Hearing Black Voices

HtA demonstrates for users how the early recording industry developed within a larger context of capitalism and technological change, and particularly how Black performers found creative space within this changing entertainment industry. As recordings moved from scientific invention to working-class novelty to a central feature in the middle-class parlor, the music industry provided new opportunities for performers to make recordings with emerging companies. At the same time, recording technology co-existed with older forms of media, such as sheet music and vaudeville shows. Using sound recordings and digital mapping, HtA invites the user to consider how technology influenced the soundscape of the period and to interrogate the contributions of Black performers to it.

We draw on the work of scholars who have explored the ways that the recording industry developed at the turn of the century. Some of this work focuses on the cultural dimensions of recording technology, and shows how new recording companies created “a new commercial class of music makers, including in one form or another entrepreneurs, inventors, manufacturers, publishers, sales agents, advertisers, critics, retailers, educators, and lawmakers.”Footnote ¹⁶ Other work focuses on the ways that these records became part of the soundscape of modern leisure culture, first as a novelty in urban leisure districts like Coney Island and only later as serious music in the parlors of middle-class American homes.Footnote ¹⁷ Still other work focuses on the ways that consumers learned to integrate recorded sound into their lives, shaping “patterns of popular behavior, thought, emotion, and sensibility.”Footnote ¹⁸ These new technologies changed consumers’ engagement with and expectations of musical performance, leading to “a new dissatisfaction with amateur music and, perhaps more significantly, a heightened engagement by amateurs with the experience of listening to professionals.”Footnote ¹⁹

HtA explores how Black performers worked within the technological shifts of the early recording industry and within the larger context of Jim Crow and racism. This is a lesser-known period of recording history, although it is when many of the central conventions of genre and style began to take shape. Apart from a handful of successful African American recording artists, record companies largely neglected Black performers and consumers in the early decades of the industry. The continued popularity of blackface in the entertainment industry meant that when Black performers were hired to make a record, they were typically hired to perform “coon” songs or other forms of racist comedy. In this way, the sonic stereotypes of nineteenth-century blackface resounded through the records of the modern recording industry. The few Black performers who found commercial success remained constrained by the tastes of white America and shaped their performances to these expectations.

For example, HtA includes a spin that features George W. Johnson, the first African American recording star (Figure 8). Johnson was likely born to enslaved parents in Virginia in 1846, although his specific origins remain unknown. After moving north, he worked as a street performer and became known for his ability to whistle a variety of popular songs, earning the attention of Victor Emerson who worked for the New Jersey Phonograph Company at the time. Emerson hired Johnson to record “coon songs,” one of the most popular genres of this period, which capitalized on racist stereotypes developed through minstrelsy. In 1890, he made his first cylinder recordings of a song called “The Whistling Coon,” written by white songwriter Sam Devere. This recording was followed by “The Laughing Song,” which tied Johnson’s identifiable laugh into the comedic tropes of minstrelsy. On the website, users can hear digitized versions of these early songs and are encouraged to listen for a variety of sonic information: Johnson’s performance style, the quality of the cylinder recording itself, and the tropes of the coon song genre. In order to direct their listening, we use Soundcite to point out how the song makes racial stereotypes audible in a kind of sonic minstrelsy. We link to promotional photographs and sheet music to show how this music was marketed to consumers, as well as to other pages on the website that explore the history of minstrelsy more deeply.

Figure 8.

Spin page about George W. Johnson. https://hearingtheamericas.org/s/the-americas/page/q-first-star.

HtA asks users to reflect on what Johnson’s career can show us about the development of recording technology. Most of Johnson’s recordings were made on cylinders, the earliest format of commercial recording invented by Thomas Edison. This technology reflected Edison’s initial interest in the business applications of recorded sound, such as dictation. To record a cylinder, an artist would sing into a large horn and the vibrations would cause a stylus to etch the sound into wax. These early recording sessions did not create a “master” recording, but rather etched sound directly onto each cylinder, meaning a single performance could only make about three to four cylinders. For Johnson, who was estimated to have sold 38,000 cylinders by 1894, the recording process meant a long and taxing afternoon of repeat performances.

In this context, Johnson’s performances would have been seen as a novelty use of the new technology rather than a musical experience. This is in part because cylinder technology limited what kinds of sounds could be recorded. Johnson’s whistle was loud and sharp enough to move through the horn and cut through the wax, creating a clear sound. These limitations shaped the kinds of sounds that were recorded during this period, leading to instrumental lineups that were optimized to the technology and even encouraging the development of new instruments like the Stroh Violin, which we explore elsewhere on the website. On Johnson’s spin page we include an image of Johnson in the studio recording these songs, illustrating the kind of labor early recording entailed. We also use Soundcite to include several versions of the song from different cylinders, making audible the slight deviations between each recording.

Early artists were often paid per performance, making recording a lucrative, if physically taxing venture for a former street musician like Johnson. Later technology, however, made it easier to record bands and singers, and to make thousands of copies from a single master. These new technologies allowed companies to save money on recording sessions and Johnson found himself edged out of the market in favor of bigger, mostly white, performers. By the time of Johnson’s death in 1914, however, new Black voices such as Bert Williams, James Reese Europe, and W. C. Handy could be heard navigating the demands and opportunities of the recording industry, now primarily focused on music. Johnson’s astonishing commercial success in a burgeoning new media, however, demonstrates that Black performers were audible from the early days of the industry.

HtA amplifies Black recording artists not only within the larger cultural and technological shifts ushered in by recording, but also within older media networks like sheet music and live performance. On record, we can hear the voices of the most commercially successful Black theater circuit performers, such as Mamie Smith or Jelly Roll Morton. However, buried beneath these recorded performances are hundreds of other voices that never made it to record but impacted the development of American entertainment all the same. For example, Doug Seroff and Lynn Abott recover the career of Butler “String Beans” May as one of the most popular Black performers of the 1900s and 1910s. Despite his popularity on touring circuits and his wide coverage in the Black press, he is rarely acknowledged for his artistic contributions due to his absence from the archive of recorded sound. Although HtA highlights sound recordings as windows into the early twentieth century, it is also important for the user to understand that focusing only on recordings distorts the much larger musical landscape in which they circulated.

To this end, HtA uses audio and mapping tools to show how Black theater circuits and itinerant tent shows in the first two decades of the twentieth century operated as a lucrative part of the entertainment landscape for the hundreds of Black performers who did not make it onto a record.Footnote ²⁰ Signing with a theater circuit provided an artist or touring company access to a network of partner theaters, often regionally based, that could increase the potential profit to be made during a touring season. Although the recording industry became increasingly focused on music, it did not displace the consumer demand for live performance. In fact, the stage remained one of the most effective advertising and distribution tools for early recording companies and their stars.Footnote ²¹ Touring shows featured all the elements of Black commercial musical performance at the time, including “coon” songs and minstrel performances as well as early ragtime and blues. In fact, touring circuits helped to popularize urban blues, which first made it to record with W. C. Handy’s “The Memphis Blues” in 1914. The Tri-State Circuit, for example, featured early performances by Bessie Smith, who would soon rise to fame as one of the “Blues Queens” of the recording industry.Footnote ²²

In addition to pairing sonic and visual sources with interpretive text, we also include interactive maps that allow the user to engage with the spatial dimensions of this history. For instance, in the example above, we include a map focusing on the Tri-State Circuit’s touring locations in Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama. Although the recording industry centralized in urban, Northeastern cities, theater circuits provided a crucial opportunity for Black performers across the nation to entertain as well as to express political ideas (Figure 9). Black theater and tent show circuits developed in smaller, mostly regional configurations over the first two decades of the twentieth century. Often, touring schedules followed the rhythms of Southern agricultural labor. Railcars brought popular acts to audiences in laboring camps across various industries, although the most successful time of year was during the fall cotton harvest in the Mississippi Delta.Footnote ²³ Although Black performers had found a way to escape agricultural labor through the entertainment industry, their tours kept them connected to the seasonal rhythms nature imposed and to the 90 percent of African Americans who still lived and worked in the South.

Figure 9.

Images, recordings, and interactive maps showing the Tri-State Circuit. https://hearingtheamericas.org/s/the-americas/page/theater-circuits.

Pairing maps with identifiable artists allows us to explore the experiential dimensions of these performance circuits and what they meant for Black mobility and politics. For example, the website includes a map with location data for the S. H. Dudley circuit from 1910–1911, the only Black owned and operated theater circuit of the time.Footnote ²⁴ We paired this map with images of Dudley and a clipping from the Black press, which would often report on his work in the entertainment industry. We also included an image and recording of Mamie Smith, a regular performer on Dudley’s circuit before she became a recording star in the 1920s, to consider the multidimensionality of these theater circuits for someone like Smith (Figure 10).

Figure 10.

Images, recordings, and interactive maps showing the S.H. Dudley Circuit. https://hearingtheamericas.org/s/the-americas/page/theater-circuits.

These circuits provided economic opportunity for Black performers at a time when most Black Americans could only find work in the service sector or agriculture. On these stages, even when forced to enact minstrel stereotypes, performers like Smith were professionals playing a role in an industry that brought them into the fold of a growing Black middle class. At the same time, the labor of touring could be grueling; performers traveled from city to city on railcars while rehearsing and refining their act before the next performance.Footnote ²⁵ Traveling could be a harrowing experience for Black performers who faced the constant threat of racist violence and discrimination on the road, particularly when traveling on circuits like the Tri-State that brought them to the South (Figure 11).

Figure 11.

Images, recordings, and interactive maps showing the S.H. Dudley Circuit. https://hearingtheamericas.org/s/the-americas/page/theater-circuits.

A map of the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA) circuit a decade later in comparison with earlier, more regional circuits, demonstrates the national expansion of Black theater circuits in just a decade. Arising in part from the success of S. H. Dudley’s circuit, TOBA consolidated several circuits into a nationwide network in 1921 that provided increased opportunity for Black artists to perform for audiences across the nation. This national circuit legitimized the professionalism of Black performers and helped to create “business relationships with the emerging race record industry” while also protecting performers from abusive practices of “rogue” theater owners.Footnote ²⁶ At the same time, not unlike the recording industry, the creation of TOBA left Black theater circuits primarily in the control of white theater owners and bookers.

Within the tent or theater, however, Black performers used the stage to create a dialogue with Black audience members who “witnessed their own people reflect on and critique American life under Jim Crow, all the while achieving fame via a very modern and newly respectable profession.”Footnote ²⁷ Despite risks to safety, touring in the South also kept Black performers connected to the African Americans who still lived and worked in the South and allowed for the continued development of new genres like the blues. We can hear some of the most successful circuit performers on record, but there are many more whose voices we cannot. From the recording studio to the tents and theaters of touring circuits, however, Black performers seized the limited opportunities available to them within the entertainment industry to shape the cultural, political, and musical life of America.

Hearing the Play of Parody in the Blues

Recent work on the history of the blues locates the genre’s origins less in folk music or pre-commercial practice than in the touring companies described above and in minstrel shows.Footnote ²⁸ In these sources and others, blues appears less as the soul cry of an oppressed people and more as a product of the endless desire of the music business to market novel musical forms in racialized ways. We can see this in many examples: in one famous instance, Alan Lomax drove to the Stovall plantation in northern Mississippi to record McKinley Morganfield, “Muddy Waters,” whom he described as an “unwashed folk singer” and a bearer of the genuine folk blues. But it’s clear from Morganfield’s own account that he played a wide variety of songs including versions of the commercial blues that had been circulating widely for almost thirty years before Lomax arrived at the Stovall farm. He would have heard, for example, Bessie Smith, who when asked by Langston Hughes about the art of the blues, replied that blues was what “put her in de money.”Footnote ²⁹ Generations of African American musicians approached questions about the blues warily, seeing it as both a form of aesthetic confinement and as a continuation of the spectacle of African American suffering foregrounded in minstrel shows. Miles Davis, in a 1989 national television interview, recalled a teacher at Julliard relating the blues to slavery. Davis dismissed the entire construction of blues as “black hurt” out of hand, saying, “Listen, my father’s rich, my mama’s good-looking, all right? And I can play the blues. I’ve never suffered and don’t intend to suffer.”Footnote ³⁰

The origin of the blues in minstrel shows appears clearly in W. C. Handy, who began his professional career as a minstrel and often spoke proudly of how the minstrel show honed his professional skills and his ability to “put one over” on the audience. In his famous account of hearing the blues for the first time at a rail station in Tutwiler, Mississippi, Handy described “a lean, loose-jointed Negro” whom he overheard playing guitar. His clothes were rags, Handy wrote, and his feet popped out of his shoes. Handy dressed him in memory like the minstrel character Jim Crow. The man played the guitar, Handy added, with a knife blade “in the manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who use steel bars,” further undermining the claim of folk authenticity by pointing out how Hawaiian music circulated as a commercial fad.Footnote ³¹ Handy located the blues in a character out of a minstrel show, then connected the possibly fictional folk musician’s playing to commercial recordings and performances of Hawaiian music.

HtA follows the recent historiography cited above by arguing that the blues derived from a complicated relationship between commercial parodies and ideas of authenticity. Many of these came from the new discipline of folklore, which always sought communities of noncommercial, uncontaminated musical practice. Despite their importance to the idea of the folk, such uncontaminated musical communities rarely existed independent of the market webs in which people lived. And minstrel shows also drew on an idea of “folk,” simultaneously presenting themselves as authentic expressions of African American culture and, as frequently, vicious mockery or parody. One of the ways HtA reveals the constant cycling between claims of authenticity and parody involves a close reading of the fluidity of pitch.

Advertising for minstrel shows featured caricatures with loose limbs and rubbery bodies. Minstrels wore absurd clothing and spoke and sang with slippery, woozy diction. Because minstrelsy appeared as both mocking and authentic, minstrel singing styles often featured elaborate and exaggerated pitch bending. The pitch bending later became the very hallmark of the blues as a commercial genre, one of the things the blues was said to consist of. Many folk traditions use nonstandard pitches, and African American musical practice may indeed have involved a less strict relationship to fixed pitch. But “swooping” up or down to the note is also a characteristic of untrained singers, who will often move sharp and flat on either side of a note until they settle at the correct pitch. Pitch slurring and swooping in minstrel shows signified the same thing as cartoonish, rubbery limbs or garbled grammar and diction: they signified both comic ineptitude and “authentic” difference.

The earliest recordings in America show us this clearly, and HtA relies on digital tools to make this process audible for users. We use the example of Arthur Collins singing “Bill Bailey Won’t You Please Come Home” from roughly 1899–1902, a classic of the minstrel and vaudeville stages that later became a staple of twentieth-century pop songs. The melody makes comic pitch bends central: for example, in the introduction, at 0:25, “Bill Bailey’s woman” is hanging clothes “in her back ya-ard, and weepin’ ha-ard.” The sharp pitch bends on those two words are juxtaposed with mundane household tasks and weeping. Then the more familiar chorus begins with a swoop up on “won’t you come home Bill Bailey” and then a swoop down on “whole day lo-ong.” The song mocks working-class African Americans and describes Bailey’s paramour moaning and “bellerin’’” like a “prune fed calf.” Similarly, Dan Quinn’s 1903 version has similar elements in the chorus. In these recordings, pitch bending signifies animalistic comic ineptitude and lack of self-control, pain you are supposed to laugh at. At the same time, the comedy of pain is framed as racial authenticity.

On the website, we use the Soundcite tool to demonstrate this phenomenon. Soundcite enables us to include an audio example of “comic pitch bends” that the user can hear without opening a new window or separate audio player or leaving the site (Figure 12). We use Soundcite as part of the larger goal of making music more legible and easier for nonmusicians to feel comfortable critiquing. Musical analysis typically consists either of celebrity biography or accounts of musical structure informed by music theory and not accessible to untrained listeners. We want to make musical analysis as seamless as possible for both scholars and lay audiences. Further, just as historians would encourage “close reading” of historical sources, we want to encourage “close listening” to musical examples. So, in a discussion of the Bert Williams song “Nobody” (1903), we point out that Williams was engaged in a parody of stereotypes, imitating and mocking the kind of pitch-bending men like Arthur Collins or Dan Quinn engaged in. And we can show this with a clip of some of the many times Williams imitates the comical slurs of the trombone with his voice (Figure 13).

Figure 12.

Clicking on the black triangle plays a short clip of pitch bending. https://hearingtheamericas.org/s/the-americas/page/minstrelsy.

Figure 13.

Soundcite clip of vocal imitation. https://hearingtheamericas.org/s/the-americas/page/memphis-blues.

Modern listeners often find “Nobody” deeply painful or embarrassing to listen to, the sound of a person compelled to enact their own degradation. But audiences at the time, Black and white, found it uproariously funny and understood it as a parody of minstrel clichés. We interpret the song as a knowing parody of stereotypes then in wide circulation, much in the manner of contemporary African American comedians who mock common stereotypes. The Soundcite clips encourage listeners to find meaning in small details and specific musical moves and make it easier to hear through the veil of time.Footnote ³²

We continue to trace the evolution of pitch bending and the blues by using one of the earliest existing recordings of W. C. Handy’s “Memphis Blues.” Handy claimed to have learned the melody from the singer at the Tutwiler rail station, and the melody includes “blue notes,” presented with some plasticity of pitch. Soundcite allows us to name the specific notes in Morton Harvey’s 1914 version of the song, and have readers click and hear them (Figure 14). Harvey himself, decades later, felt the recording failed to capture “authentic blues feeling” because the musicians on the track were unfamiliar with the blues, a genre then just emerging from vaudeville and minstrel shows. But as the screenshot below from HtA explains, Harvey felt that he had captured something authentic with exactly the sort of “trombone smears” that Williams had made famous in parody a decade earlier (Figure 15).

Figure 14.

Soundcite clips that make pitches audible for the user. https://hearingtheamericas.org/s/the-americas/page/memphis-blues.

Figure 15.

Soundcite clip of trombone smears. https://hearingtheamericas.org/s/the-americas/page/memphis-blues.

Thus, parody turns into authenticity, or as Karl Miller put it, commercial musical culture “tendered authentic minstrel deceits as authentic folkloric truths.”Footnote ³³ By 1921, the Original Dixieland Jass Band had sold more than a million copies of what were often described as the first recordings of “jazz.” We use Soundcite to show how the same tragi-comic “trombone smears” were foundational to their self-presentation as authentic jazz.

The relationship of parody and authenticity established in these early recordings continued well into the twentieth century: many scholars have pointed out that Elvis Presley’s first recordings, often described as the primal examples of authentic rock and roll, read very clearly as gleeful parodies of the blues and country genres he grew up hearing on records and on the radio. By showing the interplay of parody and authenticity we can undermine the claims to nature or race that underpin genre conventions.

Soundcite offers a simple way to do the very complicated work of unpacking roughly one hundred years of mythology around the folk origins of the blues, what might be called the “Martin Scorsese presents the blues” version, and which Miller calls the “folkloric paradigm.” We want to situate “the blues” in the play of parody and authenticity and, as the next section shows, in transnational commercial flows. Soundcite allows us to use recordings as historical evidence; it makes possible a close reading of musical sound and encourages visitors to the website to invest themselves in exploring the meaning of even very brief musical passages. It bypasses the formalism of musicology, which typically depends on the ability to read standard notation and allows a seamless integration of music and text. In these ways, we hope that HtA can serve as a model of how to integrate analysis of music into historical practice.

Hearing Musical Globalization

In addition to the way it mobilizes sound as evidence, another central feature of HtA is its transnational framing. Historians have charted the global reach of the early recording industry, but they have typically explored the musical effects of this globalization within specific national contexts. We have many excellent studies of the impact of Victor, Columbia, Edison, Pathé, and Odeon on the popular music of individual countries, but very few works that explore transnational musical patterns. Michael Denning’s Noise Uprising is a powerful exception to this rule, but Denning approaches the “phonograph music” that emerged in port cities across the world as multiple instances of a single political dynamic he identifies as decolonization.Footnote ³⁴ There is certainly a great deal more to say about musical globalization in the early recording era.

By explicitly defining its object as transnational and by incorporating recordings directly into its text, HtA allows users to hear a fundamental, sonic shift in the patterns of musical globalization. To put it briefly, we argue that the early years of the recording industry, up until around 1920, were characterized by exceptional genre fluidity and multidirectional borrowing. In these years, the advent of recording allowed music to flow more freely across generic and geographic borders. But this period did not last. During the 1920s, genres became both more fixed and more firmly associated with specific nations. Music continued to flow across borders, but these flows increasingly took the form of a one-way dissemination from the core to the periphery. This interpretation is built on elements drawn from the existing scholarly literature, yet the transnational frame of HtA and its use of music as evidence make this fundamental shift audible and understandable in a new way.

In the early decades of recording, records marketed in the United States featured a wide range of genres: Sousa marches, ragtime, minstrelsy and ethnic humor, blues, as well as plenty of musical styles from outside the United States. Among the first records made by the pioneering African American bandleader James Reese Europe was one that featured genres and compositions from Argentina and Brazil: a tango on one side and a maxixe on the other. The presence of these South American genres in Europe’s repertoire is, of course, widely known. It partly reflects his status as the bandleader for Irene and Vernon Castle, the Anglo American dance couple who popularized new forms of social dancing in the 1910s. In most accounts of Europe’s music, the tango and maxixe are minor footnotes. Europe is mostly known as a ragtime musician and a precursor of jazz.Footnote ³⁵

Yet the borders around genres were extremely porous in this period. As both dances and musical genres, the tango and maxixe were all the rage in European and North American cities in 1913 and 1914, just as the recording industry took off. And American musicians were listening closely. James Reese Europe, like many scholars today, was convinced of the tango’s deep roots in the rhythms of the African diaspora. As he put it, “Both the tango and the fox-trot are really negro dances.”Footnote ³⁶ Europe was not alone; the composer Bob Cole told interviewers that ragtime syncopation was of a piece with rhythms imported from Latin America and the Caribbean. In the words of historian David Gilbert, “as Americans Black and white just began to understand syncopation as the essential sound of blackness, they associated exciting rhythms with an entire world of exotic music.”Footnote ³⁷

Genres had been conveyed across borders by sheet music for decades and by traveling performers for centuries, and at first, recording accelerated the process. Victor and other companies sent recording teams to Buenos Aires and brought some Argentine groups to New York to make tango records they could sell in the South American market, but they also recorded tangos played for American audiences by American brass bands, including Europe’s Society Orchestra, the Victor Military Band, Sousa’s Band, Arthur Pryor’s Band, Conway’s Band, and many others.Footnote ³⁸ Records gave listeners access to cosmopolitan, musical modernity in the form of ragtime numbers, Enrico Caruso arias, as well as tangos and other international genres. Using multiple recordings as examples and Soundcite clips to isolate key elements, HtA allows users to hear what tango meant as the term circulated the globe in the 1910s.

Sonically, “tango” in this period referred to the habanera rhythm, a variant of the European contradance developed in Cuba, brought back to Spain, and from there, exported to the rest of Latin America. Tango had developed in the port cities of Montevideo and Buenos Aires as a new way to dance habanera, and in its initial wave of global popularity, the habanera pulse remained tango music’s defining characteristic.Footnote ³⁹

Given the extreme genre fluidity of these years, musical mashups and cross-fertilizations were common, and HtA examines multiple examples. Most famously, W. C. Handy included a tango section in his hit song “St. Louis Blues.” But many other mixtures were possible: Hawaiian guitarist Frank Ferara recorded “Hawaiian Portuguese Tango” with his wife Helen for Victor in 1916. Playful fusions like this one are easily dismissed as anomalous novelty numbers by contemporary listeners who know tango, blues, and hapa haole music as distinct genres. Yet easy access to musical genres, styles, and techniques from around the world could have significant effects. The adoption of the Hawaiian slide guitar by both blues and country musicians is a major example.Footnote ⁴⁰

Likewise, the early history of jazz reveals the generative power of musical transnationalism in this era. The habanera rhythm and its close relatives, the tresillo and cinquillo, figured prominently in early jazz, lending the music what New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton famously called a “Spanish tinge” and helping to lay the rhythmic foundations of the genre.Footnote ⁴¹ Again, HtA uses sound as evidence to make this case (Figure 16). For example, we draw users’ attention to the cinquillo rhythms that the African American cakewalk seemed to share with the Cuban danzón. We then allow users to hear how the pioneering boogie-woogie pianist James P. Johnson based “The Charleston” (1923) on a modified cakewalk, launching a jazz dance craze on a transnational beat. Here and elsewhere, HtA mobilizes sonic evidence to make the case that the advent of the recording industry reinforced multidirectional musical flows that yielded significant innovation (Figure 17). Groundbreaking musical innovators like Johnson fashioned their music from a wide range of transnational sources.

Figure 16.

Soundcite clip of habanera rhythm. https://hearingtheamericas.org/s/the-americas/page/habanera.

Figure 17.

Soundcite clips used to compare different rhythms. https://hearingtheamericas.org/s/the-americas/page/q-soundalike.

Nevertheless, by around 1920, the business models established by the recording industry began to channel the global flows of popular music in new ways. The agents of the multinational record companies who scoured the world for music to commercialize prioritized “local music,” popular genres that sounded completely different from the music they knew.Footnote ⁴² And they imagined that local music would only interest local consumers. Entering foreign markets, the companies hoped to sell their prestigious catalogs of European and American music, on the one hand, and this local music, on the other. When they marketed foreign music in the United States, it was generally part of an attempt to capture new markets among immigrants nostalgic for the sounds of home. Over time, this strategy drew sharper lines around musical styles and tended to strengthen the associations between musical genres and nations. The tango was essentially Argentine, the samba was Brazilian, and jazz was American, and bands tended to specialize in the popular music of their country. This way of thinking about genre is clearly visible in the record catalogs and advertisements of the day. HtA displays a typical 1925 advertisement for Victor Records in a Buenos Aires magazine that listed “local repertoire”—tango and Argentine folk genres—on one side, and European classical music and American jazz on the other.Footnote ⁴³

Transnational influence did not stop, but thanks in large part to the enormous economic and political power of the United States, it increasingly moved in only one direction. In Latin America, genres such as the tango, samba, and son underwent enormous stylistic development in the 1920s and 1930s, and in significant ways, these innovations reflected the influence of jazz. In the case of tango, a “New Guard” of composers and bandleaders, such as Julio de Caro and Juan Carlos Cobián, infused the music with harmonic and orchestral sophistication to appeal to Argentine listeners accustomed to the sonic modernity of Paul Whiteman’s jazz records.Footnote ⁴⁴ But while Argentine listeners continued to listen to jazz, American audiences were completely ignorant of developments in Argentine tango after about 1917.Footnote ⁴⁵ Record companies had decided that whereas jazz and classical music were prestigious genres of ostensibly universal appeal, tango was local music for the Argentine market.

As visitors to HtA can hear, recordings of tango, samba, son, and ragtime could often sound quite similar in the 1910s. This was partly because of the ubiquity of brass instruments and the limitations of recording technology, but it also reflected the omnipresence of the habanera and related rhythmic patterns. By the late 1920s, this was no longer the case: as Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, and others transformed jazz, New Guard musicians reinvented tango, and Brazilian and Cuban innovators like Ismael Silva and Arsenio Rodríguez produced similarly groundbreaking transformations in samba and son. And while those Latin American musicians were familiar with American jazz, the new structure of musical globalization meant that their music went largely ignored by Anglo and African American audiences and musicians. HtA allows users to hear the new shape of musical globalization by revealing the difference between what tango sounded like in the United States in the 1920s and what it had come to sound like in Argentina.

When Latin American music did flow into the United States, it did so on very different terms. The so-called rhumba craze ignited in 1930 by Don Azpiazú’s recording of “The Peanut Vendor” yielded an influx of Cuban music into mainstream American pop music that would last through the mambo era of the 1950s. But American audiences encountered this music through a lens of exoticism that made it seem essentially different. Hundreds of pop tunes with English lyrics and Cuban-inspired rhythms depicted Latin America as tropical, languid, sexy, and unserious.Footnote ⁴⁶ The tango had also been experienced as exotic, and yet James Reese Europe and Bob Cole had heard its underlying, rhythmic similarities to African American music; W. C. Handy mixed it with the blues, and jazz innovators infused their music with related rhythms. This type of blending would not occur again until the Cubop experiments of Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo in the 1940s, and then the exercise was experienced as a coming together of two different traditions whose commonalities lay in a distant, African past, rather than a reigniting of circuits of musical exchange that had been active just a few decades before (Figure 18).

Figure 18.

Soundcite clip highlights differences in tango music recordings. https://hearingtheamericas.org/s/the-americas/page/q-whatcity.

The drawing of rigid, national boundaries around popular music genres in the 1920s has cast a long shadow, profoundly constraining interpretations of music history. Specifically, scholars of American popular music have tended to construct national genealogies for national genres. They point to distant African and European roots but not to the musical blending and mixing of the early twentieth century. By making the shift in patterns of musical globalization audible, HtA begins to suggest a new, more transnational history. The project encourages users to question the essentialism that treats each musical genre as the product of a particular ethnic or racial group. Instead, the sonic evidence reveals that transnational fluidity and borrowing characterized the early decades of recording. The exclusive association between genres like tango or jazz and specific nations or groups was itself produced by the commercial recording industry.

Concluding Thoughts

Hearing the Americas leverages the enormous potential of digital tools to synthesize a new interpretation of the early recording era. The site explores a wide range of musical styles, generating specific arguments on multiple topics. We have described three of these here: a spatial analysis of Black agency within the music industry, a demonstration of the ways early records linked particular sounds and performance styles to ideas about racial authenticity derived from minstrelsy, and an examination of the shifting patterns of musical globalization in the 1920s. For these and all the other arguments developed on the website, recorded music, placed in its social, economic, and political context, provides key evidence. We rely on the digital architecture of Omeka S combined with Soundcite’s capacity to integrate sound and text to develop these claims and to enable listeners to make sense of recordings that typically sound impenetrable even to those with a deep knowledge of music history.

In the end, our analyses underscore the enormous cultural impact of the commercial marketplace for music. Genres that seem quintessentially American or deeply rooted in ancient traditions were, in fact, catalyzed by commerce. Artists innovated within the constraints and opportunities provided by a market shaped by profound inequalities and powerful ideologies. They turned musical expressions of white supremacy into vehicles for knowing parody, then watched those parodies re-emerge as new versions of authenticity. Early records are not an archive of a pre-existing set of musical expressions captured and preserved on shellac. Rather, they are the traces of a dynamic process of cultural creation. The soundscape they produced differed from what came before and would not last long. In subsequent years, African American performers would exert agency in new ways, as genres became increasingly rigid and cut off from foreign influence. And yet, the multiple musical transactions of the 1910s and 1920s would certainly affect the music of future years. Understanding those negotiations helps us to better navigate the intellectual structures that still bind music in the present.