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  7. MAKING RECORD TIME As the wax disc revolved under the cutting lathe, the wax cut by the lathe spun away from the disc in strips called “swarf.” Wade Mainer remembered the swarf because when he and Mainer’s Mountaineers recorded in the 1930s, the lathe stood near the musicians. “It was kind of like a turntable,” he said.1 “The wax was cut into a record, and somebody had to brush the wax to keep it from getting tangled up.” According to Mainer, this was the reason “a lot of those records don’t have that good a sound.” Mainer’s recollections of the wax disc process and two of its predecessors —metal wire and wax on top of a tin base—prompted me to ask how a musician would discover a new tune or song before records and radio existed as sources. “We learned it from somebody else,” he said. “Back then in mountains of North Carolina especially, old people lived in farms and houses on the mountains and would get down and sing and go to one another’s houses and play music. I learned a good lot of my music from my brother-in-law.” Simple though the question was, I had wanted to ask it of a musician who had grown up in the years before records and radio made it possible for music to travel outside the range of the community and the next couple of towns. Mainer’s answer showed how personal contact among musicians was the connection that permitted old songs and tunes to continue to exist for generations. This had been the state of music in the mountains for two hundred years before talent scouts such as Ralph Peer arrived in Appalachia with weight-powered machines that could capture the music and package it as a product. Before recording, songs had been something singers in that part of the country shared with their kinfolk and neighbors for entertainment . The recording process transformed the old ballads into commodities . Though developed to preserve the human voice for the transcription of business dictation—much as radio was developed for the utilitarian purpose of ship-to-shore and ship-to-ship communication—early  Making Record Time recording technology soon was used to capture the sounds of music. This created a demand for recorded content that could be played in the home. Because of the size of the first record players, which was necessary to include the winding tube of an internal amplification system, furniture dealers sold the early appliances. It made business sense for the same dealers to sell records. As was the case with all mass media prior to the World Wide Web, a strong economic relationship developed between the systems of distribution (the distributors and sellers of record players and records) and the providers of content (the companies that recorded and manufactured records). Without the Victrola or equivalent appliance to play the group’s songs in living rooms throughout North America, there would not have been a practical reason for the Victor Recording Company to seek to preserve the sounds of the Carter Family, or for a northeast Tennessee entrepreneur to want to make records of the Stanley Brothers. Known as Jim or Hobe, Hobart Stanton ran a small recording business out of Johnson City, Tennessee, twenty-six miles south of Bristol and well within range of WCYB’s signal. Whether it was their radio popularity or a personal pitch to him that led Stanton to sign the Stanley Brothers to his Rich-R-Tone label remains a matter of debate. According to Stanton, the brothers initiated the contact. “First time I ever met ’em, they came to Johnson City to see me and honestly I wasn’t that impressed,” he told an interviewer.2 Stanton said he had been keeping his ears open “for something tight like Lester and Earl”—referring to singer and guitarist Lester Flatt and banjo player Earl Scruggs, who were members of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in 1947, but left to form an influential group that was known for its breakneck playing and precise sound. Stanton continued, “like all artists, [the Stanley Brothers] pursued me to impress me to record them.” He recalled Carter and Ralph making a return visit to Johnson City with a mail sack in their car full of requests sent to the radio station for them to sing “Little Glass of Wine.” The Stanley Brothers maintained in separate interviews that...

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