The Development of the Record Industry - by Brian Rust

PART 1: THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

THE beginning of the story of records and recording is claimed by some to reach back to ancient China, where a prince is said to have invented a box that would carry the human voice and reproduce it to anyone receiving the box; others instance the legend of Thomas Aquinas, who was so terrified by a talking invention demonstrated to him in the mid-thirteenth century by its Creator, that he hit it with his staff and destroyed the work of thirty years. In the mid-nineteenth century, Leon Scott devised a method of recording, but no apparent playback method; but it was not until 1877 that an impoverished French poet named Charles Cros, also something of a scientist, set down a method of recording sound in a groove on a lampblacked glass disc, and deposited the paper with the Academic des Sciences on April 30th. Unable to finance the patent costs, his idea remained no more than that until after the American inventor, Thomas Alva Edison, that same year succeeded in indenting sound on a cylinder covered with tin-foil.

Although Thomas Alva Edison is usually given credit for inventing the gramophone, the man who devised the original prototype of the disc, as distinct from the cylinder, was a German immigrant into the United States. Emile Berliner of Hanover began his experiments in the mid-eighties, a decade after Edison first recorded his own voice on the famous tin-foil cylinder by means of indentations made by the recording stylus in the foil. Berliner, after many heartbreaks and disappointments, trials and errors, finally succeeded in capturing sound in the walls of a spiral groove cut laterally on a disc, and the first results - toys as they were then regarded - went on sale in 1889.

The disc emerges

By the end of the next decade, the little shellac discs - sizes varied from about 90 to 120mm (3+ to 5 inches) - had grown to 180mm (7 inches), and records of artists who had made names for themselves in various walks of life were already on sale. Through the enthusiasm, energy and foresight of his young assistants, Fred Gaisberg and Sinider Darby, Emile Berliner had produced best-sellers by artists such as the prolific but ever-popular Sousa's Band (or as large a section of it as could be accommodated in the small studio); the great banjoist Vess Ossman, who made the first records of authentic ragtime, then in the flower of its first period of popularity; the musical comedy star Maurice Farkoa; and the operatic tenor Ferruccio Giannini. Although by no means in the best-seller class, there were also records made of the almost legendary stage personality Ada Rehan, the outspoken freethinker Robert Ingersoll (one of his speeches, entitled Hope, still exists on an original Berliner master, and though not a loud voice, every word it recorded is clear, eighty years later), and even the chorus of the musical comedy The Fortune Teller.

By this time, the hand-operated machines of the early nineties had been almost entirely replaced by the clockwork-driven models devised by Eldridge R. Johnson. When law tangles over patent ownership and even the very name of his favourite machine had been settled, and Johnson, in association with Berliner, emerged as the victor over their doubledealing agent Frank Seaman, a new company was founded that alone among American firms has never been taken over by any other rival, Emile Berliner and the only rival it ever absorbed was Seaman's - his Zonophone label became a subsidiary of Johnson's product in 1903, and in America it played a very secondary role to its foster-parent label until 1910, when it was discontinued.

Victor versus Columbia

That foster-parent label of course was Victor. From the time when Emile Berliner saw in London in 1900 the original painting by Francis Barraud of "His Master's Voice" (bought by The Gramophone Company the previous autumn), he recognized its power as a means of selling his invention. The fox-terrier listening intently to a spring-driven gramophone with a long brass horn appeared on Victor products from the moment of the company's formation, although it did not receive the same recognition in Europe for some ten years. The company Johnson headed, the Victor Talking Machine Company of Camden, New Jersey, forged ahead through the years in competition with Columbia and Edison at the outset, then, as the patents they had wisely pooled in 1902 began to expire, other companies were formed, some of them offering quality products that did present challenges to the establishment of Victor and Columbia. The latter had grown out of the only one of Edison's subsidiary cylinder companies of the nineties to show a profit on the sales of its merchandise, and had broken away from Edison in 1901 to produce a lateral-cut disc that was noted for the comparative smoothness of its surface. (It continued to produce cylinders on the Edison pattern until 1912). For years, Columbia tried hard to match Victor's undoubted supremacy in the field of operatic vocals, but whereas Victor could call on almost all the great artists appearing at the Metropolitan Opera House, Columbia had attempted to record them in 1903, found the sales poor, and jettisoned the whole expensive project - to its cost. Nevertheless, in the popular field, Columbia had in Charles Prince a musical director who could match anything Victor's Walter B. Rogers could produce, and many popular singers such as Ada Jones, Billy Murray, Henry Burr and Albert Campbell recorded on an apparently freelance basis for both companies, to their mutual benefit. Victor however, had in Enrico Caruso, Antonio Scotti, Pol Plançon, Emma Eames, Marcella Sembrich and - to begin with through thier london branch, The Gramophone and Typewriter Company - Nellie Melba, Adelina Patti and Francesco Tamagno, all breathtaking names for which Columbia could find no answer.

In 1917, it was Columbia that took the historic initiative of recording the first jazz music. On January 30th that year they invited the Original Dixieland Jazz Band to make two sides, but it seems their engineers were so unprepared for the onslaught of basic jazz that the results, too, were jettisoned—until on February 26th, Victor showed that jazz could be recorded satisfactorily even under the primitive conditions of a horn, or series of horns, into which the musicians directed their sound. In the world of blues singing, though, Columbia succeeded where Victor failed, and while Victor made tests of Mamie Smith, Lucille Hegamin, Rosa Henderson, Lizzie Miles and many others, Columbia recorded Bessie Smith, Clara Smith, Maggie Jones and countless others whose work was issued to the public, not all of it negro by any means. Victor's tests of these girls remained no more than that in most cases.

While Columbia reaped rich rewards from negro and other 'popular' talent, Victor pursued a parallel course of recording the greatest artists not only in the opera world, but also that of concert music. The same year as both firms recorded the first jazz, Victor made the first American records by a symphony orchestra. These were by Karl Muck and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, recorded on October 2nd, 1917, followed twenty days later by Leopold Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. Considering they are now sixty years old, they reproduce extraordinarily well, much better than the European attempts in the same direction four years earlier.

Columbia had already countered Victor's issues of soloists such as violinists Fritz Kreisler, Mischa Elman and Efrem Zimbalist, and pianists of the eminence of Vladimir de Pachmann and Ignace Jan Paderewski, with one batch of violin solos by Eugene Ysaye, some excellent cello recordings by Pablo Casals, no less, and piano works played by Xaver Scharwenka. When in 1918 the company recorded Dr Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and soon afterwards the Cincinnati Symphony and the New York Philharmonic orchestras, the results seemed tonally dull by comparison with Victor's Philadelphia/Stokowski records. Both companies had recorded chamber music, Victor on a grander scale by means of the superb Flonzaley and Elrnan String Quartets, but neither could achieve any true realism until the coming of electric recording in 1925.

Columbia and Victor had both been offered the use of the Western Electric sound recording system on a royalty basis. After some hesitation on the part of Victor, both signed the agreement, and in March 1925, Columbia led off with an unimpressive recording of Art Gillham, the Whispering Pianist, while Victor's first electric recording was also of a pianist: the French genius Alfred Cortot. So that existing acoustically recorded issues would not be regarded by the public as unwanted while the new electrically-made product was still unobtainable except for the few rather nervously experimental releases, the two giants agreed not to publicize their precious new asset. Nevertheless, throughout the next year or so, electric recordings of all kinds appeared, from Columbia's massed choir in the Metropolitan Opera House singing John Peel to Victor's offering of Saint-Saens's Danse macabre, and from Columbia's recording Bessie Smith singing blues in a tent set up in the studio to muffle the volume of her almost operatic voice (the tent collapsed on the artist and her accompanying band during one very early electric session) to Victor making records that showed the world what their biggest selling popular artist, Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra, really sounded like in full spate.

During the inter-war years, Victor and Columbia fought for supremacy in the dance band world, Victor leading with Paul Whiteman from 1920 until 1928, when he switched his allegiance to Columbia, and Columbia maintained a steady supply of quite unmatched records by Ted Lewis and his Band. Both labels used the talents of such as Leo Reisman, Guy Lombardo, George Olsen, Roger Wolfe Kahn and Rudy Vallee, but such top names as Jean Goldkette and Coon-Sanders never forsook Victor, while Columbia employed Paul Specht and Art Kahn without either appearing on Victor. Through the swing era of the late thirties, Benny Goodman, the 'King of Swing', after four years with Victor, switched to Columbia, while Glenn Miller, after starting with Columbia, changed to Victor in 1938, and Tommy Dorsey never made records with any label but Victor until a few years before his death in 1956, long after swing had become as démodé as ragtime and jazz.

Smaller companies

It was during the first world war that other labels began to proliferate in the USA. Many of these set out as 'hill-and-dale' records, led by the American branch of the French mark that had introduced such discs in Europe in 1906 alongside its cylinder issues. This was Pathé; its competitors in what was even then an obviously dwindling market were Aeolian Vocalion, Brunswick (the product of a long-established Chicago piano company), Gennett (also a child of a piano manufacturer, the Starr Piano Company of Richmond, Indiana), and OKeh, produced by another German immigrant, Otto Heinemann, in agreement with Carl Lindström in Berlin. By 1920 the post-war boom in gramophones (the Americans have always known them as phonographs, whereas in the UK, a phonograph was strictly for playing cylinders) showed that the way indicated Victor and Columbia was the way the public was travelling. Every one of these hill-and-dale vertical-cut labels had given place to lateral-cut issues under the same mark by that year. The quality of most of them was excellent; OKeh in particular was fortunate in having the services of a recording genius named Charles Hibbard, who proved consistently that anything the big names could do he could do as well if not better, and this, coupled with OKeh's musical directors (Justin Ring, late of Sousa's Band, for the popular side and Clarence Williams for its so-called 'race' issues) made the label a rich treasure-house for all collectors of the quintessence of dance music, jazz and blues. (The General Phonograph Corporation, as Heinemann named his firm, drew on European Odeon for its classics, and there was no doubting the exceilence'ofmany of these.)

Brunswick pioneered the electrically driven machine with its Parsatrope in 1927, and attempted a new recording technique it called "the light-ray process", as an answer to Victor and Columbia's shared use of the Western Electric sound system in 1925. It offered no serious challenge to the latter; when Columbia acquired the OKeh catalogue in November 1926, Charles Hibbard included, it had a superiority that only Victor could match. Vocalion's early lateral-cut discs were thin and wiry in tone, but by 1921 they had become clean, round and for their time, very fine. The company joined forces with Brunswick when the latter 'went electric' in 1925, and played the role to that company that Zonophone had to Victor in 1903. By 1938, however, both labels had been absorbed with others into the American Record Company's monolithic concern, and thrived side-by-side (though with noticeably thin recording quality) while Columbia, another in the ARC combine, was allowed to lie fallow from 1935 to 1939.



The Gennett label is remarkable not for the excellence of its recording, whether acoustic or electric, nor for the stellar fare offered in the serious music sphere, but for the 'firsts' made in the remote studios in Richmond, Indiana by so many top names in jazz and popular music. The New Orleans pianist Ferdinand "JellyRoll" Morton made his first piano solos there; King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, featuring a 22-year-old cornettist named Louis Armstrong faced the recording horn for the first time - twenty feet away from it in case the volume of sound damaged the machinery, and Bix Beiderbecke, Iloagy Carmichael, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, the Mills Brothers and Burl Ives all made their recording debuts for Gennett.



Pathé, for all their popularity in their French homeland, were relatively short-lived in the USA. By 1928 they had amalgamated with a small firm producing cheap records for the less affluent owners of a gramophone, the Cameo Record Company, and their issues began to appear not only on Pathé Actuelle, as the principal label was known, and on its seven year-old subsidiary Perfect (it used precisely the same material in the same coupling as Pathé), but on Cameo, Lincoln and Romeo, all sisterlabels to Cameo itself. Whereas the independent Pathé and Cameo records had been of reasonable quality, despite a certain shrillness on Pathé, these combined efforts were foggy, or rather nasal, and invariably pressed on substandard material. They, too, became members of the ARC combine in 1934, along with the labels produced by the Plaza Music Company. These were Banner, Domino and Regal, which also drew for their material on other independent makes such as the excellent Emerson (it was considerably less than excellent when reactivated electrically in 1926) and the interesting Paramount, a product of the New York Recording Laboratories that also had begun life in 1917 as a vertical-cut disc. Like Gennett, Paramount made little attempt to attract the devotees of culture as the term was generally understood; it specialized in fine examples of jazz and blues, and both labels as a result are today the darlings of the jazz collecting fraternity. On going electric, as both did belatedly in 1926, the fair quality of their records showed some deterioration. Both drew on the output of the Marsh Recording Laboratories of Chicago, which could lay claim to producing the first commercial records made electrically. This was in the autumn of 1924, a good six to nine months in advance of both Victor and Columbia. Today, these relics on the Autograph label sound almost horrific, but from a jazz and dance band collector's viewpoint, they offer some fantastic rarities by quality musicians, such as King Oliver, Jelly-Roll Morton, Willard Robison, Merritt Brunies and his Friars Inn Orchestra, and even Wurlitzer organ solos by the great Jesse Crawford - at $1-50 each, twice the sum Victor charged for his (acoustic) organ solos made several months later.



Depression and re-growth



In October 1929, the financial disaster known as the Wall Street Crash all but wrecked the American record industry. Radio was the thing; once you had bought the set, there was nothing to pay for the entertainment it provided, and in an obviously impermanent state of things, its impermanence mattered not at all. Why pay 75 cents or even three-for-a-dollar for dance tunes you could hear on the radio for free? Who but the oil kings and near-beer barons could afford expensive classics? Gennett, Paramount and many other minor labels quietly disappeared into oblivion; Columbia's fortunes declined to vanishing point as we have seen, and Victor, since January 1929 a branch of the powerful Radio Corporation of America, cautiously kept going on a much reduced scale, though in 1933 it spawned some short-lived (and incredibly rare) issues on such labels as Sunrise and Electradisk, and one long-lived one, Bluebird. At 35 cents each, this was a quality product at an economic price, and it offered stiff competition to the twangy, gritty issues on the ARC labels. (These greatly improved from about 1936 onwards; as we have seen, in 1939 the Columbia label was revitalized, through its adoption by the Columbia Broadcasting System; the small subsidiaries were abandoned with the exception of Vocalion, and after a year or so, this too was dropped in favour of a new line under 'the OKeh name, which itself had not been heard of since 1935.)



If the effect of the depression on the popular record industry was, to say the least, discouraging, its effect on recorded serious music in America was catastrophic. Columbia, sold in 1932 to a refrigerating company that went Out of business within a very short time, relied—as indeed it usually had—on imports from Europe, but on a much restricted scale. Victor, the only other firm deeply involved in records of the classics, retained Stokowski and the Philadelphia, a handful of concert singers who continued trundling out the same threadbare standards as they andtheir predecessors had for two decades or more, and resigned the rest. Kreisler, Casals, Rubinstein and Rosenthal recorded in Europe; the Flonzaleys had disbanded, and the famous Red Seal label that had given the world masterpieces was now little more than a faded replica of its former self, the greater part of its important additional material being of European recordings only. (Domestic recordings issued during the somewhat more prosperous later thirties frequently included film stars such as Nelson Eddy, Jeanette Macdonald, Gladys Swarthout and such opera-singersturned-film-stars as Lily Pons.)



In 1934 improving economic conditions and the introduction of a fairly cheap, workable electric reproducer restored public interest in what some cynics termed 'canned' music. The Decca Record Company of London set up an American branch that promptly hurled a millstone into the stagant pond of American records. With Edward Lewis as Chairman and Jack Kapp as President it signed such front-rank artists as Bing Crosby, the Boswell Sisters, Guy Lombardo, the Dorsey Brothers and the Mills Brothers, and never looked back. Again, there was little attempt to win the serious music lover from the omnipotent Victor; there was no need, when Bing Crosby was selling at 35 cents a copy as fast as the Decca presses could cope with them. By the time of American entry into the second world war, Victor, Columbia and Decca accounted for 99 per cent of American record sales.



Petrillo ban



Within eight months of the United States entry into the second world war, the record industry suffered another near-mortal blow. This was nothing to do with either the war or any economic conditions. James Caesar Petrillo, head of the American Federation of Musicians, called for and obtained a ban on any kind of commercial recording by any of his union members, operative from midnight on July 31st, 1942. They felt that with records being used so extensively on radio and in public places of amusement, they, the men and women who had made them, should receive royalties. When the companies refused so flagrant a demand, the strike went on. Decca came to an arrangement for the payment of royalties into a union fund a little over a year after the silencing of their studios; almost entirely reliant on popular music, which continued to be demanded by the public, Decca was the worst hit of the three major companies. Victor and Columbia surrendered in November 1944.



Even limitless supplies of the most popular classics by the best-loved musicians made before the ban would not balance the revenue lost by no new records of the latest bands, although popular singers such as Bing Crosby, Dinah Shore, and a new young man named Frank Sinatra, who seemed promising, recorded with harmonized voices simulating an orchestra (they were singers, and not members of the AFM.



Post-war growth



When hostilities ceased in 1945, other lesser labels of minority appeal had Set up in business. Most of them faded as soon as they appeared; one that started up in Los Angeles in 1942 and is still a power in the land is Capitol, and this with Mercury and MGM, provided some healthy competition to the 'big three' during the forties and fifties. The year 1948 saw the coming of long-playing high-fidelity microgroove records pressed on vinylite, pioneered in this form by Columbia, but tentatively tested as far back as 1931 by Victor, using standard grooving and a rough plastic called Victrolac. It was as much of a revolution as the coming of electric recording a quarter of a century earlier and despite the subsequent introduction of prerecorded tape, cassettes and quadraphonic sound, the LP, at 331 revolutions per minute, and the single, at 45 rpm, have retained their popularity with all record-buyers, at the same time sounding the death-knell of the 78, which was finally abandoned in 1958.



Following the introduction of LPs came a tidal wave of new labels on to the American market. Many of these were specialist in design; their catalogues were mere leaflets compared with the huge tomes published by the long established labels, but in their own way they provided the world with superb recordings of lesser-known works, esoteric music of all kinds and connoisseur material. It is estimated that the number of independent labels on the American market today, and for the past several years, must be in the region of 2,000 - and still they come, sometimes promoting the avant-garde work of a new composer working in electronics, sometimes rediscovering some veteran of the 78 rpm era still able to play or sing, and recording him or her with all the advantages unknown at the outset of their recording career.



Human nature being what it is, however, the popularity of objects that recall for some and suggest vividly to others a day long gone is nowhere so apparent as in the record world, and as most of us know, old 78s can now fetch incredible figures among collectors, be they of early Russian opera singers or pioneer rock 'n' roll stars, great jazz musicians or little-recorded masters of the piano, the violin - or the cinema organ. LPs of these have been appearing in steady streams over the last few years, some legally by the company owning the copyright, and impeccably transferred, others by 'backstreet' firms with little ability, taste, financial resources - or legal rights. The original of course retains its mystique, and hence its value, no matter who presents it in 'paperback' form, and an 'only known copy' by Ilona Eibenschutz playing Brahms, Louis Armstrong playing duets with his master King Oliver, or Joachim Tartakoff singing opera remains as much an objet d'art as the "Mona Lisa", regardless of the calendars and post-cards on which clever reproductions appear.