Electronic Entertainment and the Working Musician

James Kraft’s Stage to Studio deals with the impact of the phonograph, radio, motion pictures, and television on professional musicians. Without question these new sound technologies transformed the musicians’ world, turning a diffused, labor-intensive group of artisans into an organized, capital-intensive union of workers that sought employment and higher wages for its members amid the revolutionary changes brought about by electronic forms of entertainment. New technology limited job opportunities for musicians, affected their wages, patterns of hiring, and basic work environment. Although electronic media brought fame and fortune to a few, for most musicians the changes meant restricted opportunity, dislocation, and persistent conflict with management.

Kraft’s book is a reworked dissertation, written under the guidance of Edwin Perkins at the University of Southern California. But Kraft has skillfully shaped his book into a readable, perceptive, interdisciplinary study of a category of artists who were forced to accept the status of workers in an effort to combat the consequences of technological change. For the most part musicians accepted electronic innovations as inevitable, yet they tried to channel the impact of these changes to their professional advantage. Kraft treats popular culture on the highest academic level and fills a void heretofore ignored by labor historians. Unlike most cultural historians he depicts musicians as workers in the marketplace of leisure and raises questions about the proper relationship among business, labor, and government.

Unionization of American musicians began in the late 1850s. Working conditions in antebellum America were poor for most performers, yet a love of showmanship often compensated. During the late nineteenth century an expanding leisure market resulted in unparalleled opportunities for musicians, since theaters, dance halls, circuses, minstrel shows, concert bands, skating rinks, hotels, restaurants, and an assortment of watering holes utilized live music. By the end of the century most musicians found joining a local union essential, although for perhaps half of the union members music was not the sole source of income. Kraft parallels the growth of musicians’ unions with developments in other trade unions and uses brief biographies to illustrate his points.

With the exodus of African Americans out of the South in the 1910s, the professional achievement of black musicians increased, even though blacks were generally barred from white unions. The first “colored” local appeared in Chicago in 1902, after whites in Local 10 voted to maintain a segregated union. Most proprietors and bandleaders considered women musicians less determined and less physically robust than men and more likely to cancel engagements and quit orchestras. Women therefore played a far more important role in music education than in professional performances.

By the turn of the century advancing technology posed major economic and social problems for professional musicians. Faced with job-threatening machinery, musicians began casting aside their image as artists and substituted instead a growing awareness of themselves as skilled laborers. The American Federation of Musicians came to represent the collective voice of working musicians, and Kraft contends that by 1910 that organization had acquired sufficient power to deal with employee needs as effectively as any union in the American Federation of Labor. The author maintains that the first quarter of the twentieth century marked a heyday for American musicians, since phonographs, silent movies, and radio expanded the public’s appreciation of music and increased the demand at a time when the supply of competent instrumentalists was still relatively low.

This happy situation took a negative turn during the late 1920s with the coming of sound motion pictures. In 1928 approximately 28,000 movie theaters operated across the United States, and upwards of 25,000 musicians performed in front of silent screens. With the advent of “talkies,” pit musicians were suddenly discharged by theater owners in sweeping numbers, and the shake-up was made all the worse by the onset of the Great Depression. Talking pictures combined with radio to destroy vaudeville and cut into the audience for touring...