29 July 2008

Race Records

Recordings of African-American styles grew in reach and influence

A popular blues 1920s and –30s blues vocalist, Bessie Smith influenced profoundly subsequent generations of jazz singers.

(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)

The music industry’s discovery of black music (and southern music in general) can be traced to a set of recordings made in 1920, featuring the black vaudeville performer Mamie Smith (1883-1946). Perry Bradford, a successful black songwriter and music store owner, brought Smith to the attention of the Okeh Record Company. A record that featured Smith performing two of Bradford’s songs was released in July 1920, and although Okeh made no special effort to promote it, sales were unexpectedly high. Smith reentered the studio two months later and recorded “Crazy Blues,” backed with the song “It’s Right Here for You (If You Don’t Get It … ‘Tain’t No Fault of Mine).” Okeh advertised “Crazy Blues” in black communities and sold an astounding 75,000 copies within one month (at that time, 5,000 sales of a given recording allowed a record company to recoup its production costs, meaning that any further record sales were almost all profit). Mamie Smith’s records were soon available at music stores, drugstores, furniture stores, and other outlets in northern and midwestern cities, and throughout the Deep South.

The promotional catchphrase “race music” was first applied by Ralph Peer (1892-1960), a Missouri-born talent scout for Okeh Records who had worked as an assistant on Mamie Smith’s first recording sessions. Although it might sound derogatory today, the term “race” was used in a positive sense in urban African-American communities during the 1920s and was an early example of black nationalism; an individual who wanted to express pride in his heritage might refer to himself as “a race man.” The term was soon picked up by other companies and was also widely used by the black press. The performances released on race records included a variety of musical styles – blues, jazz, gospel choirs, vocal quartets, string bands, and jug-and-washboard bands – as well as oral performances such as sermons, stories, and comic routines. Not all recordings featuring African-American artists were automatically classified as race records. For example, recordings by black dance orchestras or jazz bands with a substantial white audience were listed in the mainstream pop record catalogs. A few records by African-American artists even found their way into the hillbilly catalogs.

The emergence of race records set a pattern that has been repeated many times in the history of American popular music, in which talented entrepreneurs, often connected with small, independent record labels, take the lead in exploring and promoting music outside the commercial mainstream.

The 1920s also saw the emergence of African-American-owned record companies. The first of these was Black Swan, founded in 1921 in New York by Harry Pace. In announcing the new company, Pace stated that it intended to meet “a legitimate and growing demand” among the 12 million people of African descent in the United States.

By 1927 a total of some 500 race records were being issued every year. Throughout the 1920s African Americans bought as many as 10 million blues and gospel recordings a year, almost one per person, an astonishingly high figure when compared with the mainstream record market, especially considering that many black people lived in poverty. Many young people in these communities thus grew up with the sound of a phonograph as part of their everyday experience. Migrants from rural communities who had relocated to urban centers returned periodically, bringing with them the latest hit records and creating a continual flow of musical styles and tastes between city and country.

It is clear that the music business did not create race music or its intended audience out of thin air. It would be more accurate to say that the basis for an African-American audience already existed and the companies, hungry for new markets, moved to exploit (and in some cases to shape) this sense of a distinctive black identity. This process in turn helped to create a truly national African-American musical culture – for the first time, people living in New York City, Gary (Indiana), Jackson (Mississippi), and Los Angeles could hear the same phonograph records at around the same time. It was during this period that the first generation of national black music stars emerged, including Bessie Smith, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Robert Johnson.

[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]