Paul Whiteman, Game Changers & Hillbillies
By the 1920’s American popular music could be said to be a Black/Jewish conspiracy, but of course nobody said that, or even thought that, but of course, all together unconsciously, it was. Together, Blacks and Jews invented the sound of the modern world.
George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody In Blue” premiered in 1924, played by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, with orchestration by Ferde Grofe, one of Whiteman’s regular arrangers. Grofe orchestrated everything but Gershwin’s piano. Inspired by a 1923 concert that featured both classical and jazz music, Whiteman asked Gershwin to contribute a concert piece for an all-jazz concert he would give in Aeolian Hall in February 1924, just a year and three months away. Gershwin agreed, but was too busy to do much about do much about it. Then in the following January, Whiteman told Gershwin he found that a musical rival, Vincent Lopez, was planning to steal the idea of his experimental concert, and that there was no time to lose. Whiteman didn’t spell it out, but the concert was just 52 days away. Gershwin began composing while on a train journey to Boston. As he told to his first biographer, Isaac Goldberg:
“It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattlety-bang that is so often stimulating to a composer—I frequently hear music in the heart of the noise…And there I suddenly heard, and even saw on paper—the complete construction of the rhapsody, from beginning to end. No new themes came to me, but I worked on the thematic material already in my mind and tried to conceive the composition as a whole. I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness. By the time I reached Boston I had a definite plot of the piece, as distinguished from its actual substance.”
No previous work of art in history had even begun to describe as vast and complicated a subject as the United States Of America with anywhere near the all-encompassing clarity and depth as was accomplished by “Rhapsody In Blue”, in eight minutes and 59 seconds flat.
When contemporary music critics consider the 1920s, Louis Armstrong takes the forefront, as well he should, since he is considered by many to be the most influential musicians of the 20th century. For starters, Louis Armstrong introduced the extended solo and scat singing to the world. But back in the day, Paul Whiteman outsold him by magnitudes. For years I had an attitude about Paul Whiteman. How dare! Paul WHITEman! Call himself! The King! Of Jazz! I didn’t know that Duke Ellington had said: “Paul Whiteman was known as the King Of Jazz, and no one yet had come near carrying that title with more certainty and dignity.” Nor did I know he introduced to the modern orchestra the male vocalist, the female vocalist, and the vocal group. I hadn’t even known that one of his vocalists was Bing Crosby. I didn’t even know that his was the most popular musical aggregation of the ‘20s and early ‘30s. For more on Paul Whiteman and much besides, I strongly recommend Elijah Wald’s book, How The Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘N’ Roll. One of his points is the difference between critical acclaim and popularity, defending the latter.
Sound in movies was, of course, a game-changer. Writing music for the movies was a brand new vocation for songwriters, sparking an exodus from New York City to Hollywood.
Two more 1920 game-changers…one is the first blues recording, “Crazy Blues” by Mamie Smith, sold 75,000 records in its the first month. The session was supervised by Ralph Peer. The basic 12-bar blues format probably came forth around the turn of the century. It quickly went viral. The first appearance of the 12-bar blues on sheet music was in 1908, Antonio Maggio’s “I Got The Blues. So you’ve got about a twenty-year gap between birth and recording. The main reason for this is that the blues was––by the White recording industry––considered to be ephemeral trash, of no interest to the present, and certainly of no possible interest to the future. This despite the fact performance of blues music had been met with wild enthusiasm for years.
Let me digress, slightly. One of my impossible longings is: if only I could go back to the early 20th century heyday of Coney Island––Dreamland, Luna Park, and Steeplechase––and see the weird rides and attractions. I once got a book about the period, and so looked forward to getting details about this. But when I got to the part that was supposed to be about all that fun stuff, the book went on that is wasn’t going to go into that sort of thing. It was silly, tawdry, trashy, low-class. Who would ever want to know about stuff like that? Why would anyone possible care? Grrr. And the blues? And what would come to be called hillbilly music? Silly. Tawdry. Trashy. Low-class. Better if the future knows nothing of such embarrassing lapses in taste. Better yet if they never knew they existed. Inevitably though, a blues song got recorded, and sales quickly went through the roof. Oh. Money. That’s another matter. The recording industry raises its bowl. Please, sir, may I have some more?
In the case of “hillbilly” music, which hadn’t yet got that name, or any name for that matter, it took three years longer to be recorded. Back in the 1920s, records were sold in furniture stores, phonographs being considered furniture. Records were sort of software to the hardware of phonographs. An Atlanta furniture storeowner was having a meeting with a New York record company executive, who asked if there was anyone in Atlanta worth recording. A few days later the Atlantan saw a newsreel about Fiddlin’ John Carson and suggested him. A recording was set up by Ralph Peer––yes, him again––and in a weird similarity to Beck’s first single, “Loser”, only 500 copies were pressed. Nothing much was expected of either record. But Carson sold all 500 at a show in which he performed, and Okeh Records brought him to New York and a more technically sophisticated recording studio. Sales for the record proved to be massive. The record industry realized there was gold in them thar silly, tawdry, trashy low-class hills, both Black and White. But what were you going to call it? Ralph Peer was the go-to guy to ask and an immediate response was demanded of him. Um…how about…Race Music and Hillbilly Music? Ralph Peer later regretted being given no time to make a more considered response. In 1949 Billboard magazine finally replaced those labels with Rhythm and Blues and Country and Western.
Another game changer was the development of electronic recording in 1925. Up until then, acoustic recording arrays were too big to be portable and incapable of recording the more quiet instruments. Radio, which began broadcasting in 1920, had superior sound quality to acoustical recordings and by the mid-‘20s this factor was threatening to upend the recording industry. Electronic recording, and the newly developed ribbon microphone which fit the sonic counters of the human voice, not only saved the day for the recording industry, but made “crooning” possible––singers no longer had to be loud enough to reach the back of an auditorium with their voices. This paved the way for a new and intimate style of singing, which women loved, but which had much of the establishment up in arms. Cardinal William O’Connell of Boston called crooning “base, defiling, degenerate, and un-American”. Even The New York Times called it a passing fad, printing, “They sing like that because they can’t help it(!). Their style is begging to go out of fashion. Crooning will soon go the way of the tandem bicycle, mah johngg, and midget golf.” About the same time this pronouncement was made, RCA developed a new microphone, the Photophone type PB-31, which provided new and higher levels of sound quality. And better sounding crooning. For more on the subject I recommend Lenny Kaye’s book: You Call It Madness: The Sensuous Song Of The Croon.
My 1929 song, “Wedding Of The Painted Doll”, was from the first all-talking musical, Broadway Melody of 1929, another game-changer. The movie musical has, of course, endured as a permanent cultural artifact, providing us with an invaluable historical archive. Yet another 1929 game-changer was the beginning of the Great Depression, which eventually diminished record sales. But music could still be heard by anyone who had a radio. In the 1920s radio allowed anyone in the nation to hear jazz, as opposed to just those in big cities. Jazz records were of course available, and I’m sure Paul Whiteman’s enjoyed some rural sales, but it took radio to achieve a jazz-saturated USA.
The cheapest radio available was a crystal set called the Harko, which was manufactured, using mass production methods by Powel Crosley, Jr., and sold for $20. Other radios were much more expensive. By 1928, the Crosley Radio Corporation was the world’s largest manufacturer of radios and radio parts, with profits of $3.6 million. I suspect the actual manufacturing costs for radios were not too high. In the ‘20s a radio plus speaker started at around $75, what the average American earned in about 2 ½ weeks. In 1922 there were about 60,000 radios sold. By 1923 there were 1.5 million. By 1935 two-thirds of US homes had radios. Most radios and automobiles were purchased on the installment plan, another 1920s innovation. 100 million radios had been sold by the end of the 1920s, with 70% being bought on credit. In 1931, starting prices were still around $70, but by 1934 a table model could be had for $18 to $25. Reflecting actual manufacturing costs and economic reality, the prices dropped from $20 in 1935 to $15 in 1937 to $10 for table models in 1940. Fancier floor models with many tubes and big speakers were still around $50. Radios were a good deal as far as entertainment went, a one-time purchase providing years of music, drama, news, and what was to be a timeless 1930s innovation, the soap opera.
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