|
Tim Brooks,
author of
Lost
Sounds:
Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890 - 1919
*
_____________________________________________________
Lost Sounds is the first in-depth history of the involvement of African
Americans in the earliest years of recording. It examines the first three
decades of sound recording in the United States, charting the surprising
role black artists played in the period leading up to the Jazz Age.
Applying more than thirty years of scholarship, Tim Brooks identifies key
black artists who recorded commercially in a wide range of genres and provides
revealing biographies of some forty of these audio pioneers. Brooks assesses
the careers and recordings of George W. Johnson, Bert Williams, George Walker,
Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, W.C. Handy, James Reese
Europe, Wilbur Sweatman, boxing champion Jack Johnson, as well as a host
of lesser-known voices.
Many of these pioneers faced a difficult struggle to be heard in an era of
rampant discrimination and "the color line," and their stories illuminate
the forces -- both black and white -- that gradually allowed African Americans
greater entrée into the mainstream American entertainment industry.
The role played by the mass medium of sound recording in enabling change
is also explored.
Because they were viewed as "novelty" or "folk" artists, nearly all of these
African Americans were allowed to record in their own distinctive styles,
and in practically every genre: popular music, ragtime, jazz, cabaret, classical,
spoken word, poetry, and more. The sounds they preserved reflect the evolving
black culture of that tumultuous and creative period. #
In our May, 2004 interview with Brooks, he discusses many of these fascinating
topics, as well as shed light on how these historic recordings are withheld
from students and scholars today because of stringent U.S. copyright laws.
At the conclusion of the interview, you may enjoy a visit to the photo
gallery, filled with historic pictures, quotations and sound samples from
the era. Thank you to Tim Brooks for allowing use of the photos and
text.
Interview Topics
The genesis of the book
Thomas
Edison's original vision for the phonograph player
Technological
restraints and its affect on accurately reflecting musical trends
Who the
audience was, and when the recordings emerged
The artistic
vision of the early record companies
Racism in marketing techniques
The
recording industry's influence on reducing racial tension
George
W. Johnson, black America's first recording artist
Black America's response
to Johnson's music
The impact
of improving technology on Johnson's career
Bert
Williams and George Walker, and moving away from racial stereotypes
The Fisk Jubilee Singers
The
recording career of heavyweight champion Jack Johnson
Black owned
Black Swan Records' ability to compete
Artists breaking new ground
The number of recordings
currently available
The constraints
imposed by U.S. copyright law
About Tim Brooks
Photo Gallery
Comment on this interview
__________
Editors Note: Some of the photographs and quotations within the interview may be objectionable to contemporary readers. It is important to remember the times and the context in which they were made. They are included to help illustrate the complexities of the culture in which these artists performed.
George W. Johnson, the first black recording artist, in the only
photograph of him at work in the recording studio, from Phonoscope,
July 1898
*
"Before television, before radio, before even motion pictures, an earlier
mass medium began paving the way for the shared social experience that has
so profoundly changed modern society. It startled and amazed the citizens
of the late nineteenth century. Who could ever have imagined an
entertainer, orator, or famous person being "bottled up," only to spring
to life, as if by magic, simultaneously in hundreds of remote locations?
Nothing in five thousand years of human history anticipated such a
possibility. And yet here it was -- recorded sound."
- Tim Brooks
*
Listen to George W. Johnson perform
Laughing
Song
_____________________________________________________
JJM
Your book is a fascinating look at an overlooked history that took
you thirteen years to complete. What was the genesis of this project?
TB I have been interested in early recording
for a long time. When I was in high school, a kid I knew had a subscription
to Billboard magazine, which is kind of unusual since it is a trade
publication. In addition to their charts listing contemporary hits, they
had a "Ten Years Ago" on Billboard chart. Each week this chart would
evolve just as the current chart did. I found that to be interesting, and
I followed the chart from week to week. In addition to this chart, there
was one from fifteen years prior, and maybe even another that was twenty.
While I didn't know any of those songs, I watched them go up and down the
charts, and I became quite interested in that. These charts made me begin
thinking about the music recorded before that listed on the charts.
Billboard didn't have charts from earlier eras, so I started digging
back and found some books with information about records from way back --
some of them hits from the twenties -- and jazz music I was interested in.
It kindled a curiosity about what was recorded even before this era. I kept
going back further and further until hitting a wall in the 1890s, which is
when they started making records. I couldn't go any earlier than that because
there weren't any records before that.
| I discovered that there wasn't much written about the recording artists
of this time, and learning more about these early times and personalities
became my hobby. During the years of my research, I learned more about Louis
Armstrong and Duke Ellington and other famous African Americans who changed
American music in the twenties and beyond, but also those who came before
them and who weren't recognized much at all. One of the musicians was the
one who got me started on this book, George W. Johnson, who was a whistler
in the 1890's -- a time when the record industry was just beginning. While
there were a few stories written about him by collectors, they seemed to
contradict each other. They were full of guesswork and speculation with colorful
anecdotes, like how he was hanged for murdering his wife, which is not at
all true. While such stories were proven to be false, they kept appearing
anyway, and by the late 1980's, a number of articles and album liner notes
repeated these stories that I knew by then were wrong. As a result, I thought
that I would research his life, find out what truly happened, and write a
real article about him. I knew it could pose a challenge considering how
long ago he lived and that nobody had done any serious research on his life.
I began digging into it and found it to be quite a task at times, and the
trail was frequently cold since he had died in the early 1900's and this
was now the late 1980's. His records had been out of print for eighty years
at that point. The more I dug into it, however, I kept finding things nobody
else had found. The story of Johnson was turning into a very interesting
article, but it got so big that it wasn't really an article anymore -- it
was too big for that. While researching Johnson, I kept running into other
personalities who lived during this time as well -- quartets who had recorded
in the nineties, the big Broadway star Bert Williams, and so many others.
I realized that there is a whole group of fascinating people beyond Johnson
nobody seems to know much of anything about who were the foundation for all
this history that we do know about. |
Columbia Record, August,
1907
George W. Johnson
*
"Johnson, who is well known about the Tenderloin...was a slave
in the South. He makes a living by whistling in the streets. His
notes are as perfect, it is said, as those of a flute."
- New York Tribune, 1899 |
Thomas Edison with cylinder phonograph, 1878
*
"After the exhibition of his first crude tinfoil apparatus in 1878
- 79, Edison virtually abandoned the phonograph to work on the electric light.
He did not return to work on it until 1886, when the expiration of
his major commitments to the electric light, and the hot breath of competition
from other inventors working on sound recording, brought him back into the
fray. By 1888 Edison had produced an "improved" phonograph, this one
capable of producing permanent recordings on wax cylinders."
- Tim Brooks
___________
Liberty
Bell March, by the Edison Concert Band, 1897 |
JJM Yes, the book is filled with
fascinating biographies. Before we get into some of the personalities, I
would like to ask some questions about the industry they were part of. What
was Thomas Edison's initial vision for the phonograph?
TB Edison was very much a business man. As
many did during the Victorian age, he had a business orientation and aspired
to be a mogul. When he invented the phonograph in 1877, he communicated his
vision for it, and at the top of the list was using it a business dictating
machine. He also imagined that it could be used for elderly people to record
their reminisces to be played at their funeral. The idea of talking clocks
and talking appliances was also high on his list. Using the phonograph for
amusement was not a priority at this time. In the 1890's, when the equipment
finally improved and it became practical to market, he still thought it was
going to be a business machine. He disdained the entertainment uses of it.
So, somebody else had to come up with the use for which it was eventually
adopted.
JJM The technological limitations must have
hindered the vision of even using it for recording music.
TB Well, the early technological limitations
precluded it for the use of much of anything. The recording equipment was
quite crude. It is interesting, though, that when you read accounts of people
of that time, they thought the quality was miraculous, and suggested that
every word was crystal clear; then when you listen to it you can't hear a
thing and wonder what they were thinking.
JJM No matter what the quality was, I am sure
the technology seemed miraculous.
TB Yes. Think about what your first computer
was like, and compare it to those of today and it will seem slow and virtually
useless. But at that time it was a revelation. It is not how well the horse
can dance, but that it can dance at all. A recording at the time was typically
accompanied by the text of what you were listening to, so listeners would
read the letter while the person on the recording recited it. The same with
music -- you read (or knew) the song while the singers sang it. But because
the recording standards were so low, it was very difficult to record certain
instruments and certain kinds of voices. |
| JJM Given these technological restraints,
did the recordings accurately reflect what was popular at the time?
TB That was one of the interesting things
that came out during the research for this book. I discovered that there
was a big difference between the music recorded by mainstream white performers,
and that recorded by the African American artists I profile. Much of the
music on the cylinders recorded by white musicians during the 1890's are
what we would call "stilted," which means they sing right from the music
on the beat, the lyrics very carefully enunciated and quite loud, and with
very little modulation in them. It is very unreal in many ways. The idea
was to make it understandable, above all else, even if it was stilted and
contained no looseness or anything like that in the music. The few African
Americans who recorded were considered to be novelty artists. They weren't
in the mainstream, and weren't the artists the buyers went to first, in most
cases. They were basically a novelty for the record company's catalog. The
recording technicians didn't understand what the musicians were doing, all
they knew was that somebody out there found their work to be kind of novel
and different. The technicians concern was that, whatever it is that they
did, do it in a way that the recording horn can pick up the sound. The African
American musicians were given a lot more freedom, and as a consequence, they
recorded much closer to the way they performed in real life -- whether it
was a street singer like George Johnson, or a jubilee quartet, or the incredible
Bert Williams/George Walker duo recording their stage routine into a horn.
Basically, they were allowed to record naturally, whereas the white singers
were not, which makes them very interesting sound documents.
JJM Were these recordings made specifically
for the black audience, and when did they emerge?
TB They were actually made predominantly
for the white audience and emerged, contrary to most historians, at the very
beginning, 1890, which was the first full year of what we would now call
the record industry. In those days, the industry was on a very small scale,
of course, and the records were made basically for exhibitors rather than
for people in their own homes. Entrepreneurs would buy a phonograph, put
it in a case on the back of their wagon, and take it around the country.
They would set up in a town and charge admission for people to hear this
wonderful invention of Mr. Edison's. This was the first exposure most Americans
had to the phonograph, and the exhibitors needed something to play. People
didn't want to hear dictation records, they wanted to hear music -- marching
bands and singers. So, that was the market for these recordings at the time,
and from the very earliest incarnations -- even the experimental ones in
1888 and 1889 that I write about in the book -- a handful of black artists
were being recorded. When I say artists, their primary work may have been
as a waiter in a hotel, or they may have been street corner quartets, or
it might have been a street singer like Johnson, who was encountered in a
ferry terminal and asked to come down to a recording company's laboratory
and sing. It was very easy to get a musician to record. |
Library of Congress
A traveling phonograph exhibitor in the early 1890's
*
"My patrons are of all classes -- rich and poor, young and old,
male and especially female. I go to schools, colleges, asylums,
etc., etc., wherever I have paying inducements. I have lately had a
call to go to a grove near this place for a Sunday exhibition, but I get
about all the work I want during the six days, without [working] the
seventh.
"I carry fifty selections and try to have them all good...Johnson's
'Whistling Coon' and laughing song are immensely popular, and I presume they
will always be. There is more call for them than for any other
selections...
"My last customer after listening to ten selections remarked, as
he laid down the ear tubes, 'Well, that is d----d nice,' and this about what
they all say."
- A New England traveling phonograph exhibitor, from Phonogram,
July, 1892. |
Victor Records Catalog Supplement, March, 1907 |
JJM There were three major record companies during
this period -- Victor, Columbia and Edison. What was their artistic vision,
and did they differ from one another?
TB They basically wanted to appeal to the
middle class, and to some extent the upper class -- although that came a
little later with the classical Red Seal label. Although the lower class
was huge at the time, they were not attempting to reach this market because
they didn't feel they had enough money to put the nickels in the machines
or to buy the phonographs. So, their primary market was the large Victorian
middle class, and the way to reach them was to record a wide range of artists.
Every record company wanted to build up a large catalog, and in order to
show this wide selection, they created sections within them -- all the band
recordings in one place, all the tenor recordings in another, and the quartet
recordings in another. They would mix in a few operatic arias with popular
songs, and with traditional songs. You can pretty much tell by the prevalence
of older music from another era, including many Stephen Foster songs written
thirty or forty years earlier, that they were selling to a fairly conservative,
white audience. |
| JJM
As to be expected considering the era, there was a fair amount of racism
in the marketing of the music and the performers. Columbia Records described
Bert Williams's 1906 recording of "Nobody" as follows: "The July record 'Nobody'
by Bert Williams created such a sensation that this merry monarch has sung
it also on cylinder No. 33011, with orchestra accompaniment. Here is Negro
character by the funniest Negro artist on earth, genuine colored philosophy
by an African logician, whose records are made exclusively for the Columbia
Phonograph Company." How did racism of the era affect their marketing techniques?
TB Racism was part of the fabric of American
society at that time. It is hard to imagine the kind of language they used,
and the kind of relationships between people that existed then, yet no one
thought it was particularly unusual. Today, it seems unthinkable to say such
things and relate to people that way.
Much of the most exciting and vibrant musical innovations of that time were
all tied up with this racism. Many of the songs that ushered ragtime and
ultimately jazz and blues to the American public have lyrics and titles we
find very offensive today. So there is this creativity all mixed in with
this gumbo of racial mores of the time -- which today are quite uncomfortable
-- and it is hard to disentangle them and look at them from today's perspective.
But, it was a feeling that was ingrained in our society at the time, this
order of things that featured a perceived superior group and a perceived
inferior group. That is how everything was approached at that time.
Over the course of the thirty years I chronicle in the book, very interesting,
fundamental social changes took place. Williams and Walker are good examples
of this. When they started out, they were billed almost explicitly as a black
group who sang songs full of racial stereotypes. Once they became successful
in the early 1900's, they began softening their material, and were no longer
marketed as they were originally. While they still performed in black face
-- as did practically everyone at that time -- they sang more about the human
failings that anybody could relate to. It wasn't specifically black anymore.
As Bert Williams went on as a solo artist in the teens, he became the "Jonah
man," the downtrodden guy for whom everything always goes wrong and who struggles
along everywhere. Well, that is not a racial stereotype, it is a human condition.
As soon as his career got enough traction, he made this very intentional
change in his material, and other artists did as well. George Johnson was
looked down on just ten years later by the New York Age as an "Uncle Tom
sellout," because they were pioneering better self-esteem among black Americans. |
photo courtesy David Jasen
Williams and Walker, starring in In Dahomey, c. 1903
____________
"Gentlemen: I am one of the many cranks who persist in telling
you how to run your business. However I have watched closely and studiously
the effect, and after results, which your show leaves upon people. You
have a wonderful opportunity in this country. Your name is magic to
our people, the characters you bring out in your plays, the vim and dash
of Negro young manhood and womanhood have the effect of ideals which almost
every Negro boy and girl, however far distant in the backwoods, seems to
pounce upon, imitate, emulate and follow as the standard...
"May I ask this question? Is it not possible that while at
the same time you hold the old plantation Negro and the ludicrous darky and
the scheming 'grafter' up to entertain people, that you could likewise have
a prominent character representative of Locke, the Negro student at Oxford
England...such as Pickens, who won the prize at Yale; Roscoe Conkling Bruce,
who led the oratorical contest at Harvard; or the great colored football
or baseball stars at Harvard, and make such characters heroes? Such
would tend to lift the young Negro mind up to imitate and emulate these
heroes...
"Making money is not the greatest thing in life. Bettering
mankind, uplifting your fellow men, bring a far greater joy and personal
contentment of the mind and life spent in this world. You have the
opportunity; can't you turn your tremendous influence more and more as you
grow older and wiser along these lines?"
- A 1907 letter to Williams and Walker from a black college professor
in Kansas My Little Zulu Babe |
Will Marion Cook
Swing Along
*
James Reese Europe
On
Patrol in No Man's Land
________________
"People sometimes ask me if I would not give anything to be white,
I answer, in the words of the song, most emphatically, 'No.' How do
I know what I might be if I were a white man? I might be a sand-hog,
burrowing away and losing my health for $8 a day. I might be a street-car
conductor at $12 or $15 a week. There is many a white man less fortunate
and less well equipped than I am. In fact, I have never been able to
discover that there was anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But
I have often found it inconvenient -- in America."
- Bert Williams |
JJM Yes, in 1905, the influential critic
Sylvester Russell wrote in the Freeman, "Men who write words for songs
can no longer write such mean rot as the words of 'Whistling Coon' and expect
respectable publishers to accept it no matter how good the music may be.
Composers should not set music to a set of words that are a direct insult
or indirect insinuation to the colored race. This style of literature is
no longer appreciated."
TB Russell was a thought leader of the time,
and it would take more years for what he said to actually take hold. It was
really the 1920's before racial stereotypes started to settle down at all,
and many lingered on into the thirties and forties. However, this sort of
thinking was beginning to happen, and it was because of critics like Russell
and artists like Bert Williams, who toned down his material and made it more
human once he became influential. Williams and an artist like Will Marion
Cook began to show white America that blacks brought to the art form an insight
into human nature that was equally valid to any group of people, and was
not in any way inferior.
JJM As you said, the culture was at
one level in the 1890's and at another in the 1920's. Around 1910, Booker
T. Washington said of Bert Williams, "Bert Williams is a tremendous asset
to the Negro race. He is an asset because he has succeeded in actually doing
something, and because he has succeeded, the fact of his success helps the
Negro many times more than he could help the Negro by merely contenting himself
to whine and complain about racial difficulties and racial discriminations."
Four years later, in a fascinating interview James Reese Europe gave the
New York Post, he was quoted as saying, "You see, we colored people
have our own music that is part of us. It's us; it's the product of our souls;
it's been created by the sufferings and miseries of our race. Some of the
old melodies we played Wednesday night were made up by slaves of the old
days, and others were handed down from the days before we left Africa. Our
symphony orchestra never tries to play white folks' music. We should be foolish
to attempt such a thing. We are no more fitted for that than a white orchestra
is fitted to play our music…" That's a pretty courageous thing to say
considering the era.
TB Yes, and it is evidence of what the thought
leaders were saying, and it is very fundamental to what happened in American
music at the time, and more broadly to American culture. America was enormously
influenced by African American music and cultures -- some say it is the defining
element of American culture. Dvorak certainly thought so, and all of jazz,
rock and rhythm and blues comes out of the black experience, which is just
an underpinning of who and what we are as a people. It is what is unique
to America in many ways.
This is the period when that was just emerging, because if you go back into
the mid-1800's, black America was literally walled off from white America.
There was very little cultural contact between the two at all, and what little
there was emerged in the late 1800's in the form of the minstrel show, which
was a total travesty, of course. From roughly the 1890's to the 1920's, black
American mores, culture and music began to infiltrate, and once it did, it
was irresistible. Many white people understood that. One of the premises
of my book is that the phonograph has been underrated as one of the major
agents of societal change and racial tolerance, because you could have records
by a George W. Johnson or a James Reese Europe playing in the phonograph
player of a proper Victorian parlor where you might not have them there in
person -- or if you did they would have to come in through the back door.
Once white Americans began accepting that, and accepting their music, their
language, and their point of view, they began accepting them as people too.
JJM Yes, I thought you did a fine job stating
how the recording industry played a vital role in reducing racial tensions
around the country during this era.
TB It was a period of very high tensions.
I write about the 1900 race riot in New York that involved several of these
artists, actually, who ended up being chased out of their theatres. So, while
it was a period including several flash points, over a period of time, black
culture became more exposed and understood, until the explosion of acceptance
in the 1920's. |
| JJM The black artist whose music was
most closely identified with the emerging phonograph player was George W.
Johnson, who you have brought up already…
TB He is a link with the old pre-civil war
African American in America's days of slavery, and he was looked on in that
way. One of the reasons he was so accepted is because he was considered --
in the terms of those times -- "safe." He could appear non-threatening while
holding his own. He was in his forties -- considered an older man for the
era -- and while he wasn't exactly servile, he had an ability to get along
with people and get people to like him. He was very intelligent and endlessly
fascinating.
In an era when everything was copied by everybody, and when it wasn't the
artist but the song that was popular, his two famous songs, "The Laughing
Song" and "The Whistling Coon," became totally identified with him. Nobody
could copy them. When he got into real trouble and was accused of murdering
his wife in 1899, people came to his aid and spoke up for him, including
the son of the slave owner who formerly owned him. He came all the way from
Virginia -- a long trip in those times -- just to be there for him. That
speaks volumes about how well accepted he was, and it showed the people who
ran the record industry that recording a black man and promoting him as one
was not going to get you run out of town. In fact, he could sell a lot of
records for you. Even though he had to sing demeaning material that today
would be considered offensive, his work was a real breakthrough, and it opened
the door for artists who came later like Bert Williams, the Dinwiddie Quartet,
and Charley Case. If Johnson hadn't been there, it would have been at least
another decade for them to be accepted.
JJM Was his music -- particularly "The Whistling
Coon" and "The Laughing Song" -- indicative of what the music of the pre-Civil
War South sounded like?
TB No, I wouldn't say that. Polk Miller is
probably the most authentic musical connection we have to that. Johnson was
primarily a street entertainer. One of his two big songs, "The Whistling
Coon,' was a minstrel tune that had been written ten or fifteen years earlier.
It is still not clear who wrote his other big song, "The Laughing Song,"
but my guess is that somebody with Johnson probably worked it up. These were
novelty street songs of their period, basically. He was a link in terms of
people and personalities and acceptance. Much was made of the fact that he
was an ex-slave -- that was always mentioned in stories about him. He was
considered to be a link with the black experience during slavery, and a link
to that era. It is not likely many of his recordings made it to the South,
but he was certainly very popular in the North, Northeast, and Midwest. I
write about Polk Miller in the book, even though he was white. He was fascinated
by the music of blacks of the pre-civil war era, and he brought their musical
sensibilities to his performances in 1909.
JJM
What was black America's response to Johnson's music?
TB With the exception of Russell and some
of the thought leaders of the time -- and even that is ten years later --
he was accepted as a black man who had made good. Blacks did not patronize
records all that much. They didn't have the money to do so. When phonographs
began to be sold in the late 1890's and were heavily marketed in the early
1900's, African Americans were never a market. None of the sales literature
Columbia, Edison and Victor put out for their salesmen ever discussed targeting
the black audience, and that was purely economic. So, Johnson's recordings
were basically introducing the work of a black artist to white listeners,
as opposed to appealing to African Americans themselves. Marketing to African
Americans didn't start to happen until the very end of the World War I period,
when people like George Broome and Roland Hayes specifically put out records
for an upscale black market, and the broader black market was not really
addressed until the 1920's. |
Laughing
Song
As I was coming around the corner, I heard
some people say,
Here comes the dandy darky,
here he comes this way...
His heel is like a snowplow, his mouth is like a trap,
And when he opens it gently you will see a fearful
gap...
And then I laughed . . . [Laughs heartily in time with
the music]
They said his mother was a princess, his father was a
prince,
And he'd been the apple of their eye if he had not been
a quince...
But he'll be the king of Africa in the sweet bye and
bye,
And when I heard them say it, why
I'd laugh until I'd cry...And then I laughed .
. . [Laughs to the music]
So now kind friends just listen, to what I'm going to
say,
I've tried my best to please you with my simple little
lay...
Now whether you think it funny or a quiet bit of chaff,
Why, all I'm going to do is just to end it with a
laugh...
And then I laughed...[Laughs to the music] |
Library of Congress
Johnson in the recording studio, 1898
*
"George W. Johnson was, for most of his life, a happy, easygoing
man with a ready laugh who wanted nothing more than to get by in a hostile
world. He made many friends and brought pleasure to millions more.
He probably never thought of himself as a pioneer, but as the first
black recording artist he made history. Perhaps today, so long after
his death in obscurity, his achievements will at last be
remembered."
- Tim Brooks |
JJM How did the improving technology
signal the end for Johnson's career?
TB He was a leather-lunged individual, and
very robust. When he started in 1890, there was no practical way to duplicate
cylinders, which is what they were making then. Every record was essentially
an original recording. They could make three or four at a time by literally
putting three or four machines in front of him, each with its horn sticking
up. This was imperfect and at times only two or three of the machines produced
a good copy. Then he would sing it again, and now they have three more copies,
and he would sing it again, etc. He would sing all afternoon and build up
a stock of approximately fifty cylinders to sell. It was really a hand made
industry, and the artists who were successful had to sing or play the selections
over and over again just to build up stock. He had hundreds upon hundreds
of recording sessions just to produce stock of these two big songs.
JJM And since the business model at the time
was to pay by the session, when they figured out how to mass produce these
recordings, the artists didn't have to record as much, and their opportunity
for income was reduced rather substantially.
TB Yes, that is right. He got paid by the
session, or by the "round," as they called it -- a round being each time
he sang the song. While they were paid only a few pennies per round, it added
up, and it was possible a performer like Johnson would receive three or four
dollars per session, which was a lot of money in those days. When duplication
did come in, a master would not be permanent but they were able to duplicate
two or three hundred copies from it, yet they were still paying three or
four dollars per session. If it was a good seller, they would come back in
and record another master and make another three or four dollars. But the
technology got better as time went along, and by 1902, the cylinder and disc
companies both came up with much more robust mass production facilities.
As a result, they could now make thousands of copies from one original, and
that basically put George Johnson out of business since he had just the two
songs consumers wanted. |
| JJM You also profile George Walker
and Bert Williams, one time quoting Williams as saying, "Talk to me about
the infusion of white blood for the betterment of the Negro race. I do not
believe in it. I tell you the black man's' future lies in the development
of his faculties -- physical and mental -- as a Negro. I think the white
race has not realized the latent possibilities in us." Were Williams and
Walker successful at moving away from the most offensive stereotypes while
not alienating white audiences?
TB Yes they were, and after Walker died,
Williams continued on as an extremely successful solo act for the Ziegfeld
Follies shows, and performed high class vaudeville during the 19-teens and
right up until his death in the early twenties. He wrote a lot of his own
material, and most of it was personality oriented and had almost nothing
to do explicitly with race. The songs were about the "Jonah man," the downtrodden
guy for whom everything goes wrong, which "Nobody," his most famous song,
epitomized. By the end of his career in the early twenties, he was a beloved
American, and was revered as someone who never sang the old-fashioned coon
songs. Probably the most interesting recordings we have of his are his stories.
He recorded a couple of twelve inch discs -- extended into four minutes or
more -- which are the exact stories that he told while performing on stage.
They are stories that almost anyone can relate to, even if it is about a
black preacher. It is leagues from what he was doing in the early 1900's.
That is not to say this material is appropriate for today, because these
stories would still be offensive on some levels, but it clearly shows an
improvement over that time. And this growth was intentional on his part.
|
Collection of Tim Brooks
Bert Williams
"Vaudeville performances, as a rule, strike me as tiresome, but
Bert Williams' humor strikes me as the real thing. I suppose the best reason
I can give for liking his quaint songs and humorous sayings is that he puts
into this form some of the quality and philosophy of the Negro
race."
- Booker T. Washington
"Bert Williams was the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest
man I ever knew."
- W.C. Fields
*
Nobody |
photo courtesy Doug Seroff
The Fisk Quartet, 1909
*
"It is through the Fisks' untiring efforts that we have our present-day
knowledge of the old-time darkey's religious passion. Being superstitious
and of a highly imaginative turn of mind, he took a great many religious
fables and allegories too literally, as many of the old songs
show."
- An Edison publication promoting the Fisk Jubilee Singers
*
Little David/Shout All Over
|
JJM
You devote a lot of attention to the Fisk Jubilee Singers.
TB Some of these artists I profile have not
been very well accepted by modern scholars, or they have been dismissed
altogether. The Fisk Jubilee Singers, for example, were left out of the
Blues and Gospel Discography -- which has been the standard discography
in that field for years -- on the basis that they weren't "authentic." That
is a terribly slippery word, but they weren't considered authentic because
they performed mostly for white audiences. However, once you go back and
really study their career, you learn that they were a very important element
in the development of black musical culture and its effect on white America.
They weren't trying to be authentic, they weren't representing themselves
as singing as how field hands sang in Louisiana in the pre-Civil War days.
Their music was concert hall music, it was music for educated people. It
was music that had a kind of soul to it that white concert music didn't
have, yet it was orchestrated and carefully performed by trained singers.
There was nothing wrong with that. It was important that a large class of
people understand that blacks could sing that kind of music. Prior to the
Fisk Jubilee Singers, blacks didn't sing in concert halls, they would clean
the hall up after the white people left! That was about the only access they
ever had to concert halls. When the original Fisk Singers were touring in
the 1870's and would get up on stage, some of the writers didn't know what
to make of them -- they thought it was some sort of minstrel show because
they had never seen properly dressed, properly trained black singers singing
formally. By the time they recorded for the first time in 1909, they were
quite famous, but their type of music had never really been on record before,
therefore had never been widely distributed to white America. Most of them
didn't go to churches to hear the concerts the Fisk Singers had been giving
for years, but they bought their records -- they were very big sellers.
JJM You described the Fisk Singers as being
one of the original cross-over artists.
TB That's right. One of the many incredible
things I learned while writing this book was the vast kaleidoscope of the
types of black culture that was represented here. This is not a book just
about blues, or just about jazz. Sure, it is about those things, but there
are so many facets of black culture that were captured on these recordings,
including concert and formal music. There is a whole world of that.
The lives they led were fascinating, and they came from such different
backgrounds. I can't imagine, for example, that Roland Hayes and George W.
Johnson would have had anything in common, but they both represented a part
of black culture, as did the Fisk Singers, the Reverend Myers, who did the
earliest recitations of Paul Lawrence Dunbar's poetry, and Edward Sterling
Wright, who did more of it a couple of years later, as well as the boxer
Jack Johnson. |
| JJM I had forgotten that Jack Johnson
was a sort of pioneer of spoken word and wellness recordings.
TB That was an eye opener, because I knew
him as the Muhammad Ali of his day -- a high living, poke-your-finger-in-the-eye
of white America kind of personality. He was such a courageous, outgoing
personality considering the era in which he lived. It is remarkable how he
got away with what he did. How did he get away with it? Well, people
who have written of him turned him into a total caricature of a loud mouthed,
flashy black man taunting America during a period of intense racism. The
fact is that when you go back and really study what he said and then listen
to him speak, he was a very smart guy who knew just how far to go, and how
to play the theme of fairness.
Whatever we think about what happened on any many horrible levels regarding
race relations during that era, there was a fundamental belief among many
Americans that fairness looms very large in America. Johnson showed how this
feeling of fairness absolutely collided with racism. He asked how Americans
could say they are fair when an entire class of people are shoved out the
door. Relating to his own career, he questioned how a fighter -- in his case
the best fighter -- fights by the rules but is not given the opportunity
to compete for the title. That argument resonated with sports fans in America.
Even racists knew that he was a good fighter. Listen to him on these recordings
talk in his conciliatory way and communicating his "May the best man win"
slogan, and then hear him discuss health and conditioning and the importance
of drinking lots of water as the key to a longer life and ask yourself, "How
can I find that
objectionable?" |
Sound Wave, August,
1914/courtesy of British Library
Jack Johnson at the Edison Bell Studios, England,
1914
*
Hear Jack Johnson's Voice
His Own Story of His Great Victory
The heavyweight champion of the world, the unconquerable Jack Johnson,
has told into the phonograph his own story of his contest with Jeffries at
Reno, July 4. The story occupies both sides of a twelve-inch phonograph
record. It can be reproduced on any talking machine using disk records.
A letter from Johnson, in facsimile, certifying to the authenticity
of the record and commending it to his friends, goes with each record. You
hear Jack Johnson's own voice telling how he won the big fight. Price
$2.50 Delivered.
- August, 1910 advertisement in New York Age *
Runnin' Down the Title Holder |
Down
Home Blues, performed by Ethel Waters
|
JJM
Concerning
Black Swan Records, the label owned by W.C. Handy's partner Harry Pace, you
write, "According to publicity put out by (black publisher Harry) Pace, Black
Swan caused a stir in the industry. 'When the announcement was made that
a company had been formed to manufacture phonograph records of selections
by our (black) artists a great uproar was caused among white phonograph record
companies who resented the idea of having a Race company enter what they
felt was an exclusive field.' Pace would later claim that the white companies
had tried to prevent him from lining up pressing facilities, even going so
far as to buy a failing pressing plant he was using in order to shut him
out. He later bought the plant himself." Was Black Swan able to compete with
the white owned record companies?
TB Yes, and despite his chest thumping in
this quote, it failed basically because it did not have the financing that
the white companies did, and there were some problems with its artistic vision
too. White companies were less racist than opportunistic. It isn't as if
they came to work each morning thinking how to best suppress blacks -- they
came to work in the morning to sell more records than the other guy. Unlike
an industry such as banking and older, more established businesses where
racism was part of their fabric, this didn't appear to be the case with the
recording industry. This technology really helped minorities.
I am not as convinced that he was hindered or driven out of business by racism
as I am that the oligopoly that existed in the business prevented him from
competing. Therefore, it was harder for him to get distribution, it was harder
for him to get artists, and it was harder to get financing for his company.
Pace started Black Swan at the time of a major economic downturn -- the recession
of 1921 -- that drove even the mighty Columbia Records into bankruptcy and
severely damaged Edison and Victor as well. The only company that grew into
anything significant during that period was Brunswick, and probably only
because they had the deep pockets of the Brunswick Pool Table company behind
it.
We were talking before about the artistic vision of the early record companies,
and Pace's vision, at the beginning, was to have the broadest range of music.
He had his own classical artists and a Red Seal label to show that he could
do that, but it was only the blues records that sold. If he had been a smarter
business man, he probably would have turned his back on the classical stuff
until he could get this company off the ground, and only produce what people
wanted to buy. He could have gone full bore after the market white companies
seemed to have difficulty picking up on. He got too creative before he was
able to keep the lights on. Although Harry Pace was a good businessman in
other areas of his life, he kind of blew it with Black Swan. However, he
left us with some great recordings in the process. |
| JJM
Many of the personalities you profile were breaking new ground and
displayed incredible courage for their times.
TB Yes. You ask people you interview about
their childhood heroes, and, while I didn't know these people when I was
growing up, W. C. Handy would have been a hero of mine for what he did. He
has been thought of badly in some ways, and the purists don't really like
him, but my goodness, he accomplished so much and brought such great music
to America during his life. He was a skillful entrepreneur, and while he
was almost driven out of business in the twenties, he managed to get his
copyrights back and inspired the support of some white people who helped
him along the way. He was a proud man, and an amazing visionary.
Roland Hayes is an incredible character study. He was dirt poor, from a farm
in Georgia, yet he would not take "no" for an answer, and knocked down so
many walls in the process of opening the concert hall to blacks. He started
his own record company and went after the esoteric repertoire of the era
-- the classical arias and spirituals no one else wanted African Americans
to record -- so he was not appealing to the popular culture. His company
released the earliest classical recordings by a black artist. Like Handy,
he was an enormously proud and determined man who moved through tremendous
barriers just from the force of his personality.
JJM How many commercial recordings were made by
black artists prior to 1920, and how many are in print?
TB I have identified roughly eight hundred
distinct recordings by black artists prior to 1920. That doesn't count all
the remakes of the same song -- like Johnson doing copies of his two songs,
for example. Of those, because of the sweeping copyright protection laws
in the United States, four hundred are still under copyright. The other four
hundred are available as a result of companies going out of business so they
fell into the public domain as a result of disuse, or through donations to
the government like that made by the McGraw Edison Company in the fifties.
That leaves four hundred still under copyright, which is a sad story, because
of those four hundred, after thirteen years of searching, I have only been
able to identify two that have been made available by the copyright holders. |
Because W. C. Handy's band members didn't want their picture taken,
Columbia commissioned this 1918 drawing
*
"The novelty of the Columbia February Dance List is the initial,
exclusive recordings of W.C. Handy and his negro orchestra. A word
of explanation is needed regarding the 'Blues' originated and played by this
famous Southern Orchestra. These dances are not ordinary music. The
tempo is orthodox but from there all similarity ceases to any music ever
heard. The 'inside' syncopation, the weird harmonies, unforgettably
unique, and the strange use of many of the instruments seem to give us an
insight into the real, primal, superstitious, humorous nature of the negro.
The Handy records are an absolutely exclusive Columbia novelty -- dance
records which will make your dance talked about for many a day."
- Columbia Records promotional copy of a 1918 Handy recording
__________
St. Louis Blues, by W.C. Handy |
"Some early recordings made by now-defunct companies have entered
the public domain, but many are under the control of modern successor
corporations such as BMG (successor to Berliner and Victor) and Sony Music
(Columbia). With the cooperation of a compliant U.S. Congress, the
principle of copyright as a reward for creativity has been perverted into
a tool to ensure the more or less permanent control of creative works by
these huge multinational corporations. The number of years historic
recordings are owned by them, not us, has been steadily lengthened...Under
current U.S. law the earliest black recordings covered in this book (from
about 1890) will be under the control of modern corporations until 2067,
that is, for more than 170 years. Until, of course, the next 'copyright
term extension act.'"
- Tim Brooks |
JJM Come on...Only two of these recordings
out of four hundred currently under copyright are available to buy?
TB That's right, and both of them are Bert
Williams recordings. The rest of the recordings have not been paid any attention
to. All of the masters have been destroyed -- they have all been thrown out
years ago. Victor literally blew up its vault in the sixties, making way
for a condominium.
JJM That was visionary, wasn't it?
TB Yes, very visionary. Nevertheless, Congress
has given the record companies pretty much everything they want. Whenever
they come to Congress concerning this issue, they win, partially because
they have big lobbying groups there, and partially because the people who
are trusted with the public interests -- the universities and the associated
scholarly associations -- haven't spoken up, and haven't yet figured out
how to make the case for public accessibility of these records. As a result,
the laws regarding copyright protection have become more and more sweeping.
They were last extended in 1998 by the
Sonny Bono Copyright
Term Extension Act, which basically threw out twenty years worth of public
domain recordings in this country. One of the subsections of the Act specifies
that recordings will be protected by copyright through the year 2067. So,
if we all live long enough, in 2067 these recordings will suddenly become
available -- unless there is another copyright extension, of course. It is
one thing if the companies that owned them were at least making them available
to us, but they aren't, nor will they make them available to independent
marketers.
|
JJM So, if you and I wanted to get together
and put an anthology of the one hundred critical recordings of this era,
and went to the copyright holder for permission to publish these recordings,
they wouldn't allow that?
TB They may allow it, but then it becomes
an issue of economics. They would charge something like one thousand dollars
a track, and not because the recordings are valuable but because their lawyer's
time is costly. So, if we put out a CD with twenty songs on it, that is a
twenty thousand dollar investment right there, even before we get into marketing
and distribution costs. Most music enthusiasts and independent record companies
who put these kinds of packages together can't justify these kinds of expenses.
JJM Yes, especially given the condition of
today's music market. You might get lucky and sell three or four thousand
copies.
TB Maybe that many. However, if you would
like to move to England, you could do it just fine. In fact, foreign labels
have reissued much of the American culture that can't be reissued here. It
is ironic. Our laws serve to let the rest of the world see our culture and
keep it out of our hands.
JJM I see some pretty amazing box sets coming
out of England in the stores.
TB The law is pretty porous, and it is violated
as much as it is observed. The problem is that it is mostly violated by small
operators. You really have to go through a lot of work to get that stuff
ordered from overseas, and good luck if you have ever tried to transfer small
amounts of money overseas to buy a record. After thirteen years of diligence
I have been able to collect most of these recordings, but it has been a long,
hard search. The institutions like the Smithsonian and the Association for
Recorded Sound Collections -- an association I belong to -- would be happy
to reissue a lot of this if we were not afraid of being sued by the copyright
holders. Because they won't give entrepreneurs publishing rights for a reasonable
amount of money, it has put a complete damper on the public interest in these
recordings. Meanwhile, go over to England and pick these up.
Document Records, which started
in Austria but it is now located in England, has released practically every
jazz and blues recording made before World War II that isn't available somewhere
else.
JJM The good news is that given the distribution
of imports over the Internet now via retailers like Amazon, recordings like
these may be relatively easy to obtain.
TB Yes, and I should say that many of these
sets are put out with loving care, carefully restored and documented, so
they are not "cheap" reissues. People who put them out love the music. Our
laws, ironically, serve nobody's interests -- certainly not the record companies
interest because they are not making any money from them -- and they certainly
don't serve the public's interests either, because they can't get their hands
on the records with any real consistency. I am hopeful my book will help
address this.
JJM What has the most value of any of the
recordings you write about in your book?
TB The recordings that sell for the largest
amounts of money in an Ebay type auction are generally early jazz recordings.
Recently there was an auction going on for a Williams and Walker recording
that probably sold for one thousand dollars. The Dinwiddie Quartet has taken
on a certain amount of cache among rock collectors because they recorded
a number of things that sound very "rhythm and blues-ish." They recorded
in 1902, and on the rare occasions those records become available they usually
sell for between five hundred and one thousand dollars.
JJM Last question…Have you discovered
any artists since the book was published that should have been included?
TB Well, the reason the book is six hundred
pages long is because I included every black artist I could locate within
the time span of 1890 and 1919. I am confident in saying the book is quite
comprehensive in its coverage. There are no other black artists I know of
who recorded prior to 1920 who are not mentioned in the book. That doesn't
mean one won't show up, but I don't think anyone of significance will show
up -- not unless we discover Al Jolson was really black...
_____________________________________________________
Lost
Sounds:
Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890 - 1919
by
Tim Brooks
About Tim Brooks
JJM Who was your childhood hero?
TB I was always fascinated with music and
television. In music, I would have to say that Elvis was a childhood hero
of mine. When I was growing up, he was just becoming popular, and was the
voice of my generation. Fortunately, I didn't adopt all of his lifestyle
choices, or I wouldn't be here today. As for a hero in broadcasting, early
on in my life I liked James Garner. I liked actors and people who had an
off beat sense of humor about them.
*
Tim Brooks is Executive Vice President of Research at Lifetime Television.
He is co-author of the award-winning Complete Directory to Prime Time Network
and Cable TV Shows and The Columbia Master Book Discography, and the author
of Little Wonder Records: A History and Discography. He is past president
of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections and a frequent contributor
to scholarly journals.
_____________________________________________________
Photo Gallery
Editors Note: Some of the photographs and quotations within the
photo gallery may be objectionable to contemporary readers. It is important
to remember the times and the context in which they were made. They
are included to help illustrate the complexities of the culture in which
these artists performed.
Phonogram, December, 1892
George W. Johnson, c. 1892, when he was in his mid-forties. It
is the earliest known picture of Johnson.
*
"George W. Johnson was a New York City 'street artist' when he
began recording, a poor black man who whistled and sang jaunty tunes for
the coins of passersby and a well-known character in the city's tenement-filled
lower West Side. His life -- spanning some of the most significant
eras in American history, the Antebellum South, the Civil War and Reconstruction,
and the inception of the age of modern mass media -- began in a social order
far removed from anything we can imagine today."
- Tim Brooks |
Collection of Tim Brooks
Cover to the sheet music for "The Laughing Song," published in
1894
*
"'The Laughing Song' was Johnson's other big number, and it proved
just as popular as 'The Whistling Coon.' It was evidently written by
Johnson himself (at least, it was copyrighted by him, and no other composer
was ever credited with it). Its clever, intricate lyrics, with phrases
such as 'a quiet bit of chaff' and 'if he had not been a quince,' suggest
a talented, literate writer -- or someone who had a lot of help. It
was, however, the same 'coon song' mockery of the black man.
"What made this silly little song irresistable was its chorus,
in which Johnson laughed in time with the music. It sounds nonsensical,
and it was, but it never failed to draw grimaces, smirks, and guffaws from
the most jaded listeners to the coin-slot machines. Who would not find
amusement in the sound of uproarious laughter accompanied by a catchy
melody?"
- Tim Brooks
*
Laughing
Song |
Columbia Record, August,
1907
The last known picture of George Johnson, at age sixty, 1907
*
"One of the most unique characters in the talking machine world
is George Johnson, who is now working for all the companies, doing 'laughing
songs.' Johnson is said to be the most infectious laughter in the country.
He is described by the talking maching men as the original 'haw-haw'
man, and practically every laughing song heard on the phonograph is sung
by him. He even figures in some songs which have only a few bars of
laughing chorus or a laughing line. Johnson is a Negro who has been
making a living by his exhuberance for years. In the old days, it is
said, he once sang the same song 56 times in one day, and his laugh had as
much merriment in it at the conclusion as when he started."
- Music Trades Review, 1906 |
Library of Congress
Johnson in the recording studio, 1898
*
"...the ability of the record companies to produce large quantities
of discs from single master recordings through improved production methods
was beginning to have a significant negative impact on artists' incomes.
Fewer sessions were required to maintain the companies' stocks. Some
rerecording was still done to take advantage of improved recording techniques
and replace worn-out masters, but artists felt the effects of technological
unemployment. Johnson, with his limited repertoire, was particularly
hard-hit. For example his first Victor session took place in December
1900. He returned to the Victor studios in September 1902 and May 1903,
but never again. Even though his recordings remained in the Victor
catalog until 1910, his services were no longer needed."
- Tim Brooks
|
Library of Congress
A traveling phonograph exhibitor in the early 1890's
*
"My patrons are of all classes -- rich and poor, young and old,
male and especially female. I go to schools, colleges, asylums,
etc., etc., wherever I have paying inducements. I have lately had a
call to go to a grove near this place for a Sunday exhibition, but I get
about all the work I want during the six days, without [working] the
seventh.
"I carry fifty selections and try to have them all good...Johnson's
'Whistling Coon' and laughing song are immensely popular, and I presume they
will always be. There is more call for them than for any other
selections...
"My last customer after listening to ten selections remarked, as
he laid down the ear tubes, 'Well, that is d----d nice,' and this about what
they all say."
- A New England traveling phonograph exhibitor, from Phonogram,
July, 1892. |
Bert Williams in the recording studio, c. 1920
*
"Bert Williams is often referred to as the first black 'superstar'
of the twentieth century. He achieved enormous success in vaudeville
and on the Broadway stage, and was popular with black and white audiences
alike. But we need not remember him only by old photographs and the
memories of those who saw him. Often overlooked is the fact that in
addition to being a top-rank actor and comedian, he was also an extremely
popular recording artist and the best-selling black artist of the pre-1920
period by far. His recordings managed to convey his unique stage persona
in a manner that appealed to both black and white record buyers."
- Tim Brooks
*
Everybody
Wants a Key to My Cellar |
Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, July, 1897/photo courtesy
David Jasen
Bert Williams and George Walker, at the start of their career,
1897
*
"In September 1900 Williams and Walker staged their greatest hit
to date, Sons of Ham...The plot concerned the attempts of Tobias Wormwood
(Williams) and Harty Lafter (Walker) to masquerade as the sons of an old
man named Ham, in order to inherit his fortune. They soon discovered
that the real sons were away studying to be acrobats and were about to return.
A great deal of physical comedy ensued before the imposters were finally
forced to flee. The plot was hardly sophisticated, but most 'musical
comedies' at this time were really extended variety shows, held together
by a thin story line and containing interpolated acts of all kinds. While
plenty of its elements would be considered offensive today, it was relatively
free of of the extreme stereotypes found in other 'black' shows then running.
Williams and Walker had already begun to focus on human, rather than
racial, comedy. Commented one black reviewer, 'chicken stealing gags
and crap game songs are conspicuous by their absence, this is delightfully
refreshing.'"
- Tim Brooks |
photo courtesy David Jasen
Bert Williams and George Walker, starring in In Dahomey, c. 1903
*
"Williams and Walker are a great deal to blame for being the
originators and establishing the name 'coon'upon our race. They met
a white man in San Francisco by the name of McConnell, who put them on the
[vaudeville] circuit. In order to achieve success and to attract the
attention of the public they branded themselves as 'the two real coons.'
Their names, accompanied with 'coon' songs, were soon heralded North,
East, South and West...Williams & Walker and Ernest Hogan were not old
enough then to know the harm they had brought on the whole race. They
needed the money, what little they received, and the white people needed
the laugh [and made the money]. Colored men in general took no offense
at the proceedings and laughed as heartily on hearing a 'coon' song as the
whites. But where the rub came is when the colored is called a 'coon'
outside of the [theater]."
- A 1909 Freeman editorial
*
My Little Zulu Babe
|
Columbia Records supplement, April, 1921
Bert Williams, the blackface "Jonah Man"
*
"Williams has certainly been remembered, though more for his
contributions as a black man than for his talents as an entertainer. Had
he been white, his career would have been long forgotten. Appreciation
of his accomplishments has been tempered somewhat by modern discomfort with
the mere acknowledgment of the racial climate in which he lived. Any
mention of coon songs, blackface humor, and his 'shuffling darkey' persona
still makes some people uncomfortable. (According to several sources,
a planned scholarly reissue of the 1901 Victor recordings by the Smithsonian
Institution in the 1970s was suppressed due to complaints by a black staff
member). To ignore these realities is to ignore the very forces against
which he had to struggle, and thus to misunderstand profoundly the contributions
he made."
- Tim Brooks
*
Nobody
|
photo courtesy Doug Seroff
The Fisk Quartet, 1909
*
"The saga of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers is one of the
most remarkable chapters in the annals of African American music. This
unassuming chorus from a small southern college was the first performing
group to bring black music suitable for the concert stage to an American
public that had previously seen the race mostly through the prism of minstrel
stereotypes. The few black concert performers who preceded them, such
as Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield (known as the Black Swan), who was active
in the 1850s and 1860s, had emphasized standard white repertoire. The
great and lasting contribution of the Fisks was the introduction of the spiritual
to America's musical literature."
- Tim Brooks
*
Little David/Shout All Over
|
Edison Phonograph
Monthly, January, 1910
Polk Miller
*
"Polk Miller...[a white man]...organized, toured with, and recorded
with a black quartet. Those recordings, made in 1909 and very nearly
not released, provide perhaps the most direct aural link we have with the
music of black America in antebellum times."
- Tim Brooks |
Edison Phonograph
Monthly, January, 1910
Polk Miller's "Old South Quartette"
*
Genuine Negroes
They Look, Act and Sing Like the "Old Times"
With a view to giving the general public a true and faithful reproduction
of Plantation Life and Scenes before the War, Mr. Polk Miller of Virginia,
who is recognized as the very best delineator of Southern life and character
in the Negro sketches, has organized and drilled for the purpose a quartette
of the best Negro singers ever heard on the platform. They are taken from
the tobacco factories of Richmond, Virginia, and, as types of his subject,
could not be improved on. Their singing is not of the kind that has
been heard by the students from "Colored Universities," who dress
in pigeon-tailed coats, patent leather shoes, white shirt fronts, and who
are advertised to sing Plantation Melodies but do not. They
do not try to let you see how nearly a Negro can act the White Man
while parading in a dark skin, but they dress, act and sing like the real
Southern Darkey in his "workin'" clothes. As to their voices,
they are the sweet, though uncultivated, result of nature, producing a
harmony unequaled by the professionals, and because it is natural,
goes straight to the hearts of the people. To the old Southerner it
will be "Sounds from the Old Home of Long Ago." To others who
know of Southern Plantation Life from much reading, it will be a pleasant
and Educational Pastime.
- A 1910 Polk Miller program brochure
*
Jerusalem Mornin'
|
Sound Wave, August,
1914/courtesy of British Library
Jack Johnson at the Edison Bell Studios, England, August 1914
*
"Jack Johnson was one of the most inflammatory black men in America
in the early 1900s, lionized by most blacks and despised by many whites.
It is not generally known -- and biographies omit to mention -- that
he visited the recording studios several times during his heyday, recording
descriptions of his fights (including the famous 'Great White Hope' fight
in 1910), talking about his exploits outside the ring, and giving advice
on health and fitness. Not only do we have silent films of this
extraordinary athlete and lightening rod for racial tensions, we have his
own voice describing his life and philosophy."
- Tim Brooks *
Runnin' Down the Title Holder |
Talking Machine News/courtesy of British
Library
Jack Johnson recording at Edison Bell, without a script, July,
1914
*
"Ladies and gentlemen, first of all I want to thank each and every
one for this grand occasion. I am here this afternoon to speak a few
words on physical culture. Some people seem to think that one that
is fat, to get that fat off, that they will have to diet themselves. It is
absolutely untrue. First you must take exercise -- strut, and walk,
and perhaps a little run. You can use dumbbells. You can use
the medicine ball. You can also use what we term as a punching ball.
That alone will take all of the excess flesh [?] off of anyone that
will use it.
"Some people seem to think if you drink water it will make you
fat. Water is the most strengthening thing that we can possibly use.
We can go two or three days without food, but we cannot go so long
without water. Water, it makes the blood...rich, but also gives strength
to the heart. And you will notice, one that drinks a lot of water,
he, or maybe she, will never have any trouble with their kidneys. And
they always have regular beats of the heart, and it also gives one a very
enticed appetite. I myself, after a long, hard jog on the road, before
breakfast, I will come in, and after I have my rubdown, I will partake perhaps
a quart of water or a little more. Then I have gained some two or three
pounds of strength. Not in weight, strength alone [that] will help
one to overcome any pain."
- Jack Johnson, from his 1914 Edison Bell recordings |
Talking Machine News/courtesy of British
Library
Jack Johnson and his wife, Lucille, surrounded by onlookers, outside
the Edison Bell Studios, August, 1914 |
Edison Phonograph
Monthly, December, 1913
Edward Sterling Wright, 1913
*
"Most 'platform speakers' were white, but African Americans understood
better than most the value of education (which they had been long denied),
and some of their own entered the field. One of these was New York's
Edward Sterling Wright, who left us an unusual legacy in the form of readings
of the poetry of the famous black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, recorded on
Edison cylinders in 1913. These are among the earliest spoken-word
recordings dealing with serious literature. "
- Tim Brooks
*
A Little Christmas Basket/Howdy Honey Howdy
|
Collection of Tim Brooks
1919 sheet music for one of James Reese Europe's biggest hits
*
"One of the most influential and revered black musicians of the
1910's is, paradoxically, one of the less remembered today. Murdered
at the age of thirty-nine, James Reese Europe was in the early stages of
a brilliant and colorful career that might well have earned him a more prominent
place in history books had he lived into the 1920s. As it is, we know
him primarily from a handful of interesting and innovative recordings. He
was the first black bandleader to record in the United States, and his records
are fascinating precursors of big band jazz."
- Tim Brooks
*
Darktown Strutter's Ball |
Talking Machine
World, May 15, 1919
Pathe Records promotional art, 1919
*
"The Tempo Club contains about two hundred members, all musicians,
and from this body I supply at present a majority of the orchestras which
play in the various cafes of the city and also at the private dances. Our
Negro musicians have nearly cleared the field of the so called gypsy
orchestras...
"Yet we Negroes are under a great handicap. For 'The Castle
Lame Duck Waltz' I receive only one cent a copy [sheet music] royalty and
the phonographic royalties in like proportion. A white man would receive
from six to twelve times the royalty I receive, and compositions are far less
popular than mine, but written by white men, gain for their composers vastly
greater rewards. I have done my best to put a stop to this discrimination,
but I have found that it was no use. The music world is controlled
by a trust, and the Negro must submit to its demands or fail to have his
compositions produced. I am not bitter about it. It is, after
all, but a slight proportion of the price my race must pay in its at times
almost hopeless fight for a place in the sun. Someday it will be different
and justice will prevail."
- James Reese Europe, in a November, 1913 interview with the New York
Tribune
*
Indianola |
Collection of Tim Brooks
Will Marion Cook
*
"Will Marion Cook was one of the most respected black composers
of the early 1900s. His career extended from the beginnings of the
black musical theater at the turn of the century to the spread of jazz in
the 1920s, and he was a key figure in both. His name is frequently
cited in histories of black music in America. As with a number of icons
of black musical history, though, it is not generally known that he recorded
some of his best-known works."
- Tim Brooks
*
Swing Along
|
Victor Records supplement, January, 1915
The Tuskegee Institute Singers at the time of their first
recordings
*
"We are told to our faces often that though our quartet is one
of the best that has been heard up here, they would like us better if we
would 'play the Nigger' -- their own words -- more...every day we are made
to understand that if there was less refinement about us and more fool, we
would do better...When I have about three persons ask for the [spirituals]
and about four score ask that we dance and sing songs which tell of Negroes
stealing chickens, I make no pretensions to try to please."
- Tuskegee Quartet member Isaac Fisher, c. 1900
*
Good News
|
Collection of Tim Brooks
Wilbur Sweatman made his name in vaudeville playing three clarinets
at once
*
"Although he doesn't get much respect from jazz historians today,
Wilbur Sweatman was one of the great pioneers of recorded African American
music, during the transitional years from ragtime to jazz. Legend has
it that he made the first recording of Scott Joplin's 'Maple Leaf Rag' on
a locally made cylinder around 1903. He made what are arguably the
first jazz clarinet recordings in 1916 and what are undeniably some of the
first, and most popular, 'jass' band records in 1918 - 19. First and
foremost, though, Sweatman was an entertainer, and his highly successful
career as a vaudeville novelty performer has for some obscured his musical
accomplishments."
- Tim Brooks
*
Ev'rybody's Crazy 'Bout the Doggone Blues, But I'm Happy
Down
Home Rag |
Columbia Records supplement, November 1918
Wilbur Sweatman's Jazz Band at the Columbia studios in 1918.
Sweatman is at far left.
*
Sweat
Blues |
Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle from their 1923 short film, Snappy
Songs
*
"Among African Americans who recorded prior to 1920, two of the
best remembered are the team of Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake. In their
day they were major stars of vaudeville and the Broadway stage, but probably
the chief reason their names live on is the extraordinary success (as a composer)
and longevity of Eubie Blake. Blake became a major celebrity in his
eighties and nineties, playing and talking about the ragtime music he loved
to a generation far removed from the era in which it was created. He lived
to the age of one hundred, and his death in 1983 made national headlines.
Sissle and Blake each first recorded in 1917, making them pioneers
among black recording artists."
- Tim Brooks
*
Sounds of Africa, by Eubie Blake
|
Emerson Records ad, Phonograph and Talking Machine Weekly,
March 16, 1921
Noble Sissle's Sizzling Syncopators, with Eubie Blake at the
piano
*
Love
Will Find a Way
Great Camp Meetin' Day
|
Collection of Tim Brooks
W.C. Handy, later in his life
*
"W.C. Handy, 'Father of the Blues,' is one of the best-known black
Americans of the twentieth-century and his 'St. Louis Blues' is one
of its best-known songs. Less well known are the struggles he endured,
the important role that records played in popularizing his innovative music
during the 1910s, and the story of his own recordings, most of them made
between 1917 and 1923."
- Tim Brooks
*
St. Louis Blues |
Because W. C. Handy's band members didn't want their picture taken,
Columbia commissioned this 1918 drawing
*
"You do not attempt to describe the music of Handy and his Jazz
Orchestra. You dance to it. When the 'Livery Stable Blues' is
turned over to the tender mercies of a dozen negro musicians equipped with
all the instruments of an ordinary orchestra added to a various assortment
of barn-yard implements, you find yourself in a maze of melody from which
the only escape is to dance.
"W.C. Handy is the originator and composer of all the famous 'Blues,'
the most typical, modern truly American dance of the day. Handy's complete
orchestra, Handy himself and all his 'Blues' is the latest Columbia dance
achievement. Ragtime sits ten rows back of the 'Blues' when it comes
to the vital spark of super-syncopation! Remember Handy and his orchestra
play only for Columbia.
"The following 'Blues' and jazz dance selections are played by
Handy's full orchestra. The entire organization made a special trip
from Memphis, 'the home of the Blues,' to make these unique Columbia
records."
- Columbia Records promotional copy of a 1918 Handy recording
*
Snakey Blues
|
Boston Symphony Orchestra program/Boston Symphony Orchestra
archives
Black classical music singing peformer Roland W. Hayes
*
Do you own a phonograph of any make and have you tried to purchase
records which would bring to your home the singing and playing of the best
Negro artists? Of course you were offered records of popular airs and
popular music and possibly a few records of quartet songs by Negro singers.
But that wasn't what you wanted. You wanted to bring to your
home and to your family and to your friends the voice of the individual Negro
singer or the playing of the individual Negro performer who would take high
rank among the invisible makers of music and singers of song whom the phonograph
has brought to cheer your spare moments after the grind of the day's work
is done.
At last this is possible. Roland W. Hayes, the acknowledged
leading singer of the Negro race, has brought out his first record and he
has plans for many others in the very near future. Nothing else could
so well introduce the series as the favorite and plaintive Negro melody,
"Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." The record sells for $1.50 and can be used
on any machine using disc records.
- A Roland Hayes placed advertisement in the May 1918 Crisis, the
national magazine of the NAACP
*
Arioso, from Pagliacci
|
Tim Brooks products at Amazon.com
_______________________________
This interview took place on May 10, 2004
*
If you enjoyed this interview, you may want to read our interview with Bessie Smith biographer Chris Albertson.
*
_______________________________
Other
Jerry Jazz Musician interviews
# Text from publisher. Photos and text used with the consent of the author.
|
