Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945 (review)

Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945. By William Howland Kenney. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xix+258. $45.

When Thomas Edison first recorded sound in 1877, he thought he had revolutionized business communications. Once improved, he was sure, his phonograph would become an automatic stenographer. Edison's adoring public believed him. As it turned out, inventor and public alike were stunningly wrong about the future of the phonograph. Amusement, not dictation, would be the primary function of recording, promoted by a whole new entertainment industry. The history of recorded music cannot, in other words, be the history of inventing or machinery. It is rather a history of appropriations and adaptive uses, a history of the way machinery gets construed in its engagement with changing social, economic, and cultural structures and practices. The great value of William Kenney's book, long overdue in the study of sound recording, is its articulation and exploration of such engagements.

Despite an overarching chronology from 1890 to 1945, much of the book is arranged topically, with chapters treating different cultural constructions of sound recording. For example, Kenney includes chapters on popular, lowbrow records (from 1890 to World War I), on the Victor Talking Machine Company and highbrow records (from roughly 1903 to 1926), on "foreign" versus "ethnic" records (roughly 1900-29), and on the changing gender valence of the medium (1890-30). Readers may want to keep their own chronology as they enjoy Kenney's wealth of detail along this sliding, synchronic scale. That detail is moored via endnotes to the author's readings in American cultural history, such as the work of Kathy Peiss on public amusements, Victor Greene on ethnic music, and Eric Lott on minstrelsy.

Later chapters are likewise topical, though they gradually become the stories of representative individuals. So Kenny's chapter on race records and the beginnings of rhythm and blues and his chapter on hillbilly music are both organized around the careers of industry principals, usually the men behind influential record labels. In the first instance, readers encounter Perry Bradford, Harry Pace, and J. Mayo Williams, and in the second it is Ralph Sylvester Peer and his associates.

Such a top-down focus corresponds in kind if not degree to much of the original research in earlier chapters of the book, which includes careful readings of the principal trade publication of the American recording industry, Talking Machine World. Like Paul Théberge in his attention to the trade magazine The Music Trades (in his 1997 book, Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology), Kenney puts his readings of Talking Machine World to good use without losing his sense that "the political economy of culture" requires a symmetric attention to consumers and "patterns in the audience reception" of phonographs and records (pp. xv-xvi).

Of course, audience reception is notoriously difficult to study, and Kenney at least seems sensitive to the point. Consumers do remain pretty bloodless in this account, although Kenney's opening chapter offers a provocative contrast between two different audiences in the early 1920s. One is a group of 2,644 respondents to a survey of customers by Thomas A. Edison, Inc., and the other a small cadre of white, male jazz enthusiasts. Same period, same medium, but these two audiences suggestively appear to have used recorded music to vastly different ends.

Finally! This is a fully cultural history of the phonograph. Kenney adds a sense of process, adds the music and the milieu to previous accounts, which have been more oriented toward (or at least by) the machine.

Lisa Gitelman

Dr. Gitelman is an assistant professor in the Program for Media Studies at Catholic University. She is the author of Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (1999).

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