Tribute to the Blues: Record Labels and Their Contributions to Blues Culture

"Can’t Stop the Blues: Race Records, Exploitation, Segregation and Censorship"

When Alan Lomax was conducting his field recordings of blues music in the Mississippi Delta for the Library of Congress in the 1930s and 1940s, the traditional blues had already morphed and developed styles outside of the solo acoustic guitar and other blues traditions found within the plantation life in the South. A major change in blues had to do with the “Great Migration” starting in 1914, when hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the South moved North to work in factories. In these Northern cities they were able to work for more promising wages, had access to better education and lived what seemed as a more promising lifestyle. Though exploitation, segregation and violence were still a part of their lives, the new urban settings offered an escape from the plantation life and a space for the unification of blacks from all over the South to live and work together in their newly developing communities.

In this new urban life, a different blues music bloomed. There are many factors to consider how and why blues changed. A few of the changes are related to blues musicians having acquired electronic instruments. With better wages, blues artists were able to afford better instruments giving the artist the ability to entertain a greater number of black listeners in these growing communities and to share different blues styles from different southern regions. Another influence on the new blues was the success of recorded blues artists from 1914 to the 1930s. These artists started to create music that was appealing to a diverse Southern black population in their newly developing communities. With this new sound and a new demographic of consumers, the American economy forever changed, and the music industry in the American capitalist system would be the main beneficiary. These latter developments of the blues eventually helped preserve the music, and shape a lot of what we have now recognized as major influences by African American culture in mainstream American culture. But at the time of the growing success of blues music and well into the 1950s, segregation created a wall between the white population and non-white people, isolating many white Americans from anything significant created or reproduced by black people.  How then, did blues music and culture become a major influence within the whole of American culture, and what was the role of the music industry in this influence?

In the newly developing communities, a growing number of African American citizens working, living and raising families in the North were able to spend a little more money because of their new jobs in the factories. These companies were not providing them the same salaries as their white acquaintances and certainly weren’t treating their black workers as equals. Nonetheless, African Americans had a meager hourly wage that allowed them to become a new target of consumers for many corporations. The major industry that became somewhat of a capitalist leech on the black population was the major record label. Starting at around 1914 a few record labels figured out how to use black music as a new market that appealed to the African American consumer. The blues and later rhythm and blues were the main products through which record label marketing would gain success. The first sign to the labels that African Americans could be gainful consumers was back in 1920 with the sales success of “Crazy Blues” by Mamie Smith. Mamie Smith’s selling of over 75,000 records eventually led to the numerous recordings of African American women, most of whom would be taken advantage of with such low pay for recording it was criminal. (xii, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism). In the 1920s, the Bluesman would become the most popular artist, and would be exploited for work just the same as Blues women had a few years prior. The blues recording frenzy propelled by recording companies would last well into the 1930s, retreating around the time of WWII and the Great Depression.

The success of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” in the weeks following her completed recording on February 14, 1920, also marked the beginning of a new marketing record label phenomenon called “race records”. And what a social phenomenon and hypocritical stance these race records would take part in! During this time in the US segregation was legal and it was expected for white Americans to look down on African Americans. Especially criticized by the white public were the developing African American traditions and cultural practices. Yet, a huge corporation, run by white men, dedicated a section of their company to producing and reproducing black art and in the end preserving the cultural significances and influences of African Americans in mainstream American culture. If asked, they might insist it was for the artistic endeavors and deny that it was for monetary gain, regardless of the numerous cases of robbery for talent and songs these executives inflicted on the blues artists. Instead of question the integrity of individuals in such a racist and segregationist society, I encourage all to consider the analysis of Leroi Jones in Blues People:

Of course, looking at the phenomenon of race records from a more practical point of view, as I am certain the owners of Okeh [Columbia Records race record label sector] must have done, Mamie Smith’s records proved dramatically the existence of a not yet exploited market. Crazy Blues sold for months at a rate of 8,000 records a week. Victoria Spivey’s first record, Black Snake Blues, recorded six years later, sold 150,000 copies in one year. So it is easy to see that there were no altruistic or artistic motives behind the record companies’ decision to continue and enlarge the race category. Race records swiftly became big business. (Blues People, pg 100).

The race record sectors of these companies, such as Columbia Records Okeh Label, through their financial gains and lack of compassion towards their black artists make it obvious that their actions lacked good intentions for the African American community. Clearly, their main intent was to gain maximum profit by taking full advantage of the lack of laws that prevented the exploitation of these artists. Alan Lomax writes of these label executives, “managers swindled and cheated the musicians. They made vulgar demands on the naïve and wonderful black artists…[they] pocketed royalties that belonged to the singers… they held out a pen, which the illiterate and often blind musicians touched with a trembling hand, thereby assigning copyrights of their songs to these musical gangsters. (The Land Where the Blues Began, pg 139-140).

The numerous artists that fell victim to the record labels’ blood sucking greed would lead to thousands of recordings, some never to be distributed, some left to sit gathering dust until these artists were dead and gone. There are a few artists who would be rediscovered in the 1960s, like the revival of Jack Johnson and a few others. Sadly, for those whose music made a reemergence, they would never live to see the influence their music created in American culture or around the world. Their heirs would never receive any monies owed to their ancestors for the talents they shared or the royalties rightly owed. Nor would these record labels be subject to the penal offense for wrongfully exploiting the blues artists’ work. And yet, in the midst of all the thieving and deceiving acts committed by the record labels’ relentless exploitation of black artists, there leaked from the African American music and culture a stream of creative influence that would forever change mainstream American culture, world culture and art.

The shameless exploitation of the blues musicians, like the art itself was censored so much from the white public that it was never recognized during this time period as significant. Blues music was even subject to censorship from the black population who bought and listened to the recordings. Angela Davis writes in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, “the material recorded by blues singers during the twenties was subject to the veto power of white record producers… Paul Oliver observes that ‘amongst the record companies, precautions were generally taken to ensure the material likely to cause embarrassment and possible distress was rejected.’” (pg 94-95). With such scrutiny and subjective veto power, it is obvious how much control these record companies had over the artists’ records, the artists themselves, and the dissemination of artistic content. Later in her book Angela Davis shares just how deep the segregation of the society was and how it affected the music sales. These observations expose the type of social expectations that existed amongst the white population.

…[D]uring the 1920s, as blues music became the foundation of the fledgling recording companies’ “race records” sections, it was identified and culturally represented not only as music produced by black people but as music to be heard solely by black people. As music entered its age of mechanical reproduction, blues were deemed reproducible only within the cultural borders of their site of origin. The racially segregationist distribution strategy of the recording industry implicitly instructed white ears to feel revolted by the blues and, moreover, to assume that this sense of revulsion was instinctive. Even those white Americans who wanted to break through barriers of racism, and who sincerely attempted to appreciate this music, tended to perceive it as primitive and exotic. Despite their intent to resist the racism that located the blues in racially restricted cultural space, their Eurocentric perspective conferred upon the blues the very sense of inferiority they thought they were challenging. (Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, pg 141-142).

With such a divided society, it is no wonder that these record companies were able to resell and repackage black music to white audiences in the following decades of race records from the 1920s to the 1950s. During such years blues music would be injected into American culture. Yet, because segregation and racism so deeply affected American society, the influence of African American blues culture would go unnoticed, unseen, secretly invading like a Trojan horse.

At its inception, record labels’ race records sectors, clearly needed to secure success and monetary gain with music sales to a strictly African American demographic. It was initially this success that led to the continued development of race records. Record labels were of course in competition and raced to continue the growth of this new market. But it was also important to remember that with the contracts that record labels had blues artists sign, the record labels were given unrestrained access to the artists’ work, ultimately giving way to the labels’ next phase of exploitation. It is in the nature of capitalist corporations to constantly grow, and through the growth and success of race records, there could only be so many black people to steal music from, and only so many black people to sell the music to. As the record labels no doubt discovered, there would be a cap off of sales, and growth would eventually decline. I believe this need to constantly create larger profit is the link to these record labels’ further exploitation of the blues. The labels would learn to take full advantage of their rights to the blues artists’ work, and extend the record label profits by creating a new audience with a repackaged “blues music” sound.

Starting in the 1920s, it became a new tactic of the record labels to take out the African American musicians, and use white musicians. They would take black songs, and have white people singing them and arranging them to remove it from “black culture”. They called Jazz, “Syncopated Music” to draw attention away from the influences of African Americans in the New Orleans style 2^nd Line music. This approach to reproducing blues and jazz was culturally acceptable to the white listeners because it was sold to them as white music and the audiences had no reference to the creative originators—African Americans. The acts of the record labels creating “white washed” black music is significant in showing just how huge the divide existed between white and black communities in America. With white audiences restricted, and forbidden to engage in black art or with black music it is easy to see how creating a white version of blues and jazz music made the record labels even more disgustingly rich. This racial divide is also significant in that it exposes the main financial artery of the exploitation of black music by the record labels. The repackaging and reselling of black music led record labels to invest in white American arrangers and musicians who used African American musical ideas to create something outside of the European traditions that would be socially acceptable to white America, and then sold it to the white American audience for outstanding profits.

[i]n the 1920s…many white fans probably knew jazz only through the work of white musicians. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB), for example, a white ensemble from New Orleans, made the first jazz recordings in 1917 and soon inspired an array of imitators… Some white musicians took it upon themselves to distance jazz from its African American origins as a means of popularizing the music or securing more prestige for it. Band leader Paul Whiteman, for example, the self-professed “King of Jazz,” attempted to make jazz more respectable by constraining its syncopated rhythms and tonal embellishments and fusing it with popular song and classical music… Whiteman paid scant attention to the role of African Americans in the development of jazz, describing the music in a press release for [a] concert as an art form “which sprang into existence about ten years ago from nowhere in particular.” (What Is This Thing Called Jazz? pg 10-11).

These acts deceived the white American public, engaged and propagated the white audiences’ sense of self-importance and superiority so that they would never question or consider how African Americans influenced American culture.

It is a true inspiration to know that regardless of the poverty, social injustice and racial discrimination, that African Americans and African American culture survived on a daily basis. Regardless of the injustices faced by the black population, communities of African American artists continued to develop one of the most important cultural contributions in America, and one of the most unique and modern approaches to creating music in the world. It is just shameful that at the time of the black cultural influence into mainstream American culture, the African American community was never acknowledged by American mainstream society as being the backbone to this new cultural development and the modern American identity.