George Wellington Broome was born in New York probably in 1868. As an adult, he relocated with his family to Medford, a small town in Massachusetts, where he may have worked in a government job. He was interested in theatre and education and had always wanted to work in those fields. It was no surprise, then, to find that he set up a company in 1910 to make films about Black colleges. He called it the Broome Exhibition Company.
A few years later, Broome became involved with sound recordings, as he was the agent for a well-known Black opera singer, tenor Roland Hayes. Broome helped Hayes to organise and sell private recordings of famous Classical arias, thus establishing the first commercial sales of Black artists’ records. The recordings were made by Columbia via a private session. The discs were pressed by Columbia and then sold by Hayes and Broome from a small shop in Medford, which Broome ran, and by mail order. The recording below dates from 1918.
Broome decided in 1919 to set up his own recording company, which he called the Broome Special Phonographic Company. He wanted to give other Black artists the opportunity that Roland Hayes had created for himself, and he used his contacts within the world of opera and theatre to attract some big names. Baritone Harry T. Burleigh was the first, followed by sopranos Florence Cole-Talbert and Antoinette Garnes, plus violinist Clarence Cameron White and pianist R. Nathaniel Dett, who were both also composers. These wonderful Black performers had not been invited to record by any of the existing companies, so they jumped at the chance. Below is an advert placed by Broome in The Crisis magazine in November 1919. It was aimed at the Black market; The Crisis was a national Black publication.
Image: The Crisis 1919 (Wikimedia)
It would appear from the ad that Broome issued three or four new recordings each month. The recording of a Booker T. Washington speech in Atlanta was not typical of his stock. It is possible that he licensed the recording from another source. Around a dozen Broome recordings are known to exist, although he probably produced more.
In his aim to record genuine Black performances of Classical music, Broome was prefiguring the mission of Harry Pace, who was soon to follow him into the world of sound recording with Black Swan Records. Neither Broome nor Pace used the term Race music, but both held the view that Black performances deserved to be heard and rewarded. Both were aware that there was a market for these records amongst the Black communities across the USA and wanted to spread the good news that Black performances were now available. If White music-lovers bought them, so much the better.
It was a very limited experiment, concentrating on Classical music, but it set the ball rolling. The first recordings by Broome probably took place around August 1919, the last of them was in 1923. Broome continued to sell old stock, however, maybe for six or seven years. The first recordings by Pace came a little later, also ending in 1923. Given that Classical music is outside the sphere of Race music, it is unlikely that either Broome or Pace had an influence on the major White-owned companies that were setting up Race series around this time. Nevertheless, their vision was a powerful one that found echoes in Chicago in 1953, when Vivian Carter and Jimmy Bracken set up Vee-Jay Records , and in Detroit in 1959, when Berry Gordy set up Tamla Records.
