The Race Record Industry.
...cal music. Some artists, mainly choruses, went abroad (in Europe and Africa) and sang Negro spirituals. At the same time, ministers like Charles A. Tindley, in Philadelphia, and their churches sang exciting church songs that they copyrighted.”(Spiritual Workshop, par. 12) The African-American gaining their new freedom had time to become independent citizens giving them the freedom to express themselves. The African-American culture already had deep roots in music before their emancipation. So it does not seem that strange that they would create a new style of music. This new style is the Blues “originated by black sharecroppers who took the field hollers and work songs and transformed them into song.”(Davis) “The blues was first sung by men at leisure, and was called the folk blues. Some folk blues singers sung in medicine shows and touring carnivals. As black vaudeville singers came in contact with country singers, they eventually learned to sing the blues. Vaudeville singers brought a professional quality to it and constructed the foundation for the Classic Blues. The first recording of the blues was in 1895. George W. Johnson's recording of "Laughing Song" was the first blues song to be recorded."(About, par. 5, 8) This recording was very important for later happening in the recoding industry. “The record industry began as a stepchild of the Sheet-music business, since popular tunes originally were consumed primarily through the sale of sheet music.”(George 8) “After the exhibition of his first crude tinfoil apparatus in 1878-79, Thomas Edison virtually abandoned the phonograph to work on the electric light. He did not return to work on it until 1886 when the expiration of his major commitments to the electric light, and the hot breath of competition from other inventors working on sound recording, brought him back into the fray. By 1888 Edison had produced an “improved phonograph, this one capable of producing permanent recordings.”(Brooks 26) Edison’s talking machine might have never played music if it were not for “Victor H. Emerson, a twenty-four-year-old telegraph operator and [art time employee of the struggling New Jersey Phonograph Company. Fascinated with the potential of the wondrous new talking machine, he enthusiastically pitched the idea of making musical recording to the owners of the company. They initially resisted but, with their business on the brink of collapse, finally agreed. Emerson later and got a four piece band together on a summer day in 1890. He paid the musician’s $3.50 for the day and made 500 albums in turn they sold them for two dollars each.”(Brooks 26) These recording “were played on “coin-in-slot” machines that were set up in public places. By 1891 more than 1,250 of the machines were in operation throughout the United States.” This grew to the extent that from “World War I through the mid-1920s, advancements in technology permitted an explosion in record sales, causing music historians to dub the period the “golden age”.”(George 8) This time period might be labeled the gold age, but it was not until the introduction of the “race records” did the record industry really begin to profit. After Victor, the patent holder of the phonograph, lost its patent on its ‘machine in 1919’ it opened the market so that “any company was now free to make lateral-cut records.”(Oliver 249) One of the companies to take advantage of this opportunity was OKeh, also known for the original “race recording”. “In 1920 Mamie Smith, a female African American singer little known outside of vaudeville, recorded the song "Crazy Blues" for the small OKeh record label."(Killmeier, par. 3) Smith’s song “Crazy Blues” was “released in November of 1920; it sold 75,000 copies the first month of release, and unexpectedly sold over 100,000 copies by the end of the year. This in turned the emerging recording industry's attention to African-American artists and audiences.”(Brooks 374; About, par. 9; Killmeier, par. 3) This was the birth of the “race record industry. The sales of the “Crazy Blues” record showed that the “race” market, giving more African-American the possibility of recording their own albums. “Still competing with sheet-music publishers for marketplace supremacy, the fledging record industry toppled 100 million units in sales for the first time in 1921, thanks in no small part to the participation of black Americans to whom sheet music had meant nothing, requiring as it did both conventional literacy and the ability to read music—not to mention access to a piano.”(Davis 62) The popularity of the “race records” grew till the “the recordings by colored singers were being issued at an average of about one per week during 1921 and 1922. In January 1922 Metronome declared that every phonograph company has a colored girl recording blues’.”(Oliver 251) “OKeh, who had unwittingly started it all, continued to be leader of the new trend. Mamie Smith continued to be featured (twenty-three more Mamie Smi...