In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

appendix: caribbean and south american recordings Dick Spottswood It is interesting to speculate what sorts of music would have been captured on early records if Thomas Edison had built his laboratories in—say—North Carolina, Alabama , or Texas, where rich indigenous preindustrialized music traditions thrived, black, white, and otherwise. Instead, sound recording was invented in West Orange , New Jersey, a suburb of New York City, where music publishing became a thriving business after the Civil War. Music became a commodifiable product of Tin Pan Alley on the one hand and of the classical/art establishment on the other. New copyrightable New York music was a major component of sound recordings from 1889, when music cylinders were first produced for coin-operated salon phonographs , to the 1920s. When the record industry belatedly discovered that black and white regional and traditional styles of music from other parts of America could produce profits, mountain music, cowboy songs, jazz, and the blues became available on records. Abroad, as the phonograph industry was gearing up at the end of the nineteenth century, English and European entrepreneurs quickly set out to create markets throughout Europe and Asia. Portable equipment and sound technicians traveled to urban centers throughout the continents to capture local and regional music, correctly assuming that, if familiar music was available, consumers would buy phonographs and records. The process ensured that an impressive body of folk, classical , religious, and popular music from many locales was captured. Some of those recordings survive today, giving us invaluable glimpses into the kaleidoscopic world of music a century and more ago. When American record-makers wanted to sell their products beyond U.S. borders , they quickly came to terms with the popular local, regional, and folk styles of other nations in this hemisphere, including the artistry of black and creole musicmakers . Fortunately they did so in abundance, though relatively few of the early discs and cylinders they produced survive today. Examples of Cuban danzones, Brazilian chôros, and Trinidadian paseos from the 1900s and 1910s have been reissued, allowing us to enjoy African American music from the other Americas. But, as we trace our own music history, we stare at old photos of North American black music -makers, desperately wishing for surviving sounds to accompany the fading images —sounds from the early records that were never made. 07.APP.523-530_Broo 12/17/03, 1:48 PM 523 524 appendix With Tin Pan Alley providing the hits, and capable singers and musicians performing them, New York record products reflected enough popular taste of the time that no one thought of capturing and distributing regional music from other parts of the country. It wasn’t until 1920 that blues singer Mamie Smith demonstrated that there was a separate and identifiable audience for recorded African American music. Three years later, a surprise hit record by Atlanta’s Fiddlin’ John Carson showed that a comparable audience existed for southern white rural music. By then, enterprising record-makers learned that they could work profitably in locales remote from New York and find appealing songs and styles unique to particular places. The early industry did supply appropriate music to the foreign-born audience. New York had no shortage of immigrants from many lands, and language variety was reflected in foreign-language catalogs after 1905. European products were available for reissue here, supplemented by examples of popular local immigrant talent. Among diverse genres, there were Greek songs from Ottoman Turkey, romantic Neapolitan melodies, klezmer dances from Eastern Europe, Spanish-language music , and Arabic popular songs imported from Cairo and Damascus. In the early days, records were expected to do little more than keep standard material available, supplementing it with soundprint equivalents of published sheet music. New York–created products sufficed to supply a broad-based market that demanded little else; consequently, Victor, Columbia, and Edison were in less of a hurry than their counterparts in Europe to explore remote recording sites. Occasional journeys were made to record presidential candidates’ speeches or other isolated events. Other exceptions to the rule included Edison recordings of Cantonese opera from San Francisco in 1902 and Columbia recordings of Polish and Bohemian titles from Chicago in 1915. But there were no general field-recording sorties in North America before the 1920s, when excursions to cities like Buffalo, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Dallas, and other remote locales for the specific purpose of recording regional music became a frequent and pro...

Share