Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919 (review)

Over the last decade, scholarly interest in the history of sound recording has increased, reaching into uncharted terrain, expanding our definition of culture, and contributing to the growing field of sound studies. While sound and recording technology may be relatively new subjects of inquiry for academic historians, a large and dedicated group of archivists, discographers, sound technicians, and collectors has long carried the torch for recording history, gathering and preserving rare and fragile sound recordings, oral histories, documentary sources, and ephemera that enable a new generation of historians to analyze the cultural meanings of sound recording. Tim Brooks, a media executive by day and a passionate preservationist of recording history by night, has both contributed to and benefited from those efforts. Now he has published Lost Sounds, a monumental work of research and documentation, uncovering previously unknown or little-known recording activity by African Americans during the first three decades of the record industry, from 1890 to 1919.

Brooks offers no overarching thesis, but he does note two generalizations that emerge from the thirty-seven biographies and one chapter on miscellaneous recordings that comprise Lost Sounds: first, that new technology offered opportunities for a minority excluded from other professional fields, and second, that "race relations in the United States were not a simple matter of black versus white" (p. 4). Even though neither of these will seem new to historians, the scope and depth of Brooks's data is unprecedented. The strength of Lost Sounds is in its depictions of the early "struggle to bring black musical culture to America" (p. 3) at a time when America seemed more interested in re-creations of the antebellum South, novelty songs, and blackface minstrelsy than in the music by and for blacks that sparked the blues and jazz craze of the 1920s. Moreover, Brooks shows that African-American culture became integrated into the cultural mainstream earlier than previously thought, through the first mass sound medium—the phonograph—before film, radio, and television.

The organization of Lost Sounds is straightforward: thirty-seven biographical studies divided into five chronological parts and one final section exploring "miscellaneous recordings," from the unissued to the "rumored." An appendix by Dick Spottswood covers recordings from the Caribbean and South America, and Brooks includes a select discography of CD reissues of the recordings. Extensive notes, a bibliography, and a forty-page index further enhance the utility of this indispensable reference work.

This is the first major study of recording activity by African Americans prior to the well-documented "race" records boom of the 1920s. Eileen Southern's four-century survey, The Music of Black Americans (1971), has long been the standard reference work on African-American music and its origins; now Brooks offers a detailed look at one thirty-year period, digging much deeper into primary sources, revealing much fresh material about well-known artists such as W. C. Handy, and lesser-known figures such as George W. Johnson, the first black recording "star." One of the heretofore least-known stories is that of Broome Special Phonograph Records, a black-owned record company that predates Black Swan Records, long thought to have been the first African-American label.

Historians of technology Rayvon Fouché, Carroll Pursell, and Bruce Sinclair have examined African-American inventors and artisans, but Brooks is less concerned with technology and how it was used than he is with the musical and life circumstances of these recording pioneers. Those seeking details of early recording sessions, the operations of studios, and the way recordists carried out their work will find some interesting passages here, but those seeking technical details will have to tease out the information from both text and the extensive citations. These include cylinder recordings (which Brooks transcribed himself), discographies, dictionaries, encyclopedias, slave registers, legal archives, census records, advertisements, record company archives, catalogs, obituaries, newspaper articles, memoirs, trade journals, record reviews, oral interviews, historical monographs, and biographies...