Back in the early days of popular music studies, a leading sociologist of culture, Richard Peterson, wrote “Why 1955?” to put academic structure around an assertion made previously in the first persuasive history of rock and roll, authored by fanzine writer and future BBC DJ Charlie Gillett.Footnote ¹ Gillett had argued, one label roster at a time, that “independent” record labels were the key innovators in the emergence of a new pop youth music. Peterson shrewdly saw this as a fight within modes of capitalism, not against it, and contrasted the music industry of the late 1940s, as opposed to the late 1950s, as having shifted from corporate and bureaucratic approaches to an entrepreneurial model with room for disruptive upstarts. Peterson, who later explored a multidecade version of part of this narrative in his book, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity, would have hugely enjoyed Kyle Barnett's Record Cultures.Footnote ² (Gillett, however, might have wanted more zip in the musical descriptions.) Barnett looks at a period well before rock and roll—the 1910s through 1930s—to demonstrate that the practices outlined by Peterson and Gillett had actually first occurred much earlier. As Barnett illustrates, indies (independent record labels) had similarly opened new terrain at the dawn of jazz to challenge the “Big Three” Tin Pan Alley/vaudeville record labels—Victor, Columbia, and Edison—only to see their territory consolidated by radio networks and swing-era stars. Record Cultures outlines this early cycle of the U.S. record business as concisely and persuasively as anyone has managed to date. Realizing his goal to reconcile media studies with popular music scholarship, Barnett delivers a nuanced overview, synthesizing a generation's worth of popular music studies research with trade magazine and archival material to emphasize a time when selling records across the full spectrum of U.S. music was as much of an adventure as making them.

Touchingly, Barnett makes it a point to pay homage to another early popular music studies scholar, the late and much-missed David Sanjek, who argued against “agoraphobia”: the distorting fear in cultural studies of music markets, seen as totalitarian forces and intractable dialectics.Footnote ³ Instead, Barnett discovers industry perspectives similar to those I found reading trade magazines like Radio & Records in the 1970s and 1980s, though he is perusing Talking Machine World as it morphed into Radio Music Merchant. Industry insiders were less radical-conservative than endlessly adaptive, registering, in the best way they could, the modernizing effects of new technologies, booms and busts, and clinging to what worked.Footnote ⁴ For example, as Chapter 1 demonstrates, Gennett Records, out of Indiana no less, became a player in jazz because their Starr Piano Stores offered showrooms doubling as talent scout locations in multiple cities; in a different moment (207), the same ledger-sheet look at synergies (“tie-ups,” as they were called then) might favor pulling back on a Depression stricken phonograph business to favor a bigger money maker in domestic electronics, the refrigerator.

Earlier work on the period covered by Barnett has tended to be more collector-driven, more episodic, or more prescriptive. Rick Kennedy's books are his window into the nuts and bolts of Gennett Records, whereas Alex van der Tuuk's work offers a similar boon for studying Paramount Records—a force in southern blues despite its home base in Wisconsin.Footnote ⁵ The small details of positioning chronicled in the trade press helped produce Sanjek and his father Russell's music business study, Pennies from Heaven, used for tidbits. With this kind of material, Barnett simply consolidates and refines the evidence to focus his overview.Footnote ⁶

Barnett's study is challenged more when it comes to ideological questions about commodification and racism so critical to influential work on aspects of his topic in recent years. David Suisman's Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music studied Tin Pan Alley's emergence through to 1930s consolidation, with a chapter on the doomed but fascinating Black-owned Black Swan label—yet Suisman modeled (at times to his detriment) reservations about a “commercial revolution” equating with popular expression.Footnote ⁷ Karl Hagstrom Miller's Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop in the Age of Jim Crow was as historically assured as Suisman's, but had a more pointed bone to pick: The strict apartheid division of non-mainstream records into a Race Records line for Black musicians, and a Hillbilly or Old-Time category for southern white performers.Footnote ⁸ However, where this left jazz was never made entirely clear. Finally, Allison McCracken's Real Men Don't Sing: Crooning in American Culture took on the reaction of the Depression era U.S. audiences to crooners, whose gender indeterminacy and soft focus incited a backlash against Rudy Vallee, but coronated the safest of dad golfers, Bing Crosby.Footnote ⁹ Unlike these more ideological studies, Barnett prefers to linger on “intermedial contexts”: for example, jazz's relationship to network radio broadcasting. He therefore confines himself to targeted observations, such as: “Radio excluded African Americans to a much greater degree than either sound recording or cinema” (180).

What is gained by Barnett's media studies perspective—which examines industry figures as “intermediaries” in the Bourdieu vein—is a well-managed tour of how things looked week to week over the course of many decades, from Original Dixieland Jazz Band and Blind Lemon Jefferson raising eyebrows with their sales tallies, to RCA acquiring Victor for the Camden, New Jersey manufacturing plant (perfect for assembling radios), to Jack Kapp's practice of discounting discs on Decca. The first main chapter adds key information to pop's history by looking at 1910s to 1920s midwestern indies that were hardly clued in but were still able to outpace bigger New York labels in picking up on early jazz currents. Focusing specifically on race, he then, in Chapter 2, surveys the years from Black Swan to Bessie Smith and Blind Lemon Jefferson, although his approach is a bit vague, with none of the thunder that Daphne Brooks's subsequently published Liner Notes for the Revolution brings to Mamie Smith's landmark hit “Crazy Blues” (1920).Footnote ¹⁰ Rounding out the pre-Depression years, his Chapter 3 looks at the Hillbilly category, relishing musicians’ show biz personae and figures like the industry-savvy performer Bradley Kincaid, “The Kentucky Mountain Boy with the Houn’ Dog Guitar.”

Putting jazz and pop much more into dialogue with race records and old time sounds than Miller's book, Chapter 4 explains how Tin Pan Alley welcomed upstart sounds to the party, using the looseness of jazz as a descriptor to create, via radio and film, the likes of the Lucky Strike Orchestra Dance Hour on NBC in 1928. In this period, Record Cultures shows, Paul Whiteman emerged as king of various media: When Columbia signed him away from Victor in 1928 (attracting much publicity), it allowed the bandleader to spread that wealth to hire hot-jazzish folks like Bing Crosby and Bix Beiderbecke, and to make the prestige picture King of Jazz (1930). Barnett further discusses Louis Armstrong, another intermedial entertainer from this viewpoint who was based in New York City after 1929. In addition to appearances on Broadway, he too enjoyed crossover hits and film exposure. Jimmie Rodgers also sought a mediated popularity—one that transcended the hillbilly personae for which he was well known.

As Chapter 5 chronicles, the Depression's dust storms corroded many of the industry's prior gains. Record sales dropped by 90 percent, race records (apart from jazz) halted, but hillbilly persisted, helped by its radio strongholds. Barnett persuasively argues that the pop incorporations of the late 1920s became key precedents to reviving the industry in the late 1930s: Now in the form of a swing, jukebox, youth-focused, and 35-cent vision of “the latest, newest smash hits” (215). Decca, in a way, was thus Paul Whiteman with a leaner disposition—not just intermedial but working the audience slivers that became niche marketing. One of the “repeating patterns” most striking to Barnett is BMI's challenge from the 1940s onward to ASCAP's hold on publishing revenue and its pursuit of race and hillbilly styles, which the new era's major labels ignored—a practice that obviously followed the Gennett–Paramount–OKeh Records model of an earlier time. This is another example of why this book, seemingly focused only on records, should be illuminating for anybody interested in abandoning worries about “contamination” and pursuing the far-from-finished project of unpacking the nature and impact of pop culture marketing. Barnett has given us the rock and pop pre-history that led as much to Pat Boone and Harry Belafonte as Elvis Presley, demonstrating how long before David Geffen and his crowd appeared the intermediaries were already stoking the talking machinery behind the popular song.