Almost 100 years ago, Fats Waller recorded some of the most unique songs of his career: stride tunes on pipe organ. Operating out of Victor’s state-of-the-art Camden, New Jersey Studio—a former Baptist church—Waller recorded both solo and group recordings on the instrument, all of which were published in the company’s mainstream “popular” series. Such a designation was rare for Black musicians, who, in this era, were traditionally relegated to making “race records.” However, despite Waller’s inclusion in its popular series, Victor still intentionally limited his musical output, maintaining similar stylistic restrictions to those they placed on other Black performers within the race record designation.

Even though Waller had a well-known love of classical music, he was expressly not allowed to record these works. Instead, he was given the difficult task of adapting the quick-striking sound of stride to the pipe organ, an adjustment that posed multiple technical and logistical challenges. Building on the work of Paul S. Machlin, Brian Ward, and Allan Sutton, I argue that Waller’s pipe organ recordings not only provide further insight into the racial logic of the early recording industry, but that they also demonstrate how that logic restricted Black musicians’ ability to sonically and instrumentally experiment within the jazz idiom. Ultimately, Waller’s story encapsulates many of the larger discriminatory practices that Black musicians faced during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, while, at the same time, these records highlight a side of Black music making that is often overlooked in accounts of the era.

Women writers from the peripheries and semiperipheries of Europe who participated in the metropolitan melting pots of new ideas at the fin de siècle are often marginalized or excluded in historiographical accounts, making their contributions to a European cultural heritage invisible.1 This marginalization, shared by numerous women playwrights and artists, prompts the need to explore ways of providing a fair account of their contributions. Swedish playwright Anne Charlotte Leffler (1849–92) was one of these women who set out on a European journey to try her luck with an international career. In this essay I explore her contribution to the late nineteenth-century London avant-garde with her play Sanna kvinnor (1883) [True Women, 1892].2 The application of any quantitative method, or those that rely solely on the translation, staging, publication, and reviews of actual plays, would likely obscure rather than illuminate the reception of her work. To contextualize the reception of Leffler’s play, it is necessary to adopt a theoretical perspective that integrates the political and the artistic, while also considering Leffler’s status as a foreign playwright in Britain. Furthermore, the pattern of reception requires theoretical conceptualization and evaluation in line with the social and cultural position of women at the time. In the case of Leffler, this conceptualization should consider the reception of her embodiment of the New Woman together with her contribution to theatre as part of the endeavors of a personal network marked by blurred boundaries between the private and the public, as well as between life, politics, and art.3

This article forwards an alternative perspective on how authenticity can be constructed through popular music tribute show performances. It adopts Edward Bruner’s (1994, American Anthropologist, 96, 397–415) categorisation of authenticity in relation to the replication of ‘historical sites’ in museum exhibitions. It argues that rather than focusing on sonic and historical ‘accuracy’, tribute musicians strive to curate their history and personal experiences with the music they play to prove their ‘authority’ as cultural ambassadors. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Perth, Western Australia, and a case study of a UK-based international touring tribute to The Smiths, this article highlights how some tribute musicians may purposely ‘put themselves in the music’ to conjure a sense of legitimacy and connect with audiences.