Race records

Assembled from 33 blocks · 1 evidence · 33 related

1. Story
2. The segregated catalogue category under which American record companies from 1920 issued music by Black musicians for Black buyers, and the commercial mechanism through which most early blues, gospel and jazz survives at all. It began with a commercial surprise. On 10 August 1920 Okeh recorded the vaudeville singer Mamie Smith in New York performing "Crazy Blues", written by the Black songwriter Perry Bradford; the record sold in very large numbers, a substantial share of them to Black purchasers whom the industry had not previously regarded as a market. Companies responded by creating dedicated series and sending field units south to record singers and players in hotel rooms and warehouses. The consequence is double-edged and both edges matter. Segregation of the catalogue is why a large body of Black American music from the 1920s and 1930s was recorded and therefore exists; it is also why it was priced, marketed, distributed and credited separately, and why the terms on which musicians were paid for it were routinely one-sided. The archive this Journey depends on was assembled by an industry practising the segregation the music was made under.
3. Knowledge
4. Blues
5. Sound recording
6. Race records
7. Connections
8. Blues
9. Sound recording
10. Mamie Smith records "Crazy Blues"
11. Colonial prohibition of drumming
12. The Mississippi Delta
13. Jazz
14. Guitar
15. The Great Migration
16. Samba
17. Race records
18. W. C. Handy hears a guitarist at Tutwiler station
19. The Great Migration
20. Mamie Smith records "Crazy Blues"
21. Muddy Waters is recorded at Stovall Farm
22. Electrical recording
23. Race records
24. Radio diffusion
25. Field recording
26. Edison demonstrates recorded and reproduced sound
27. Berliner patents the gramophone
28. The first jazz record is made
29. KDKA broadcasts
30. Victor and Columbia adopt electrical recording
31. The Kumasi Trio record in London
32. Evidence
33. Mamie Smith recorded "Crazy Blues", written by Perry Bradford, for Okeh in New York on 10 August 1920; it was the first vocal blues recording by an African American artist, sold strongly to Black purchasers, and prompted the record industry's race-records series. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary alongside encyclopaedic accounts; the Registry essay PDF was not opened, and the widely repeated million-copy sales figure is not adopted here.