As we saw in Race Records Part 1, the earliest recordings of Black performing artists were made to satisfy a White audience. They included comedy songs, minstrel songs, some harmony songs by barber-shop quartets, a few Spirituals, some instrumentals, such as “Memphis Blues”, and some Jazz pieces. Three companies controlled the recorded music market, thanks to patents taken out on their inventions by the early pioneers. They were Columbia, Victor and Edison. In 1919, those patents were challenged in court by entrepreneurs who wanted to join the newly-created industry. When they won their case, the door was open for new companies to be born.
It was one of the new companies, OKeh, who, almost by accident, found the key that unlocked an untapped market amongst America’s Black communities. Mamie Smith’s first recording for OKeh sold around ten thousand copies. That was encouraging! When a group of Black musicians was added to the mix for the recording of “Crazy Blues” in 1920, the public response was amazing.
Mamie Smith and her Jazz Hounds
The record was promoted in the normal way. Advertising was not targeted at the Black communities, yet the word was spread that a Black female singer had recorded a song written by a Black songwriter in a style that drew on Jazz and Blues. It was a style of music that had developed in the theatres, where vaudeville entertainment included many such songs. Now, recorded for the first time, it created a sensation, selling over one hundred thousand copies. The response of the other recording companies was mixed. Edison and Victor were not convinced, while Columbia and Arto immediately went in search of Black female Vaudeville Blues singers and found Mary Stafford and Lucille Hegamin.
Another of the new companies, Black Swan, also wasn’t quick to follow the path taken by OKeh. Black owner Harry Pace was a keen supporter of Black artists, but first he felt that he needed to establish his company as a serious music business. He concentrated, therefore, on Black Classical singers, to raise the status of Black music, before later recording Ethel Waters singing in a more popular style. Ajax Records took a similar approach, advertising their recordings as “the Quality Race Record” and then turning to Vaudeville Blues singer Hazel Myers. Other Black entrepreneurs created small record companies to promote Jazz. None of these early Black-owned companies were able to raise enough capital to develop their businesses quickly, and none of them were able to solve the important issue of distribution. They could achieve success in a local area, but they found it hard to advertise and market more widely. All of them soon closed.
Black Swan was bought by Paramount, who decided to concentrate its efforts on Race Records and the Black record-buyers, who had bought “Crazy Blues” in 1920. Paramount found another style of Blues, by looking not in the cities were Vaudeville Blues had originated but in more rural areas.
The Country Blues of Blind Blake and Papa Charlie Jackson brought them significant success, as did the Southern Blues of Ma Rainey and Ida Cox. They were joined in the market by Gennett Records, who brought King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band to record in Richmond, Indiana, and quickly developed a very strong Race Records roster.
In all communities there was a new level of prosperity building during the twenties. This brought an increase in opportunities for new businesses to cater for the demand for entertainment. Music was an important part of that demand.
In 1923, Bessie Smith recorded “Down Hearted Blues” for Columbia. It probably sold a million copies! Bessie Smith was from the South. She had grown up in Chattanooga, earning money as a street singer after the death of her parents. 1n 1912, when only fourteen years old, she had joined a travelling show, where she had met Ma Rainey and been taken under her wing. Eleven years later, thanks to Columbia, she was the best-known of the Blues singers. She was presented, as were her female Blues singer colleagues, as confident, glamorous and sophisticated. She was given the name “Empress of the Blues”. She sang about enjoying herself and seeking pleasures in life, but she also sang about hardship, poverty, abusive treatment and pain. There are echoes of slavery in some of the Southern Blues songs. In 1929, W.C. Handy made a short film to tell the story of his seminal tune “St. Louis Blues”, which Smith had recorded in 1925. He chose her to star in it.
For the record companies, there was an added bonus in recording the songs of the Southern Blues singers. Many of the songs that they brought into the studio or sang on the companies’ field trips were not published. They were folk songs, handed down from singer to singer, with all the variations that such oral transmission implies, while the Northern female Blues singers, such as Mamie Smith, sang songs that had been written by songwriters and copyrighted. The bonus for the companies who recorded Southern Blues was that there was often no songwriter’s royalty to pay. The companies could copyright the songs and then pick up royalties when other artists recorded them. Often, there was no royalty paid to the singers either. Bessie Smith couldn’t read and didn’t understand that she should be paid for every disc sold. She recorded well over a hundred and fifty songs for Columbia over ten years, but she probably only received a one-off payment for each recording.
In 1920, Mamie Smith had recorded “Crazy Blues” with a small Jazz group, the Jazz Hounds, and that pattern was copied for the next three years by all the record companies who issued Vaudeville Blues songs sung by the Queens of the Blues. Then, in February 1924, OKeh Records released Sara Martin singing “Good-Bye Blues”, backed by “Longing For Daddy Blues”. The songs were co-written by Martin herself and Clarence Williams. For the first time, there was just one accompanying musician, Sylvester Weaver, playing guitar. The songs had been recorded in New York in October and November 1923. An advert for the disc was placed in the Chicago Defender on February 9th, highlighting Sylvester Weaver’s “big, mean, blue guitar”. A sketch of an old Black guitarist outside a shack illustrated the ad. It was the first hint of the Country Blues that was to emerge from the Mississippi Delta.
Sara Martin & Sylvester Weaver
The Southern Blues artists such as Ma Rainey and Sara Martin began to move away from the Jazz Band formula, adding a more rural option, the Jug Band, which featured whisky jars, banjos, violins and guitars. It was a move that was probably encouraged by the record companies as a way of adding something new to the Race Records mix.
Strangely, the male singers who were usually guitarists too never achieved the popularity of the Queens of the Blues during the inter-war period. One of the first male Blues singers to be recorded was Big Bill Broonzy. He had been a sharecropper in Mississippi and a soldier before he joined thousands of his fellow African Americans in the Great Migration in the 1920s. He made his way to Chicago, where he took a series of low-paid jobs.
Big Bill Broonzy 1951
Photo: James Kriegsmann for Mercury Records (Wikimedia Commons)
Broonzy had made himself a fiddle from a cigar box when he was ten, on which he played folk tunes and spirituals, but in Chicago he switched to guitar. He was taught to play by Papa Charlie Jackson and then teamed up with a friend, John Thomas, to audition for J. Mayo Williams at Paramount. The duo’s first release was “House Rent Stomp” in 1927, but it made little impression. It is possible that record buyers regarded Blues as a genre that belonged to female singers!
By 1929 all the major companies (even the reluctant ones) were devoting considerable time and money to recording a wide range of music of Black origin. Thanks to field trips into more rural areas of the Eastern United States, a large number of talented performers were now finding their songs on sale in record stores and department stores across America.
In cities with large Black populations, there were specialist Race Records stores. Many of the stores and several of the recording companies also made the discs available through mail order. New studios had been built in the major cities and the industry had grown as recording methods and record-players were improved to create discs that gave good-quality reproduction, while the price of the discs went down even as they became more durable.
Through the twenties it also became easier to buy goods on credit, which gave poorer families the chance to buy record players. All these changes led to a rapid growth in sales of music of Black origin, mainly among the Black communities but also amongst White record buyers. Before 1920, Black songwriters relied on White performers to sing their compositions; after 1920, some White songwriters began to write songs with Black performers in mind. They had some stiff competition from Black songwriters, including Perry Bradford, Clarence Williams, Charles Warfield, Alex Hill, Chris Smith and Thomas “Fats” Waller. In addition, some of the Southern Blues artists were writing their own songs.
Around the end of the twenties, Big Bill Broonzy went on to record for Champion and Gennett, then moved to the ARC labels in 1932, where he finally started to get noticed. His next move was in in 1934, to Bluebird, where he teamed up with pianist Black Bob, and then it was on again to Vocalion in 1938. A minor breakthrough came that year. He was booked by John H. Hammond to appear in the “From Spirituals to Swing” concert at Carnegie Hall in New York, and then asked back the following year.
He continued to write songs, accumulating hundreds of credits, and widened his repertoire during the forties, including folk songs, spirituals, Country Blues, Urban Blues, Hokum, Ragtime, and everything in between. When the male Country Blues artists became an inspiration for musicians in the UK during the nineteen sixties, the importance of Broonzy and his fellow artists was finally recognised. Broonzy was invited to the UK and later toured in Europe on several occasions, but he and his colleagues remained almost completely unknown amongst White Americans.
Broonzy was one of hundreds of Black artists trying to make a career in the music industry. His experiences were typical. He was obliged to move around from one company to another. Long-term contracts were not on offer for most of the Race artists. Neither were royalties. Broonzy told Alan Lomax in 1947: “I didn’t get no royalties, because I didn’t know nothing about trying to demand for no money, see.”
After the Wall Street Crash and the fallow years of the Great Depression, the music industry was able to recover and expand during the later part of the thirties. In 1927, the annual value of record sales in America had been around one hundred million dollars. By 1933, it is estimated that the value had sunk to only six million dollars. Race series were shut down everywhere; some companies closed completely, whilst others amalgamated. The price of discs was halved and the number of new recordings was drastically reduced. The industry survived by re-issuing a lot of old material. Then, things began to improve. The Prohibition laws banning the sale of alcohol were repealed in 1933, giving a boost to live entertainment. Towards the end of the thirties, the widespread installation of jukeboxes pushed the demand for discs up another notch. Three major companies emerged from the Depression. They were Columbia and RCA Victor, plus Decca, a late-comer to the industry and a subsidiary of Decca UK. Together they took Race music in new directions.
The most popular music genre of the thirties was Big Band Swing. The improvised Jazz of the twenties continued within smaller groups of musicians, but it was the sound of the new orchestras that dominated. The music they played was sophisticated, scored and arranged, often with a vocalist or two who were not usually credited. The brass instruments of earlier years were now augmented by the addition of woodwind instruments. The sound was rich and smooth.
Cab Calloway and his Orchestra
Many of the bands were led by Black musicians who became famous: Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Chick Webb and more, who took Jazz into the main stream. Race Records series were becoming redundant. The industry recovered well, until 1942, when two major set-backs occurred.
In December, 1941, Japanese forces had attacked Pearl Harbour in Hawaii and other American and British bases across South East Asia and the Pacific, as a result of which America declared war on Japan. During the following year, the United States government imposed rationing on the use of shellac, which was the material used to create the discs manufactured by the recording industry. Much of the shellac used by the recording industry came from areas affected by the war in the East, so was no longer available. Within a short time, record company stocks of shellac were depleted and production of new discs was severely curtailed.
That was followed by the second crisis – the breakdown of talks between the record companies and the American Federation of Musicians over royalty payments. The response of the union’s President, James C. Petrillo, was to call a strike, which began at midnight on July 31st, 1942. All union musicians were required to withdraw from any commercial recording. The strike did not affect live performances or radio broadcasts. The record companies had, of course, taken action to mitigate the impact of the strike before the talks broke down. All the major bands had been in the studios during July, allowing the companies to build up a stock of recordings “just in case”. They thought the strike would be called off after just a few weeks.
They were wrong. The strike went on, week after week, until the companies’ stockpiles were gone. Then, the companies issued old recordings that had never been used, while re-releasing some old favourites too. Still, the musicians held out. Some of the smaller companies settled with the union in mid-1943, and that put added pressure on the majors.
James C. Petrillo
Decca was the first of the big three to sign a deal with the union, in September 1943. The remaining companies refused to follow Decca’s example and the strike continued for another year! With a hint of desperation, Columbia, RCA Victor and the rest took their case to the White House, as a result of which President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote to James Petrillo asking him politely to call off the strike. Petrillo did not meet the request and the end came quickly, with all the companies signing up to similar royalty schemes. It was the longest strike ever called in the entertainment industry, finally ending on November 11th 1944. The end of the war came in September 1945. The music industry was soon growing again, but some major changes were being made.
The big bands were in decline. They had lost many of their members in the war and tastes were moving away from orchestral Jazz-based dance music. Individual singers were now the stars rather than the bandleaders, and small groups were also in favour.
The large multinational companies were still leading the way, but the strike had created the opportunity for smaller independent companies to record new performers, who were not in any union. Savoy and Excelsior had been set up in 1942, King and Apollo in 1943, DeLuxe and Jukebox in 1944 (renamed Specialty in 1946), Modern and Imperial in 1945, Miracle and Dial in 1946, and Aristocrat, Atlantic, and Mercury in 1947. Aristocrat became Chess in 1950. And another big player had joined the market. Just before the AFM had called on its members to strike in 1942, Capitol Records (originally called Liberty) had opened on the West Coast. It built its own studios and pressing plants and set up its own distribution network. Mercury followed suit.
The musicians strike had many important consequences but the industry quickly recovered any lost ground. Record sales had been around 127 million units in 1941. That jumped to 275 million units in 1946 and topped 400 million units the following year.
The first 12-inch LP (long-playing recording) was issued in 1948. The first 45rpm single came in 1949. Discs were now made from vinyl instead of shellac. The record industry, like many others, was experiencing a boom. It has been estimated that around a thousand new record labels were created by 1954. Many of them were happy to focus on one or two genres of music and to restrict their sales area rather than try to cover the whole country. In addition, sound recording was much improved by the introduction of magnetic tape recording machines. Ampex delivered the first machine in 1948; by 1950, it was the industry standard.
Most important of all the music was developing too. The Swing of the thirties gave way to Jump Blues in Los Angeles, New Orleans and many other cities, the old-style Country Blues became Electric Blues in Chicago, the Hillbilly Country music was energised by Bluegrass, and labels such as Folkways and Elektra stimulated the revival of interest in Folk music. In the field of Jazz, Charlie Parker and Dizzie Gillespie were playing a new style of Jazz, Be Bop, which started to appear on recordings made by the new independent labels from 1944.
Conclusion
It is hard to overestimate the importance of Race Records to the development of Black music in the United States. They were an important means of earning a living for Black musicians between 1920 and 1945. Radio had grown in popularity, but Black performers were not given many opportunities to be heard via that medium during the inter-war years. Live performances had been the main source of income prior to 1920, but venues were often segregated. Recorded music was the most important factor in making Black musicians known to White audiences, even though progress was slow.
The Race label was dropped by the record companies after the war, although Billboard magazine began issuing a Race Records chart in 1945 and maintained it until 1949. At the end of each year, starting in 1946, Billboard analysed all the juke box plays for that year and calculated the overall success of each single. Later, they measured record sales too. The results were published in a Top Race Records chart. In 1946, the chart was dominated by Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five, with eleven singles featuring during the year, and Lionel Hampton & His Orchestra, with the year’s top hit “Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop”. Jordan and Hampton led the way again in 1947, with the addition of Count Basie & His Orchestra, but there were some interesting newcomers from Capitol (Julia Lee & Her Boy Friends, Nellie Lutcher & Her Rhythm) and Exclusive (Joe Liggins & His Honeydrippers).
In 1948, Louis Jordan had just two entries on the chart; the rest of the entries were taking Race Records in a new direction, thanks largely to the new independent companies. King Records, founded in Cincinnati in 1943 by Syd Nathan, had six entries. Miracle Records, established in 1946 in Chicago by Lee L. Egalnick, had three singles at number one on the Race Records chart during 1948. They all made the Top of the Year chart and one of them, “Long Gone”, was the year’s most successful release, topping the Top of the Year chart. Capital also had three entries, with Julia Lee and Nellie Lutcher again, plus Nat King Cole. Other independent labels to make the Top chart were 4 Star, Savoy, Modern, National, Mercury, Specialty, Natural and Bullet. The industry had changed and so had the music. Many of these independents were set up to promote Black artists, many of them heading towards Rhythm & Blues.
It has been estimated that around fifteen thousand discs were issued of performances by Black artists as part of a Race or General series during the Race Records era. Two thirds of these were Blues tracks, although it is important to note that the early Vaudeville Blues were actually Jazz-based. Just over three thousand were Jazz, and just under two thousand were Gospel. This total is only a tiny part of the overall record production during this period, but it is nevertheless a hugely significant part. Just ten years after Billboard replaced the Race Records Chart with the Rhythm & Blues Chart, Berry Gordy set up Tamla Records and the phenomenon of Motown hit the popular music industry. For ten years or more, Rhythm and Blues music had already been developing in New Orleans, Los Angeles, Chicago and other American cities, thanks largely to post-war independent labels that emerged from the musicians’ strike. Since that early explosion, music of Black origin has been at the heart of most popular music in the USA and beyond. It still is today.
Bill Spicer 2025. All Rights Reserved
