Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (9 page)

Recording the Appalachian fiddler in a loft, Peer winced, describing the screechy sounds as “pluperfect awful.” However, Brockman knew Carson had a loyal following among all the “rednecks” and “wool hats” who had flocked to Atlanta’s mill industries. To ensure the recording wasn’t shelved, Brockman begged Peer to press him 500 copies “right now.”

Four weeks later, a box of unlabeled records arrived in Atlanta by Railway Express. A few days later, Fiddlin’ John Carson performed his two songs at a local festival where Brockman began selling the all-black discs to enthusiastic spectators. “I’ll have to quit making moonshine and start making records!” exclaimed Carson when he saw the frenzy.

As Brockman ordered more records, Peer included the fiddler in Okeh’s catalog. He remembered that earlier that spring, he had shelved a test pressing of a certain Henry Whitter singing “The Wreck of the Old 97,” a folk song about a tragic train crash in Virginia. He sent a copy to Brockman, who confirmed it would sell in the Tennessee and Virginia market. Okeh had another rural hit, and Peer began to smell something in the air.

It didn’t take long for the competition to catch on. Columbia’s Frank Walker turned his attentions away from Bessie Smith to what was now being termed
hillbilly
. Then, in August 1924, Victor commissioned balladeer Vernon Dalhart to perform a syrupy rendition of “The Wreck of the Old 97.” Tailor-made for popular audiences, the Dalhart version snowballed into a nationwide monster. As many as 7 million copies were sold, making it the biggest-selling record in the industry’s forty-year history.

Such statistics were a welcome blessing in an otherwise shrinking market. An even bigger lifesaver came that year from Bell Labs researchers who developed a sonic medicine for the phonograph’s technological irrelevance. Combining carbon condenser microphones, matched-impedance vacuum tube amplifiers, and a new method of electromagnetic disc cutting, they invented electrical recording. Thanks to microphones and amplifiers, both high and low frequencies could now be picked up with higher definition. Singers didn’t have to bellow, diction was clearer, and instruments like guitars and banjos could be heard for the first time.

Once the technology was patented, Bell Labs presented its Westrex system to Victor. However, because Eldridge Johnson had fostered among his senior managers such disdain for radio, when they heard the distinctive timbre of tube amplifiers, they held off their answer.

Having observed all these interesting developments from London, Louis Sterling sailed into New York precisely at this juncture and bought out Columbia Phonograph for $2.5 million, then immediately signed on to the Westrex proposal. When Victor followed suit, both companies privately agreed to embark on a massive sell-off of acoustic records while their technicians refurbished studios with dampening partitions and separated amplification rooms.

Agreeing to phase out acoustic records was an important step in Eldridge Johnson’s gradual, albeit grudging, acceptance of radio. In a poignant symbol of the generational rupture, Johnson’s son was convinced Victor should manufacture new models combining radio sets and electrical record players. Earlier that February, Eldridge Johnson wrote a thoughtful memo back to his son. “I do not believe … that the scheme of broadcast music will replace talking machines; it may, however, slow up our expansion. But there is the feature of privacy, selection, repeat and the sense of proprietorship in a talking machine that no general broadcasting scheme can hope to substitute.”

Victor could do no better than raise its advertising budget to a record $5 million in 1924, making it America’s second-biggest spender on magazine advertising behind Campbell’s Soup. By 1925, the shrinking leader announced its first-ever deficit. Eldridge Johnson looked on helplessly while, one by one, senior executives who held 15 percent of the company’s stock left the business. He lamented the fact that “I must reconstruct the organization from men who are not so heavily financially interested.”

Abandoning his fruitless boycott, Johnson followed Brunswick’s lead by hosting a live radio broadcast from Victor laboratories on New Year’s Day 1926. Starring tenor icon John McCormack, the hugely successful media event aroused renewed enthusiasm for the singer’s records. The less adventurous Thomas Edison, however, continued scowling, having only once allowed a radio station to play some of his favorite Edison Diamond Discs. He personally telephoned the station after the broadcast, blasting, “If the phonograph sounded like that in any room, nobody would ever buy it. Why do you give people a laboratory experiment? I give people a finished product, and you’re a long way from having one. I don’t want any part of it.”

With the old moguls drifting further into irrelevance, Otto Heinemann continued charging ahead. As radio stations opened in far-flung locations, his field-recording trucks ventured to St. Petersburg, Cleveland, Buffalo, Kansas City, Annapolis, Asheville, and Dallas.
Talking Machine World
ran a distinctly musicological editorial in 1925 about Okeh’s Cajun recordings. “As portraits of bayou life they are real poetry, connoisseurs say, telling stories of the strange water creatures that inhabit the bayous and the uneventful life of the fisherfolk.” Thanks to field recording, Okeh was exploring America’s folk consciousness and the epic story of migrations into the New World.

It was perhaps inevitable that Louis Sterling couldn’t resist buying out Okeh’s parent company, the Carl Lindström group, in 1925, simultaneously giving Columbia a stronger foothold in continental Europe and rural America. However, by far the biggest corporate event of the period was Eldridge Johnson’s capitulation. In 1926, the financial consortium Seligman & Speyer bought out the Victor Talking Machine Company for $400 million—a decision Johnson would regret to his grave.

Spotting a career opportunity, Ralph Peer jumped ship to the confused but modernizing Victor. He traveled down to Bristol, Tennessee, set up a studio on the second floor of a hat warehouse, and placed advertisements in local newspapers asserting that “in no other section of the South have the pre-war melodies and old mountaineer songs been better preserved than in the mountains of East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia … and it is primarily for this reason that the Victrola Company chose Bristol as its operating base.” Peer knew how to sweet-talk a musician; the articles were careful to mention that hillbilly Ernest Stoneman had just received $3,600 in royalties. As singers and string bands began descending from the hills, Peer discovered both Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, whose
Bristol sessions
would in time be revered as a seminal moment in country music.

The motivation behind Ralph Peer’s defection became quickly evident. According to a Victor staffer, Nathaniel Shilkret, a senior executive, Walter Clark, met Peer to review his remuneration as a talent scout. In this meeting, Peer sold Clark a novel idea, “no raise, but a royalty of one cent per record side that he would divide with the artist.” Shilkret remembered the shock it aroused. “When I heard of this I was stunned. No one on the musical staff had been offered a royalty for his arrangements or compositions, and here was a man collecting royalties with other men’s compositions!”

In the second quarter of 1927 alone, Peer collected $250,000 in royalties. He duly set up the Southern Music Company, requiring his artists to sign both management and publishing contracts. Peer may have been a ruthless opportunist, but he understood the market he was working in. In these uncharted musical territories, most rural musicians were happy to accept a $25 or $50 flat fee. He even claimed that paying performers was “unnecessary, as most of them expected to record for absolutely nothing.”

With talent scouts such as Ralph Peer and Frank Walker turning their attentions to country music, the less lucrative market for rural blues was left wide open for a legendary blues hunter based in Jackson, Mississippi.

Henry Speir was another white store owner. Inside his big warehouse, he stocked Gramophones, musical instruments, and about three thousand records. He allowed his mainly black customers to listen to records in booths, and upstairs musicians could record on a metal disc for $5. Oblivious of how important his discoveries would become, Henry Speir was personally responsible for finding nearly all of the major
Delta blues
singers of the late twenties and early thirties.

The neglected market for rural blues had been illustrated by the Wisconsin label Paramount, which scored a niche hit in 1926 with Blind Lemon Jefferson—sparse, rusty, real-deal blues evoking one man playing a beat-up guitar on his own porch. In need of follow-ups, Paramount sent out a call through its commercial networks. Because Speir was ordering his stocks from regional distributors in St. Louis or directly from the companies by mail order, he had a connection with Paramount.

Speir knew Mississippi had musicians as good as Blind Lemon Jefferson, and he knew the blues customer. On Saturdays, blacks converged on Jackson in old cars or on wagons to hear street musicians or buy records for parties on the plantations. In summer, Speir would often stay open till ten, selling up to 600 records a day. The vast majority of his customers were black women, typically maids and cooks for wealthy white families. Sharecroppers, especially cotton pickers, could only afford these 75-cent records at harvest time.

Having grown up around blacks in the hill country, Speir could pick up all the slanguage in blues lyrics. He knew that blues songs were about gambling, drinking, adultery, and violence—black men really did get shot or stabbed at jook houses. In this religious land, to sing gospel was to serve the Lord. Those who played blues and lived a life of sin knew they were serving the devil and were going to hell.

In search of compelling bluesmen, Speir drove around the region listening to street singers and railway station announcers and attending barn dances on plantations. He drove across state lines and stayed overnight at full-moon parties. Although talent popped up anywhere, he soon noticed it usually gravitated to Memphis or New Orleans.

When Speir heard potential, he would record two songs himself, using his metal disc cutter, then send this demo to the appropriate record company. Supplying alcohol was an integral part of getting a good performance. During Prohibition, the popular poison among blues singers was either antiseptic or canned heat, a solid cooking fuel that became a potent liquid when melted.

For a $150 finder’s fee per artist, Speir brought William Harris to Gennett, then supplied Ralph Peer with Tommy Johnson. On a plantation in 1929, he stumbled on “
The father of Delta blues,
” Charlie Patton. Speir instantly recognized the exceptional musical power of this small man with a booming voice—Patton had written more songs than he could play in one sitting. For Speir, a body of original material was as important as style, and there was a simple reason why. The lucky musicians would be sent by train to mobile studios in nearby cities. To recoup the cost of Speir’s fee and the musician’s $50 payment, the record companies needed at least four copyrightable original compositions. If the first record sold, follow-ups would be pulled from the same session.

Henry Speir’s discoveries include most of the early legends: Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, Son House, Jim Jackson, Bo Carter, Skip James, Ishmon Bracey, Blind Joe Reynolds, Blind Roosevelt Graves, the Mississippi Sheiks, Robert Wilkins, and Geeshie Wiley. He also found jazz bands, white string bands, and Choctaw groups and once brought Mexican musicians over the border to record in San Antonio. Apart from Paramount, his other clients included Victor, Columbia, Okeh, Brunswick-Vocalion, and Gennett.

During this decade of American self-discovery, the sound of the city was getting less bluesy and more jazzy. More than just a musical genre, jazz was synonymous with a whole new culture. First came a dance craze,
the Charleston
; then came a Hollywood sensation, Al Jolson, who starred in the first full-length talkie,
The Jazz Singer
—the box-office smash of 1927.

The urban poetry of jazz fit the times like Cinderella’s lost shoe. As flapper fashions changed women’s silhouettes, speakeasies were generously pouring slang onto the streets. For being drunk, the jazz generation invented a new lexicon:
blotto, fried, hoary eyed, splifficated, ossified, zozzled
. Nasty bootleg booze was
coffin varnish
; to “
pull a Danny Boon
” meant to vomit, hangover sensations were referred to as the
heebie jeebies
or the
screaming meemies
. A
vamp
was a seducer; a
lollygagger
was a loose woman; a
cake eater
was a playboy; a
face stretcher
was an older woman trying to look young. Engagement rings were
handcuffs
or
manacles
.

In New York’s blooming jazz scene, the shrewdest operator of the pack was taking the same route as Ralph Peer in country music. Part shark, part visionary, Irving Mills also understood that in the nascent radio age, publishing and management were more lucrative than record production.

Irving Mills was accustomed to survival. He was born in an East Side ghetto in 1894 to Jewish parents who emigrated from Odessa, and his father died when he was just eleven years old. Leaving school to sell ties and wallpaper, he got his first glimpse of the bright lights while working as a page boy at Shanley’s Restaurant near Broadway. It had a great orchestra, and young Irving was fascinated by the theatrical characters who tipped him for errands.

By the age of fourteen, he was a theater usher just a few blocks away from Tin Pan Alley, working two showings a day. Actors tipped him to run around to the publishing houses and procure copies of the latest hits. One publisher eventually asked him to be its song plugger. Although Mills couldn’t read music, he had a good voice and would simply sing his product to actors.

As a young man Mills sang with orchestras, set up his own publishing company, and began to produce cheap jazz records for department stores. His life-changing moment happened in 1926 when, having been tipped off about a new arrival in town, he walked into the Kentucky Club to check out the Washingtonians, whose leader was a certain Duke Ellington. Hearing genius, seeing stars, and smelling dollars, Mills signed Ellington’s band up the very next day; he would be both manager and Ellington’s publisher. Within a grueling year of performing and making records for department stores, Mills then secured Ellington’s band a residency at the Cotton Club.