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Black Swan Records and the Political Economy of African American Music

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Black Swan Records and the Political Economy of African American Music Co-workers in the Kingdom of Culture: Black Swan Records and the Political Economy of African American Music David Suisman For suggestions on how to use this article in the U.S. history classroom, see our “Teaching the JAH” Web project at <http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/teaching/>. In London in 1923, W. E. B. Du Bois addressed the third Pan-African Congress on the topic of “The American Negro.” In his talk he jumped from familiar themes such as voting rights and lynching to one topic that stood out: attempts by a large Ameri- can phonograph record corporation to bankrupt Black Swan Records, a small, black- owned company that produced records for African American consumers. Why would a large phonograph corporation launch such a campaign? And why would it merit Du Bois’s attention in that heady forum? By way of answering those questions, this article investigates the rise and fall of the small record company and explores the complex political economy in which it operated. Black Swan was established by a former protégé of Du Bois, Harry H. Pace, who saw the company as a powerful means to respond to the hostile conditions African Americans faced, both in the entertainment business and in American society at large. At stake was not merely entertainment but access to, and control of, material resources that could cultivate and boost African Americans’ creative spirits, support and encourage African Ameri- can business development and economic self-sufficiency, and, it was believed, help shape popular opinion to produce tangible social, political, and economic benefits for African Americans.1 David Suisman teaches history at the New School University, Parsons School of Design division and at City Uni- versity of New York, Queens College campus. The author wishes to thank Eric Foner, Elizabeth Blackmar, Charles McGovern, Karl Hagstrom Miller, Jeffrey Melnick, Burton W. Peretti, Douglas H. Daniels, and an anonymous reader for the JAH for their comments and suggestions. Readers may contact Suisman at <[email protected]>. 1 On W. E. B. Du Bois’s speech and reactions to it, see David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York, 2000), 113. Lewis mistakenly identifies the company as “Pace and Handy.” The Journal of American History March 2004 1295 1296 The Journal of American History March 2004 When music functions as a commodity, as it often does in American consumer cul- ture, who makes it and on what terms are important questions of cultural and eco- nomic power. In the early twentieth century, the manufacturers and merchants of printed music and musical instruments (including phonographs) grew rapidly in size and prestige, and tremendous sales of pianos, sheet music, and phonograph records established music as an essential component of the growing consumer economy and national mass culture. By the end of World War I, the U.S. music industries pro- duced goods worth more than $335 million; never before had those industries exerted such cultural authority or financial influence in American life. In the trenches and on the home front, music had been hailed as morally uplifting, and singing was widely promoted as a national duty. Pianos were exempted from the wartime luxury tax as a social necessity. Phonographs and records were not exempted, but the phono- graph industry nonetheless thrived: the industry-leading Victor Talking Machine Company enjoyed its highest record sales to date in 1917 and 1918 and ended the war with back orders for some five million additional discs.2 The music industries were not an equal opportunity employer, however. Despite the disarming popularity of the singer-comedian Bert Williams, the nation’s wide- spread (though not universal) embrace of ragtime, and the popular acclaim for the bandleader James Reese Europe, African Americans found their opportunities in the music industries tightly restricted. While phonograph manufacturers appealed to immigrant groups by issuing hundreds of titles in every language from Czech to Chi- nese, they all but refused to issue records by African Americans and paid no attention to African American consumers. When African Americans did make records, the recordings were limited to comedy or novelty styles, which established “coon songs” and minstrelsy as the paradigm of African American culture within the industry. (Coon songs were a popular style of comic songs based on caricatures of Negro life, usually sung in “dialect.”) Minor exceptions to the pattern included records by the concert vocalist Carroll Clark, a few vocal jubilee groups, and the band of James Reese Europe, which had famously accompanied the dance pioneers Vernon Castle and Irene Castle as well as the armed forces’ Harlem Hellfighters regiment, but those exceptions did nothing to alter the industry’s low valuation of African American tal- ent, its reluctance to depict African Americans as performers of so-called quality music, or its general pattern of marginalizing or excluding African American musi- cians.3 2 David Suisman, “The Sound of Money: Music, Machines, and Markets, 1890–1925” (Ph.D. diss., Colum- bia University, 2002), 131–46; Edmund E. Day and Woodlief Thomas, The Growth of Manufacturers, 1899 to 1923: A Study of the Indexes of Increase in the Volume of Manufactured Products (Washington, 1928), 173–74. On the promotion of patriotic community-based singing groups, see Edward B. Marks with Abbot J. Liebling, They All Sang: From Tony Pastor to Rudy Vallee (New York, 1935), 189–90; and Mark Katz, “Making America More Musical through the Phonograph, 1900–1930,” American Music, 16 (Winter 1998), 461. 3 Ronald C. Foreman Jr., “Jazz and Race Records, 1920–1932: Their Origins and Their Significance for the Record Industry and Society” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, Urbana, 1968), 11–54; William Howland Ken- ney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory (New York, 1999), 65–87, 109–34; American Folklife Center, Ethnic Recordings in America: A Neglected Heritage (Washington, 1982); Howard Rye, Black Swan Records and the Political Economy of Music 1297 When the United States entered World War I, many African Americans lent their support only reluctantly, with the hope that they could leverage the fight for democ- racy abroad into a renewed commitment to democracy at home after the war’s end. This heightened sense of entitlement combined with the bloody race riots of 1919 to radicalize large numbers of African Americans. African Americans’ political assertive- ness took many forms across the country, but they shared, as the Chicago Defender put it, “new thoughts, new ideas, new aspirations” as the postwar years unfolded.4 It was in this environment that a bright, charismatic businessman named Harry H. Pace launched the first major black-owned record company. Conceived as a ven- ture to produce a broad range of music by and for African Americans, the company that became known as Black Swan Records was an audacious didactic project designed to utilize the combined power of music and business as vehicles of uplift and racial justice. Musically, Pace sought to issue all kinds of records—not just blues, ragtime, and comic records, but also opera, spirituals, and classical music—in order to challenge stereotypes about African Americans, promote African Americans’ cul- tural development, and impugn racist arguments about African American barbarism. The company would also be a model of economic development, inspiring and instructing African Americans in capital accumulation and the potential for eco- nomic self-determination.5 Black Swan Records, then, was a radical experiment in the political economy of African American culture in the guise of musical entertainment and small-business development. Its distinct but connected priorities—music and business—were at once practical and symbolic, designed to effect real change in African Americans’ condition in the United States. The diversity and quality of its musical products would uplift and empower African Americans, as well as challenge (white) public opinion about African Americans’ qualities and capabilities. Its business aims brought together many competing strains of African American political activism to form a solid consensus on black economic self-determination. Closely, though unof- ficially, aligned with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peo- ple (NAACP), Black Swan also benefited from the direct support and guidance of Du Bois, who invested the project with heavyweight political credibility. The record company was about more than selling records, and the one-two punch of its uplift through music and business makes its brief history an important, revealing event in the African American political struggles of the twentieth century. By the time the company collapsed in the mid-1920s, however, the potential for achieving racial uplift through the commercial music industries was down for the count. “Afterword,” in Yonder Come the Blues: The Evolution of a Genre, ed. Paul Oliver et al. (Cambridge, Eng., [2001]), 331–32. On coon songs, see James H. Dormon, “Shaping the Popular Image of Post-Reconstruction American Blacks: The ‘Coon Song’ Phenomenon of the Gilded Age,” American Quarterly, 40 (Dec. 1988), 450–71. For technical reasons most of James Reese Europe’s recordings were not playable on most phonographs; see Foreman, “Jazz and Race Records,” 19–21. 4 David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York, 1981), 3–24; Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York, 1971), 6–7; Chicago Defender, May 31, 1919, p. 20. 5 For most of its existence, the company name was Pace Phonograph Corp., and the label name (that is, the trade name) was Black Swan. Eventually the two were combined as the Black Swan Phonograph Co. For the sake of simplicity, I use only the Black Swan name. 1298 The Journal of American History March 2004 Despite the peculiar and intriguing nexus of music, politics, business, and racial uplift, scholars have done little to understand the Black Swan experiment.
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