NEW LABELS, NEW STYLES

Despite the booming popularity of records during WWI, only a very limited selection of the music of the times was released. Sometimes this was due to technical limitations (pianos and other instruments didn’t record well), often it was due to labels catering to the tastes of upper-class Victrola owners, but mostly it had to do with competition being limited to just three or four major labels. As with the big labels today, their goal wasn’t documentation or rewarding talent and innovation: it was to put out records that would move a lot of units, and please the listeners with the most disposable income.
The dominant majors in North America before 1920 were Victor (the biggest by far), Edison’s National Phonograph Company, and Columbia, while in Europe there was Pathé among a few others. The North American majors aggressively defended their patents in the courts to prevent new competition, but the number of companies making records still grew in the US from about 18 in 1914 to over 160 by 1918. That number exploded after 1921, when the Gennett label successfully sued Victor, placing the 78 RPM record firmly in the public domain.
Almost immediately, labels totally independent of the distribution and licensing monopolies of the majors (hence, independent labels, or “indies”) appeared. In 1921, the typical cost of producing a record was about 20 cents, including payment to songwriters or performers. Retailers kept no more than 15%, and consumers typically paid between 85 cents and $1.25 for a record. Most costs were recouped after 5000 copies were sold, with the rest being pure profit. This was considered pretty good business, which accounts for why so many people with no prior interest in music, such as furniture companies and department store chains, started putting out records.
The explosion of new labels coincided with the jazz craze in the US. Jazz had broken out in 1917, and outside of New Orleans, Chicago and the handful of other places where it was played in nightclubs, no one had heard jazz music before they heard it on record. This was new: since the invention of recording, the music styles people heard on record had already become popular through sheet music or on the stage. What’s more, the cheap sound quality and usually cheesy selections didn’t exactly inspire musicians to copy music from records.
But not long after the first hit jazz records came out, the style was being copied by bands in many different places. For the first time, musicians were learning music off of records and spreading a style without any firsthand contact with its original performers. And also, bands and orchestras who would never have played this strange music before start doing so, just to cash in and sell some records. (The most prominent commercial—and white—bandleaders included Isham Jones, Ted Lewis, and Paul Whiteman, who recorded the original version of Rhapsody in Blue with George Gershwin on piano.)
This was a profound and permanent change from the record industry’s first decades: from now on, obscure regional styles would sporadically pop up on records and suddenly be popular across the country, or even across the world.
The next new style after jazz to break out big through records was the blues, which had previously been confined to vaudeville stages and rural porch-fronts. It hit big when upstart New York label OKeh released Mamie Smith’s Crazy Blues in 1921, the first record by a black artist to sell a million copies. (Any records made by blacks and aimed mainly at black audiences were called “race” records, an industry term only replaced by “rhythm and blues” after Billboard renamed its charts in 1951.)
The huge sales of Crazy Blues led the majors to sign their own blues singers, such as Bessie Smith (who recorded for Columbia) and Ma Rainey. But the style’s popularity grew from the efforts of independent labels like Paramount Records and Gennett, a division of the Starr piano company of Indiana.
Gennett was a good example of a label that put out overlooked music not so much out of artistic mission but because the major labels weren’t bothering with it. They released records of any and every passing fad for as long as they sold. They put out various ethnic and polka records, vaudeville and comedy records, exercise records, religious records (both hymns and preaching), marching bands, hotel orchestras, blues and “hillbilly” artists and even briefly made records for the Ku Klux Klan (which was having a national resurgence at the time, although they were still controversial enough that some Gennett employees refused to work on their records.) They recorded everything they could, and began releasing jazz when the manager of the large Starr Piano store in Chicago noted the profusion of black jazz bands arriving there from New Orleans after WWI.
Since Gennett used employees from their piano factories to run their recording operation, the music recorded was usually not altered or directed to sound a certain way by the staff. Anyone recording there was able to play whatever they wanted, however they wanted. King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings were among the seminal jazz names recording at Gennett as unknowns in the early 20s
Paramount Records was another important independent, an arm of the Wisconsin Chair Company that found its way into records by first manufacturing phonograph cabinets, then phonographs, then deciding it could promote phonograph sales by selling records. As with Gennett, the company’s general lack of interest in what it recorded led it to release a lot of raw blues music untainted by efforts to make it sound more commercial (except for occasionally requesting that performers clean up dirty lyrics.) By the mid-20s, Blind Lemon Jefferson was the first big star in the country blues style. Surprisingly, one of the main bulk buyers of both white and black rural music from labels like Gennett and Paramount was the Sears & Roebuck Company. Among the best customers of its famous mail-order catalogue were rural folk, both black and white, who lived far from any department store. Sears was more than happy to sell them cheap phonographs and records of the music they liked to hear, which most often was country or blues.
Much of this music was recorded in the 20s by white scouts who traveled the South with portable disk recorders searching out interesting street musicians or porchfront amateurs. They would usually pay them a few bucks for their time, and then sell the material to record labels further north. Mayo Williams and A.C. Speir were two of the best-known scouts who discovered such legends as Charley Patton, Son House and Blind Blake. It’s estimated that about 20 000 “race” records, mostly of country blues, gospel, preaching and comedy, were produced between 1922 and 1932.
Only a few bigger labels paid royalties to these rural artists, usually just a fraction of a cent per disc. Some scouts never bothered explaining the concept to the artists, and got rich by pocketing royalties on hundreds of records for years (with the labels presumably thinking that they were going to pass them on to the performers.) The labels often took even further advantage of these itinerant singers: Gennett, for example, was known to create pseudonyms for its artists when pressing records on budget labels commissioned by chain stores like Kresges. None of these artists got paid for these extra record sales, and some of those who’d become jazz legends by the 50s were reported to be quite surprised when collectors asked them about some of their old “nicknames.”
While considered just as quaint and somewhat backward as blues music was, “hillbilly” music (which I’ll henceforth refer to as country music) became even more popular across the US in the 20s. The first big country star was “Fiddlin’” John Carson, the “Singing Brakeman,” who put out a string of huge-selling hit records starting in 1923. The first million-selling country record was put out by Victor’s answer to Carson, one Vernon Dalhart, whose The Prisoner’s Song/ Wreck of the Old ’97 was a smash with rural and urban audiences in 1924, eventually selling over five million copies! Country remained a strong style for the big labels into the 30s, with the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers both releasing million-selling singles by 1928. Country music, and the early silent Cowboy movies, also had international appeal, even spawning an Australian star called Tex Morton who had a few hits in the late 20s.

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