The electrical recording of vernacular musics not only transformed the music industry (making sound recording its center rather than live performance and printed music) and the world’s music guilds (giving a new symbolic primacy to urban popular musics); it also profoundly changed the vernacular musical cultures of the colonial ports. This was true both for audiences, as listening to records became a part of everyday musicking, and for musicians, as recording became an essential element in acquiring musical skills, a new kind of musical labor, and, eventually, a new form of artistic expression. A new phonograph culture emerged. On the one hand, it was manifest in the simple ubiquity of discs and record players in the popular quarters: as Theodor Adorno wrote in the midst of the recording boom, “the downtrodden gramophone horns reassert themselves as proletarian loudspeakers.”1 But this phonograph culture was also a profound remaking of the time and space of music. “Although a phonograph record is recorded at a special time and a special place,” Adorno noted, “it is no longer bound to this special time and place.”2
Of course, musics had long circulated as musicians traveled with their instruments; moreover, the mass printing of sheet music was a powerful form of musical circulation, even though it relied on relatively arcane and incomplete notations. But the circulation of records meant that music’s sound moved without the performers; it created an entirely new relation between sound and space, music and territory.3 Even radio broadcasting was not as mobile as the gramophone record: as Adorno pointed out, the radio listener was tied to the moment of the broadcast and the reach of the signal. “The phonograph record destroys the ‘now’ of the live performance and, in a way, its ‘here’ as well,” Adorno wrote. The ubiquity of “music pouring out of the loudspeaker” meant that listeners came to hear the sound captured on recordings as the sound of music. Even the expression “canned music,” which had emerged in the early years of recording to denote a poor, factory-made substitute for fresh, homemade music, peaked relatively quickly.4 As songs and dances became “records,” records became music. This new dialectic between performing and recording changed the meaning of both musical practice (the place of music in the daily life of a community) and the musical work (the enduring notation of a musical composition).
The emergence of this popular phonograph culture was a product of the dramatic leap in working-class access to phonographs. “The portable wind-up gramophones of the late 1920s were certainly not beyond the resources of the average worker,” the record industry scholar Pekka Gronow noted,5 and this trend was recognized by both industry leaders and social researchers. “The popularity of the phonograph,” the head of Columbia, Louis Sterling, concluded in 1927, “is probably due to the fact that the phonograph is one of the few products that have not increased in price proportionately with the rate of wages earned by the average working man in Europe.”6
As a result of declining prices and portable models, gramophones and records were becoming part of ordinary working-class life in colonial ports and mill towns across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. In British Malaya, whereas in 1911 “only the urban rich—including British officers, plantation and mine owners and some Babas (interpreters and clerks for the British) and Jawi Peranakan (mainly traders and merchants)—could afford to buy the gramophone player and discs,” by the 1920s, “records also became more accessible to the urban dwellers of principal towns such as Penang, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur due to the postwar record boom.”7 Similarly in British India, the “coming of the gramophone to Tamilnadu in the early 1920s was,” S. Theodore Baskaran argues, “something in the nature of a revolution. It was the first time that music was accessible to all, irrespective of caste or class … through the gramophone, even people in interior villages without electricity could listen to famous musicians.”8 This trend accelerated in the late 1920s when gramophones began to be assembled in India from inexpensive Japanese parts: the price of gramophones fell by more than half in about five years from the late 1920s to the early 1930s.9
In Egypt, the magazine Rūz al-Yūsuf noted in 1926, “the phonograph has spread among all classes of people after its price went down and it became possible for any family of moderate means to acquire one along with some records to fill the home with music.”10 That same year, Gramophone’s S. H. Sheard found the business thriving in Istanbul and Baghdad but placed Tehran outside of gramophone culture: “the large majority of people here are so poor that the purchase of a gramophone is out of the question. After seeing the country and the people I am amazed that the Company ever had a branch in Tehran and venture to say that it was, and is, impossible for a branch to be made to pay there.”11 By 1937, an Algerian police agent reported that “there is hardly a café maure or family—however modest their condition—that does not have a phonograph and a collection of popular songs.”12
On the east coast of Africa, a Gramophone agent noticed in 1931 the “large demand” among migrant miners for the records Odeon made “in all the principal languages” in the Mozambiquan ports of Lourenço Marques (present-day Maputo) and Beira:
I have been unable to obtain any statistics in proof of the large sales claimed in Lourenço Marques, but it is probably true on account of the natives in the area having money by reason of the fact that they go to Johannesburg to work in the gold mines where they earn good wages. It is stated that there are 100,000 of these natives always working in the mines and after working out their contract period they return to their native lands and are replaced by others. In common with all natives on the East Coast they spend liberally when they have money in their possession. 13
In southern Africa, one historian writes, “by the 1920s, the gramophone had installed itself as a fairly common feature in the homes of black people living in the cities”;14 in 1929, a black South African newspaper writer complained that “nowadays the dance craze has taken hold of the Native masses and they play or vamp whatever they hear from gramophones.”15 In West Africa, the evidence is sketchier: in Nigeria, one musicologist writes, “gramophones were owned predominantly by Europeans, Saro, and Western-educated African civil servants, since their cost (from about two to six pounds sterling in 1930) placed them out of the reach of most traders, artisans, and laborers.”16 In Ghana, on the other hand, one historian notes that “as a result of lucrative cash-crops, many Ghanaians, even farmers, could afford wind-up gramophones” in the 1920s.17
In the Americas, one sees a similar adoption of the phonograph. In the United States, phonographs spread throughout immigrant and African-American working-class communities in the 1920s; by 1927, phonographs were found in 60 percent of households in large cities.18 L. L. Sebok, who took over Brunswick’s foreign recording in 1927, recognized “the tremendous market represented by the foreign record field” among European immigrants to the US: “despite immigration restrictions thousands of people are coming to America every year … America is said to be the ‘melting pot,’ but the ‘melting’ process does not make the newcomer to our shores forget his home melodies and folk songs. European people are more or less music lovers and spend their money liberally in comparison to the average American.”19 In their classic study of Muncie, Indiana, Middletown, Helen and Robert Lynd found that a quarter of working-class families had purchased phonograph records over the preceding year; a larger proportion owned phonographs.20 In the mill towns of the Carolina and Georgia Piedmont, a sociologist noted in 1934, “installment sellers convinced the workers that they wanted their houses fitted up with phonographs, parlor suites, and player pianos”; surveys found that a third of families owned phonographs.21 The folklorist Zora Neale Hurston came across phonographs in Florida turpentine camps;22 even in the Mississippi Delta, 30 percent of households had a phonograph in 1930.23
“Often as not, the Victrola was the sole source of musical entertainment for working-class Puerto Ricans,” historian Ruth Glasser notes. When she interviewed guitarist Francisco López Cruz, he said of his compatriotas living in New York in the 1920s and 1930s: “If they had to give up eating, they gave up eating in order to buy records.”24 The anthropologist Manuel Gamio, studying the communities of Mexican immigrants in the United States in 1926 and 1927, found phonographs not only in established working-class households—“nearly always”—but also in tenements and even the huts of transient workers: “very frequently even in a poor house there is a phonograph.” Moreover, on examining the records of customs officials, he found that phonograph records were the most common item brought back to Mexico by returning migrants.25 In Argentina, the cost of a record player dropped by half from 1920 to 1929, though the historian Donald Castro argues that it remained beyond the means of ordinary workers;26 nonetheless, in the late 1920s, the folklorist Juan Alfonso Carrizo found that Argentine sugar workers were buying gramophones and tango records.27
Taking part in phonograph culture did not necessarily require the purchase of a gramophone, because records were heard not only, or even mainly, in the home. Rather recorded music remade the local spaces of musicking, as phonographs became public “musical instruments.” Gramophones were regularly played in bars, coffee shops, bodegas, barbershops, and in the street. “What a state Istanbul was in!” the satirist Refik Halid Karay wrote. “On streets lined with coffee houses, the cacophony of forty-odd gramophones playing all at once will gnaw your ear, scratch your heart, and blow your head up.”28 In Kirkuk, Iraq, a Gramophone agent in the late 1920s found coffeehouse gramophones playing records of local Kurdish music.29 A Puerto Rican musician later recalled that the first gramophone he saw was in 1927, a wind-up Edison playing on the back of a truck that carried merchandise to the town’s central market.30 In Cairo and Beirut in the 1920s, street entertainers “carried a phonograph from one public place to another, playing discs upon request, and charging a certain fee per playing.”31 Similarly, in Athens, “those who could not afford the luxury of a gramophone relied on … those who wandered the streets and markets and played songs for a fee on their portable gramophone machines … These individuals were particularly important to the refugees [from Smyrna], many of whom lacked the necessary capital to acquire a gramophone.”32
In China, “records were widely sold in urban areas and were played publicly in hotels, nightclubs, restaurants, bars, and shops”;33 a 1929 novel of colonial Shanghai opens with a character listening to a phonograph in a bathhouse.34 Similarly, in Malaya, “By the mid-1930s, recorded music was played in public places especially in shops … [and] at amusement parks … thus gramophone music also became accessible to the general urban population who could not afford the gramophone itself.”35 In Nigeria, gramophones were used in “two primary contexts: private homes, where a group of men might gather to drink beer or palmwine and hear the latest sounds, and public bars, where they were utilized to attract patrons.”36 The first important musicological account of West African gramophone music—that of J. H. Nketia—did not appear until the mid-1950s, but it summed up the emerging phonograph culture:
I need hardly point out that the Gramophone is, in many places in the Gold Coast, growing in popularity. People are drawn to it wherever it is played in village or town, just as people would gather around a wayside musician. Many drinking bars find it a useful means of attracting customers … The popularity of the gramophone has been fostered by the availability of a variety of recordings which meet the taste of the literate and the illiterate, the young and the old.37
The time of popular musicking was also remade by the record player. As J. H. Nketia noted of the Gold Coast, the gramophone was “not subject to customary control. Whereas certain forms of music are performed on prescribed occasions only—at funerals, festivals, worship, and celebrations, recordings of such occasional music may be listened to at any time.”38 Records became a way of extending the celebrations of daily life. “Everyone from the countryside in whose home or at whose wedding I sang,” Umm Kulthūm recalled, “bought my records in order to be able to say to his friends, ‘Come and listen to the girl who sang at my daughter’s wedding.’”39 They also commemorated public festivals, as popular songs of each carnival season were released on disc. The songs of the beguine “used to remain popular only during the Carnival time in the Antilles,” Andrée Nardal noted in 1931. “Then they were rapidly forgotten, but thanks to the phonograph, now-a-days certain ones are being revived such as the biguines formerly played during the delirious Carnival of St. Pierre, the city swallowed up by the volcano Mount Pelée.”40 Gramophone records could cross social boundaries that restricted musicians: in Istanbul, the recording served as a kind of shellac veil, allowing some women singers who would rarely perform publicly to became widely heard.41 In some cases, this breaching of the boundaries of space and time provoked moral panics. “In our Singapore suburbs,” a newspaper reporter noted in the midst of a 1934 noise controversy, “with their open houses and different nationalities, the gramophone, especially the electrical type, can be a very real nuisance.” When the Singapore legislative council prohibited the playing of gramophone music after midnight, the newspaper reported that “an outraged house-holder, unable to listen any longer to Miss Riboet’s ditties in the neighboring servants’ quarter” could now invoke the law against her.42
This working-class phonograph culture of the colonial ports was first constructed as a local culture. For the most part, even when the vernacular phonograph records were recorded and pressed in imperial metropolises, they were circulated in the cities and towns where the musicians worked. Visiting East Africa in 1931, the Gramophone agent H. Evans reported that “the bulk of the sale of Swahili records already placed on the market has been among the Swahilis themselves and very little has been purchased by others.”43 A decade later, the US critic Paul Bowles wrote that
it has been impossible to buy recordings of North African music other than in the record shops of the regions producing the particular kind of music desired. Records of Kabyle music are found only in the coast towns of northern Algiers, whereas Chleuh music is not sold at all in Tangier and Rabat, but only farther south. Interest is particularly centered on local stars, who sing songs of local significance.44
This led the well-known British music critic, Constant Lambert, to complain that “one’s exasperation with the excessively drab catalogues issued recently by the gramophone companies is increased by the knowledge that the very same factory … is at the same time producing records of the greatest interest which are destined to be immediately sent abroad.”45 Even those records that did travel the world—like Cuban son, African-American jazz, and Hawaiian hula—were originally made with local audiences in mind.
As a result, despite being dominated by the transnational recording companies, the emerging phonograph culture of these local segregated markets often marked the beginning of an industrial decolonization. Gramophone records linked dance halls and cabarets to furniture dealers and radio stations and became the heart of a local consumer goods industry, marketing local products to working-class consumers, and “substituting”—like the other import-substitution industries of the era—for the more “prestigious” European and North American musical imports. “The Brazilian recording industry,” historian Brian McCann notes, “was one of the most successful Latin American cases of import-substituting industrialization in the 1930s.”46
The emergence of these local record markets was, however, a contradictory process, particularly in the settler colonial states where national cultural sovereignty often coincided with racial disenfranchisement. One sees this in the uneven history of the recording of black musics. In the United States, on the one hand, the recording boom produced the distinct marketing of “race records” to African-Americans. As a result of this segregated market, hundreds of African-American musicians recorded jazz, blues, and gospel records in the era of electrical recording, even as white musicians adopted these forms. Similarly, many Afro-Cuban musicians recorded secular dances and songs both in Havana and New York (though the traditional rumba itself was not recorded in Cuba during the first half of the century47). In South Africa, in contrast, “aside from an effort by Zonophone (the Gramophone Record Company) to market some records by black South Africans in 1925 there were no records by local blacks available” as late as 1929.48 In Brazil, where no separate “race records” industry aimed at Afro-Brazilian consumers developed, relatively few of the Afro-Brazilian musicians who created the samba schools of Rio’s favelas were recorded at the time. For example, Cartola—the founder of Mangueira samba school in 1929, whose compositions were recorded by all of the leading vocalists of the era and who would later be central to the samba revival of the 1950s and 1960s—was recorded only once in the 1920s and 1930s, more or less anonymously as part of Stokowski’s famous 1940 “field recording,” Native Brazilian Music.49 The samba became a national rhythm through the popular recordings by light-skinned Brazilian crooners like Chico Alves and Mario Reis.
If the economy of gramophones and records was designed to tap local musical markets, it is also clear that records circulated throughout the archipelago of colonial ports, carried by sailors and maritime workers, and imported by music stores. As Paul Gilroy noted, ships made possible “the movement of key cultural and political artefacts: tracts, books, gramophone records, and choirs.”50 In many cases, diaspora communities of migrant workers imported records from homelands across oceans. After decades of indentured workers—girmitiyas—migrating from South Asia, Indian records circulated in the East Indies as well as the West Indies. Parlophone’s Tamil-language discs followed workers to ports and plantations across Southeast Asia, advertised in the Tamil press (a Tamil gramophone song compendium was published in British Malaya through the 1920s); meanwhile, as early as 1929, East Indians in Trinidad were importing records from India, and by the 1930s the ghazals of K.L. Saigal and the bhajans of K.C. Dey were popular among Indo-Caribbeans.51 Some early African recordings echoed across the black Atlantic; the African-American music critic Maud Cuney-Hare took note of the Kumasi Trio’s recording of Fante tunes in London and the London appearances of South Africans Griffiths Motsieloa and Reuben Caluza.52
The vernacular phonograph musics of the Americas—calypso, jazz, hillbilly, samba, and son—reverberated widely. Trinidadian calypsos moved quickly across the Atlantic to West Africa, in part by way of London, as can be seen in the 1929 Zonophone recordings of the West African Instrumental Quintet that included both “Kara So,” a Trinidadian carnival song and “Tin Ka Tin Ka,” a version of “Sly Mongoose,” which had been recorded a few years earlier by Trinidadian singers Lionel Belasco and Sam Manning.53 The impact of African-American jazz on the urban communities of Africa and Latin America was equally important: the distribution of African-American records made “jazz maniacs” of the musicians who created the marabi of Cape Town and Johannesburg. In Brazil, Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues” was imported immediately by Parlophon.54 (This might be contrasted to France and Germany where, as many critics and historians have noted, the “race” records of Louis Armstrong were generally unavailable, and “jazz” meant the hotel orchestras of Paul Whiteman and Britain’s Jack Hylton.) The blue yodels of the US singer Jimmie Rodgers, hardly noticed in the US outside the South, had remarkably wide reverberations elsewhere, particularly in Africa: as early as 1930, record advertisements in South Africa’s black press put the “Dixie Records” of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family side by side with Zonophone’s Zulu records, and the black South African writer Es’kia Mphahlele later recalled that “at Christmas-time, Jeemee Roe-Jars ( Jimmy Rodgers), then in fashion, yodelled plaintively from various parts of the village.”55 Rodgers’s records influenced palm-wine guitarists in Lagos and rumba musicians in Kinshasa, and, in 1932, the Durban singer William Mseleku recorded songs directly modeled on Rodgers’s blue yodels.56 By 1950, Hugh Tracey was noting “the widespread influence [of] gramophone records of Brazilian music” on the East African coast: “Dance bands in all East African towns are playing Africanized versions of Brazilian rumbas, congas, and sambas.”57
Afro-Cuban son had an even wider circulation. The popularity of Cuba’s “El Manisero”* has long served as a figure for the travels of these musics to metropolitan capitals. Recorded in 1928 and 1929 by the cabaret singer Rita Montaner, by Miguel Matamoros’s son trio, and by the hotel orchestra of Don Apiazu (a recording that was released in France, Spain, Italy, and Scandinavia, as well as Brazil, India, Australia, and West Africa), “The Peanut Vendor” crossed the world, a son pregón packaged as a “rumba” for European and North American audiences.58
But Cuban music was celebrated not only in Paris and New York; it reverberated across the archipelago of colonial ports. In the Dutch East Indies, Takonai Susumu notes, “Kroncong Rumba was a fusion of Kroncong music and rumba, a Cuban music which had worldwide popularity following the 1930 hit ‘El Manisero.’”59 In Africa, the recordings of “El Manisero” were among the earliest of hundreds of recordings of Cuban music released when Gramophone repackaged Victor’s Cuban recordings as the African GV—Gramophone Victor—series in 1933.60 “From Senegal to the Congo, [the record of ‘El Manisero’] had a pronounced influence on the development of African popular music,” the musicologist Richard Shain notes:
It shaped regional styles (as in Ghana) and sometimes constituted the very foundation of national musics (as in Senegal) … Distributed in francophone West Africa by the Compagnie Française d’Afrique Occidentale, the records were heard in Senegal at a number of different venues. Some Senegalese heard Cuban music at dry good stores in Dakar that began selling records and gramophones in addition to their regular stock. To stimulate business, these stores sometimes played “the latest” music for their customers while they were shopping.61
In Lagos, the Latin American GV series were “the most influential recordings” among palm-wine musicians.62 In the Congos, these recordings of Cuban soneros triggered the emergence of a Lingala rumba in the migrant riverside cities of Leopoldville (Kinshasa) and Brazzaville in the 1930s. As a Congolese musician recalled, “South American music, the records we had here, especially on the GV label, distributed works that Congolese people picked up on right away.”63 The first Congolese recordings, often just of guitar and voice, used the melodies and chord progressions of GV recordings.64 Indeed, there are stories of musicians calling out the songs by their GV number, rather than their Spanish title.
The reach of commercial Hawaiian music—the product of a colonial plantation economy that forced together Asian, Pacific and Atlantic peoples and cultures—was as wide and influential as that of US jazz or Cuban son. It was heard not only in the colonial capitals of New York, Paris, London, and Tokyo, but throughout the archipelago of colonial ports.65 Ernest Kaai’s Royal Hawaiian Troubadours had left Hawaii in 1919 for a three-year tour across Pacific and Asian ports from Batavia and Manila to Shanghai and Calcutta; he published Hawaiian Songs in Java—where two members of his band stayed—in 1921, and recorded in Tokyo in 1923.66 A few years later, Kaai’s troupe was followed by steel guitarist Tau Moe—born in Samoa and raised in Hawaii—who toured Japan, China, Southeast Asia, the Philippines, India, Burma, and Indonesia from 1928 to 1934 as part of Madame Riviere’s Polynesians (they recorded in Tokyo in 1929).67
In the wake of such tours, Hawaiian music was intertwined with the emerging vernacular phonograph musics of the Pacific and Asia. In India, there were Hawaiian groups in the 1930s, and the Hawaiian steel guitar became an element of Hindi film music.68 In Java’s Batavia, Hawaiian music reverberated in kroncong, as “Hawaiian” served to name a genre of popular music that used the same instrumentation as kroncong but was sung in Hawaiian or English.69 By the 1930s, the kroncong recordings of Miss Ninja—recorded in Calcutta for distribution in both British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies—featured her “Hawaiian Orkest ‘Sweet Java Islanders’” with Hawaiian steel guitar and ‘ukulele, and these Hawaiian/kroncong bands—like “The HMV Combined East & West Java Kronchong Orchestra & Hawaiian Rhythm Kings”—were performing in Singapore.70
Hawaiian records not only traveled to Latin America (the hula records of Kalama’s Quartet were imported to Brazil by Parlophon in 1929), but Hawaiian-style ensembles—like Oscar Alemán’s Les Loups in Argentina—performed and recorded.71 In the United States, Hawaiian music was not simply the Tin Pan Alley fantasy of the South Seas; a number of the vernacular musicians who came out of the recording boom incorporated the sounds of Hawaiian music, collaborating with Hawaiian musicians. Country singer Jimmie Rodgers recorded with the Hawaiian steel guitarist Joseph Kaaaia Kaipo in the fall of 1929, and jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong later recorded several sessions with a Hawaiian band led by Andy Iona.72 Hawaiian music also had remarkable reverberations across the ports of Africa. Hawaiian guitar records not only influenced the palm-wine music of Lagos,73 but when Griffiths Motsieloa arrived in London from South Africa to organize an early session of recordings of South African marabi and vaudeville tunes for the South African market, his first recording, a duet with Ignatius Monare, “Aubuti Nkikho” (Brother Nkikho), featured Hawaiian steel guitar.74 Hawaiian guitar eventually became so influential that the term Hawaiian—hauyani—was adopted into Bantu languages.75
Other musics did not travel as widely. Indeed, in 1933, a journalist remarked on the difference between the global diffusion of Hawaiian music and the local nature of kroncong: “If the Hawaiian songs have become popular throughout the world, and appear in a variety of compositions, the Lagu Krontjong has remained unchanged and unspoiled.”76 However, the circulation of records of US jazz, Cuban son, and Hawaiian hula across the archipelago of colonial ports is not only a story of specific musical influences and echoes. Rather it is also the sign of the emergence of a new world musical space, a transnational phonograph culture, in which words like “jazz,” “rumba,” and “Hawaiian” were often attached to idioms that bore little sonic resemblance to their “originals.”77
The changing time and space of phonograph culture also changed the way music was learned and passed on. Though musical apprenticeships with teachers continued, a host of idioms that had not been notated and were learned largely by ear were now available to musicians well out of earshot. Umm Kulthūm “learned songs from the records she heard at the home of her schoolmate, the ‘umda’s daughter”; she even remembered specific records she had heard, including those of Shaykh Abū al-‘Ulā Muhammad.78 Louis Armstrong recalled getting “one of those upright Victrolas, which we were very proud of,” and he purchased a copy of Livery Stable Blues (one of the early 1917 recordings of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band).79 Armstrong’s own records, in turn, had a powerful effect on younger jazz musicians: “My greatest inspiration,” Danny Barker recalled, “was the regular flow of Armstrong records on OKeh, each to me and the other young jazz musicians a masterpiece in jazz playing … I went to Dave Karnosky’s South Rampart Street record store and listened to records and checked on when Louis’s next great record would be released and arrive in New Orleans.” Rex Stewart said he and his friends played Armstrong’s recording with King Oliver “until our arms were worn out from working the phonograph handle, the record was worn out and our souls were on fire.”80 Legend had it that the flamenco guitarist Sabicas, a teenager at the time of the recording boom, taught himself from gramophone records because no one in his home town of Pamplona could play flamenco.81 “In a country without a tradition of written musical publication,” the Ghanaian musicologist J. H. Nketia wrote, “the importance of the disc cannot be overemphasized.”82
But recordings not only influenced apprentices in a particular idiom; they also became the key avenue for the exploration of musical idioms across oceans. There are many stories like those of the bands in the West African port of St. Louis like Grand Diop, St. Louis Jazz, and La Lyre Africaine who taught themselves Cuban music from the GV records;83 of the young tzigane and musette guitarist Django Reinhardt in Toulon, listening to the jazz 78s of Duke Ellington, Eddie Lang/JoeVenuti, and Louis Armstrong;84 or of the young Murakami Kazunori—who would become the first major Japanese performer of Hawaiian music—learning steel guitar in Tokyo in the early 1930s from the 78s of Sol Ho‘opi‘i.85
Recording also transformed the lives of musicians, as recording sessions become a part of their work, less as a way to make a living than as a form of advertising and promotion. Some of the early vernacular music discs were made by musicians who migrated to colonial metropolises before entering recording studios, as exemplified by the parallel but separate careers of two Honolulu-born steel guitarists: Sol Ho‘opi‘i left Hawaii for California at age seventeen in 1919, and rarely returned, becoming well known both for his recordings in Los Angeles and for playing in Hollywood’s “Hawaiian” films; Buckie Shirakata left Hawaii for Japan at age twenty-one in 1933, recorded Hawaiian records for Columbia’s Japanese label, and became the leading Hawaiian musician in Japan over the next three decades.86
Most of the recordings took place in the colonial ports themselves, as record company agents set up sessions in hotel rooms and makeshift studios. However, some musicians used local success to become migrant workers in the global music industry, traveling to national or colonial metropolises and recording in state-of-the-art studios: the Cuban Septeto Nacional recorded in Madrid as well as New York; Johnny Noble’s Hawaiians went to Los Angeles after their first Honolulu sessions. A few of the early recordings occurred when companies brought artists to London, Paris, or New York for specific recording sessions. One of the rare musical narratives of these overseas recording journeys was the Kumasi Trio’s song “Asin Asin.”*87 Accompanied by palm-wine guitar and frikyiwa (the West African iron castanet), Kwame Asare sings that “we were in Kumasi for a funeral. I heard DC officials were in town, looking for Kwame Asare, Ocansey and Biney [the three members of the Trio] … they took us to the white man’s office, he said Sunday morning we’d set sail, to record Fanti songs abroad, for the good of the people.” The song then becomes a praise song for the black man who helps them in England, Kweku Yankson, a “charming personality … a hard worker … our guardian.” Yankson, they sing, has been accepted by the whites in England; nonetheless, “some of the whites are evil … they killed his kid brother.”88
Few musicians made much money from these sessions, despite the hyperbole of journalists like E. V. Solomons who reported that Miss Riboet “has made a fortune from the royalties paid to her by Gramophone companies for her Krontjong and other song records.”89 In 1931, a Gramophone agent wrote of the Odeon recording sessions in east Africa that “the cost of the recording is stated to be small as the artists were only paid nominal sums and the average per title is 10/-.”90 Meanwhile, in Mombassa, the agent noted, “the artist Sitti Binti from Zanzibar was paid 20/-per title plus travelling expenses from Zanzibar and 4/-per day expenses for food.”91 In Lagos, Parlophone paid the highlife singer Tunde King five shillings for each side.92 In many cases, these payments had no provision for royalties: Cuba’s pioneering son group, the Trio Matamoros, apparently never received any royalty payments from their Victor recordings.93 “When I was first recorded in the year 1932,” the popular Bombay Bhavageet singer G. N. Joshi later wrote,
I was lured to the studios to record only two of my most popular songs. At the recording session, I became so involved and excited at the prospect of being recorded that instead of just two songs, when the recording session was wound up after about six hours, I discovered that I had actually recorded fourteen songs! These songs, when released in the market, received such unprecedented support that literally thousands of disks were sold. Artists are by nature very simple, sentimental, and temperamental. When I received such a tremendous following and public favour, I did not care that I had not been paid a single penny for the first fourteen songs!94
The role recordings were coming to play in the public image of musicians was dramatized in the occasional incorporation of the recording apparatus in live performances: blues singer Bessie Smith sometimes performed alongside a large recording horn, and her rival Ma Rainey, according to her pianist Thomas Dorsey, emerged on stage from a giant Victrola.95
Given the development of this phonograph culture, one of the curiosities of the intellectual debates over these vernacular musics in the late 1920s is how rarely actual records were mentioned. The record review was only just emerging as a genre, so with only a handful of exceptions, the early controversies over the vernacular phonograph musics were conducted through discussions of performances and books, particularly published song collections. This was true of both those who celebrated the musics and those who condemned them. Carpentier’s account of son in Music in Cuba mentions a half dozen classic songs and compares them to the compositions of Stravinsky, but names no son recording artist; for Carpentier, son remains an anonymous folk dance on the way to the learned compositions of Roldán and Caturla. Bartók’s dismissal of gypsy music took place in a book review of a folk song collection. The US debate over African-American spirituals, jazz and blues in the 1920s almost entirely ignored specific recordings. There were a handful of exceptions—both Irving Brown’s 1929 account of flamenco, Deep Song, and Alain Locke’s 1936 study, The Negro and His Music, had short appended discographies of commercial recordings—but for the most part phonograph culture had not penetrated the literary culture of music.
In contrast to the music critics and folklorists, who rarely analyzed the commercial recordings they deplored, there were a handful of figures who heard these records with new ears, in large part because they were reviewing the records themselves, rather than the printed songbooks. Two of these figures, Abbe Niles and Rodney Gallop, are particularly interesting because the trajectory of their magazine articles captures the tensions between print and recording, rural folklorism and urban commercialism, and marks the emergence of this phonograph culture.
Abbe Niles’s year-long series of monthly articles in The Bookman were perhaps the first regular reviews of vernacular phonograph records in US journalism. Niles, a young lawyer and blues aficionado, had visited the songwriter W. C. Handy at his New York publishing office in 1925, intending to write a profile for the Wall Street Journal; within a year he wrote an introduction to Handy’s pathbreaking collection Blues: An Anthology, and began reviewing books on American vernacular musics for the New Republic and the Nation. In early 1928, he took up an offer by the monthly magazine, The Bookman, to review contemporary “popular music”:
In speaking of “popular music” … I shall not imply the assertion that it is music, nor by this disclaimer do I confess that it is not. The term will be used in the narrow sense which denotes the songs and other pieces on which royalties are paid (or left unpaid), which generally escape mention in the purer musical circles, and which, together with American folksong and the slender but growing literature of both, will be among our major subjects.96
When he embarked on his monthly surveys in February 1928—titled “Ballads, Songs and Snatches”—he focused mainly on printed music: song collections and the best-selling sheet music. However, by the June 1928 survey, he was recommending phonograph records, and by the September 1928 installment he had abandoned sheet music entirely, and was discussing the recording company’s expeditions to the southern mountains. In the final January 1929 article, he concluded that he had, over the last year, “listened to a substantial proportion of the current ‘popular’ records of five leading phonograph companies.”97 The recording boom faltered in the wake of the Crash of October 1929, and Niles never returned to record reviewing (though he did contribute the occasional book review on popular music to the Nation and the New Republic). So the dozen articles Niles wrote in 1928 stand as a remarkable, unparalleled survey of the US side of the revolution in recorded vernacular music.98
Niles’s counterpart across the Atlantic was Rodney Gallop, a young British diplomat stationed in Belgrade, Athens, and Lisbon in the 1920s and early 1930s. An amateur folklorist, Gallop had begun collecting Basque folk songs in his early twenties—in a 1928 letter to The Gramophone he inquires about obtaining “a recording machine, preferably fairly portable, to take direct records of folk-songs from the peasant singers”99—and he wrote essays on Basque and Portuguese folk song for Music & Letters and the Musical Quarterly throughout the 1930s. However, in June 1928, while in Athens, he began a decade-long series of record reviews of the vernacular gramophone musics with a notice of the “new HMV Greek Records” in The Gramophone.100 If Niles mapped the musics of North America’s periphery, from the African-American South to the colony of Hawaii, Gallop mapped the musics of the European periphery, stretching across Greece, Albania, Serbia (the tzigane singer Sofka in Belgrade), Hungary (drawing on the work of Bartók and Kodály), the Basque country, Andalusia (cante jondo), Aragon (jota), Catalonia (the Sardana dance), Galicia (bagpipes), rural Portugal (the cantos regionais), and Lisbon and Coimbra fado. Later, Gallop reviewed recordings from Mexico, Java, and Japan, but they were not central to him; nor did he ever focus on the Celtic fringe, aside from an article on Scottish bagpipes. It was the “gypsy and Moorish ingredients” in the vernacular gramophone musics that captured his attention.
Like most of those of their generation interested in folk music, Niles and Gallop began with a focus on songs, paying more attention to the history and variations of particular songs than to individual performers or performances. Gallop was very much a folk-song collector, transcribing words and music of songs he heard, whereas Niles was a collector of printed sheet music as well as folk-song collections. And they retained elements of the folklorist’s disdain when they approached commercial recordings: reviewing a recording by José Luis de la Rica, Gallop noted that it “contains examples of what Basque song should and should not be. [One side] is one of those misapplications of five-eight time to a drawing-room ballad tune which are unfortunately so popular in the larger coast-towns. [The other side] is a perfectly lovely and genuine Basque folk melody.” Sounding like Bartók, he wrote that “the other two [records] are perfect examples of unaccompanied folksong performed by real peasants with all the shades and inflections which only the untutored folk-singer can give.”101
Unlike many folklorists, however, they sensed the way recordings shifted attention from the song to the performer’s style. If Niles’s articles begin by tracking variants of topical songs—like ballads of the Titanic—with only a casual mention of the recorded performer, they increasingly shift to describing the performance style and timbre on the records, as when he writes of “Blind Willie Johnson’s violent, tortured, and abysmal shouts and groans and his inspired guitar in a primitive and frightening Negro religious song, ‘Nobody’s Fault but Mine.’”*102 Similarly, Gallop defends “the services which the gramophone companies have rendered the cause of music in recording the folksongs of many and divers nations” because “it is the original singers whose voices are recorded with all the subtle inflections and mannerisms of performance without which folksong loses so much of its value and charm.”103
Both Gallop and Niles recognized that these recordings were aimed at local audiences, and were rarely available to mainstream metropolitan audiences. “Few owners of gramophones realise that these records, although recorded in Greece by Greek artists, are printed at Hayes, and can be obtained in England, if specially ordered,” Gallop wrote in his first review in The Gramophone in June 1928;104 that same month, Niles found it necessary to define “race records” for the readers of The Bookman: “‘Race records,’ here indicated by the letter ‘r,’ are those made for colored consumption. Most dealers haven’t them, but all can obtain them. Listening to race records is nearly the only way for white people to share the Negroes’ pleasures without bothering the Negroes.”105
Both also recognized the significance of the commercial field recordings: “It is the pleasant occupation of Ralph S. Peer,” Niles wrote, “to go on expeditions throughout the South looking for such as Rabbit [Brown], and inducing them to sing their songs for Victor Records on the spot.”106 Nonetheless, he asked in exasperation: “Why should recording managers of phonographic companies remain ignorant of the mine which [the folk-song collector Carl] Sandburg has opened up? They contribute to knowledge by their expeditions into the Southern mountains, where they pick up the country’s least sophisticated songs and dances at their source, but the resulting hill-billy records are ninety percent trash, fit only to sell back to the hill-billies.”107 Despite his condescension to “hill-billies,” Niles praised the recordings of Jimmie Rodgers, Ernest Stoneman’s Mountaineers, Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers, and Bascom Lunsford, all of which have come to be regarded as the “roots” of modern country music. For his part, Gallop noted that “Not only do scientific expeditions and individual collectors arm themselves with recording apparatus and thus make permanent record of the words and music of folk-musicians the world over, with all their vocal and instrumental mannerisms, but the big recording companies, while pursuing purely commercial aims, have made similar records forming a valuable contribution to musical scholarship.”108
Niles and Gallop stand out not only for their early practice of the record review, a form that would flourish over the next century, but for their recognition and defense of the new phonograph culture taking shape. “I have been waiting for someone to take up the cudgels on behalf of the gramophone,” Gallop wrote in 1934, “and proclaim the respects in which ‘canned’ music may be preferable to the real article. Since no one has done so, I now feel constrained to enter the lists myself,” noting that “we can summon up native performers from every quarter of the globe with their ‘strange music’ and stranger instruments and voice production.”109
From Song and Dance to Records
If phonograph culture transformed audiences and musicians, it also transformed the musics themselves, turning songs and dances into “records.” At first glance, the vernacular phonograph musics seem to be made up of a repertoire of songs and dances: the labels on the discs almost always carried a song title and usually included a dance title. But song and dance are such universalizing terms that it is worth reflecting on the nature of the songs and dances found on these “records,” particularly since the word “record”—now as much an emblem of twentieth-century vocabulary as the “triple-decker” novel is of the nineteenth century—came to mean not simply the disc one purchased, played, and collected, but the “piece” of music it contained.110 The characteristic musical unit of the vernacular phonograph record was three minutes of recorded sound, set by the approximate limits of a ten- or twelve-inch disc rotating at 78 revolutions per minute, more or less.111 These three-minute extracts were ripped from musical practices built on longer durations, and did not match the variety of existing song and dance forms. There were many musicians like the flamenco singer Aurelio de Cádiz (Aurelio Selles), recorded in a 1929 Polydor session, who “disliked records, saying they never allowed the singer to get going.”112 As a result, the vernacular phonograph musics were constituted by the tension between the record and the song, the record and the dance.
In addition, it might seem that song and dance have always been part of everyday life, and that everyday life is itself a transhistorical phenomenon. However, if everyday life is, as social theorists from Henri Lefebvre on have argued, a modern invention, the consequence of the capitalist division of workplace and household, of “making a living” and “living,” then the songs and dances of vernacular phonograph music—forms radically distinct from earlier art songs and work songs, court dances or folk dances—were, I would suggest, the first great medium that articulated and constituted the “everyday.” The songs and dances on the “record” evaded the terms of musicology’s classic dichotomy of functional and absolute music. They were neither functional, deeply embedded in social activities at specific times and places, the way work songs, sacred songs, or wedding dances were, nor were absolute, the object of an autonomous aesthetic contemplation, disconnected from the world of utility, like the modern art musics. Records simply inhabited modern daily life, an omnipresent soundtrack to household and neighborhood. They were, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s way of understanding the arts of daily life (his examples were architecture and film), musics for distraction rather than contemplation, musics that one lived with rather than musics that separated themselves from daily life.113
Moreover, though dance and song are in many times and places intertwined, one of the peculiarities of the vernacular phonograph musics was the way they encompassed but separated dance and lyric. Almost all of these musics had two distinct recorded repertoires: the one an instrumental dance music with characteristic rhythms performed by ensembles, the other a lyric song form with characteristic commonplaces, performed by individual singers with spare accompaniment. Thus highlife in Lagos encompassed both a dance style with roots in marching brass bands, and the guitar-based lyric “palm-wine” style spread by Kru sailors;114 tango on the River Plate was both a driving instrumental dance played by the sextets of Francisco Canaro and Roberto Firpo (two violins, two bandoneons, piano, and bass), and a lyric song—tango canción—made famous by Carlos Gardel, often accompanied by two guitars.115 Samba encompassed the parading style dominated by the percussive batucada as well as a lyric samba—samba cancão—accompanied by guitar and matchbox; the blues could mean either the virtuoso “hot jazz” played by the young Louis Armstrong or Sidney Bechet, or the blues lyrics sung by Bessie Smith or Blind Lemon Jefferson. To those outside the idiom, it was sometimes difficult to see the two branches as related. By separating, analytically, lyrics from dances, we can see how the new song topoi refigured the commonplaces of everyday life, while the new dance steps remade the rhythms of everyday life.
The hybrid “songs” of the vernacular phonograph records came out of the intersection of, and tension between, the professional ballads and theater songs that had become the mainstay of the sheet music publishing industry over the previous century, and the practice of performing linked lyric commonplaces that characterized the vernacular musics of the colonial ports. At the time, this uncertain relationship between commercial sheet music and lyric commonplaces was viewed through the lens of folk song, provoking controversies over whether or not samba, fado, jazz, and the like were folk musics. Reflecting on fado’s relation to folk song, Rodney Gallop concluded that it was “urban folk song”; in the US, the composer Virgil Thomson insisted that jazz was not folk song but urban and urbane.116 Three elements seemed to distinguish these musics from folk song: they were urban, not rural; they were played by professional musicians, not ordinary members of a community; and they appeared as authored songs, not simply variants on an oral tradition. In retrospect, it is clear that the recorded vernacular songs were not “folk songs,” as that term was understood at the time; indeed a host of historians and musicologists have revealed that many songs which appeared to be “authentic” folk songs had their origins less in the “oral tradition” than in the circulation of commercial sheet music. However, the rejection of the “folk” nature of vernacular phonograph music has often obscured the hybrid nature of these “songs,” and it would be an equal mistake simply to assimilate them to the established paradigm of printed sheet music.
Since the commodity sold was a disc rather than the printed song, the musical unit of the commodity usually had a unique lyric component, which was often confused and conflated with the commercial “popular song.” Moreover, since the circulation of records quickly led to the practice of “covering” popular tunes from distant regions, this helped reify the “song” as the central musical unit. However, in most cases, the lyrics sung on these records were less composed songs with standard sections—verses and refrains, choruses and releases—than improvised combinations and recombinations of lines, couplets, and verses drawn from a body of lyric commonplaces that were used and reused. This was true of the coplas of flamenco, of the largos and montunos of son, of the pantuns of kroncong, of the mele of hula, of the ṭarab phrases repeated and extended through vocal melismas, and of the blues couplets of early jazz and blues. These lyric commonplaces were often tied to particular rhythms, as in the various palos of flamenco; to melodic shapes, as in the “tumbling strain” of the blues or the maqam of ṭarab; or to chord changes: for example, the classic West African “song,” “Yaa Amponsah,” is really a particular rhythm and set of chord changes.117 The resulting songs often had little thematic or narrative unity. “The first two lines of a pantun very seldom have any connection with the following two lines,” a contemporary wrote of kroncong’s Malay lyric, “they are simply placed there for the purpose of rhyming. To those who understand Malay, it is an easy matter to appreciate the construction of a pantun, but it is no easy task to render a correct translation in a foreign tongue.”118 Thus, these songs were neither closed organic forms, like the folk songs Bartók collected—“in the folksong, text and music form an indivisible unity”—nor closed compositions like commercial sheet music; rather they lie in the open quotidian realm of the proverb, “equipment for living,” in Kenneth Burke’s words.119
Nonetheless, since “songs” had, through the world of publishing, become commodities on which songwriters staked claims to ownership, the issue of the “author” of vernacular music was highly contested. Commercial bandleaders arranged commonplaces, both melodic and lyric, turning them into commercial “songs.” When they copyrighted and published the arrangements, they were often taken to be the author of the song: W. C. Handy did this with blues commonplaces, as did Johnny Noble with “ancient” hulas and chants.120 The early Afro-Brazilian sambistas regularly sold the sambas they had written to white singers who recorded them: Ismael Silva sold many sambas to Francisco Alves, and Cartola later remembered being told in 1931 that “Mário Reis [a popular singer] wanted to buy one of my sambas … Buy a samba? For what?” “He’s going to make a record,” was the reply, so Cartola met Reis, “sang the samba [he] wanted to hear,” and sold it for 300 contos.121 In turn, many early record producers like Ralph Peer insisted that vernacular musicians record musical works made up of such lyric commonplaces rather than commercially printed songs; in this way, they not only avoided paying royalties, but also, by copyrighting these “new” songs in the name of the record producer, they generated new income for the record producer’s music publishing firm.122 After a period of chaotic claims and counter-claims to songs in the early years of the recording boom, a host of legal challenges to the copyright of particular songs emerged in the 1930s, and the battles continued through the rest of the century.
When the popular song of commercial sheet music did intersect vernacular phonograph records, it often led to the remarkable musical transformation that is central to the vernacular revolution in music: the elevation of the recorded improvised performance over the song itself, a tendency that can be seen in tzigane’s treatment of Hungarian sheet music and in jazz’s treatment of Tin Pan Alley tunes. As Béla Bartók noted of tzigane, “Gypsy performance destroys” the “indivisible unity” of text and music “because it transforms, without exception, the vocal pieces into purely instrumental ones. This alone suffices to prove the lack of authenticity in gypsy renderings of music, even with regard to popular art music.”123 What Bartók understood as “lack of authenticity” could as easily be understood as a “re-functioning” of the popular song, to use Benjamin’s term, creating a new, performance-based rather than song-based, idiom. Such a re-functioning is close in spirit to the remarkable innovation of Louis Armstrong when he first adapted Tin Pan Alley songs to the idiom of jazz in 1928. This was a radical break with the repertoire of hot jazz and race records; indeed, one might think of this as the moment of a shift from “race records,” on which black musicians recorded a black repertoire for black audiences (figures like Bessie Smith or Blind Lemon Jefferson in the 1920s), to “race covers,” on which black musicians recorded covers of mainstream popular hits for a largely black audience (figures like Billie Holiday in the 1930s). Nonetheless, each of these mark a powerful decolonization of the ear, as mainstream forms were subjected to new timbres and new rhythms, often leaving the source song behind.
Just as the mass production of printed sheet music in the nineteenth century created “songs” as commodities to be sold, so the proliferation of printed dance manuals at the turn of the century created “dances” as commodities, as the waltz, polka, schottische, and mazurka were joined, in ports around the world, by the dances of the Americas: the tango, the maxixe, the foxtrot, the Charleston, the beguine, the rumba. “When the tango made its appearance in the old world in 1910, it released a dance frenzy, almost a mania, which attacked all ages and classes with the same virulence,” the pioneering German musicologist Curt Sachs wrote, as he summed up the history of his generation in his 1933 World History of the Dance:
The adoption of American Creole and Negro steps corresponds exactly to the assimilation of Spanish and Slavic dances in earlier centuries, … Since the Brazilian maxixe of 1890 and the cakewalk of 1903 broke up the pattern of turns and glides that dominated the European round dances, our generation has adopted with disquieting rapidity a succession of Central American dances, in an effort to replace what has been lost to modern Europe: multiplicity, power, and expressiveness of movement to the point of grotesque distortion of the whole body. We have shortly after 1900 the one-step or turkey-trot; in 1910, inspired by the Cuban habanera, the so-called “Argentine” tango with its measured crossing and flexing steps and the dramatic pauses in the midst of the glide; and in 1912 the fox trot with its wealth of figures. After the war we take over its offspring, the shimmy, which with toes together and heels apart contradicts all the rules of post-minnesinger Europe; the grotesquely distorted Charleston; in 1926 the black bottom with its lively mixture of side turns, stamps, skating glides, skips and leaps; and finally the rocking rumba—all compressed into even movement, all emphasizing strongly the erotic element, and all in that glittering rhythm of syncopated four-four measures classified as ragtime. One can hardly imagine a greater contrast to the monotony of steps and melody of the latter part of the nineteenth century.124
These modern dances were thus neither folk dances nor society dances. “When talking about mambo,” the Cuban critic Alejo Carpentier wrote, “it’s a matter of not mixing up or confusing dance music, the fruit of urban life, with folklore. The two are never the same. Dance music of the cities is not a pure outburst of popular inspiration, like the son, for example, rural song, regional dance, and so on. It is the product of what in all times is called ‘modern life.’”125 This was true as well of the modern hula that emerged in late nineteenth-century Hawaii: the “hula ku‘i,” “the most democratic of the hulas,” which, in the words of a turn of the century observer, “became all the rage among dancing folk, attaining such a vogue as almost to cause a panic among the tribunes and censors of society.”126 The modern dances were, one might say, a product of the circulation of commercial “dances” marketed in printed dance manuals and dance schools, and the popular practice of mimicking and satirizing society dances and folk dances alike in the colonial ports.
However, as these urban dances were recorded, they were further transformed. Their iterative forms had to be fitted to the three-minute limits of the disc; one finds, for example, that the commercial recordings of Irish dance tunes—with their repeating and alternating eight-bar sections—often assembled medleys of three different tunes. And if the printed dance manuals had illustrated the dances as a disciplined and regularized set of steps that could be taught and learned, with competitions and exhibitions codifying them, sound recording tended to transform the vernacular dances—whether the tango or the foxtrot, the beguine or the hula—from a set of steps into a characteristic rhythm. As a result, phonograph “dances” were more abstract if just as visceral, increasingly autonomous from social dancing, recorded rhythms that reverberated around the world.
In addition to turning songs and dances into records, the commercial and technical context of recording had profound effects on the repertoires and musical styles of vernacular musicking. The commercial impulses of the recording producers reshaped the musics in ways of which we, as listeners to the existing recordings, may not be aware. In some cases they restricted the recorded repertoire of performers to specific commercially defined genres, as when the blues recording boom led race-record labels to package black songsters with wide-ranging repertoires as blues singers.127 In other cases, recording engineers changed the characteristic instrumentation of vernacular idioms: Christopher Waterman notes that a recording engineer added a violin and keyboard to an early jùjú recording, though these instruments were not part of performed jùjú.128
The technical limits and freedoms of recording had profound effects on musical styles. “There is a wide difference between hearing an air in the propitiatory surroundings of a dance hall and the listening to the same as emitted by a mechanism of pitiless precision,” Gisèle Dubouillé wrote in a review of the early beguine recordings. “The microphone requires the sacrifice of the allurement of improvisation and the embellishments of a pre-arranged orchestration.”129 But the microphone also opened up new and more intimate vocal styles—“crooning”—and changed the relations between singers and instrumentalists. “The microphone and audio amplifier facilitated the coordination of guitar and voice in flamenco performances,” flamenco scholar William Washabaugh argues.
Prior to the mike, the guitarist and the cantaor formed a mismatched pair. The guitar was a quiet, introspective instrument, generally incapable of projecting anything but vague percussive sounds over long distances. The cantaor’s voice, however, had formed in early nineteenth-century Andalucía under the influence of Italian operatic styles, and was a powerful projective instrument.130
Finally, electrical recording led to a wave of experiments with techniques of altering sonic space. Precisely because recording separated music from its place of performance, recording engineers began to reinsert a sense of place in the recording. At first, this took the form of audio captioning, as artists were introduced at the start of the disc; later, as radio broadcasting accustomed audiences to listening from afar, singers would open a recording by setting the scene. As recording engineers began to experiment with reverb and echo, they could create imaginary audioscapes; indeed, Peter Doyle has suggested that a repertoire of “spatial sonic production practices” were invented, not at the heart of the recording industry’s best practices, but in the less prestigious “shadow” recording of Southern blues and hillbilly music. The first use of “managed reverb,” he argues, was the landmark 1927 recording of Jimmie Rodgers’s “Blue Yodel No. 1” in RCA’s Camden studio in Trinity Baptist Church.131 In the process, recording became an art in itself.
The feedback loops created by the schizophonia of recorded sound, combined with a worldwide industry that inadvertently circulated the vernacular musics of the colonial ports, not only reconfigured local and regional music practices, but created a new phonograph culture. Whereas musical performances in the era before recording usually functioned in specific social worlds and spaces, vernacular sounds on shellac discs not only transgressed those boundaries but created a new world soundscape. And this new soundscape was more than a musical revolution. Just as earlier musical revolutions were harbingers of political transformations, so this remaking of world musical space was a harbinger of the remaking of the world’s social and political space, a herald of the anticolonial revolutions of the twentieth century.