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

introduction: lost, stolen, or strayed? One of the most honored television documentaries of the late 1960s was a CBS News Hour written by Andy Rooney and Perry Wolff called “Black History: Lost, Stolen, or Strayed?” That title kept coming back to me during the years in which this book was being researched. African Americans made significant contributions to the recording industry in its formative years, from 1890 to 1919, and their recordings reveal much about evolving African American culture during that period. Yet little of that aural history is now available, and less has been written about it. Is this another piece of black history that is lost, stolen, or strayed? The stories of the first black recording artists turned out to be fascinating on several levels. It would be easy to write a book about the injustices done to African Americans over the course of the nation’s history. From the cold shackles of slavery to the more subtle discrimination of modern times, America’s attitude toward its black citizens has always been a stain on the national character and a source of embarrassment. The examples are many and obvious. As tempting as it might be to focus solely on the racial injustices of early twentieth-century America, it is arguably more productive—and helpful to our own time—to examine the ways in which those injustices were gradually ameliorated. How did change come about? The stories of the first black recording artists are stories not only of barriers, but of how some of those barriers were reduced. Progress—slow and halting, to be sure— was won not so much by changes in the law, or by dramatic confrontations between “good” and “evil,” as by the actions of ordinary people who when faced with instances of unfairness quietly and without fanfare “did the right thing.” Through their actions they acknowledged that the “color line” was fundamentally wrong. We still have a considerable distance to travel in ensuring equal rights for all. The lessons of those times can help guide us today. One agent of change that has been little recognized was the early recording industry . The First Modern Mass Medium Before television, before radio, before even motion pictures, an earlier mass medium began paving the way for the shared social experience that has so profoundly 00.INTRO.1-12_Broo 12/17/03, 1:44 PM 1 2 introduction changed modern society. It startled and amazed the citizens of the late nineteenth century. Who could ever have imagined an entertainer, orator, or famous person being “bottled up,” only to spring to life, as if by magic, simultaneously in hundreds of remote locations? Nothing in five thousand years of human history anticipated such a possibility. And yet here it was—recorded sound. The public was first teased with the possibility of “bottling sound” in 1878 when thirty-one-year-old inventor Thomas A. Edison demonstrated his new tinfoil phonograph . At first it was only a laboratory curiosity. Not until a decade or so later did more or less permanent wax cylinder recordings of singers, orators, and jokesmiths begin to be heard in hamlets across America. Eventually even presidential candidates sent out prerecorded speeches on cylinders and discs in which they personally explained the issues and exhorted voters. The idea that a singer or speaker could be heard across the land, and that a person could be heard after death, was nothing short of a miracle, even to citizens in the Age of Wonders. Generally overlooked has been the effect this revolution had on the integration of minorities into the social mainstream. Jews, Italians, and others who would hardly have been welcomed into the neighborhood in person carried their cultural values into many a genteel Victorian parlor through the medium of recordings. Once there, it can be argued, they gradually became less threatening. Blacks faced the most difficult challenge of all. Considered no more than animal chattel in the days of slavery, barely thirty years earlier, they lived in a rigidly segregated, inferior world. Entertainment was one of the few fields in which they could achieve some prominence, but until the advent of mass media this was largely a localized phenomenon . It was one thing for a black man named Bert Williams to become a stage star in liberal New York, but once his recordings began to be bought and played in homes and neighborhood entertainment establishments everywhere, at least a small step had been taken toward the acceptance of...

Share