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

 c h a p t e r 6 6 Blacks, Jews, and the Business of Race Music, 1945–1955 Jonathan Karp “Race” music was a term employed by the recording industry in the years  to  to describe commercial music made by blacks for blacks. Between  and  many of the most significant companies specializing in race music (or “rhythm and blues,” as it later came to be known) were owned or co-owned by Jews. These were independent (“indie”) labels that exploited the vacuum left by the “majors,” the established music corporations, in servicing the black record market. They included such influential labels as King in Cincinnati; Savoy in Newark; Apollo, Old Time, and Atlantic in New York; Chess and National in Chicago; and Specialty, Aladdin, and Modern in Los Angeles, as well as many others of lesser stature and duration. The men, and occasionally women, who ran these companies were Jewish entrepreneurs, businesspeople first and foremost, only sometimes with a previous strong interest in and deep knowledge of black music. Although the successful ones came to take the music seriously, to the point of making detailed studies of its commercial qualities, their activity was driven by money, not aesthetics. In true Adam Smithian fashion—that is, out of self-interested motives—they provided black musicians with unprecedented opportunities to record and acquire fans. But they also almost invariably exploited black artists who were doubly vulnerable: individually as musicians lacking in independent capital and collectively as members of a subordinate racial caste in a still largely segregated society. If the story of these business pioneers is a morally ambiguous one, the morality tale so often central to accounts of the music business is only part of the story. A related but distinct aspect is the matter of how and why Jewish  jonathan k arp entrepreneurs succeeded to a comparatively greater degree than black ones in a business whose initial market was almost exclusively African American. A further issue is the extent to which the label owners represented a creative force in their own right, not just in the Schumpeterian sense of innovative entrepreneurship but also in the artistic sense of making creative contributions to the development of American popular music. Finally, the topic of what constituted the label owners’ Jewishness cannot be ignored; if these men and women tended to be infrequent attendees at synagogue, they nevertheless evolved a kind of Jewish subculture, one in which Yiddish provided a part of the code and where business networks followed ethnic patterns not just within a single generation but over the course of many. In what follows I address all of these issues: how the market for rhythm and blues music evolved, the relation of race music to black capitalism, the ways in which Jewish entrepreneurs capitalized on this niche, and the complex character of the resulting relations between Jewish owners and black artists. The Birth of Rhythm and Blues The race industry reflected the emergence of new styles in black popular music. What became known as rhythm and blues evolved out of a trimmed down, ensemble-based jazz band sound synthesized with the blues music of blacks who had recently migrated from rural parts of the South to cities such as New Orleans, Houston, Memphis, New York, Detroit, Chicago, Cincinnati, and Los Angeles. Although there were many different styles of race music—the “boogie woogie” of the s and the raucous “jump blues” of the s, the subdued “club blues” played by piano-based trios with gentle crooning vocalists and the sweet a cappella–style “doo wop” prominent in the mid-s—the following brief description of one record serves to convey a sense of the genre’s qualities as a whole.1 A good deal of information can be gleaned, for instance, from the grooves of a  release by jump blues master Louis Jordan. His “Beans and Cornbread” was among the last in a series of hits with his group, the Tympany Five, that had helped to redefine postwar black popular music, with songs such as “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” “Saturday Night Fish Fry,” “Knock Me a Kiss,” and “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens.” Although these records were released on Decca, one of the “majors” (along with RCA-Victor, Columbia, Mercury, and Capitol), they were linked to the indie phenomenon through their producer, Milt Gabler, who, as we will see, was an important figure in the history of the independent label phenomenon. Jordan, who both wrote and performed “Beans...

Share