This double-CD set is the aural companion to Tim Brooks's book of the same title (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). Ideally, listeners should also possess the book, but they will get the essence of it in the sixty-page booklet by Brooks that accompanies the recordings. The booklet contains a general introduction, biographies of some of the best-known artists, and commentary on each selection.

The fifty-four tracks here were all recorded prior to the establishment of the concept of “race records,” that is, prior to the realization by the record industry that there was a black record-buying constituency that wanted music specifically directed toward it and that could be reached by targeted marketing. Thus, these recordings by black artists were almost all aimed at white, mostly middle- and upper-class consumers. This public was, of course, already familiar with a certain range of black and black-themed musical material, especially spirituals, “coon” songs, ragtime, and—toward the end of this period—blues and jazz. One will find here only limited evidence of the sort of material that dominated the “race record” catalogs of the 1920s—vocal blues, semi-improvised hot jazz, swinging quartets in a “barbershop” style, and various types of sacred and secular folksong. Only some of the quartet and minstrel selections come close to the styles heard on later records. These recordings either had to meet the expectations of white consumers about black expression, which relied heavily on racial stereotyping, or had to display high cultural and musical standards and be delivered with very precise diction so that they could be judged on the same level as the best productions of “good music” of their white counterparts. Only a limited amount of material, mostly the Bert Williams tracks and dance band selections, gives a sense of being up-to-date, i.e., the “latest thing,” a concept that would become more prominent in the race record era.

Not surprisingly, the majority of the featured artists were already well known to white Americans and to the urban black middle and upper classes, a fact that lent them name recognition and created a certain demand for their recordings. These artists included Eubie Blake, Harry T. Burleigh, Florence Cole-Talbert, Ford Dabney, R. Nathaniel Dett, James Reese Europe, the Fisk University Jubilee Quartet, the Four Harmony Kings, W. C. Handy, Roland Hayes, Polk Miller's Old South Quartette, Noble Sissle, Wilbur Sweatman, the Tuskegee Institute Singers, Clarence Cameron White, and Bert Williams and George Walker, as well as speakers Jack Johnson and Booker T. Washington. Others, such as Cousins and DeMoss, the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet, the Oriole Quartette, the Standard Quartette, and the Unique Quartette, had worked in vaudeville and traveling shows and achieved a moderate level of success. These are the artists who sound the closest to what would later be called “race music.” Then there were some like George W. Johnson and Carroll Clark, who became famous largely as a result of their recordings. It's not a long list compared to the hundreds of white artists who recorded in the same period, but it's heavy in star power and shows considerable variety of genre, style, and repertoire, including quartet and solo spirituals, spiritual parodies, minstrel and “coon” songs, a comic sermon, mainstream popular songs, classical selections, instrumental dance music ranging from ragtime to formal blues and (arguably) jazz, and speeches and recitations. The most notable missing element is vocal blues, which had gained a foothold on the professional stage by 1910 and was widely heard, even by many whites, over the following decade. Given the range of other material that was recorded in this period, it's actually surprising that it took until 1920 for vocal blues by black singers to be recorded. Although selections bearing the hallmarks of oral traditional learning and semi-improvisational performance style are in short supply, the same could be said of recordings by whites from this period, and the folk tradition is at least represented in the content of many of the selections no matter how highly arranged and formalized. Furthermore, the values of formalism, arrangement, and musical “betterment,” promoted by black educational institutions and the leadership class since the Reconstruction era, already had some degree of resonance and prestige within the black working class that would become the chief consumers of recordings by black artists in the 1920s.

Because there are so few recordings of music by black performers before 1920, almost all of these examples are of extreme historical and documentary value. Many are also quite rare, the originals existing in only one or two known copies, which sometimes exhibit formidable wear or surface noise. Brooks and Archeophone are therefore to be congratulated for unearthing and researching this material and making it available in the best possible sound quality, thereby adding immensely to our understanding of American music over a period of three decades. Nearly every track is a highlight in some way.

Merely for the sake of tempering an otherwise unreserved rave review, I will offer just a few quibbles with the selection and production. One is that artists who recorded prolifically and much of whose work is available on other CDs (e.g., Fisk, Handy, Bert Williams, Clark, Europe, Sweatman) are represented here by only one or two selections, creating somewhat of an imbalance toward the obscure and causing those interested in a more rounded picture to have to seek out these other CDs (a number of them also on Archeophone). George W. Johnson, enormously important as perhaps the first black artist to make commercial recordings and also one who comes close to being described as “folk” or “traditional,” appears on eight tracks, some of them in less-than-ideal condition, covering almost all of his recorded repertoire, whereas the Fisk University Jubilee Quartet gets a single track. One track is attributed to the Memphis Pickaninny Band, a group that recorded in the wake of the success of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. The fact that the band is otherwise entirely unknown raises the possibility that it is a group of white studio musicians and perhaps should not have been included here. Likewise, the inclusion of the humorous monologue by Charley Case, rumored to have had some black ancestry, is questionable, because he was never in his lifetime associated with black entertainment in any form. The final track, a 1922 recording of a “St. Louis Blues” medley by Handy's Memphis Blues Band, is perhaps out of place because of its late recording date. It is said to be in the style of “slick, big-band jazz” popular at that time (56). With its blues content it might have passed for jazz in the ears of contemporary listeners, but it really seems to be in the earlier style of a concert band or “Handy band,” a concept of formal blues performance created by Handy himself in his Memphis years before “jazz” became widely recognized. There is no apparent improvisation or “hot” quality in this performance. These criticisms are minor, however, and in no way should detract from a CD package whose release is a monumental achievement.