The warm tones and perfumed imagery of the South found a streetwise swagger in the bright lights of Chicago and Harlem. From this meeting point, lots of interesting music began pouring out.
Black music from the South was creeping into dance halls and music publishing houses. The first important pioneer bringing Southern black music to the big cities of the North was W. C. Handy, a black composer and bandleader who had been working in the music business for a decade.
In Handy’s youth, early blues was generally played by brass orchestras, a legacy of the Victorian tradition of marching-band music that had caught on in black communities. In the late nineteenth century most towns, and even many businesses, had their own brass bands for festivals, weddings, and funerals. The new rag style evolved as cheap surplus instruments, decommissioned in New Orleans after the 1898 Spanish-American War, entered civilian circulation. Because black marching bands learned pieces by ear and played offbeat rhythms passed down from their African tradition, the upright um-pah of Victorian marching bands took on a woozier, four-legged groove. The term ragtime evolved from this loose, unwritten, ragged style.
Handy was the first to study the mechanics of this “three-chord basic harmonic structure.” He realized that a warbling effect later referred to as the blue note was the hallmark of “Negro roustabouts, honky-tonk piano players, wanderers and others of the underprivileged but undaunted class … The primitive Southern Negro, as he sang, was sure to bear down on the third and seventh tone of the scale, slurring between major and minor. Whether in the cotton field of the Delta or on the Levee up St. Louis way, it was always the same.”
In 1912, Handy wrote his first hit for the sheet-music market, a tune called “Memphis Blues”—the first widely distributed 12-bar blues, credited as the inspiration for the invention of the foxtrot in 1914 by a New York dance duo, Vernon and Irene Castle. Handy was a bandleader in the big city in the summer of 1914, when “the tango was in vogue,” and he recalled that one night “I tricked the dancers by arranging a tango introduction, breaking abruptly into a low-down blues. My eyes swept the floor anxiously, then suddenly I saw lightning strike. The dancers seemed electrified. Something within them came suddenly to life. An instinct that wanted so much to live, to fling its arms to spread joy, took them by the heels.”
As the old expression goes, it takes two to tango. Change wasn’t limited to Southern blacks pouring into the Northern cities. Marking the waning of Victorian ideals of femininity, the period also brought seismic sociological shifts for women. Although the term flapper has become synonymous with the Roaring Twenties, the process of women’s liberation took a giant leap during the war.
The wave was strongest in Britain’s four-year war effort, where an estimated 2 million women replaced men in factories. When America joined the war in 1917, Teddy Roosevelt endorsed American writer Harriot Stanton Blatch’s public appeal to “mobilize woman-power.” Voicing a stirring tribute, Blatch claimed the British war effort had made women “capable … bright-eyed, happy.” The political world was stirring also. Between 1913 and 1920 women won the right to vote in Norway, Denmark, Australia, Russia, Poland, Germany, Britain, Holland, and America.
All these migrations and upheavals in black and female culture explain why suddenly in 1917, the year America joined the war, a new dance craze exploded in Chicago and New York—jazz, the first organically grown musical wave to rise from the street and change the face of the record business.
Before the war, the word jazz, meaning spirit or fizziness, was popular in California, where, according to one dubious theory, it had sexual connotations derived from the nineteenth-century word jism. A more plausible explanation is that the word originated from a Gaelic word, spelled “teas” but pronounced “tchass,” meaning heat, excitement, vigor, or the passion of spirit. It was also the name of an Irish superstitious cult surrounding St. Bridget’s tomb, where a fire was kept burning, and as such it had long been invoked by gamblers. The Irish imported the term into American gambling halls, from whence it spread to other domains, first sport, then music. The fact that Gaelic is an ancient language whose artificial spelling in Latin letters differs greatly from its true pronunciation might explain why at least four spellings of the Americanized word—jass, jas, jazz, and jaz—appeared between 1913 and 1918.
In 1913, an Irish American sports journalist, Scoop Gleeson, used the word jass to describe the spirit and pep of baseball players. The word was already on the street; Gleeson’s newspaper, the San Francisco Bulletin, ran a piece in April 1913 entitled “In Praise of Jazz, a Futurist Word Which Has Just Joined the Language.” Its author, Ernest J. Hopkins, explained that “a new word, like a new muscle, only comes into being when it has long been needed. This remarkable and satisfactory-sounding word … means something like life, vigor, energy, effervescence of spirit, joy, pep, magnetism, verve, virility ebullience, courage, happiness—oh, what’s the use?—Jazz. Nothing else can express it.”
In Chicago, the popular new word was pinned onto an older yet increasingly popular flavor of Southern brass band music. The Chicago Daily Tribune’s editor, Fred Shapiro, wrote an excited piece in the summer of 1915 explaining, “Blues is jazz and jazz is blues … The blues are never written into music, but are interpolated by the piano player or other players. They aren’t new. They are just reborn into popularity. They started in the South half a century ago and are the interpolations of darkies originally. The trade name for them is jazz.”
Ironically, the word arrived in the South last. In November 1916, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, previewing a parade, noted, “Theatrical journals have taken cognizance of the jas bands and at first these organizations of syncopation were credited with having originated in Chicago, but anyone ever having frequented the tango belt of New Orleans knows that the real home of the jas bands is right here … Just where and when these bands, until this winter known only to New Orleans, originated, is a disputed question. It is claimed they are the outgrowth of the so-called fish bands of the lake front camps, Saturday and Sunday night affairs. However, the fact remains that their popularity has already reached Chicago, and that New York probably will be invaded next.”
The first jazz record “Livery Stable Blues” and “Dixie Jass Band One Step,” was released on Victor in February 1917. The performers were a white group called the Original Dixieland Jass Band—Southern musicians playing in the Chicago dance halls. Three months later, Columbia invited them to record two more tunes, “Darktown Strutters Ball” and “Back Home Again in Indiana.” Even Edison jumped on the bandwagon with “Everybody Loves a Jass Band” by Arthur Fields. By the end of 1917, there appeared to be a consensus that the spelling “jazz” carried a nicer ring.
In 1919, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band took London by storm and was commissioned by Columbia’s British company to record no less than thirty sides. In a private concert at Buckingham Palace, the bandleader recalled Marshal Philippe Pétain peered ominously through his opera glasses, “as though there were bugs on us.” When King George V began clapping excitedly, his motionless guests let go and began enjoying themselves. After four rapturous months, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band was forced to leave England abruptly. According to rumors, they were chased to the Southampton docks by a furious Lord Harrington. One of the musicians had romanced his daughter.
Feeling the generational chasms opening up between youngsters and their Victorian parents, Victor’s senior managers were urgently rethinking their entire image and product line. Highbrow values were becoming unfashionable, which meant unprofitable. Victor’s contract man, Calvin Child, was assigned the delicate task of convincing all the company’s operatic and classical artists to accept new terms whereby, instead of exorbitant flat fees, they would receive a percentage of net profits, with a guaranteed minimum annual income. Caruso, of course, obtained the most generous deal, with a minimum guarantee of $100,000 per year for a term of ten years. Less lucrative names obtained minimum guarantees of around $15,000 per
year. The age of percentage-based royalties had tentatively begun.
Once all Victor’s artist contracts were renegotiated, in July 1919, Talking Machine World announced “the democratization of music.” The price of Victor’s classical and operatic records was being slashed to as low as $1. Even the cost of Victor’s most exclusive limited editions, which had retailed at $7, were being cut in half. In the accompanying visual campaign, operatic icons were photographed in boxing gloves, in kitchens, and on bicycles. Every effort was made to take the haughtiness out of classical music.
What Victor hadn’t anticipated was the loss of its virtual monopoly on laterally cut discs. Perhaps the single biggest upheaval of the postwar years was a legal battle between Victor and Starr Piano Company, owners of a new record label called Gennett. In 1919, Gennett had dared to release a laterally cut disc and was, as expected, promptly sued by Victor. However, Starr’s lawyers were able to convince the court of a number of gray areas surrounding Victor’s patents. In January 1920, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Victor’s injunction and opened the floodgates to mass competition.
Accelerating a process that had started during the First World War, the record business grew dense and vibrant. The industry’s monthly trade magazine, Talking Machine World, which contained about a hundred pages in 1916, doubled to over two hundred pages in 1920 with listings for about two hundred manufacturers. Many of these new talking machines were named after their founders: Cheney, Emerson, Heintzman, Wilson, Steger, Crafts, Onken, Weser. Other brands copied the sound of “Victrola” with names like Robinola, Harmonola, Tonkola, and Saxola. In record production, interesting new labels entered the market, including Brunswick, Aeolian-Vocalion, Gennett, Okeh, Paramount, and Black Swan.
It was into this complex, rapidly evolving market that the period’s most progressive record man, Otto Heinemann, launched Okeh, arguably the first example of the alternative record label.
Jehuda Otto Heinemann was born in the north German city of Lüneburg in 1877, the sixth son of sixteen children. At thirty-seven years of age, Heinemann was the managing director of one of Europe’s biggest record empires, Carl Lindström AG. Based in Berlin, it owned a vast record-pressing plant as well as three large labels: Odeon, Parlophon, and Beka. Its factory in Berlin employed thousands and pressed 100,000 records per day. With distribution operations in France, Britain, Austria, and Holland, the company was one of the first majors in continental Europe. It had just opened an office in Argentina, Disco Nacional, which produced the first recordings of tango legend Carlos Gardel.
In the summer of 1914, Heinemann was sailing to New York to investigate industrial conditions in the American record market. War broke out when he was at sea, and as a result, he was briefly interned in the British port of Southampton before eventually arriving in America. As European countries began declaring war on each other through pact arrangements, borders closed, telegraph lines were severed, and shipping became hazardous. Watching events in Europe unravel from New York, Heinemann realized he was stuck in America and had to make money.
Although starting from scratch, he was experienced and adaptable, and he had been studying the American record industry since his first trip in 1909. He registered an import-export business in New York, the Otto Heinemann Phonograph Supply Company, and set up a small factory in Ohio. His business plan was to supply motors to the blooming market of smaller independent phonograph manufacturers. As he hoped, Heinemann quickly found clients among the scores of newcomers sprouting up during the boom of the First World War.
Heinemann wanted to move into record production but patiently observed the rapidly changing music market around him. In 1918, with the war drawing to a close, he bought out a bankrupt record company, the Rex Talking Machine Corporation, and hired its former musical director, Fred Hager. Symbolizing Heinemann’s fascination with America’s indigenous culture, his Okeh logo was an Indian warrior’s head wearing a lone feather.
Heinemann visited Berlin in 1920 and was shocked to find currency turmoil, massive national debt, food shortages, and political instability. After six exciting years setting up his own small business in boom-time America, Heinemann returned to New York eagerly anticipating the final outcome of Starr Piano Company’s landmark case against Victor. With capital investment from his former employer, Carl Lindström, he reorganized his company and opened Okeh dealerships in Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta, Seattle, and Toronto.
With Lindström’s European catalog at his disposal, Heinemann began importing German, Swedish, Czech, and Yiddish-language records for America’s ethnic minorities. This niche marketing approach led Heinemann and his staff to ask themselves two simple questions: Was the Negro population the most potentially profitable ethnic market in America? If so, why should black music be considered any differently than the other ethnic records Okeh was selling?
The initial question in fact came from a black composer and theater producer Perry Bradford who had made a name for himself on the black vaudeville circuit. In February 1920, he strolled around to Okeh’s studio at 145 West Forty-fifth Street to see Fred Hager. He presented some songs he had written for a thirty-six-year-old singer called Mamie Smith, the star of a recent black vaudeville production, The Maid of Harlem. Bradford argued, “There’s fourteen million Negroes in our great country and they will buy records if recorded by one of their own, because we are the only folks that can sing and interpret hot jazz songs just off the griddle.”
On August 10, 1920, Okeh organized a session supervised by a sound engineer named Ralph Peer. The song produced was “Crazy Blues,” in which Mamie Smith bellowed a catchy melody over a 12-bar arrangement in the woozy, stomping style of New Orleans brass bands. Swelling into a smash hit, it sold an estimated 1 million copies—many of which went into white parlors. Realizing they’d struck a gold mine, Hager and Heinemann then invited W. C. Handy to record more brass-band blues for Okeh.
Jealous of Okeh’s knockout success and determined to create the first genuine black record company, Handy’s publisher, a former insurer from Georgia, Harry Pace, established Black Swan. From his home on Striver Row in New York City, he borrowed $30,000 and released a string of disappointing records. Fortunately, his talented musical director, Fletcher Henderson, found a lifesaver in Ethel Waters, a beautiful singer from a sad childhood. Her first record on Black Swan, “Down Home Blues” and “Oh Daddy,” sold 500,000 copies within six months.
Harry Pace’s masterstroke was to send his artists off on a nationwide tour of vaudeville theaters. Between November 1921 and July 1922, the Black Swan Troubadours visited twenty-one states and performed in at least fifty-three cities. A black newspaper columnist, Lester Walton, took charge of road management and persuaded the New York Age, The Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, and Baltimore Afro-American to cover the tour with constant reviews. Some white newspapers even started to take notice.
The lovely Ethel Waters, whose contract with Black Swan restricted her from marrying for a two-year period, performed in elegant feather costumes, the new style in Chicago and New York clubs. A North Carolina newspaper, the Tribute, reported, “Ethel Waters and her jazz masters have come and gone but their memory will linger for months … The crowd was left wide eyed and gasping with astonishment … Her act, including shimmies and shivers,… sent the crowd into paroxysms of the wildest delight.” After seven months of sold-out concerts, Black Swan’s mail-order business was employing thirty people and had shipped some $100,000 worth of records to about a thousand dealers.
With growing demand for so-called race records, new distribution networks opened up around the black newspaper circuits. Paperboys began selling blues records at newsstands; Pullman porters peddled copies at whistle stops; salesmen went door to door. The editorials in The Chicago Defender encouraged “lovers of music everywhere and those who desire to help in the advance of the Race” to buy these new records.
Meanwhile, Okeh was busy signing a roster of black artists and formulating
its own ambitious plans. As well as alternative distribution, Otto Heinemann initiated a quiet revolution inside the mainstream industry. From October 1921, Okeh took out advertorials in Talking Machine World showing its advertisements in black newspapers—a conscious strategy to reassure white dealers that race music was a wide-open, lucrative market.
As demand grew in white parlors for danceable music with modern American identity, jazz and blues moved toward the mainstream. Blacks may not have been treated equally in real life, but in the otherworldliness of music, the potent mix of streetwise slang and Southern imagery seemed to express an American dream. A new wave was breaking—as an even bigger one rolled in behind.
5. THE INVISIBLE WAVE
There was one other shadow on the horizon. It was happening out at sea—but only teenaged boys could see it coming.
A tidal wave was about to crash over the record industry and wash away much of what the founding fathers had built. Compounding the cultural changes like a perfect storm, in 1922 radio suddenly hit and sent the record industry into its first serious prolonged recession, in total some twenty years of contraction and soul searching.
Way back in the 1880s, there was a third Menlo Park project going on as Edison’s phonograph and lightbulb were being developed. Edison demonstrated, as a few others had before him, that it was possible to transmit electrical pulses through the air. Wireless telegraphy, as it was first called, had been one of the great dreams of the Victorian age, but compared to telephones, electric lighting, and talking machines, the science required huge investment. Even Edison, with all his money and stubbornness, gave up and sold his patents.
Eldridge Johnson, by far the most powerful man in the record industry, was one of several observers reading articles about this fledgling sector with disinterested bemusement. Radio had yielded more investment scams and fantastical predictions than any other field of research. It was probably unimaginable that a system based on transmitting Morse code messages between ships might be so spectacularly improved that entire sonic pictures could be transmitted across great distances with arguably better sound quality than talking machines.
Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry Page 5
