Recorded Music in American Life: the Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890–1945
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Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890–1945 William Howland Kenney OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS recorded music in american life This page intentionally left blank RECORDED MUSIC IN AMERICAN LIFE The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890–1945 William Howland Kenney 1 New York Oxford Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris São Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1999 by William Howland Kenney Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kenney, William Howland. Recorded music in American life : the phonograph and popular memory, 1890–1945 / William Howland Kenney. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-510046-8; 0-19-517177-2 (pbk.) 1. Popular music—Social aspects—United States. 2. Phonograph— Social aspects—United States. 3. Sound recording industry—United States—History. 4. Popular culture—United States—History—20th century. I. Title. ML3477.K46 1999 306.4'84—dc21 98-8611 98765 43 21 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper iv introductionDisclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. to the memory of Marie Isabelle (Gill) Kenney & William Howland Kenney II introduction v This page intentionally left blank acknowledgments n the lengthening interim between this project’s opening hy- Ipotheses and its final chapter drafts, my curiosity grew steadily as I met and began learning from recorded sound archivists about the stunning number and range of phonograph records. It increas- ingly appeared to me that we historians had overlooked archival sources of unrivaled richness, diversity, and complexity. I started at the Library of Congress, where Sam Brylawski, director of the Division of Recorded Sound, became my invaluable guide. He and his colleagues Gene Deanna and Wynn Mathias then formed what seemed to me to be an exception- ally well-informed and professional archival team. So, too, Dan Morgenstern, Ed Berger, Vincent Pelote, and Donald Luck of the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey, offered me their insightful commentary and friendly encouragement on this project, as they have on earlier ones. Calvin Elliker, director of the music library at the University of Michigan, ably assisted my research on the Edison surveys. Betty Obadashian of the Schomburg Center for Re- search in Black Culture guided my work on Harry H. Pace. Robin Van Fleet, senior manuscript librarian of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, kindly supplied copies of the correspondence between Harry H. Pace and Robert Vann. Amy Brown and Richard Shrader of the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill guided my research into the origins of country music records, while Donald McCormick, curator of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Archives of Re- corded Sound at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, helped me locate important documentation on early phonograph culture. A 1993–1994 National Endowment for the Humanities Grant to Uni- versity Teachers provided the necessary time to map out a research plan and begin to understand the primary sources in the several archives mentioned above. Dean Eugene Wenninger and his successor Dean M. Thomas Jones of Kent State University’s Office of Research and Spon- sored Programs helped to defray a significant portion of the expenses involved in my return visits to the archives. My special thanks also go to Frank Field, associate director of the Kent State University Geneva Program, for helping me to secure in the fall of 1993 a pass to the Library of the United Nations, Geneva, Switzerland. Without that courtesy, I could not then have read all that microfilm of phonograph industry publications. Nina Kriz Leneman, chief of Readers’ Services, United Nations Library, immediately grasped the goal of my project, and diplomatically overlooked its tangential relation to pressing United Nations business. Several friends and colleagues took the time to criticize chapter drafts and to suggest further readings. Although the responsibility for all errors in this book is my own, I am indebted to Spencer Bennett, John Gennari, Victor Greene, Doris Kadish, August Meier, Henry D. Shapiro, Robert Swierenga, Nancy Walker, and Raymond Woller. I reserve spe- cial thanks for Richard Berrong’s critical reading of the greater part of an early manuscript draft. Jonathan Crewe of the Dartmouth Humani- ties Institute suggested several exciting works on collective memory; Mark Tucker, Neil Leonard, James Collier, and Lewis Erenberg shared data from their own research; David Kyvig, professor of history at Akron University provided an occasion for me to speak to members of the University of Akron History Department about my evolving views of the phonograph. Herbert L. Hochhauser graciously consented to translate lyrics from records of Aaron Lebedeff. G. Phillip Cartwright, a jazz musi- cian and educator who understands the power of recorded music, encour- aged me to keep playing jazz and working on this project. At different times, four editors at Oxford University Press took a hand in preparing this manuscript for publication. Sheldon Meyer saw some potential in my early chapter drafts and negotiated a book contract; Soo Mee Kwon guided the manuscript through the process of peer evaluation; while Jonathan Wiener and Jessica Ryan reviewed the final version. Thanks to all four for their faith in this further research on American music. What eventually became a book began as I started to think about the influential role that the phonograph has played in my own life. I soon realized that I wanted to acknowledge and evaluate the paths to musi- cal experience that it has opened to me. Thanks to the research that I have been able to undertake, I now understand better how and why I came so to embrace the recorded music of my parents’ generation. On this project, as on earlier ones, I take great pleasure in acknowl- edging my gratitude to Françoise Massardier Kenney for her encourage- ment and her critical readings of several chapters. She has carefully pro- tected my research and writing time, sometimes at the expense of her own. So as not to unduly load the musical dice, we try to make a variety of recorded music available to our daughter Mélanie Massardier Kenney. Sharing her reactions to it enriches our resonant circle. Hudson, Ohio W.H.K. October 1997 viii acknowledgmentsintroduction contents Introduction: Recorded Music and Collective Memory xi 1 Two “Circles of Resonance”: Audience Uses of Recorded Music 3 2 “The Coney Island Crowd”: The Phonograph and Popular Recordings before World War I 23 3 “His Master’s Voice”: The Victor Talking Machine Company and the Social Reconstruction of the Phonograph 44 4 The Phonograph and the Evolution of “Foreign” and “Ethnic” Records 65 5 The Gendered Phonograph: Women and Recorded Sound, 1890–1930 88 6 African American Blues and the Phonograph: From Race Records to Rhythm and Blues 109 7 Economics and the Invention of Hillbilly Records in the South 135 8 A Renewed Flow of Memories: The Depression and the Struggle over “Hit Records” 158 9 Popular Recorded Music within the Context of National Life 182 Notes 203 Index 234 A gallery of photos appears after page 108. introduction ix This page intentionally left blank introduction Recorded Music and Collective Memory In memory, everything seems to happen to music. —Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie ost people would admit that the phonograph1 and re- Mcorded music have had an impact on life in the United States. Americans’ enjoyment of records has evolved into a major phe- nomenon: by 1902 the Victor Talking Machine Company had assets of $2,724,016 which grew to $33,235,378 in 1917. Despite several diffi- cult periods, record sales have soared over the long run, taking off in the mid-1950s: they totaled $199,000,000 in 1954 and by 1977 we were pur- chasing $3 billion worth of recordings a year at retail prices and playing them on 75 million domestic playback machines.2 The numbers alone give pause and oblige us to consider that turntables and records may have been more than clever distractions. Most would as quickly acknowledge that records played a dominant role in spreading a taste for popular and vernacular music styles—jazz, blues, hillbilly, rock and roll—and a variety of other styles of popular music. The mere mention of these stylistic labels and those that subse- quently replaced them in popularity usually suffices to demonstrate the cultural significance of the phonograph. Clearly, people of divergent tastes have not only bought and listened to recordings but participated in associated social and cultural movements as well. But important ques- tions about this larger social and cultural context remain unanswered: where did these style categories come from; how did they come to be defined; what did they mean to those who bought and listened to the records; and what, if anything, may they be said to reveal about the cul- tural life of the United States? xi This book takes a step toward answering these latter questions by taking a closer look at the interplay between recorded music and social, political, and economic forces in the United States from 1890 to 1945.