HKS Records and the Wake Up label, both recorded at Gennett, operated under the auspices of two groups of Michigan Klansmen. Homer Rodeheaver, the gospel impresario and music director for Billy Sunday, lent out his Chicago studio for Klan recordings, releasing the titles through Gennett on his private label. A variety of Klan recordings, including the popular “Wake Up America (and Kluck, Kluck, Kluck),” were issued by James D. Vaughan of Tennessee, a songbook publisher known as “the father of southern gospel music,” on his Gennett-produced label.39 Indianapolis Klan publisher The American released a series of popular Klan tunes in 1924 and 1925 on the KKK and Hitch labels, including “The Bright Fiery Cross,” “Mystic City,” and “Why I Am a Klansman.” The Indiana Klansmen were so convinced of the quality of these “leading Klan hits of today” that they sent sample copies to Thomas Edison in 1924 in hopes of gaining wider distribution. Edison, for his part, dismissed them as “trash,” although he did note that “Why I Am a Klansman” had a “fair tune.”40
Much as with Klan sheet music, sales of Klan recordings were an indication of the complex relationship between the Invisible Empire and modern mass culture. Klan-made phonograph records could be found in music stores across the nation. The KKK label even had its own Acme Record Shop in Indianapolis. Salesmen and local distributors took out advertisements in both the Klan and mainstream press, selling recordings by mail. The Danville Bee of Virginia, for one, regularly carried announcements of the latest Klan records, while the Joplin Globe of Missouri was frequently used to promote the work of local songwriter Billy Newton and his Klannish melodies. Both the Lutz and Wight catalogs offered more than twenty double-sided phonograph records, a mix of original tunes and rewritten classics, selling at around a dollar each.41
As significant as these Klan songs are in fully understanding the cultural milieu of the 1920s, an even clearer indication of the ambiguities and contradictions of popular entertainment in the period comes from the embrace of the Klan by songwriters outside the organization. World War I had seen an outpouring of new patriotic songs to capitalize on the moment. The 1920s saw an even greater prevalence of “event songs” as songwriters on Tin Pan Alley jostled to create the latest hit. It is hardly surprising, then, that a number of novelty songs attempted to capitalize on public interest in the Invisible Empire. As the 1921 song “There’s a Bunch of Klucks in the Ku Klux Klan,” by Sam Coslow and Leon Friedman, noted, “a certain society” was being provided with “notoriety” by constant coverage in the daily papers. Coslow and Friedman’s tune was widely advertised as a “timely and sensational hit.”42
“Klucks” was perhaps the least flattering of these novelty songs, complaining that the Klan’s “awful hoke” made them an “awful joke.” Many others, however, implicitly favored and normalized the Invisible Empire. As on page, stage, and screen, the commercial exploitation of the Klan in music reinforced the Klannish community in many ways. While the organization came in for criticism, the ideals and aims of the wider movement were sanitized and often celebrated for a mass consumer public.
The 1922 song “Ku Ku (the Klucking of the Klan)” by Billy Frisch of Tin Pan Alley’s Hitland Music, released by OKeh Records in 1923, provides a prime example of this tendency. The song clearly indicated its anti-Klan sentiments, referring to the “awful sight” of Klansmen on the march, mocking the “gobble of the Goblin Man,” and warning listeners that the Klan would “call ’round in their nighties” and tar and feather them. At the same time, any real sense of menace was undermined by the bouncy, jaunty tune, while Frisch seemingly endorsed the Klan’s choice in victims. If you were a landlord who “tries to profiteer,” a drinker of “home-made beer,” or if you beat your wife, the song warned, you would soon hear “the Klucking of the Klan” as it came for you. Even as the song jeered at the organization’s tactics, it endorsed the movement’s morals.43
A popular upbeat tune entitled “Daddy Swiped Our Last Clean Sheet and Joined the Ku Klux Klan” had similar issues. Written by Helen Marcell of the University of Kansas, the song was intended to lampoon the organization. In the most cutting line of the novelty number, Marcell noted that “Daddy took the pillow case to cover up his head,” but “he soon found out that it would smother him instead.” Nonetheless, the fact that it also endorsed many of the movement’s aims meant the song soon began to become popular with Klan members and sympathizers. The sheet music was offered for sale in Klan publications, and Marcell’s composition was recorded at the Gennett studios and released under the KKK label (see fig. 7.2). By 1927, the touring Klan production The Awakening prominently featured the song, receiving “loud applause” whenever it was performed. Marcell’s intent in writing the song did not seem to matter. “Daddy Swiped Our Last Clean Sheet” had become a bona fide hit with the Ku Klux Klan.44
Figure 7.2. Cover illustration for Helen Marcell’s “Daddy Swiped Our Last Clean Sheet and Joined the Ku Klux Klan” (Ottawa, KS: R.C. Marcell, 1924).
The majority of these novelty songs took a similar tack. The organization’s violence and vigilantism were condemned even as the lyrics implicitly reinforced the idea that the Klan stood for law and order, and its victims somehow warranted their fate. This tendency was particularly apparent in the proliferation of Klan “blues” songs. Illustrative of the often-ironic tensions of the cultural 1920s, these popular songs fused the racial stereotypes of nineteenth-century “coon” songs with contemporary rhythms appropriated from black musicians.
The “coon song” fad, from the mid-1880s until the early 1910s, had seen hundreds of songs published that combined earlier tropes of blackface minstrelsy with a Jim Crow desire to enforce racial hierarchies. African Americans, these songs proclaimed, were marked by ignorance and indolence, lust, dishonesty, and irresponsibility. Worse, the “coon” represented an active threat to white Americans. Prone to drinking and gambling, he was also inextricably associated with the physical threat of black violence. In song after song, the straight razor became the signifier of an uninhibited savagery.45
These stereotypes continued well into the 1920s and 1930s in songs like “Pickanninies’ Heaven” and “Georgia Gigolo”—and in songs about the Klan. Most often, these songs took the point of view of an African American in the South. Mingling cartoonishly exaggerated Negro dialect with classic blues chord progressions, these songs explained exactly why their subjects actually deserved to be punished by the Invisible Empire. In “Those Dog-Gone Ku Klux Blues” by John Douglas Lewis, for one, the song’s narrator is threatened by the Klan after “loafing around” and brewing alcohol, and flees, leaving “my woman and my booze.” Warren D. Ownby’s “De Ku Klux Klan Gwine to Git You Ef You Don’t Watch Out” told the story of a black preacher in Alabama who used the threat of the Klan to scare his parishioners into good behavior. While containing elements of criticism, these songs were recognizably favorable to Klannish aims and to the law-enforcing image that members of the organization were keen to promote. This became particularly apparent when Klan songwriters began to adopt a similar narrative and melodic device in their own work, including Billy Newton’s “Ku Klux Steppin’ Blues” and Charles A. Arthur’s “Those Good Old Ku Klux Blues.”46
The earliest, and most successful, of these novelty blues songs was “The Ku Klux Blues” by popular Southern songwriters Al Mars and Clarence Krause, published in 1921. Mars and Krause told the overfamiliar “coon” story of Sambo Rastus, who liked to “roam around, with a razor in my hand,” “loved to fight both night and day,” and enjoyed shooting craps. After a visit from the Klan, though, Rastus reformed and vowed to be “as good as Abraham.” Several well-regarded African American bands actually adopted the song as a regular number, while Gus Creagh’s Orchestra recorded it for See-Bee Records.47
The Invisible Empire’s most influential and lasting interaction with American musical culture was not, however, as the subject of novelty songs. It was as a catalyst in the revival of “old-time fiddling” and the development of the new “hill
billy” genre. Many in the 1920s, including novelist Andrew Lytle and tycoon Henry Ford, bemoaned the decline in the popularity of classic rural fiddle music. Klan members apparently shared not only the car manufacturer’s anti-Semitism but also his musical tastes. The Invisible Empire proved itself a high-profile aficionado of “old-time” music, with fiddlers often providing the entertainment at Klan events. This appreciation for the genre also translated into active support.48
Although the musical style was popular with Klan members as a whole, the story of the Invisible Empire’s influence on the “hillbilly” genre is best understood within the context of the story of one man—Fiddlin’ John Carson, one of the most successful and talented white Southern musicians of the 1920s. Carson was a native of Georgia, and his career was intertwined with the second Klan from the very beginning. In 1913, he wrote “Little Mary Phagan,” demonizing local Jewish industrialist Leo Frank, who had been falsely accused of killing Phagan. By 1915, when Frank was lynched by a precursor to the soon-to-be-reborn Klan, Carson’s song had already become recognized as a “classic murder ballad” popular with the Southern working-class community.49
Thanks largely to his participation in the annual Georgia Old-Time Fiddlers’ Conventions, Carson’s popularity in the state steadily grew. By 1922, when he became one of the first Southern fiddlers to appear on radio, Carson had already joined the Ku Klux Klan. His membership is hardly surprising. According to music historian Patrick Huber, Carson was “deeply immersed” in Georgia’s populist politics, alongside many of the Invisible Empire’s leading lights. One biographer, Gene Wiggins, defends Carson as “probably not an ardent” Klansman, but the musician was certainly a valuable ally of the organization. Klansman Clifford Walker, soon to win election as governor of Georgia, hired Carson in 1922 to play at political rallies across the state. Historian James C. Cobb notes that the fiddler was a frequent presence at Klan events in Georgia.50
Carson’s membership in the Klan certainly did not seem to hurt his career, which took a major step forward in 1923. Producer Ralph S. Peer of OKeh Records (which had also issued Billy Frisch’s “Ku Ku”) arrived in Atlanta, looking to be “the first of any major company to record traditional artists of either race in the South.” Peer, an emblem of the dynamic cultural currents of the 1920s, was already credited with sparking the boom in African American “race records” after recording Mamie Smith in 1921. Now he was in search of material that he thought would appeal to rural and rural-minded markets. He found it in Fiddlin’ John Carson. By 1924, Carson’s records were so popular that the company began to advertise the Klansman and similar artists as “a new and discrete genre of American commercial music.” Trafficking on romanticized ideas of a preindustrial South, Carson’s recordings marked the beginning of what was initially known as “Hill Country Music.”51
The trend that Carson started was turned into a cultural juggernaut by the 1925 Fiddlers’ Convention in Mountain City, Tennessee. Fiddle contests of this type had emerged in the 1890s, making them, in the words of Patrick Huber, “a comparatively modern and largely urban phenomenon.” Fiddling aficionado Henry Ford backed some of the most prominent of these conventions and created a prize for national fiddle champion as a means of spurring interest in the genre. In doing so, he “set the woods and hills and plains afire with competitive rage” throughout the 1920s. Similarly, the Ku Klux Klan sponsored a number of local and regional competitions.52
The Invisible Empire’s association with these “old-time fiddling” contests reached its apex with the Mountain City Convention in May 1925. Cosponsored by the Buster Brown Shoe Company, the event began as a fund-raiser for a local farmer but quickly grew much larger. Much of this may have been due to the convention’s “liberal cash prizes.” Whatever the reason, the Ku Klux Klan’s Mountain City Convention managed to attract, according to one historian, “every old-time musician who ever was or hoped to be,” a collection of performers that even Ford’s national conventions could not match. Competitors included Carson, Edgar Hickam, Ralph Story, Charlie Bowman, Waits “Whiskers” Wiseman, Demp Harris, Al Hopkins and his brothers, Ralph Chinouth, and Smokey Davis.53
A Klan lecturer, the Reverend J. C. Reynolds, opened the convention with a “very fine” address. The local newspaper reported that the music offered was “the best ever heard” in the region and declared the event a “great success.” Bob Cox, biographer of Charlie Bowman, has argued that this is an understatement. The collection of talented performers, many of whom were already well-known to radio listeners, attracted an above-capacity crowd. With the auditorium filled to overflowing, old-time music enthusiasts were left “standing on cars and sitting in windows,” anywhere they might be able to hear the fiddlers. Dudley Vance won the grand prize, with Bowman taking second and Uncle Am Stuart third.54
Quite apart from its immediate success, the Mountain City Convention also left such an impression on the “hillbilly” genre that it is still widely remembered among music scholars—even though its Klannish connections are often conveniently forgotten. One of the event’s most significant legacies was in marking the spectacular rise of the band that lent its name to the genre, the Hill Billies. The group, which was initially comprised of Al Hopkins, Joe Hopkins, John Rector, and Alonzo Alderman, had already made several recordings for Ralph Peer and OKeh earlier in the year. At the fiddling convention, they “made their initial reputation.” They also met and recruited Charlie Bowman, which marked a major turning point for the group. Infrequent appearances on the District of Columbia’s WRC radio station soon became four- or five-hour stints. Radio success parlayed into sales and increasingly popular tour dates. By 1927, the Hill Billies were playing at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in front of President Calvin Coolidge. The Ku Klux Klan had launched a phenomenon.55
It is a mistake, though, to assume that the Invisible Empire’s association with this “old-time” music represents a consolidated resistance to modernity. For one thing, the launch of that hillbilly sound was caught up in the development of a modern consumerist music culture of phonographs and radio. For another, an appreciation of skillful fiddling does not erase the fact that Klan members enjoyed a wide swath of popular songs of the day, including novelty nonsense like “Yes! We Have No Bananas.” In a process largely divorced from organizational control or sanction, they were also performing in widely popular jazz bands. While the organization declaimed modern musical miscegenation, Klan musicians appropriated rhythms and melodies from black performers to promote a virtuous white Protestant identity. Published, recorded, and sold around the country, these songs could be—and were—purchased by members and nonmembers alike. At the same time, the organization’s image was hungrily, if inconsistently, consumed by a music industry looking for sales. The imagined community of the Klannish movement was reinforced even as members reveled in the same popular culture as most other Americans. In the new tonalities of the 1920s, the hot sounds of jazz harmonized with the razzmatazz of the Ku Klux Klan.
8
PBS—The Protestant Broadcasting System
Astronomers have observed a vast white area on Mars. The Ku Klux Klan may now be expected to set up a radio station.
Chicago Defender, August 26, 1922
William S. Paley began the 1920s “half student, half playboy.” By 1930, he had graduated to playboy tycoon. Propelled by the soaring stock market, he took control of the Columbia Network in September 1928. In New York, he combined the business mania of the Coolidge years with the “giddy hedonistic” pursuits of the Jazz Age city. Frequenting the lavish Casino nightclub, hosting elaborate and glamorous parties, he threw himself into what one biographer called a “sybaritic time of nightclub hopping and theatergoing.” Even as he pursued a string of socialites and film stars like Louise Brooks, he began to build the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) radio network to compete with the fledgling National Broadcasting Company (NBC). As he did so, this fixture of the New York nightlife found himself in business with t
he Ku Klux Klan. The ambivalent embrace of the Klan and pluralist mass culture extended into the rise of radio.1
Radio, like the second Klan, was a true product of the postwar era. Although the technology had arrived with the turn of the century, it was not until after World War I that the radio boom began—and what a boom it was. In November 1920, with radios in less than 1 percent of American homes, station KDKA aired what is commonly cited as the first scheduled commercial broadcast. Radio listeners had previously been limited to hobbyists with a deep knowledge of receiving crystals. Even as the second Klan began its rise, commercially manufactured radios became widely available for the first time, massively expanding the potential radio audience.
A Radio Corporation of America (RCA) official recalled that “demand developed with an intensity that industrial America had never before experienced.” Half a million radios were sold in 1923; almost four million in 1925—roughly the same number of members in the Invisible Empire that year; then over six million in 1926. The cost of sets declined even as choice proliferated. Consumers were no longer restricted just to RCA equipment, with the ability to purchase the Mercury, the Newport, the DeForest Radiophone, and more. By the end of the decade, more than 45 percent of homes had at least one radio set. Some seventy-five thousand listeners in 1922 had become more than twelve million households, comprising an estimated forty million listeners, by 1930. In the process, radio broadcasts became social events. Families, friends, neighbors, and communities gathered to listen, on porches and in front yards, outside stores, and at special “radio parties.” Broadcasting had become a billion-dollar industry.2
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