Race Records was the most common name used by record companies during the first half of the twentieth century to categorise recordings of Black artists that were marketed specifically to the Black community in the United States. Its first formal use was by Okeh Records in 1921, but the word Race was current much earlier than that as an alternative to Black, used by both White and Black communities.
Music had, of course, existed for a long time as an important part of Black culture. Spirituals and Blues developed among the Black communities in the Southern States of America, with roots that pre-dated the Civil War and strong links to slavery. Ragtime emerged from the syncopated piano tunes created by honky-tonk piano players also in the southern states during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, evolving into Jazz in the early twentieth century. The best-known Ragtime pianist was Scott Joplin, who wrote hundreds of tunes and several operas; other exponents of the style were Louis Chauvin in St. Louis and Tony Jackson in New Orleans.
Boogie-Woogie emerged around the same time. Music historians have traced its origins back to work camps in Texas, where itinerant piano players developed the style in the taverns, barrelhouses and juke joints where the workers went to relax. During the early years of the new century, boogie-woogie spread widely, progressing from solo piano to piano duos and trios, then being taken up by guitarists and big bands. The earliest recordings of boogie-woogie tunes were made by Charles “Cow Cow” Davenport in the early nineteen twenties.
The first use of the term boogie-woogie on a record came later, with the release of Clarence “Pinetop” Smith’s “Pinetop’s Boogie-Woogie”, issued on the Vocalion label in 1928. Charles Davenport had recommended Smith to J. Mayo Williams, who had moved from Paramount to Vocalion. Williams took note and brought Smith and his family from Pittsburgh to Chicago. “Pinetop’s Boogie-Woogie” was a big success, cementing the popularity of the style and giving future R&B performers a few ideas. Ray Charles certainly borrowed some of the words that Smith spoke over the tune for his early hits. The popularity of the style was at its height in the nineteen-forties, thanks to the performances of Albert Ammons, Meade “Lux” Lewis and Pete Johnson.
Jazz emerged around the start of the new century and became extremely popular amongst both Black and White communities, with big bands and smaller combos developing a variety of styles. It became popular to write dance tunes, which had Blues in their titles, following W.C. Handy’s success with songs such as “Memphis Blues” and “St. Louis Blues”, but many were more Jazz than Blues. Handy himself had lived in Clarksdale in the Mississippi Delta and had heard the Blues songs of the local musicians. He adapted them for dance-lovers, White or Black. Original Blues recordings were to come later.
Black Gospel choruses had become popular during the second half of the nineteenth century, many inspired by the Fisk University Jubilee Singers in Nashville, who formed in 1871 and introduced a new fashion for spirituals. Their songs are beautifully sung, with complex harmonies and Classical precision. They sang traditional spirituals and also works by American composers, including Stephen Foster. Their first non-commercial recording dates from 1889, but they then waited over thirty years to make a commercial recording.
All these genres were popular among the Black communities in America, but, with one exception, Jazz, they were largely neglected by the White businessmen who ran the music industry in the early 1900s. In an era of racial segregation, they simply didn’t see the market for Black music.
As a result, prior to 1920, the only commercial recordings made of Black performers involved singers from the Minstrel groups that were popular during the nineteenth century and beyond, from Barber Shop Quartets, or from comedy performers. The first Black singers to be recorded commercially were George W. Johnson, known for his “laughing songs”, and the Unique Quartette, who were a Barber Shop quartet. Both made their first recordings in 1890. Bert Williams is generally considered as the first Black superstar, based on his success in vaudeville and theatres with Black and White audiences. He made his first recording for Columbia Records in 1906 and added around thirty more singles by 1922. They are often essentially monologues but some have a full orchestral backing. He was an entertainer rather than a singer. Critically, these early recordings were made with a White audience in mind.

Despite these early examples of Black performers gaining a foothold in an essentially White music industry, the overwhelming practice was for the record companies to use White singers for recordings. Hence, Black composers were usually only able to get their work recorded by having it performed by White singers. Often, these singers were employed by the record companies and were not famous. It was cheaper for the companies to hire lesser-known or unknown performers, thus avoiding the cost of paying expensive stars to record everything for them. That may seem strange today, but the companies were focussed on finding a hit song and were not too concerned who sang it. Black artists Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson and James Weldon were songwriters and performers who wrote many well-known shows and performed in them. Their songs were covered by White singers, e.g. “Oh Didn’t He Ramble”, which was recorded several times in the early 1900s. (The tune later became popular in New Orleans, especially amongst Black Jazz bands playing at funerals!). The famous American composer Stephen Foster had also drawn on elements of Black culture in the mid-nineteenth century to write his songs, but he had gleaned his inspiration from Minstrel Shows. Foster was born in Pittsburgh and visited the South just once, in 1852, four years after writing “Oh! Susanna”. In the early twentieth century, a few White singers, including Sophie Tucker, performed “Black” songs in blackface, imitating African-American speech patterns and dance movements, in an extension of the Minstrel shows that created a caricature of Black culture. None of the above are examples of Race music.
The first recordings of Jazz (or Jas or Jass, as it was called on the early recordings) took place in 1917. In April, Arthur Collins and Byron G. Harlan released “That Funny Jas Band From Dixieland”. In May, Victor released “Dixie Jass Band One Step” and “Livery Stable Blues” by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. In July, Ernest Borbee’s Jass Orchestra released “It’s A Long, Long Time” on the Columbia label.

However, these early Jazz recordings were made by White musicians. The members of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band were drawn from Papa Jack Laine’s Reliance Brass Band, a multi-racial group from New Orleans. The Black members of the Reliance Band were not invited to Chicago to play the concert which led to the recording sessions with Victor.
The first recordings that could be thought of as genuinely Race music came in the field of Ragtime and Jazz. Clarinettist Wilbur Sweatman made the first recording of Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” in 1903 in Chicago, before making his first commercial recording with his orchestra in 1916 in New York, and then releasing a series of Jazz songs in response to the hits from the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.

Wilbur Sweatman’s 1916 release on Emerson Records (Source: Infrogmation, Wikimedia Commons)
Other recordings were made by W.C. Handy’s band and the Six Brown Brothers around 1917. Columbia Records hired James Reese Europe to lead the recording of an album by the Castle House Orchestra in 1914 and also worked with W.C. Handy and Wilbur Sweatman. These are the real pioneers of Black popular music recordings, but the record companies were still not marketing these records to Black communities. The music-loving Black communities were able to enjoy live music covering all the genres described above, but they heard very little of this music on most radio stations and could buy only a small number of recordings, such as Wilbur Sweatman’s above. Then, in 1920 in New York, everything changed!

It is hard to believe that it was a Black female Blues singer who brought the idea of recorded Race Music to life, when she went to OKeh records in February 1920 together with Perry Bradford. Bradford was a talented Black pianist, singer and dancer, who also composed songs that drew deeply on Black culture. He wrote a show called “Maid of Harlem” (also known as “Made in Harlem”) that toured theatres in the southern and northern states in 1918, with Blues singer Mamie Smith in the starring role. Now, he was determined to get some of his songs recorded!
OKeh Records was one of the new companies set up to rival Columbia and Victor. It was founded by Otto K. E. Heinemann, a German American, who set up a recording studio and pressing plant in New York City and started the label in 1918. OKeh released mainly music by dance and Jazz bands, until a Blues singer, Mamie Smith, became the first African American woman to make a Blues recording in 1920. (It took another four years for OKeh Records to record the first Black male artist, singer/guitarist Ed Andrews.)
As Mamie Smith’s musical director, Bradford was somehow able to convince Fred Hager (the recording manager at OKeh Records) to set up a recording session for Mamie Smith. It must have taken a lot of effort, but Bradford’s nickname was “The Mule” because he was so stubborn!
Two of Bradford’s songs were chosen, “That Thing Called Love” and “You Can’t Keep A Good Man Down”. In the recording studio Smith was backed by the Rega Orchestra, none of whom were likely to have been Black. The resulting single sold pretty well, but Bradford wasn’t satisfied. He could see that Fred Hager was still focussed on the White market. For the follow-up recording, “Crazy Blues”, he insisted on bringing the Jazz Hounds in to play the session. They were an all-Black group, with a flexible line-up. The probable members present for the session were Johnny Dunn (cornet), who led the group, accompanied by Ernest Elliott (clarinet), Leroy Parker (violin), Perry Bradford (piano) and Dope Andrews (trombone). Some writers believe that Ed Cox (cornet) and Willie Smith (piano) played in place of Dunn and Bradford, but that seems unlikely, given that Dunn was the band’s leader and Bradford was the driving force behind the singer and the song! Cox and Smith did play, however, on some of Smith’s follow-up singles. The recording director from OKeh was Ralph Peer. The song was published by the Pace & Handy Publishing Company.
Finally an authentic Black song was recorded! “Crazy Blues”, backed by “It’s Right Here For You”, sold around a million copies over the next few months and alerted the music industry to a new market, the American Black community. It also opened many people’s eyes and ears to a “new” musical genre, Blues. Although the instrumentation and the arrangement of “Crazy Blues” was clearly Jazz-based, the structure of the song, the lyrics and the vocal melody are Blues-based. Following a pattern used by W.C. Handy, Perry Bradford combined sequences of sixteen bars and twelve bars. It is a style known today as Classic Blues, most frequently associated with Black female solo singers, of whom there were many following Mamie Smith’s success.

Mamie Smith & the Jazz Hounds
OKeh soon created a new series, the 8000 catalogue, to tap into this hitherto unrecognised source of income. A New York team led by Clarence Williams and a team in Chicago led by Richard M. Jones were put in charge of production. A year later, the series was given a change of name; it was now called the Race Records series.
The OKeh Race Series was produced from 1921 to 1932, including music by Clarence Williams, Lonnie Johnson, King Oliver and Louis Armstrong. The success of the series persuaded the company to begin “remote recording”. Starting in 1923, OKeh sent a team with mobile recording equipment to cities where new Black artists could be found, including New Orleans, Atlanta, San Antonio, St. Louis, Kansas City and Detroit. The OKeh studio in Atlanta also discovered “hillbilly” artists such as “Fiddlin’ John Carson, who first recorded Country music in 1923. Where OKeh led, other companies soon followed.

OKeh Advertising 1921
Photo: Talking Machine World 1921 (Wikimedia Commons)
Columbia signed a number of Black female Blues singers in 1921, Paramount bought Black Swan in 1924 and switched most of its production to Race music. Vocalion entered the market in the mid-1920s. For the first time, recording companies were taking Black music seriously. Black Swan Records, ARC Records, Gennett, and a whole host of other labels took Jazz, Blues, and Country artists into the studio to cut records or recorded them on mobile equipment in the field, travelling widely to explore new areas, both urban and rural.
One of these new companies stands out. The Pace Phonograph Corporation was founded in 1921 in Harlem, New York, by Black songwriter Harry Pace, to give African American artists more creative opportunities; it was renamed the Black Swan Phonograph Company in the autumn of 1922. It was the second Black-owned record company, after George Broome’s Broome Special Phonographic Records, which was founded in 1919.

Harry Pace
The Crisis (October 1911), p. 236 (Wikimedia Commons)
Pace left school aged twelve but, seven years later, graduated from Atlanta University. In 1912, he met W.C. Handy, with whom he wrote songs and set up a music publishing company. He left to set up a new recording company in 1921, making his aims clear: “There are twelve million colored people in [the] US, and in that number there is hid a wonderful amount of musical ability. We propose to spare no expense in the search for and developing of the best singers and musicians among the twelve million.”
Pace launched his new label using the slogan “The only records using exclusively Negro voices and musicians”. Black newspapers across the USA carried adverts for the new company’s label Black Swan Records. He signed around eighteen artists to the label, including Ethel Waters, known by the nickname Sweet Mama Stringbean, who had a hit with “Down Home Blues” in 1921. She was the fifth Black woman to make a commercial recording, and she went on to have a scintillating career as a recording artist, a film star, and on the stage. Between 1921 and 1938, she released twenty-five hit singles and won three Grammy Awards.
Despite Waters’ success, the company struggled to make a profit. Pace declared the company bankrupt in December 1923 and sold it to Paramount Records in 1924. Although it wasn’t around for very long, the company had made its mark. Other small Black-owned record companies were set up in Los Angeles (Sunshine Records) and Chicago (Black Patti Records).
In 1921, the year during which Harry Pace set up his record company and OKeh Records launched the first ever series of Race Records, there was another highly significant event in the field of Gospel music. A collection of hymns and sacred songs was issued by the National Baptist Convention, which contained one hundred and sixty-four songs written by Black songwriters (including Charles Tindley and Lucie Campbell) and well-known White composers (including Sankey, Bliss, and Rodeheaver). The name of the collection is “Gospel Pearls”; this was the first formal use of the word Gospel (meaning Good News) in relation to songs. Its usage has since been extended to cover the whole gamut of sacred songs from spirituals and modern church hymns to choral songs.

“Gospel Pearls” is important for a second reason. Included in the collection is the song “If I Don’t Get There”, the first “gospel” song written by Thomas A. Dorsey. Dorsey was born in Georgia into a religious family. His father was a Baptist minister. He grew up surrounded by Black music: Jazz, Blues, and Sacred. He played piano. Around the age of twenty, he moved to Chicago where he studied music at the College of Composition and Arranging and began writing songs. Whilst in Chicago, he heard a sermon that changed his life. He went to hear the Reverend A. W. Nix and heard the preacher sing “I Do, Don’t You” and “his heart was inspired”, as he described it. He made up his mind to be a writer not just of secular but also sacred music.

Thomas A. Dorsey
He was much younger than the majority of the composers represented in “Gospel Pearls” and his compositions drew on his love of Jazz and Blues. His playing style appealed to young people and made his songs extremely popular.
Gospel music developed all over the United States, but Chicago was blessed with two outstanding talents during the Race Records era. First, in 1929, Dorsey met a young singer from New Orleans, who impressed him so much that he became her mentor for the next nine years. Her name was Mahalia Jackson.

Thomas Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson
She went on tour with Dorsey until 1946, when she signed for Apollo Records in New York and released “Move on up a Little Higher”. The song sold over two million copies!

Sister Rosetta Tharpe
Also in Chicago during the twenties, was a young singer named Rosetta Tharpe. She came from Arkansas and in 1921, at the age of six, Tharpe was already touring the country with her mother, who was a travelling preacher in The Church of God in Christ, singing spirituals, hymns and old sacred songs in Black churches. She learned to play the guitar and developed a taste for Delta Blues and New Orleans Jazz. In 1938, she moved (still with her mother) to New York, where she signed a contract with Decca Records. Her first album for Decca, “The Lonesome Road”, included several songs by Thomas Dorsey but was entirely secular in terms of the feel of the music. Sister Rosetta Tharpe later returned to Gospel music. More than any other artist, she encapsulated the spirit of Black music and pointed the way forward to post-war Rhythm and Blues music. UK fans of Blues music hold her in high esteem, thanks to a UK tour in 1964, during which she played a memorable set on the platform of Wilbraham Road railway station in Manchester.
So, by 1921, all the key ingredients were in place for an explosion of new Black music, played by Black musicians and marketed to Black music-lovers. The advent of radio and cheaper record players and discs meant that the music could travel far and wide. It could be appreciated by all Americans, Black or White, and it could cross the Atlantic into markets in the UK and Europe and beyond. Race Music took off.

All the companies selling Race Records had a similar range of music in their Race catalogues, with small variations. A Victor poster from the 1920s lists the genres that they included. Sermons were a popular addition to the range, but surprisingly, Jazz is not included here. It is probable that Victor left that genre to OKeh, Columbia, and Paramount.

This newspaper ad for OKeh Race Records shows that George M. Wood’s record shop in Pittsburgh was a specialist Race Records outlet and that Mr. Wood offered a mail order service. That was common practice, You wonder how the discs fared, being sent through the post!
The poster below raises some interesting questions. Did OKeh really think that this catalogue cover would tempt Black music-lovers to browse the records on offer? Was this an attempt to market Race music to White record buyers?

Paramount certainly took a more enlightened approach. The company originally signed a deal with Black Swan to press the discs for all Harry Pace’s recordings and then took Black Swan over when it went bankrupt. They made Race Records the cornerstone of the Paramount company. A quarter of all the Race Records issued from 1922 to 1932 are estimated to have been on the Paramount label. It was certainly the most lucrative element in the company’s sales. Paramount paid a Black entrepreneur, J. Mayo Williams, to scout for them and to arrange all the songs for studio recording. Williams wasn’t a Paramount employee, but his input kept the company in business. The one disappointing element of Paramount’s investment in Race music was the poor quality of some of the recordings and pressings. Nevertheless, Paramount continued successfully until 1932, when the Great Depression hit the economy. They stopped releasing new issues and finally shut down in 1935.

Columbia Records bought the OKeh Record Company in 1926. They specialised in Jazz and Blues, with stars including Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith and Clara Smith. The emergence of confident, Black female singers is due in no small measure to the dramatic success of Mamie Smith in 1920.

Vocalion Records was founded in 1916 and was sold to Brunswick in 1924. The company then became Brunswick’s Race Records imprint, concentrating on Jazz and Blues. Jim Jackson had a major hit with “Kansas City Blues” in 1927, and Vocalion quickly grew in popularity. Like OKeh Records, Vocalion sent recording teams out into the smaller towns and rural communities in search of undiscovered talent. Thanks to this approach, many obscure but highly talented Jazz, Gospel and Blues singers became known. The most significant recordings for Blues fans were the sessions recorded with Robert Johnson from the Mississippi Delta during the late nineteen-thirties. The company was bought by CBS in 1939 as part of the acquisition of ARC and was made a subsidiary of Columbia Records. Within a year the label ceased to be used.

The Wall Street Crash in 1929, followed by the Great Depression during the thirties, had a world-wide economic impact. The music industry was hit hard. According to researcher Reebee Garofalo, “annual record revenues in the United States declined immediately and then plummeted to an all-time low of $6 million in 1933.” Most record companies closed their Race Records production. Like many other Americans, African American musicians were unable to find work.
Strangely, through the extreme hardships of the thirties, the term Race Music lingered on. During World War ll, in 1942, Billboard Magazine established a new chart to measure the most popular records amongst the Black population of Harlem, New York. They called it the Harlem Hit Parade. Three years later, at the end of the war, they added the Race Records Chart. Initially the chart covered just juke box plays, but in 1948 record sales were also included. It seems strange today to describe music of Black origin as Race Music, but the term had been in common use for some time and no-one had come up with a better alternative.
Jerry Wexler, later co-owner of Atlantic Records, then a journalist at Billboard Magazine, finally found a solution. He coined the description “Rhythm & Blues” in 1949 and a new R&B Chart was added to the Billboard collection. It took until 1958 for the three charts to be consolidated into just one. Since then, the name has been changed ten times!
It is not difficult to see faults in the way that Black performers were treated in the era of Race Records. Many of the field recordings were made with artists who didn’t understand the need for a contract. As a result, many stories are told of records appearing with no credit given to the real singers and of performers who received no royalties at all. Nevertheless, Mamie Smith opened a door of opportunity. Many Black artists took that opportunity to make their mark in music history, including many women, and several entrepreneurs showed that record companies could be set up by Black men. Their example was followed by a host of talented Black musicians, arrangers, songwriters and singers, and a small number of record company owners.
Whatever you call it, Race Music was at the heart of the most important developments in popular music after 1945, starting in New Orleans with the emergence of Fats Domino, Little Richard and Lloyd Price, and in Chicago with the birth of Electric Blues and then smooth R&B. In Memphis, Otis Redding and Al Green added variations of Soul to the mix. In Detroit and Chicago, the pounding dance beats of Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and Fontella Bass gave way to the Psychedelic Soul of the Temptations and Minnie Riperton. And in Muscle Shoals, a group of White musicians who all loved Black music created some magic in a corner of Alabama with some talented Black singers. Between 1963 and 1973, Black music spread far and wide. It was no longer Race music but Everybody’s music.
All the singers and musicians involved in the development of R&B and Soul music after World War ll built on the work of the pre-war pioneers.
The piano-based R&B of Professor Longhair, Allen Toussaint and Dr. John can be traced back to development of Ragtime, Boogie-Woogie and Jazz in the early years of the twentieth century. The horn-players of the Jazz age must have inspired the saxophonists, trombonists and trumpeters of New Orleans, the Memphis and Muscle Shoals Horns, the Funk Brothers and the session men in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. A large percentage of the session musicians in studios across America played Jazz before turning to other genres, including R&B and Soul. The Blues singers from the Mississippi Delta and those of their number who moved to Chicago showed what a versatile instrument the guitar could be, as did Sister Rosetta Tharpe. The wonderful session guitarists of Chicago, Detroit, Memphis and Muscle Shoals learned a lot from them.
And, everywhere, there was Gospel. Many of the post-war R&B and Soul artists grew up in church-going families. They learnt to sing in church, they understood the beauty of harmony and choral singing. They knew that music is able to carry an emotional charge. When Sister Rosetta Tharpe moved from Gospel to secular performances, she was highly criticised by many, but she was determined to take her music beyond the church and she inspired others to do the same. Sam Cooke followed the same path in 1957 and Aretha Franklin did likewise in 1960. The Staple Singers, exceptionally, managed to merge sacred and secular in a way that attracted less criticism. These are the singers who best exemplify the importance of Gospel to the development of Soul and R&B, but a great many of the performers in these genres demonstrated that impact too.
It was the issuing of the Race Records series by OKeh, Paramount, Victor, Decca, Columbia and many others that enabled all Black music genres to flourish. It was through these recordings that the music became available to the White communities in America, whether through the buying of discs or listening to the radio or playing them on a juke-box. Some of the Race recordings were also exported to Europe and elsewhere, helping to grow the industry in those early days and opening new markets for first Jazz, Blues and Gospel, and then R&B and Soul. Despite being called Race music for so long, the music has demonstrated the power to bring Black and White communities together.
Would Harry Pace have been surprised at the phenomenal success of music of Black origin? I doubt it. He knew how much talent was waiting to be discovered.
Coming soon: Race Records Part 2, which will present a detailed account of the labels that issued Race Records from the nineteen twenties to the forties.
Bill Spicer January 2025