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Blacks And the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919 (Music in American Life
University of Illinois Press
September 2005
634 pages
ISBN: 025207307X
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction | Historical
The first in-depth history of the involvement of
African-Americans in the early recording industry, this book
examines the first three decades of sound recording in the
United States, charting the vigorous and varied roles black
artists played in the period leading up to the Jazz Age. Applying more than thirty years of scholarship, Tim Brooks
identifies key black artists who recorded commercially in a
wide range of genres and provides in-depth biographies of
some forty of these audio pioneers. Brooks assesses the
careers and impacts, as well as analyzing the recordings, of
figures including George W. Johnson, Bert Williams, George
Walker, Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake, the Fisk Jubilee Singers,
W. C. Handy, James Reese Europe, Wilbur Sweatman, Harry T.
Burleigh, Roland Hayes, Booker T. Washington, and boxing
champion Jack Johnson, as well as a host of lesser-known voices. Because they were viewed as "novelty" or "folk" artists,
nearly all of these African Americans were allowed to record
commercially in their own distinctive styles, and in
practically every genre: popular music, ragtime, jazz,
cabaret, classical, spoken word, politics, poetry, and more.
The sounds they preserved reflect the actual emerging black
culture of that tumultuous and creative period. The stories
gathered here give a previously unavailable insight into the
early history of the recording industry, as well as the
racially complex landscape of post-Civil War society at large. Lost Sounds also includes Brooks's selected discography of
CD reissues, and an appendix from Richard K. Spottswood
describing early recordings by black artists in the
Caribbean and South America.
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