Fats Waller in Harlem

As a young man, Thomas “Fats” Waller (1904−1943) was introduced to the piano through his mother, Adeline Locket Waller, who herself played both the piano and the pipe organ. Born and raised in New York City, Waller learned to play the harmonium as a child, on which he would accompany his father’s street-corner preaching, while also “experimenting with an upstairs neighbor’s piano.”Footnote ³ At age ten, he first made his way to the bench of the pipe organ, in the church where his father was a lay preacher, although it would be a few more years before he began performing on the instrument.Footnote ⁴ By the late 1910s, Waller and his family had settled in Harlem, a move that situated him within the city’s distinct musical culture(s), and he quickly took inspiration from the famed rent parties then taking place throughout the city. Through these parties, he was eventually introduced to pianist James P. Johnson and became a student of Johnson’s stride style. Stride differs from other forms of keyboard playing, even within styles of jazz piano, and “flourished in New York City” throughout the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote ⁵ Paul Machlin gives a thorough description of the style:

Tammy Kernodle likewise notes that the stride style developed during these rent parties ultimately served as the bridge “between the ragtime tradition of the early 1900s and the emerging modern jazz piano approach.”Footnote ⁷ Through his experience with church music and stride, Waller found steady work as an organist at the Lincoln and Lafayette theaters, where he improvised music for silent films and performed renditions of popular tunes during intermissions and between acts.

Waller’s time in Harlem coincided with the height of the Harlem Renaissance, although he and the styles of music he played occupied an uneasy position within that movement. For example, describing the Harlem Renaissance of the late 1920s—the era in which Waller’s pipe organ recordings were made and marketed—Kernodle writes,

As Kernodle attests, Waller and the jazz styles with which he was associated were often dismissed as being at odds with the movement’s mission of racial uplift. For instance, writing about Alain Locke, the intellectual founder of the New Negro Movement, Everett H. Akam notes that Locke “reject[ed] the commercialized jazz of Tin Pan Alley,” instead favoring “art-music or classical jazz.”Footnote ⁹ This attitude was prevalent among Harlem’s Black elite in this era, who believed that success in the realm of classical music was a key step in demonstrating that Black musicians and composers could be just as good as (if not better than) their white counterparts.

Although Waller was predominantly associated with “lowbrow” musical styles, he too had an abiding interest in performing classical music, and in this way he shared a key affinity with other Harlem-based Black composers and performers of this era, such as Will Marion Cook, James P. Johnson, and William Grant Still.Footnote ¹⁰ In fact, Waller’s devotion and attachment to classical organ literature was so strong that, according to Marty Grosz, while Waller was living in Chicago in the late-1920s “he had an organ installed in his hotel room, and in the wee hours after work he would play his favorite childhood hymns, such as ‘Abide with Me’ and ‘Silent Night.’ There were rare times of solitude and contemplation when Waller would play Chopin, Bach, Liszt, Brahms, Debussy, by the hour.”Footnote ¹¹ This account demonstrates a lesser-known side of Waller’s musical personality, one that contrasts with his usual depiction as a popular entertainer.Footnote ¹² For instance, according to saxophonist Gene Sedric, when Waller would try to perform classical pieces live, audiences would rail against them and instead insist he play the popular material they expected from him; in response, Sedric recalled, Waller would “take a swig of gin or something and say resignedly, ‘Aw right, here it is.’”Footnote ¹³ Although his commercial success was contingent on this specific, affable persona, the limits of audience expectations meant Waller was rarely able to express the classical side of his musical personality in live settings.Footnote ¹⁴ Unfortunately for Waller, these issues carried over into his recording career, further cementing this specific image of Waller and his music, as the record labels he worked for similarly expected him to perform strictly in popular styles—styles that corresponded with their expectations of the new race records market.

Race Records, Ralph Peer, and Waller’s Early Recordings

The race records market was first established in the 1920s by smaller labels, such as OKeh, in an attempt to sell their product to Black audiences, a new and theretofore untapped demographic of consumers.Footnote ¹⁵ Conceived by white-owned and -operated labels as a separate subsection of the commercial recording industry, “race records” became a catch-all category for music made by non-white, largely Black, artists that labels believed would appeal to a marketplace of Black listeners—whether the artists believed their music should fall under this category or not. More than just a demographic designation, however, the category of race records was inherently built on a problematic, racialized logic that fed into stereotypical conceptions of Black musical culture, with labels investing in recording gospel music and spirituals over orchestral hymn arrangements, and ragtime records over classical works.Footnote ¹⁶ Furthermore, despite the market’s eventual success, race records were always treated as a peripheral component of the recording industry and therefore received significantly less investment than their mainstream “popular” counterparts.

The race record market had been the brainchild of OKeh talent scout Ralph Peer (1892−1960), and it was Peer who kickstarted Waller’s recording career, bringing him to OKeh to record race records. According to Waller’s son, Maurice, “Ralph Peer had heard a song, ‘Muscle Shoals Blues,’ that had been recorded by a white band with little success and Peer was convinced it could be a hit with the Black community if it were recorded by a Black performer. He brought the tune to Fred Hager, who immediately recommended that Fats Waller record it.”Footnote ¹⁷ Ultimately, Waller recorded the song in New York on October 21, 1922, and Peer was so delighted with his performance that he suggested Waller “cut something for the flip side,” “Birmingham Blues,” despite the lack of prepared charts.Footnote ¹⁸ Altogether, this record “enjoyed a fairly good sale” according to Ed Kirkeby, Waller’s manager.Footnote ¹⁹ Paul Machlin likewise believes that, despite Waller’s lack of regular recording with OKeh, Peer never forgot the success of these recordings.Footnote ²⁰

In 1925, Peer left OKeh to go work for Victor, one of the nation’s largest record labels, and began developing Victor’s country, alternative, and race record series. Per Peer’s contract, he would not take a direct salary from Victor; instead, he would earn a two-cent mechanical royalty for each side sold, as well as the copyrights to all new material he produced.Footnote ²¹ It was within this context that Peer brought Waller to Victor to record some new material at their brand-new recording studio—one built in the husk of an old Baptist church.Footnote ²²

Victor’s Camden Studio

As part of a campaign to boost record sales, Victor invested in the creation of a state-of-the-art recording studio. Rather than construct a new building, the company decided to purchase and renovate the former Trinity Baptist Church in Camden, New Jersey. Victor’s original company, the Eldridge R. Johnson Machine Shop, was built in 1894; just five blocks away, the church was built two years later in 1896. As the two buildings sat nearby, and Eldridge R. Johnson’s Machine Shop became the Victor Talking Company, the church was not nearly as prosperous. By the late 1910s, it had already fallen into debt and minor disrepair. The sheer amount of space that the church contained was enough incentive for Victor to buy out the church and repurpose it into two studios: the church hall became Studio 1, while the upper floor—where orchestral music was recorded—became Studio 2.Footnote ²³ According to Victor mechanist and recording pioneer Harry O. Sooy,

In the 1920s, Camden became the site for Victor’s in-studio experiments, which became fully functional in the Camden studio in 1925. In conjunction with the company’s multiple “listening labs,” Victor’s engineers used the Camden studio to perfect new recording technologies, especially the newly emergent Western Electrical recording system. In 1925, this pivotal moment of creating, installing, and using new methods of electronic recording was established at the Camden studio.Footnote ²⁵ Shortly thereafter, the company decided to overhaul Studio 1. Notably, they decided to install a brand-new pipe organ to replace the church’s older, existing one, making the Camden studio the first ever U.S. American recording studio to house a pipe organ (the Edison Company followed suit in 1926). In fact, the church’s original pipe organ was part of what initially drew Victor to the space’s potential as a studio. However, it soon became apparent that the existing organ (designed by E. & G.G. Hook & Hastings in 1879) was a less than suitable recording instrument, as it had only a single manual with very limited stop options. These limitations meant that it was not viable for Victor to turn the existing church organ into a recordable instrument. Installing a new organ was much less expensive than fixing and expanding the existing one, so the decision was made to tear it out.Footnote ²⁶ Therefore, in 1921, Victor installed a new Estey organ.

It soon became apparent, however, that this initial Estey organ fell short of the company’s recording needs.Footnote ²⁷ As detailed in a surviving letter dated November 28, 1924, Victor employee Guy S. Boyer noted the company’s changing intentions:

As detailed in this letter, Victor was now expressly interested in using their pipe organ to make jazz records. To better accommodate this initiative, they continued to work with Estey to overhaul the instrument, first in 1925 and then again in 1926.Footnote ²⁹ Ultimately, the final instrument was a hybrid between a more traditional “church” pipe organ originally envisioned for the space and a theatre organ. This design gave the player increased flexibility and tone coloring not found on other types of instruments.Footnote ³⁰ One such feature specific to theatre organs is that of “Second Touch,” which allows for a second set of stops to be used when additional pressure is added to the keys, something that is not present on pipe organs used for church purposes, but was “fascinat[ing]” to Waller during his first encounter with the instrument.Footnote ³¹ Due to the repeated refiguring and expansion of the instrument, the final version of the Estey organ was created with the pipes of a church organ, but the console of a theatre organ (Figure 1).Footnote ³²

Figure 1.

The final, expanded Estey organ installed in the camden studio, ca. 1930. This is the instrument that Waller used while recording for Victor. (Source: David L. Junchen, Encyclopedia of the American Theatre Organ Vol. 1. Pasadena, CA: Showcase Publications, 1985, 113).

Another reason that Victor acquired the Estey organ was so that they could use it to showcase their state-of-the-art electric recording technology, as organs were difficult, if not impossible, to capture acoustically. According to Larry Huffman,

The low C, two octaves below middle C, on an 8-foot organ pipe—which made up the majority of the pipes on the studio’s new Estey organ (see Appendix B)—sounds at around 70.4 Hertz. However, the Estey organ was also comprised of four 16-foot stops, which yielded even lower frequencies, meaning that they would have been impossible to capture using previous recording technologies.Footnote ³⁴ By having an organ in-house and with brand new electronic recording technology—a combination no other studio in the country had—Victor was the leader in pipe organ recording innovations and technology.

But recording a pipe organ was not without its challenges. For instance, the studio’s acoustics posed a significant issue. Church architecture has a distinct, reverberating, sound. Practically, churches are often built for projection.Footnote ³⁵ Before microphone technology, there was a need for the priest, cantor, and organ to be heard all the way across the space. While the Camden studio’s new Estey organ itself allowed for incredible accuracy and pointedness, the room caused its notes to linger and reverberate, even after the musician has stopped playing.Footnote ³⁶ There was also the issue of how to properly record and capture a pipe organ through a microphone-based system. First, the pipes appear to have been placed and recorded in a separate room from the console.Footnote ³⁷ This prevented the sound of keys and pushing stops from making their way onto the recording, but also meant that “the organist at the console would only hear a muffled and delayed version of what he was playing.”Footnote ³⁸ Furthermore, on most pipe organs, there is a short delay between when a player hits a key and when the pipe actually emits the corresponding sound. In the Camden studio, the pipes were seemingly placed away from the instrument, which increased this delay even further. Given the relatively short length allowed by the era’s recording technology, the organ’s delay itself posed a substantial issue, as it was crucial for a performer to know exactly when to begin and stop playing. To satisfy this particular issue, Victor’s engineers set up a buzzer between the Estey and the recording booth. As Harry Coster explains,

Although Victor would continue to fine tune these technologies in the years to come, these innovations had set the stage for Waller to create some of the most distinctive material of his career: stride recordings on a pipe organ.

Fats Waller at the Pipe Organ

Given his prior performing experience and his love of organ playing, one can imagine that Waller felt right at home at Studio 1. What is more difficult to imagine, however, is how the stride piano style he was known for could be adapted to the pipe organ. For example, on an organ, the player has no ability to control the strength of alternating powerful and weaker notes, a key part of stride playing (as Maurice Waller notes “the stronger the left hand, the richer the sound of the stride”).Footnote ⁴⁰ By contrast, as Paul Machlin explains, piano keys allow the player to “place on any individual pitch or chord… the driving, energetic left-hand patterns which are the essence of stride” in the way that the keys respond to differences in pressure applied to them.Footnote ⁴¹ The organ keyboards do not respond in the same way. Although differences in articulation as determined by duration are possible, the keys will produce the same volume regardless of how the keys are struck; instead, volume and timbre are mechanically controlled by other forces, such as stop pistons and swell pedals. As Waller himself once remarked, “the organ doesn’t give you a left hand.”Footnote ⁴²

Despite these challenges, Waller came up with many creative solutions for transferring the stride idiom to the pipe organ. As Machlin demonstrates, one way that Waller overcame the issue of accentuation was by using the pedalboard “to provide the underlying fundamental pitches of a given harmony on the first and third beats… [which] isolates the strong beats of a measure, thereby fostering the illusion that they have been accented.”Footnote ⁴³ This approach to pedaling is most apparent on Waller’s 1927 solo pipe organ recording “Soothin’ Syrup Stomp.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Here, Waller plays steady eighth notes with his left hand while using the pedal to accentuate strong beats. After his initial introduction to the piece, Waller changes the melody and switches manuals in his right hand to create a different affect; at the same time, his left hand slows to playing quarter notes on the weak beats on a similar registration to the pedalboard. With the left-hand manual and the pedalboard set to the same registration, Waller then turns to other methods to create the illusion of accents. In his transcription for a similar pipe organ recording, Machlin notes that “Waller apparently does not articulate pitches on the pedal board in a consistent pattern or duration, except that he seems to favor legato for half-step motion.”Footnote ⁴⁵ This noted inconsistency, however, was likely a deliberate choice. Waller’s inconsistent pedal articulation signaled their ever-changing function, which can shift from measure to measure or even as quickly from beat to beat. It is the duration of the pedal notes that prime the listener to hear them as a second left hand rather than a foundational bass line. On “Soothin’ Syrup Stomp,” where the left hand is playing quarter notes on the weak beats, Waller holds the pedal notes just a moment longer than their left-hand counterparts, clearly invoking the accentuated style of stride.

“Soothin’ Syrup Stomp” also captures how Waller used a variety of techniques to counteract the pipe organ’s ringing echo, even from within a pipe chest.Footnote ⁴⁶ After the initial introduction, we hear Waller’s left and right hands act rapidly in alternation with one another to form a specialized kind of tremolo. This approach, known as the “Chop-Chop style,” comes out of Waller’s prior experience as a theatre organist.Footnote ⁴⁷ Pulling it off requires a distinct cleanliness of technique, which Waller accomplishes through the crispness of his playing, releasing a note cleanly in time with the beat or melody of the song. As the organ does not experience a natural aural decay, and there is a substantial delay in timing between lifting a key and the halting of wind through the pipe, it can be difficult to learn the tricks to crisp playing on the instrument. This is a major challenge when adapting stride for the organ, as the short, quick attacks of notes are essential to creating the right feel. Waller’s invocation of the “Chop-Chop” style is thus an inventive, creative solution to another of the pipe organ’s technical obstacles. Most significantly, complicated ornamentation is often discouraged in large recording spaces such as Studio 1. So, while the melodies of stride playing are full of small riffs and ornaments, those stylistic devices simply do not work in a church building meant to have overarching ringing acoustics. Waller therefore had to determine how to make these ornaments come across. One solution he developed was to reserve ornaments for notes in a higher register, which has shorter corresponding organ pipes and less reverberation. This approach can be heard in “Lenox Avenue Blues” (1926), on which Waller also takes a slower overall tempo to give these ornaments time to be fully audible before the following note is played. Furthermore, there is the problem of the volume of sound that a pipe organ produces. As jazz historians Ben Kragting Jr. and Harry Coster note, “If the [swell] pedal was pressed a little too firmly at any time, the recording room lost control and resulted in over-modulated grooves on the record. This was clearly a problem that was not easily rectified, because they would otherwise have made another take.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Certain measures, therefore, had to be taken to compensate for these issues:

Waller’s sensitivity to these issues of volume and echo demonstrates his skill as a musician, responding to technical issues on the fly.

If Waller faced multiple technical challenges when trying to adapt the stride idiom for solo pipe organ, even more challenges arose when he had to record with other musicians. For example, the pipe organ as a stride instrument works better on the ensemble recording with the guitar (see, for example, Waller’s December 1, 1927, recordings with Morris’s Hot Babies including “Geechee” and “Red Hot Dan”), as the echoing sound of the organ blends with the string overtones and reverb better than it does with the wind instruments or while playing alone. Solving how to blend instruments with the pipe organ was a problem for the recording team, and pairing instruments with softer timbres alongside the imposing organ made for easier mixing. The pairing of instruments, however, created its own issues. As musician Garvin Bushell recalled

Bushell also jokingly stated that during the session, Waller was in a room “about a city block away” from the rest of the musicians.Footnote ⁵¹ The issues raised by the musicians’ physical separation in the studio is most clearly demonstrated on their recording “Persian Rug,” which Victor released in 1928 under the band name “Louisiana Sugar Babes.”Footnote ⁵² On it, Johnson begins by setting the introduction for the piece on piano, after which Waller takes off with his own introduction on the pipe organ, employing a right-hand melody on the cornopean and oboe stops on the Swell that he combines with his aforementioned stride-based alternation between pedal and a left-hand coupled Great. Here, we can hear some of the sound and volume leveling issues of the Camden studio. At the beginning of Waller’s introduction, he is much quieter than Johnson and as he begins to play, he does indeed sound like he is “a city block away.”

Throughout the song, Waller adapts his own style depending on with whom he is playing. At around one minute and nineteen seconds into “Persian Rug,” Bushell enters on bassoon, and during this section, Waller works to not overshadow Bushell, but rather seeks to add in extra flourishes where possible. However, this section makes clear some of the difficulty caused by the recording set up. Near the end of the bassoon/organ phrases, there is always a lag as Bushell takes a different route through the ending sequence than Waller does. While the two manage to stay together for the majority of the recording, these phrase endings, as well as some of the out-of-sync flourishes from Waller during their shared melody, demonstrate that Victor’s recording set-up was certainly less than ideal.

“Persian Rug” also ends with a keyboard duet between Johnson on piano and Waller on pipe organ. Regarding their instruments’ placement in Studio 1, Kirkeby explains that

Although it is difficult to reconstruct the exact layout of the studio space, from Kirkeby’s account, we know that there was a Steinway piano placed in the same room as the Estey organ. Considering how smoothly the keyboard players trade off solos, this is most likely the piano Johnson used in these recordings.Footnote ⁵⁴ In terms of style, the two seem to be playing melody lines together, each taking turns trying out various riffs before ending with a grand final chord from Waller. The main point of note here is that Waller appears to exactly match his teacher’s style of articulation, something that should not be possible on the pipe organ. Here, Waller yet again demonstrates his crisp playing and his nuanced understanding of how to adjust his technique to match Johnson’s. However, not all of his ensemble recordings were so successful. On “He’s Gone Away,” with Thomas Morris’ Hot Babies, the recording suffers from a lack of synchronization between the pipe organ and the rest of the ensemble, one made even more evident by the clearer cohesion of the piano and the ensemble.

The acoustic environment of Studio 1 was always a challenge for Waller, but one that he took head-on. For instance, the very first time a pipe organ was used to accompany a jazz group on a commercial record occurred on May 20, 1927 with Thomas Morris’ Hot Babies.Footnote ⁵⁵ Their first song together, the aptly named “Fats Waller Stomp” (1927), was composed in part by Waller and performed on the Estey pipe organ. On another recording from this session, “Won’t You Take Me Home?” (1927), Richard B. Hadlock notes that Waller “trills on the organ with piano-like crispness and pulls off an amazing chromatic break that rolls up from the bowels of the great Estey.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Never one to shy away from a challenge, during his first recording session with Morris’s Hot Babies, Waller also accomplished the feat of playing both pipe organ and piano in a single recording, “Savannah Blues” (1927), audibly running back and forth across the space between the two instruments.Footnote ⁵⁷ As Hadlock describes it, “switching in mid-tune from the giant pipe organ to the piano is not unlike leaping from the cab of a trailer truck, with its daunting array of gears, into the seat of a moving sports car.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Although the logistics of transferring from one instrument to the other were difficult, they were not insurmountable for Waller, as demonstrated by how many times he successfully accomplished the task. For example, on the later recording, “He’s Gone Away” (1928), Waller has only seven seconds in which he must have literally run from the pipe organ to the piano. Given the speed of this switch, there is an audible shuffle fifty-one seconds into the recording, which keyboard players will recognize as the sound of quickly sliding onto a bench. This shuffling can be confirmed as the moving of a piano bench when listening to “Geechee” (1928), when Waller is given nine seconds (beginning at around fifty-five seconds into the recording) to move and again the bench can be heard scooting into place at the last moment before he resumes playing.

Bench adjustments aside, the piano and pipe organ require different playing techniques. The mental and physical flexibility needed to fluidly go back and forth between the two demonstrates Waller’s mastery and how devoted he was to trying to adapt his musical style to the pipe organ. He combined his existing skills with enormous effort to adapt the stride style to the pipe organ, with varying levels of success. As someone who knew the stride idiom inside and out, what it required, how it had to sound, and how a piano was uniquely suited for these tasks, why then did Waller try so hard to execute something that was likely to be unsuccessful? While in some way these recordings may represent a form of creative experimentation, the more likely answer is that Victor only allowed Waller’s records to represent a circumscribed musical style, one that they thought would be most appealing to record buyers of the era.

The Racialized Logic of the Early Recording Industry

Many rumors survive about unreleased classical music recordings that Waller created in Studio 1.Footnote ⁵⁹ For instance, according to biographer John S. Wilson,

Although Victor would never press any of Waller’s recordings of classical repertoire, Waller still found inventive ways to incorporate classical material. For example, on his first Victor recording, “St. Louis Blues” (recorded on November 17, 1926, during the same session as “Lenox Avenue Blues”), John L. Fell and Terkild Vinding note that Waller “interpolates two bars of a Bach chorale” into his performance.Footnote ⁶¹ Ultimately, however, it appears that Waller’s love for Bach and Liszt were considered too far afield for the target audience that Victor had in mind for his records, a presumption that was inherently tied to the company’s wider racialized business practices.

It goes without saying that Black musicians like Waller faced great racial prejudice throughout their careers. Record labels had preconceived expectations about what Waller should record, based on what audiences would expect from him as a performer—expectations that were based largely on the color of his skin. The idea of a Black musician recording classical organ pieces was incompatible with what labels wanted because they did not think it would appeal to white audiences, while at the same time, the company also assumed that Black audiences would not want to buy classical recordings. As Karl Hagstrom Miller notes, record companies in the early 1920s, “often refused to allow Black artists to record selections the musicians held dear—rom pop songs and arias to hillbilly breakdowns—but did not fit within corporate conceptions of Black music. African American musicians made race records, the argument went, and race records contained race music.”Footnote ⁶² These unequal expectations for white artists and Black artists are part of what forced Waller to stay within the realm of stride, despite his love for learning and playing classical works.

Waller was thus confined to recording what was considered “Black” music. This logic is clearly confirmed in Victor’s in-house records, which list all of Waller’s pipe organ recordings as “Colored,” (Figure 2) signaling the company’s conception of his work as being separate from their white performers.Footnote ⁶³ Despite the fact that his pipe organ works were actually published as part of Victor’s Black Label “popular” series, Waller’s employment as a recording artist was still structured by the company’s entrenched racialized conceptions. Later in his career, Victor made this logic explicit when they tried to relegate Waller and some of his fellow Black musicians back to their segregated race record series, where they received far less exposure to their white audiences who were buying his music. But, as Allan Sutton notes, “The Victor executives soon realized their strategic error and returned (only) their most popular Black artists to the standard series.Footnote ⁶⁴ This moving around of Waller’s works indicates that Victor understood Waller’s music through a racial framework, one they were compelled to adjust after it proved detrimental to the company’s profits.

Figure 2.

Victor recording book entry for Waller’s December 1, 1927 Session.Footnote ⁶⁵

Victor also restricted Waller and his repertoire because publishers, like Ralph Peer, had a vested financial interest in him recording original material. Pieces that were in the public domain or were already under copyright were not personally profitable to publishers. As Brian Ward and Patrick Huber note, after joining Victor,

At the time, this was a relatively generous offer, but it did mean that composers would rarely maintain ownership of their own works. As the main publisher in charge of overseeing Waller’s sessions, both solo and group, Peer saw personal financial gain from almost all of Waller’s recordings. Quite pointedly, R.S. Peer (sometimes credited as Mr. Peer in the recording book), held the copyright for all 6 of the records produced from Waller’s first pipe organ recordings from January 14, 1927, and the vast majority of his pipe organ output overall. In fact, any new material that Waller recorded at Camden was immediately owned by Peer, per Peer’s previously cited contract to trade a steady salary for full copyright ownership of the artists he recorded. After growing and heading the race records series at OKeh, Brian Ward and Patrick Huber note, Peer “fully grasped the importance of securing and controlling song copyrights in order to cash in on the mechanical royalty payments.”Footnote ⁶⁷

It is no secret that Waller had troubles with money throughout his life. However, these money issues were partly a result of the recording industry’s wider exploitation of Black musicians and their appropriation of those musicians’ copyrights.Footnote ⁶⁸ Sutton speaks extensively of Peer’s financial exploits, including minimal artist pay, a line in their contracts that forbade them from recording for other companies, and the company’s ability to drop groups after only a single recording if it did not meet their sales expectations.Footnote ⁶⁹ Clearly, Peer saw himself as providing Waller and his fellow musicians with special opportunities to work in the nascent recording business, but he also used this widely exploitative system for his own monetary gain.Footnote ⁷⁰

Waller, a known performer and successful songwriter, would have been highly valued by Peer—valued enough to be brought in to try out the new recording technology housed in Victor’s Camden studio. In the end, Victor’s new Camden studio was designed around a sense of experimentation, one in which new technologies and new sounds combined to create some of the most distinctive recordings that had ever been produced. Yet, the racialized logic of the recording industry still confined Waller to performing what Victor deemed to be sufficiently “Black” material. As such, it seems, Waller was simply never given the creative latitude to experiment.