Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry

333 Pages·2020·2.381 MB·English

by  Kyle Barnett

Record Cultures

Record Cultures
The Transformation of the
U.S. Recording Industry
KYLE BARNETT
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS • ANN ARBOR
First paperback edition 2021
Copyright © 2020 by Kyle Barnett
All rights reserved
For questions or permissions, please contact [email protected].
Published in the United States of America by the
University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid- free paper
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication data has been applied for.
First published in paperback July 2021.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Barnett, Kyle, author.
Title: Record cultures : the transformation of the U.S. recording industry / Kyle
Barnett.
Description: Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2020. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019039017 (print) | LCCN 2019039018 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780472131037 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780472124312 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Sound recording industry— United States— History. |
Popular music— Social aspects— United States— History.
Classification: LCC ML3790 .B27 2020 (print) | LCC ML3790 (ebook) |
DDC 384— dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039017
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039018
ISBN: 978-0-472-03877-0 (pbk : alk paper)
For Lisa

Acknowledgments
I lived with this book a long while and I am deeply grateful for those that
helped along the way. This project began while I was a graduate student
at the University of Texas Department of Radio-T elevision- Film. When I
brought Tom Schatz my proposal to frame the story of the recording in-
dustry as a media industry during a crucial, transitional era, he immediately
embraced the idea. Without his support and friendship, this book would
likely not exist. At Texas, I was fortunate to find a committee of brilliant
and supportive scholars: Jim Buhler, John Downing, James Hay, Mary Ke-
arney, and Craig Watkins. I am so thankful for the friendship, camaraderie,
and critical eye of my friends and colleagues at Texas, who read various
versions of what appears here: Christopher Lucas, Afsheen Nomai, Allison
Perlman, Jennifer Petersen, and Avi Santo.
At Bellarmine University, I found lasting friendship and support from
Ruth Wagoner and Gail Henson, who supported my research and assisted
me in navigating the learning curve endemic to life as a junior profes-
sor. My fellow faculty in Bellarmine’s Department of Communication
have helped this come together, among a blur of classes, meetings, and
campus changes big and small. I am especially grateful to the friendship
and collegiality of Moira O’Keeffe, who offered writing advice and sup-
port with great patience and kindness. I benefited in no small way from
the assistance of Sue Mauldin, our administrative assistant in Bellarmine’s
Department of Communication, who fuses optimism and care for students,
faculty, and staff, with a practical disposition perfect for the role. Thanks
to numerous undergraduate work- study students who assisted me, under
Sue’s tutelage, over the course of this book project. I am indebted for the
help of Bellarmine’s first- rate reference librarians: Daniel Bays, John Boyd,
viii • Acknowledgments
Kevin Peers, and Martha Perry-L undgren for their tireless work in track-
ing down hard-t o- find sources and answering my arcane questions. Thanks
to my undergraduate and graduate students over the years, at Bellarmine
and elsewhere, whose discussions with me about music, media, and history
are reflected here in meaningful ways. Those students could attest to my
writing time in the coffee houses of Louisville, and I am accordingly thank-
ful for the (past and present) baristas of Sunergos Coffee on Norris Place
and Quills Coffee on Baxter Avenue.
At the University of Michigan Press, Mary Francis proved to be the
ideal editor for a book that stands at the intersection of music, media, and
culture. Mary assisted and supported this project at various stages with in-
sight and patience. Thanks to all at the University of Michigan Press who
helped me along: Sara Cohen, Susan Cronin, Mary Hashman, Carol Reed,
and Samuel Killian.
I am thankful to the archivists and librarians who assisted me in no
small way. Their assistance in this detective work was and is a pleasure. I am
grateful for the help of archivists and librarians at the Starr- Gennett Foun-
dation (then curated by Elizabeth Surles) and the Wayne County Histori-
cal Society in Richmond, Indiana. Thanks to Deborah Gillaspie of the Chi-
cago Jazz Archive at the University of Chicago, as well as Matt Holdzkom,
Jordan Ryan, and the staff of the Indiana Historical Society (IHS) in India-
napolis. My deepest thanks to the family of the late John MacKenzie, who
made sure his Gennett Records research was made available to researchers
at the IHS. In Nashville, I benefited from the advice of senior historian
John Rumble of the Country Music Hall of Fame. Thanks to a tip from
the late author and collector Raymond Wile and the help of archivists at
the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts’ Rodgers and Ham-
merstein Archives of Recorded Sound, I researched OKeh and Columbia
Records materials that to my knowledge have yet to be cataloged. I’m also
thankful to the staff of the Camden County Historical Society in Camden,
New Jersey, where I researched RCA- Victor history and the Port Wash-
ington Historical Society and Ozaukee County Historical Society in Wis-
consin, where I researched Paramount Records. The holdings of such city
and county historical societies hold untold treasures, of which we remain
largely unaware. At Kentucky’s Berea College, I was greatly assisted by ar-
chivist Harry Rice in researching the Southern Appalachian Collection in
the Hutchins Library Special Collections and Archives. Various trips to the
Library of Congress’ Recorded Sound Reference Center were crucial for
this research, where I benefited from the expertise of Bryan Cornell, Karen
Acknowledgments • ix
Fishman, and David Sager. I was granted access to archival audio inter-
views of musicians and talent scouts in the Southern Folklife Collection
thanks to Steven Weiss and staff at the University of North Carolina’s Wil-
son Library, and from Martin Fisher and Greg Reish at Middle Tennessee
State University’s Center for Popular Music. I am also deeply grateful to
the collectors, fans, and amateur researchers from whom I have learned
much over the years. Their work has been crucial to media research and
deserves to be recognized.
I am thankful for the anthology editors that commented on several
book chapters that were precursors to what I present here. Some of my
work on Gennett in chapter 1 first appeared in “The Recording Indus-
try’s Role in Media History,” in Convergence Media History, edited by Ja-
net Staiger and Sabine Hake (Routledge, 2009). Some passages focused
on scouts as cultural intermediaries in chapter 2 were first published in
“Record Men: Talent Scouts in the U.S. Recording Industry, 1920– 1935,”
in Making Media Work: Cultures of Management in the Entertainment Indus-
tries, edited by Derek Johnson, Derek Kompare, and Avi Santo (New York
University Press, 2014). Thanks to the Berea College Special Collections
and Archives, the Library of Congress, the Country Music Hall of Fame,
and the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library of
the Performing Arts for images reproduced here. I am fortunate to have
Chicago’s Halloween Martin gracing the cover of this book, who many
believe to be the first female radio disc jockey in Chicago, and quite pos-
sibly the United States. (Her life and career deserve more attention.) The
image first appeared (without a photographer’s credit) in the November
1932 issue of The Chicagoan and appears here thanks to Quigley Publishing
Company, a division of QP Media, Inc.
I received several fellowships that assisted in the research and writing
of this book. At the University of Texas, I received a Jesse Jones Fellowship
that afforded me resources and time to work. Thanks to Bellarmine Uni-
versity for several Faculty Development Fellowships that supported this
research, which allowed funding to visit archives. Thanks to Bellarmine for
the sabbatical in which I was able to focus on research without the teach-
ing and administrative responsibilities of a college professor at a liberal arts
college. Finally, I am grateful for the generous support of the American
Musicological Society for a grant in support of this research.
This book was given new purpose by the late David Sanjek’s presenta-
tion, “First I Look at the Purse: The Contamination of Popular Music
Studies by Agoraphobia,” at the 2011 Experience Music Project pop music