para-
mount, who recorded the new genres of the day. At the start of the 1920s,
the recording industry was still largely an East Coast phenomenon, cen-
tered between New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. During the
1920s and 1930s, new industry upstarts had shifted business to what was
then known as “the Middle West,” with musical production centered in
the industrial centers that drew poor blacks and whites north. It’s become
commonplace for me to inform friends from Wisconsin just how many
foundational blues recordings were recorded by the Paramount label of
Port Washington. Friends are equally incredulous when I mention that
Louis Armstrong’s first recording sessions were not in New Orleans but
at the Gennett Records studio in Richmond, Indiana. At the same time
that many Americans were leaving the rural south for the industrial north,
these emerging record companies in the Great Lakes Midwest were there
to record them.
This book examines institutional cultures at various recording
companies—­seen as media-­producing, culture-­producing industries—­and
those producers, consumers, and circulators of this sound media who helped
shape U.S. popular music beginning in this era. The central questions to
which I will continually return are: How did the shaping of genres and shift-
ing recording industry practices and ownership affect one another? How
do we account for the practices of the recording industry as reflected in its
decision-­making and culture-­shaping/reflecting mode, both as an industry
involved in manufacturing culture and reflecting its own participation as a
cultural institution? How did the mediating roles of company go-­betweens
help to both shape new genres and reflect record companies’ attitudes about
those genres? How did competing technologies such as radio influence the
 32 • record cultures

recording industry? And finally, how did the phonograph industry shift
from an industry largely concerned with its own fortunes to one concerned
with its role in part of a much larger media formation?

The Recording Industry, Media Historiography,

and Cultural Production
An implicit purpose of this book is to suggest that recording industry his-
tories would benefit media industry histories (and, more broadly, media
studies) through true inclusion, in recognition of the recording industry’s
history and its deep and abiding connections to other media industries. As
an interdisciplinary endeavor tied to fields each with its own specific em-
phasis and trajectory, media studies research has been defined in primary
terms via its relationships to radio, television, and film (with various digital
inclusions in recent years), traditionally “marked more by what it excludes
(or what has been excluded) than by grounded inclusions.”136 As Michele
Hilmes notes, the media that fell outside of traditional humanities research
was traditionally seen as “debased and anti-­individual, fodder for sociolo-
gists rather than critics or historians.”137 But a focus on media industries—­
including the recording industries—­allows for a focus on “those aspects of
cultural production in the twentieth century and beyond that most trouble
the humanities-­oriented categories of coherence and analysis so central to
our understanding of culture itself: the author, the text, the reader.” But
“the media of radio, popular music, television, and film refuse to conform
to comfortable analytical paradigms.”138 “By taking an industries approach
to the critical study of media,” Hilmes continues, “we are indicating a per-
spective that is inherently contextual and interrelated.”139 Christopher An-
derson and Michael Curtin have also examined the “cultural turn” that
has marked the rise of media industry histories, in which media are “not
the given facts that precede historical investigation,” but the “ongoing so-
cial productions, defined and redefined through use, affected not only by
events and material conditions, but, crucially, by the language used to de-
scribe and discuss them.”140
Like the study of media writ large, the study of popular music has never
had a single disciplinary home. This has been a simultaneous strength and
weakness that reflects the multifaceted nature of the cultural form. To date,
there has been meaningful popular music research from the study of his-
tory, music, sociology, literature, and various interdisciplinary traditions.
Each has defined and approached popular music in different ways, but I
 Introduction • 33

have found Simon Frith’s definition of the term most useful because of his
refusal to embrace “popular” in neither its “of the people” mode, common
in folklore traditions, nor in its strict commercial sense, too often under-
stood in opposition to music as cultural expression.141 The contradictory
sets of criteria that hover around the notion of “the popular” is fraught, to
be sure, especially when popularity is understood to be synonymous with
market performance.142 The U.S. recording industry encompasses a wide
variety of industrial practices, given both the traditionally low barrier to
entry to those who start recording companies and the variety of practices
that define the differences between the smallest and largest businesses. In
this study, I focus on the recording industry first and foremost as a media
industry as opposed to the larger definitional scope of “the music industry,”
which includes music publishing, the market in musical instruments, and
so on. The recording industry has been unique in its long-­term role as its
own stand-­alone medium, but one that has played a crucial role as raw
material to other media. While these dynamics were present early on in
the history of recorded sound, the latter sections of this book outline the
intensifying nature of these connections from the late 1920s onward.
Within the U.S. context, the relative lack of recording industry histories
and precarity of popular music studies has led to a tendency toward omni-
bus approaches, at least until recently.143 This book has greatly benefited
from those earlier studies, but it also asserts the need for more targeted
histories more common in historiographic work in film, radio, and televi-
sion. Foundational texts opted for broad historical approaches, investiga-
tions focused either on either technological histories of sound recording or
broader studies that attempted to map as much as possible. These studies
incorporated textual analyses, technological and industrial histories, regu-
latory contexts, and more. Some histories told triumphal “great men” his-
tories, spent scant time on social or cultural contexts, couched technologies
in narratives of inexorable progress, or sometimes dismissed present-­day
popular music contexts as signs of decline. William Howland Kenney ref-
erenced this work in arguing the following: “Cultural analysis of the pho-
nograph and recorded music has languished as writers and scholars alike
have favored the study of technology in its many changing forms. This has
had the effect of diverting attention away from the ways that Americans
interacted with recorded sound technologies, both in producing recorded
music and in consuming it.”144 But despite such flaws, these studies also laid
a groundwork for further research in that they outlined technological and
industrial contexts that might have been lost otherwise.
 34 • record cultures

More recently, cultural histories have chosen more targeted and the-
matic approaches that suggest a turn of sorts, in which the perennially ar-
riving study of popular music appears to get closer to a destination with
each study. While largely continuing the division between technological
and industrial histories of previous decades, these new studies (largely from
scholars in history and American studies) were informed by the “cultural
turn” across various disciplines and a thematic approach that no longer
tried to do it all. Not surprisingly, much of this work comes from authors in
interdisciplinary contexts. Examples of this approach include Evan Eisen-
berg (1987), Michael Chanan (1995), William Howland Kenney (1999),
David Morton (2000), and so on. Two key histories by David Suisman
(2009) and Karl Hagstrom Miller (2010) added much to existing scholar-
ship. Suisman focuses on the social, cultural, and regulatory contexts in
which music became a commodified object while Miller focuses on the
recording industry’s role in formulating racialized folk and pop genres in
the Jim Crow era. This study has also benefited from collectors’ ongoing
research and literature. While this work has spent less time on the deeply
impactful social contexts in which recording companies work, their dogged
attention to detail has added hard-­sought evidence, often little known out-
side this research by those in academia or music criticism.
Within contemporary media studies, popular music has held a precari-
ous place at best, largely relegated to textual analyses of screen-­based media.
More recently, sound research within media studies has renewed interest
in phenomena closely tied to popular music, though the sound studies and
popular music research appear to have as many complications as affinities to
date. This maps with popular music studies’ complicated and curious theo-
retical and methodological trajectory referenced above, which has followed
a decidedly different course from the study of film, radio, television, and
other media forms. This may be due in part to the blurring of disciplinary
boundaries represented in the subject. While cinema, radio, and television
were all able to define themselves as separate from the theatrical tradition,
popular music is still associated in no small way with live performance, even
though most of us consume popular music via media much more often.
Traditional media studies diverge in other ways, via two important histor-
ical dynamics in which popular music doesn’t easily fit. At its inception,
mass communication research commonly focused on mass media’s ability
to reach large audiences simultaneously, while phonography was most com-
monly understood as an asynchronous medium and not “mass” in the way
that the disciplinary focus on broadcasting had encouraged.145
 Introduction • 35

“Common sense tells us that sound recording . . . is a mass medium,

just like newspapers, films or television,” Pekka Gronow wrote in his 1983
article “The Record Industry: The Growth of a Mass Medium.”146 “The
problem is in the message,” he continued. “The message of records is usu-
ally music, and communications research does not know how to deal with
music.”147 Gronow goes on to suggest that the sale of recordings is one
primary means of proving the influence of recordings as mass media. This
dynamic points to an important distinction between recordings as media
and music as content, which can easily be confused through recordings’
role as media and music’s role as content across media platforms (record-
ings, radio, film, and later media). But it is those traditional connections to
other media that were made all the clearer by the first major conglomera-
tion of entertainment media industries in the twentieth century: the 1920s
phonograph-­radio mergers detailed here, most emblematically Victor’s
merging with the Radio Corporation of America (RCA).
I use the term “recording industry” here to mean commercial record-
ing companies, encompassing both the largest and smallest recording
companies that sought to sell recordings (largely, but not solely, music)
to consumers. John Williamson and Martin Cloonan have argued, as has
Jonathan Sterne, for the multiplicity of the music industries, within which
the recording industry is a constituent part.148 And if there are multiple
music industries there are also multiple recording industries, with various
roles across media industries and sociocultural contexts, including small
commercial record labels that have benefited from the industry’s low bar-
rier to entry, as well as some of the largest and most well-­known labels
and companies.
Like Keith Negus in Music Genres and Corporate Cultures, my under-
standing of recording companies encourages a view that understands these
companies as multifaceted organizations, in which various dynamics can be
at play at any given time, via the cultural intermediaries’ everyday actions
that shape what goes on, rather than any conception of media industries
as static, monolithic structures.149 Pierre Bourdieu’s intersecting concepts
of habitus, field, and capital have been most important here, as it has been
across work in the cultural industries.150 In an attempt to reconcile the roles
of individual actors and larger social formations, Bourdieu sees shifting
social contexts (fields) correlating in complicated ways with participants’
subjective responses, dispositions, and tendencies, or habitus.151 For Bour-
dieu, these fields and subfields were not mere production of objects in any
simple way, but a process of cultural production that produces “not only
 36 • record cultures

the object of its materiality, but also the value of this object,” a “recognition
of artistic legitimacy.”152 As Keith Negus argues, the recording industry
has been in a state of near-­constant adaptation in relation to genre, au-
dience, technology, promotion, advertising, and the law. “Since its emer-
gence at the end of the nineteenth century,” Negus writes, “the recorded
music business (and indeed the sheet-­ music publishing industry from
which many working practices were drawn) has been organized according
to small-­scale productions and selling changing niche markets alongside
the creation of big hits and blockbusters. . . . In addition, since its earliest
days the recording industry has employed various legal and illegal, small-­
scale and team-­based, marketing and promotional activities as a way of ap-
proaching consumers—­practices which might well be labelled ‘flexible.’”153
This is certainly evident in the various strategies employed by recording
companies during a period in which American consumer culture was just
taking shape. Key among these strategies was a reliance on advertising in
the pages of trade journals, newspapers, and magazines. “By 1930,” Charles
McGovern writes, “advertising was ingrained in everyday life, not only as
a thoroughly integrated tool of industrial capitalism, but also as a widely
accepted cultural influence.”154 Negus characterizes recording companies
as in constant flux, not only in their advertising and promotional strate-
gies, but in adaptations to market conditions, changing competition, tech-
nological changes, promotional, and legal precedents (paired sometimes
with tactics of dubious legality), through which companies have constantly
negotiated.
This historiographical work is deeply indebted to the work of archivists
and fans, collectors, and discographers. It is also shaped by their interests
and questions, by what they decided to keep or dispose of, what questions
they may have asked in oral interviews decades ago, what points of view
they brought to the work at hand. In the effort to preserve sound record-
ings, some archives pay less attention to printed materials—­business cor-
respondence, catalogs, contracts—­in favor of sound recordings themselves.
Those players in the recording industry and other media industries of the
1920s and 1930s may have thought of their labor as ephemeral, even unim-
portant. What they kept or didn’t, what they recalled when asked decades
later, shapes this too. Finally, the figures who were understood to be of
central importance to the U.S. recording industry were largely white and
male, while some researchers have, over time, given voice to others in-
volved. Performers, certainly, but also those worked at companies in vary-
ing capacities. I think most clearly here of Harry Pace, Mayo Williams, and
 Introduction • 37

others, about whom you will hear more in these pages. Important work re-
mains to be done in identifying women who were involved, especially those
doing the work of songwriters, scouts, and recording engineers, without
claiming those roles publicly or even identifying with the roles privately.
Here I am also thinking of the work of Aletha Dickerson, who worked in
varying capacities for the Paramount label in Chicago through much of
the 1920s, becoming de facto recording manager for Paramount.155 We
have yet to fully map those significantly involved in recording companies
during this era.
A difficult necessity in researching this era is to be aware of the many
myths, biases, distortions, and misconceptions that have emerged in layers
between the musicians discussed here and the music they made. One such
example, of many represented in this book, is Elijah Wald’s reminder that
we experience the blues (among other genres) through a haze of previous
generations’ values and categorizations, in which the genre was somehow
separated from popular music writ large. “Writers like myself have tended
to shy away from the fact that blues was once popular music,” Wald writes.
“Its evolution as a style,” he continued, “and the career paths of most of its
significant artists, were driven not by elite, cult tastes, but by the trends of
mainstream black record buyers.”156 Decades and decades of genre articu-
lations and reformations, amidst shifting sociocultural and aesthetic tastes,
have made this era’s commercial music culture increasingly inscrutable. If
we take the mythologized blues, for instance, we imbue Robert Johnson
with great importance while ignoring Bessie Smith, or Leroy Carr, for
that matter.157 We (mis)understand the blues through the industry’s racist
segregation of the music, but also through the framing and reframing via
the American folk music “revival,” or the British Invasion’s fetishization
of blues performers found via crate digging and various other layers of
meaning that have brought the music to us in the first place. Jazz’s many
iterations have obscured its origins as syncopated dance music, while the
cultural connotations of country—­and its ancestral genre titles “old time”
and “hillbilly”—­have similarly permutated at various points and in various
ways, lending toward a certain inscrutability to its earliest progenitors. My
own interest in this era is mediated in various ways, from the commercial
and cultural contexts of the 1920s and 1930s as evident in documents of
the time, to the remembrances of those involved, “rediscovered” by col-
lectors, journalists, and researchers who did interviews and published texts
created in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. While my agenda of placing the
recording industry squarely as a media industry, one that both produces
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