Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age

4. The Race of Sound

4 The Race of Sound Jimmie Rodgers, the father of country music, recorded a few blues tunes at the Victor Corporation’s Hollywood studio during a visit to California in July 1930. One of the songs he recorded required more than he could provide through his weak voice and simple guitar picking. So a pianist and a trumpet player were drafted to accompany the country crooner in the studio . Neither of these artists’ names were included on the records produced by Victor. When the single “Blue Yodel #9” was marketed, it went out under Rodgers’s name alone. Those who listened to the recording from its release in 1930 until it was performed on the Johnny Cash Show on October 28, 1970, probably wondered who the trumpet player was because the performance was extraordinary. The question was answered in 1970 when Cash was joined by Louis Armstrong, who played the song for the first time since he had recorded it with Rodgers. Armstrong announced to the audience that he and Cash were going “to give it to ’em in black and white.”1 That the father of (white) country music and the great (black) jazz trumpeter played together in 1930 complicates assumptions about Jim Crow laws and racial segregation during the interwar period. We believe that Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier when he played for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 and that country music has always been a white musical form even as blues and hot jazz (in contrast to cool, dance, or swing jazz) have always been black. But why? In the wake of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, scholars found an origin story about racial integration in America. Searching for the answer in a period dominated by television and rock ’n’ roll, those scholars overlooked radio, blues, and B movies, focusing instead on televised baseball and variety programming like The Ed Sullivan Show. In a culture in which sports dominated the visual airwaves and rock ’n’ roll dominated the sound waves, it seems almost inevitable that scholars began their origin stories with the integration of baseball by Robinson or the appropriation of black music by Elvis Presley.2 The scholars would have had difficulty recalling the impact of jazz personalities, radio, and the blues. But the photos of Robinson in his Brooklyn Dodgers uniform in 1947 are like the silent films of the 1920s—they tell only half of a story. I do not wish to detract from the courage of Robinson, who withstood the racial insults of fans and players during his heroic professional baseball career. But Robinson played most of his games in urban settings. Some of the fans who saw Robinson were not watching a black man play with whites in public for the first time. Some would have already seen blacks and whites playing together in the dance halls, jazz clubs, and speakeasies of cosmopolitan and biracial cities. Indeed, black and white musicians had occasionally played together from the beginnings of jazz, a pattern repeated in other musical genres, particularly the blues. Listening to jazz and blues between 1919 and 1941 presents a different picture of integration. By studying the interwar period , a period when sound was as significant for knowing the world as sight because of the ubiquity of phonographs, telephones, and radios, scholars may be able to gain a fuller appreciation of the construction of race and racial integration in the twenty-first century. The very terms applied to race—black and white—remind us of that construction ’s visual genesis. Those terms have resulted in the production of scholarship that focuses on visual aspects of race and ignores other sensory constructions. Thus, important studies on blackness and whiteness describe the sight of whites in blackface, visual passing, and black fashion.3 Winthrop D. Jordan’s seminal study, in particular, emphasizes the importance of appearance in the creation of distinct racial identities, a result of his argument that race’s origins are rooted in the visual observation–obsessed age of reason.4 Studies done on the sound of race largely emphasize dialects and music as adjuncts to black and white. However, Lawrence W. Levine, in his still-seminal Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1977), employs sound in a nuanced manner to make sense of black identity. Yet, even Levine, who taught students to listen, does not read sound as constructing identity; he reads identity as already constructed. For Levine, sound reiterates identity.5 Yet, scholars can discover that sound...