Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  That deep-summer day was hot and humid; looked like a thunderstorm was coming, and Maybelle must have been miserable. She was eight months pregnant, and in the sticky heat her hair must have been curling like new leaves. Still, she probably never complained as A.P. drove them out of Poor Valley, through Jett Gap. If it did rain, the deep-rutted roads would muddy and grab at Eck’s tires. Then they’d be in trouble. But if they could make it out of the Valley, and ford the Holston River before it got up, they’d get be on a state highway. It wasn’t paved, but it was graded, graveled, and oiled to keep the dust down. If they made it across the Holston, A.P. figured, it would be smooth riding from there.

  The Bristol News Bulletin advertisement that lured A.P. (Bristol News Bulletin)

  Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Peer (Carter Family Museum)

  Mr. Peer

  Ralph Sylvester Peer must have seemed an odd duck to the people who auditioned for him in his make-do “recording studios.” Even when he was on his scouting expeditions, living out of suitcases, in the middle of wet-hot southern summers, Ralph Peer would be wearing his fine London-tailored suits with a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. The hopeful musicians stood small in some cavernous and nearly empty warehouse loft, shuffling their feet, trying to introduce themselves to the New York record scout, and wondering what might be behind the thick blankets that hung from the ceiling, but Mr. Peer rarely took pains to put people at ease. Not that he was threatening. His rich baritone voice had command, but just enough midwestern twang to take the edge off. Even as he neared forty, there was something boyish about his smooth, moon-round face, and he was so naturally placid that people around him rarely got rattled. God knows, that helped in the recording business.

  It took only one bad mistake to blow a take: could be an engineer or his assistant; could be a bandleader or an instrumentalist or a singer. There were a lot of people who had to be able to do their jobs right. If just one fouled up, they’d have to shave the wax and start again. It helped having a head man who kept jangled nerves at a minimum. That’s part of the reason Peer was in the driver’s seat. He didn’t waste time.

  So when some new act was standing in front of him, shuffling nervously, Peer would dispense with preliminaries and tell them to get on with it, do the song they wanted to do, and do it their way. And when they’d start, Ralph Peer would lean forward in his seat, close his eyes, cup a hand behind each ear, and listen. He didn’t care so much what anybody looked like. He cared to know only what they would sound like on record. Mr. Peer liked to cut to the chase.

  That’s not to say Ralph Peer himself was simple to know. He was an opera’s worth of contrapuntal chords. By the end of his life, he had almost single-handedly built the world’s largest music publishing company, but his own son would say he took just as much pride—and spent just as much time—cultivating his prizewinning flowers. He sat on the board of directors of the local camellia society, rarely missed the camellia club’s Tuesday meeting at the California Institute of Technology, and kept up a correspondence with botanists around the world. He was a committed workaholic, but his idea of a well-spent Saturday was to sneak away from his desk and engraft camellias in the greenhouse out back. After a lifetime in the music business, Peer knew more music people than anybody, but he probably didn’t spend three hours a year at industry parties.

  In his later years, he could sit for days in perfect stillness at his home office in Los Angeles, reading a blizzard of memoranda into the latest-model Dictaphone (he was proud to keep two secretaries overworked), but he liked nothing more than to take his speedboat out onto Lake Tahoe and open it up while the deafening wind whipped through his hair. He was always, even toward the luxurious end of his life, sensitive about his education. When asked where he’d gone to college, Peer’s answer was “University of Chicago . . . for two months.” Naval officers’ training course, he’d explain, First World War. It was a deft parry, and headed off further discussion of his deficiencies in formal schooling. But Peer never lacked for confidence in his own capacities. “It’s amazing how accurately I forecast what finally happened,” he once mused out loud about a major turn in the music business. “I have a brain that likes to work.”

  Peer rarely talked of himself or his accomplishments. When he did, he could be surprisingly seductive: thoughtful, matter-of-fact, and modest. And then suddenly, wildly, egotistical. In 1958, during a two-day interview, he claimed credit for launching the careers of Jimmie Rodgers (true) and the Carter Family (true), coining the genre terms race and hillbilly for records (true), helping Gene Autry into the saddle (partially true), setting the foundation of the modern music-publishing business (glancingly true), and “inventing” Louis Armstrong (a whopper).

  Peer was an unmistakable aesthete but claimed to care about little besides making a buck. His personal tastes in music ran to opera, chamber music, and big-band swing, but he staked his own business with forms of music he sometimes claimed to despise, what he called “the hillbilly and nigger stuff.” Late in life, he still sounded ashamed that such “stuff” was the underpinning of his music-publishing empire. “I’ve tried so hard to forget them,” he once said of the early race and hillbilly artists he discovered. He could speak of those same artists with a father’s secret fondness for his wayward children, and then a blue blood’s unconflicted coarseness. He also was prone to exaggerating the artists’ shortcomings in a way that engorged his own genius. On bringing back harmonica player Henry Whitter for a 1923 re-recording session, he said, “Something was lacking. Then I discovered the dope could sing. He never told me.”

  “I wouldn’t say Jimmie Rodgers was extremely clever,” he said of the man who almost single-handedly made Peer his first fortune, “but that he had good intelligence from a hillbilly base. Above the average [for a hillbilly].” Actually, Jimmie was clever enough to put the shine on Peer from time to time. Right up to his last New York recording trip, in 1933, the tubercular Rodgers used his illness to procure from Peer the perquisites he would require. “We got him to the Taft Hotel and assigned a man to watch out for his ‘incidental welfare.’ If he needed more whiskey and whatnot,” Peer said years later. “The tubercular person has three times the sexual activity of a normal man. There was nothing he could do about it, so he was just acting naturally.”

  When asked how Rodgers himself made out on the millions of records sold, Peer answered, “I looked after him. Of course, looking after him was giving him all the money he asked for. And warning him when he got in too deep. . . . I remember when he owed me a hundred thousand dollars at one time, so he must have made out okay. He wanted to build a great big mansion in some little town north of San Antonio. But I certainly never lost anything on Jimmie Rodgers.”

  Despite friendships with black professionals such as composer Perry Bradford, theater critic Tony Langston, and musician Louis Armstrong, Peer could be even uglier when he spoke of African Americans. Hillbilly records brought in an avalanche of correspondence from would-be artists, Peer said, but not race records. “Of course the niggers can’t write,” he explained, with a chuckle, “southern niggers.” Louis Armstrong’s second wife, Lillian, a woman of expansive intelligence who held a university degree, Peer called simply “an awfully nice ole nigger girl.”

  Still, nobody can gainsay Ralph Peer’s place in history—or what he did for black and rural white musicians, and what he did for their long-ignored audience. He opened the field of recording to artists who had been left out, even while they held America’s richest native musical traditions. And he opened it up at precisely the moment when those traditions were being reforged in the white-hot shuttle between old-timey country living and wage-slaving in the city. There were blues enough at both terminals, and most every mile in between. In the decade after World War I, huge numbers of blacks and mountain whites from the South were kicking the dust off their shoes and moving into mill towns, coal camps, and industrial cities all over the country. Even on meager wages, they had money to spend. Ralph Peer
found out before anybody else in the recording business that there was a big world out there making music, with a lot of different audiences, and room enough for everybody; that the color that mattered most was green, and that sometimes a man had to just close his eyes and listen.

  In the 1958 interview, sixty-six-year-old Ralph Peer tried to explain how he’d made his place in history: “I have a favorite saying: ‘It’s the art of being where the lightning is going to strike.’ And how in God’s name you can detect that, I wouldn’t know. But I’ve always been able to do it. . . . Look at the accidents! Just why did those things happen?” If you were to fill up Ralph Peer with truth serum, he’d probably say there wasn’t an ounce of school-bought genius to it. As a young man, he was flinty enough to cause a stir in the marbled halls of the “respectable” music business, and contrary enough to have enjoyed it. And there’s little doubt he’d say he was addicted to the sheer adventure of it. More than brains, what he did took effort, energy, and endurance. Ralph Peer understood this: If a man chased the sound of thunder long enough, he was probably going to get hit by lightning. “The real secret,” he said, “is continuous activity.”

  * * *

  Ralph Peer and the recording industry grew up together. He was born in Independence, Missouri, in 1892, just as the first recordings were being sold to the public. The business was mostly a hard-science racket then, and the product a rich man’s vanity toy. In 1892 Thomas Edison’s Electric Motor Phonograph, fully loaded, sold for a whopping $190. Those machines read songs carved into heavy wax cylinders. Fidelity to the original music was iffy. And there was no way to copy the cylinders from a master. So even if Edison could get an artist to record one song over and over and over, production costs were high. Still, the phenomenon of recorded sound was enrapturing. Its future could be read in the wide-eyed, slack-jawed look of a virgin listener. When a New Orleans drugstore installed a “coin-in-the-slot” phonograph, it pulled in five hundred dollars a month. And once cash was on the line, the scientists and engineers got right down to business. A German immigrant named Emile Berliner started to carve songs into seven-inch wax disks, and to make as many copies as needed from a single master recording, while the two biggest companies in the business—Edison and Columbia—raced each other to improve fidelity and to drive prices down enough to make the phonograph a middle-class vanity toy. By the turn of the century, furniture stores all over the country were retailing the top-of-the-line Edison Home Phonograph for $40 and the Edison Gem model for just $7.50. Columbia’s Home Graphaphone sold nationwide for $25, and its Eagle model (introduced for the Christmas rush of 1897) could be had for $10.

  Phonograph sales were a boon to Abraham Peer, whose furniture store was the exclusive Columbia dealer in Independence. Business was so good that he didn’t seem to mind that his ten-year-old son, Ralph, spent most of his Saturday workday listening to and cataloging the newest Columbia disks. Abraham even relented when his boy wanted to make the forty-minute train ride downtown to pick up the newest selections from Columbia’s main retail office and warehouse in Kansas City. By the time he was eleven, Peer had won a summer job in the Columbia office, filling in for whichever stock boy or shipping clerk took vacation.

  Peer was so sure of the business, and his own future in it, that he took a pass on his slot at Kansas University, married his high-school sweetheart, and settled into the permanent employ of the Columbia Phonograph Company’s Kansas City office. For an eighteen-year-old with big dreams, the work itself lacked romance. Over the next five years he worked as a credit manager, a retail manager, a traveling salesman, and the assistant manager (without title, because he was too young) of the Kansas City operation. He was still 1,200 miles away from what he considered the real action, the recording studio. What went on in those New York studios was a tantalizing mystery to him.

  He made a brief stop in Columbia’s Chicago store, where he worked again as the assistant manager without title, and he followed that with an uneventful tour with the U.S. Navy during World War I. After Peer was mustered out, one of his old bosses, who had left Columbia, offered him a job at the General Phonograph Corporation. It was hardly the big time, but it was New York.

  General Phonograph’s bread and butter was the manufacture of phonograph motors, billed in their catalog as the “Motor of Quality.” For the five years before Peer joined the company, General had spent most of its time trying to convince piano and furniture manufacturers to try their hand at phonograph production. The company’s recording label, Okeh (the “Indian” word, they said, for “all right”), was barely that. The early repertoire—pressed at a button factory in Scranton, Pennsylvania—didn’t live up to the flashy Indian-head design on the label and sleeves; the first recording they issued was “The Star Spangled Banner,” with the equally uninspired “American Patriotic Medley” on the flip side. Even after they switched over from the old vertical “hill-and-dale” recordings to lateral-cut disks and got down into the groove with “The Vamp” and “My Cairo Love,” Okeh hardly made the established companies quake with fear. While Columbia, Edison, and Victor were riding a wave of record sales that pushed over $100 million in 1921, Okeh was lucky to claim 3 percent of the total market.

  By the time Peer became director of recordings at Okeh, the postwar depression and radio were starting to pinch the record business. Within four years, sales would be little more than half the industry’s 1921 benchmark, and Okeh had little margin for survival. Peer was trying new fixes, leaning hard on the ethnic markets, recording German oompah bands, Polish polka bands, Swedish chorale groups, Yiddish nightingales, and African-American blues singers. “We had all foreign groups: German records, Swedish records, Polish records,” Peer said, “but we were afraid to advertise Negro records.” He didn’t have to. “Race records,” as he named them in the Okeh catalog, sold big. Peer got reports of Pullman porters buying twenty-five records at a time, dollar a pop, and then carrying them off to southern cities such as Atlanta and New Orleans, where they could sell them for double the money.

  Peer decided it was time to go out into the country and record local artists; there was almost no music he wouldn’t try to keep Okeh afloat. In Chicago, he recorded selections in Italian, German, Bohemian, Lithuanian, and Greek. In Buffalo, he recorded Polish bands. In New Orleans, he recorded Dr. James Roach, a “Cajan” singer whose first cut was “Gue Gue Solingail,” i.e., “Song of the Crocodile”; in Dallas, the Bel Canto Quartet and Jimmie Wilson’s Catfish String Band. And in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1923, he recorded a local radio celebrity named Fiddlin’ John Carson. Carson’s record—“The Little Old Log Cabin” and “The Old Hen Cackled”—was the first southern mountain music Peer put out on Okeh. But he didn’t have much hope for the release.

  For decades the phonograph companies had been dabbling in recording the music of the southern mountains: mainly gospel hymns and old-timey fiddle music. The market had never been big. And when Peer got back to New York and listened to the Fiddlin’ John selections, he was horrified. They were, in his phrase, “pluperfect awful.” It wasn’t that John Carson lacked talent, but the recordings themselves were terrible. In order to play in his angular style, Carson had stood so far back from the acoustic horn that the warehouse’s roaring presence had been captured in the space between and laid permanently on the wax disk. Because the warehouse walls weren’t properly muffled, Carson’s voice and his fiddle played in maddening dueling echoes. Even so, the Okeh dealer in Atlanta insisted on having five hundred disks pressed and shipped right away. He said he wanted them for a fiddlers’ convention, less than a month away. Peer was too embarrassed to even put a catalog number on the selections. But the local dealer was adamant, mainly because he understood the fiddle’s place in southern mountain culture.

  In the twenties, the fiddler was the knight errant of mountain music, traveling to well-attended tournaments all over the southern mountains, playing the same Scotch-Irish airs that had been handed down for generations. At the annual inters
tate old-time fiddle contest in Atlanta, for instance, John Carson competed with a fiddle that bore the date 1714. His great-grandfather had carried the instrument over from Ireland a century earlier, and when John was ten years old, his grandfather presented it to the boy. Besides the annual Atlanta event, there were dozens of regional fiddle contests. America’s most publicity-minded magnates were even trying to cash in on the cult of the fiddle. Henry Ford and Thomas Edison halted their “vacation motor tour” to alert news outlets worldwide that they had discovered the greatest fiddler on earth, one Jasper E. Bisbee, of Paris, Michigan. Mr. Ford even sponsored his own round-robin of regional tournaments, which culminated in a national championship. Mr. Ford’s first champ, a five-foot-tall construction worker named “Uncle Bunt” Stephens, won a thousand dollars and a new Lincoln automobile. Other contests had a more down-home feel to them, as did the contestants. There was Dexter Allison, an octogenarian from the Georgia mountains who started his fiddle-fight days by simply calling out any man of reputation. Stubbins Watts came out of western Missouri, claiming kinship to the original mountain man, Daniel Boone, and offering his own recipe for success: “You can’t fiddle if you don’t pat your foot.” From the Ozark Mountains there was “Hi” Taylor and his local adversary, Mrs. Lem Waterman, wife of a Baptist preacher. Mrs. Waterman was one of the few contestants who would do without a chaw of tobacco, but even without the benefit of nicotine jolt, her renderings of “Money Musk” and “Get Up and Go” always gave Hi a run for his money.

  For the contestants, this was not play. The prize might only be bragging rights, but that was prize enough. The oldsters could still get testy when the judges had spoken on tekneek and repertory. When sixty-six-year-old William Stalcup edged out seventy-one-year-old “Uncle John” Llewellyn for the King of Missouri Old-Timers crown in 1923, Uncle John yelled that he’d been hamstrung. “Ef it had been wet times, I’d beaten the youngster out,” he complained. “I learned to fiddle with my feet on a beer keg. I do my best fiddling with my knees half as high as my head.” And there was more than a hint of sadness when ninety-year-old Wise Deacon of the Arkansas Ozarks said he could still play “The Arkansaw Traveler” and “Turkey in the Straw” just fine, but when it came to “Leather Breeches” and “Give the Poor Fiddler a Dram,” he could no longer “put the tingle” in the dancing feet.