History of Live Recording

http://www.peermusic.com/peermusic/index.cfm/about-us/ralph-s-peer/

Ralph S. Peer
A Life of Infinite Variety and Many Achievements
by Richard M. Sudhalter

If one abiding paradox surrounds the life of Ralph Sylvester Peer, it is this: that a man so indispensable to the story of 20th Century vernacular music should remain so little known to the public.

 

Consider the evidence: histories of popular and country music, jazz and the blues, as well as the recording and music publishing industries, abound with his innovations and discoveries. Peer figures centrally in the lives of performers as disparate as the Carter Family and "singing brakeman" Jimmie Rodgers, of Thomas "Fats" Waller and Kansas City bandleader Bennie Moten, of Latin American legends Alberto Dominguez and Agustin Lara, and of blues icons Sleepy John Estes and Bukka White. Success might have been longer coming to "Star Dust" composer Hoagy Carmichael but for Peer's foresight in publishing and promoting his work; song standards from France, Italy, Germany, England, Mexico, Brazil, and other countries might have been far slower reaching the international audiences they now command.

In short, historical research finds Ralph Peer everywhere, driving the main action from a position usually just offstage, slightly out of camera range. And ironically enough, that may be the way he preferred it. From all indications, Peer considered himself a businessman, working behind the scenes in living embodiment of Calvin Coolidge's 1925 declaration that, "The chief business of the American people is business."

He was born May 22, 1892, in Independence, Missouri, the suburb of Kansas City best known as the birthplace of President Harry S. Truman. His father, Abram Peer, was a storekeeper, dealing in furniture, sewing machines and - significantly for the boy - Columbia Graphophones and records. A vaguely Horatio Alger flavor hangs over accounts of young Ralph, age ten, working weekends in Abram's stock room and learning the operation quickly enough to handle re-orders of machines, parts, and records. "Naturally I went in and out of Kansas City," he told interviewer Lillian Borgeson in 1959, a year before his death. "There was an interurban electrical line running back and forth, a 45-minute trip. I would go in to pick up a package of records, for example, or some repair parts."

Self-possessed and personable, the lad was soon a frequent and welcome visitor at Columbia's Kansas City offices and warehouse, and before long began filling in during summer months for vacationing stock and shipping clerks. Married directly out of high school and in need of a steady job, he knocked on the door he knew best, easily landing a full-time position with Columbia. "I worked very hard for them for a number of years," he recalled, and his enthusiasm and industry won rapid promotions to credit manager, retail manager, and finally a transfer to Chicago, Columbia's largest regional office.

Shortly after President Woodrow Wilson took the United States into World War I, young Peer went to sea in the Merchant Marine, catching his first taste of Britain and France and establishing an international outlook which would serve him well in coming years. By 1920 he was back in the United States, again with Columbia. When his old Chicago boss, W. S. Fuhri, moved to the smaller but livelier General Phonograph Corporation, young Peer followed him.

General had launched its OKeh label in 1918 with a selection of standard ballads, sacred music, marching bands, and light classical pieces. It also showed marked interest in the music of black Americans, particularly the blues and the emergent novelty called jazz. On the advice of house pianist-songwriter Perry Bradford, OKeh in early 1920 recorded black vaudeville singer Mamie Smith performing two numbers, one of them composed by Bradford himself. The record was an almost immediate success, prompting OKeh to schedule another Mamie Smith date. On August 10th, when the singer and a small backup band assembled in front of OKeh's acoustical recording horns, young Ralph Peer was there as assistant to musical supervisor Fred Hager.

"Crazy Blues," made that day, was a breakthrough, a runaway million-seller that revealed a fresh market for what Peer soon began calling "race" records, performances by black artists specifically targeted at black buyers. By the following summer he was running OKeh's new 8000 "race" series, and General Phonograph had captured a market that enabled it to compete significantly with industry leaders Columbia and Victor. By 1923, Peer and Hager had recorded such nascent artists as singer Sara Martin and young Harlem pianist Fats Waller, pupil and protège of the respected James P. Johnson.

Then, one morning that March, destiny strolled into Peer's West 45th Street Manhattan office in the person of a Virginia mill hand who introduced himself as William Henry Whittier and touted himself as "the world's greatest harmonica player." Peer, intrigued by such bravado, recorded a few test selections at Okeh's Union Square studio. "He was a great harmonica player," he recalled later. "No doubt about that."

By year's end OKeh had released performances by Whittier and by Atlanta-based "Fiddlin' John" Carson, among others, and launched yet another specialty record series, designated "hillbilly" by Peer and bearing its own catalogue numbers. Together with the company's already thriving business in ethnic and nationality-oriented records, the new lines propelled Okeh - and Ralph Peer - into the most important phase of his early career. Country music had arrived.

Most available evidence indicates that the practice of "field" or location recording - travelling to sometimes remote locales to capture the work of regional artists on portable equipment - had gone on since the industry's first days. But there is no doubting that it began in earnest in the early 1920s, and that its most vigorous practitioner was Ralph S. Peer. By the end of 1923, he had taken equipment designed by OKeh technical director Charles Hibbard to Atlanta, Chicago, and St. Louis, recording artists for the label's "race," "hillbilly," and mainstream catalogues.

Among attractions recorded this way, often under Peer's close supervision, were King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, Erskine Tate's Vendome Orchestra of Chicago, the Clarence Williams Blue Five, Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orchestra, Louis Armstrong's Hot Five, the Jenkins Family, Kelly Harrell, blues singer "Sippie" Wallace, and the family of Ernest V. "Pop" Stoneman, whose 1925 hit, The Titanic, numbers among the earliest "event songs" - those celebrating and romanticizing actual occurrences - recorded in the country field.

In 1924 and '25 Peer expanded his reach to Cincinnati, Dallas, Cleveland, Detroit, Asheville, North Carolina, and, significantly, New Orleans, where he recorded some of the Crescent City's leading jazz bands in situ, doing much to justify folklore historian Archie Green's praise of him as "a cultural documentarian of the first rank." As he did, attracting scores of performers from sometimes far-flung and rural retreats, a business idea took root in his mind.

By securing copyright protection for original material recorded under his supervision, Peer became de facto publisher and recipient of royalties earned by those compositions under the 1909 U.S. Copyright Act. In a general sense, that had been common record industry practice all along; but the idea of actively encouraging early country and black artists to generate original material to record, avoiding already copyrighted selections, was his innovation. That way, Peer paid each artist a $25 talent fee per selection, and a percentage of royalties earned.

By late 1925, when he left OKeh, Ralph S. Peer was certain of his own value as a recording man, but unsure what to do with it. A preliminary approach to the Victor Talking Machine Company foundered on his salary demands. Brief ventures in promoting experimental automobiles and apple pies, though prescient in their grasp of marketing principles, came to nothing. He returned to Victor, this time proposing a novel arrangement: he would draw no salary at all, as long as he could control copyrights on all original material recorded under his aegis. He could furthermore promise that several key attractions who had recorded for him at OKeh - bandleader Moten, blues singer Wallace and "hillbilly" standout Harrell among them - would come over to Victor with him. The company accepted, and Peer hit the road in early 1927 to put the new association into action. Between January and March he set up Victor's brand-new "Orthophonic" electrical recording equipment in Atlanta, Memphis, and again in New Orleans. By summer he was off again to points south, his first stop Bristol, Tennessee.

A small city (population 25,000 in 1927) straddling the Virginia-Tennessee border, Bristol is now celebrated by historians as the scene of modern country music's "big bang," its origin on record. While hardly the first location recording of such material, Peer's two weeks in Bristol did assemble a virtual Who's Who of early "hillbilly" and gospel performers, who committed 69 examples of their singing and playing to posterity: they included Whittier, the Stonemans (with fiddler "Uncle Eck" Dunford), gospel singers Alfred G. Karnes and Blind Alfred Reed, and many others - but above all two particular acts: Alvin Pleasance Carter of nearby Maces Springs, recording with his wife Sara and sister-in-law Maybelle as the Carter Family - and, no less significantly, the personable Mississippi-born singer and guitarist Jimmie Rodgers.

Recognizing great potential in both, Peer soon began managing and steering their careers, carefully selecting the material they recorded. As scholar Charles Wolfe has remarked, "Peer sensed he was developing a new commercial art form...and that this art form was to be derived from, though not fully reflective of, traditional mountain music."

The same field trip that took Peer to Bristol found him, some weeks later, in Savannah, Georgia, where he recorded Blue Steele's "territory" band playing Girl of My Dreams, a new waltz by trombonist Charles "Sunny" Clapp. By year's end the song was a national hit, and remains a beloved standard. Further trips the following year yielded such seminal bluesmen as Furry Lewis, Ishmon Bracey, Will Shade, Jim Jackson, and Blind Willie McTell. A series of New York dates, meanwhile, featured music by Trinidad-born songwriter Donald Heywood, targeted at new arrivals from the Caribbean and West Indies.

Again and again, while steadfastly denying any motive other than effective business, Peer displayed a knack for making making music history by doing the right thing at the most appropriate time. In 1929, on his watch at Victor, jazz bands of black and white musicians began recording together regularly for the hitherto socially conservative industry leader. A mid-November field trip to New Orleans yielded four titles by the "Jones and Collins Astoria Hot Eight," including (reportedly at Peer's specific behest) white clarinetist Sidney Arodin. New York sessions organized around comb-playing "blue-blower" Red McKenzie also included such Harlem stars as Coleman Hawkins on tenor sax and bassist George "Pops" Foster.

Peer's publishing operation, now officially known as Southern Music, by 1928 controlled more than one-third of all non-classical music recorded by Victor. In 1928 it split into four distinct companies, to accommodate ever greater and more diversified revenue. Southern Music, now the group's flagship firm, extended its reach well into the mainstream pop market with such standards-in-the-making as Carmichael's "Georgia on My Mind," "Rockin' Chair" and, somewhat later, "Lazybones," his first collaboration with Georgia-born Johnny Mercer. When Hollywood's Hal Roach studios followed Warner Brothers into sound movies it signed Leroy Shield at Victor to write soundtrack music, with Peer handling copyright business. Income from the Roach films eventually helped Peer underwrite expansion of Southern's operations in Europe and South America.

Jimmie Rodgers, by now gravely ill with the tuberculosis that would shortly claim his life, continued to tour and record as the '30s got under way, with Peer guiding him steadily toward a wider popular market. Nolan Porterfield, biographer of "the singing brakeman," contends that Peer saw a natural fan base for Rodgers in the audience attracted to crooners Gene Austin and Johnny Marvin.

Even with the Depression at its pre-New Deal worst and such record industry leaders as Columbia in bankruptcy, the Carter Family's Victor records kept selling. But all was far from well: the marriage of A.P. and Sara Carter, foundation of the trio's successs, had unraveled. Jimmie Rodgers' death of tuberculosis on May 26, 1933, put an abrupt end to the singer's career. Ralph Peer, having recovered sole ownership of his publishing concerns from RCA Victor, seemed poised to move on.

A 1928 visit to Mexico City, the first of three, had resulted in Peer's discovery of the composer Agustin Lara (1901-1970), and an immediate realization of Latin America's importance as a popular music resource for U.S. listeners. Overnighting at a San Antonio hotel en route home, he heard a local band playing The Peanut Vendor, by Cuban composer Moises Simons. Within weeks the firm had opened offices in Mexico City and Havana, beginning the long process of carrying Latin American melodies and rhythms to a grateful international market.

The next decade saw an infusion of Peer-controlled Latin American songs into the American popular music bloodstream: Granada (1932), Baia (1938), Brazil and Perfidia (1939), Frenesi (1940), Green Eyes and Maria Elena (1941), Besame Mucho (1943), Amor (1944), and other classic standards, all fitted with English-language lyrics.

The 1930s also found Peer establishing offices in London, Paris, Rome, and Madrid, and even exploring the German market. But the Nazi takeover with its increasingly repressive laws concerning Jews, then Adolf Hitler's annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia and invasion of Poland, created all but insuperable obstacles to free interchange of music between the United States and the Third Reich. Letters from German firms, still in the company's files, can chill with their casual references to "aryan" and "non-aryan" composers.

A 1940 Paris visit by Tom Ward, Peer's London executive, had convinced him that France, with its rich musical life, could be fertile territory for Peer Southern songs. But Gen. Georg von Kuechler's 18th German Army, swooping on the French capital one bright Friday morning that June and hoisting a giant Nazi swastika flag on the Eiffel Tower, put such plans on hold. Business might continue, at least officially, but on a greatly reduced scale and subject to the constant scrutiny of Joseph Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry and the even more sinister gaze of the Gestapo.

By early 1945, with the Nazis fighting on two fronts against Allied forces in the west and the Red Army advancing from the east, several formerly occupied cities were becoming more accessible. Using available channels, Ward gained entry to Paris, Brussels, Barcelona, Madrid, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Rome and Milan and ultimately Vienna, discovering a market hungry for new songs from abroad - despite even a paper shortage that seemed universal through Europe. His personal journal of those months, prepared later at Peer's request, reads like a spy thriller, full of vividly sobering details of the dedication and resourcefulness required even to subsist in such chaotic times.

Peer had dealt with a crisis of a far different sort at home: at the start of 1941, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) pulled all music it controlled off the radio in a dispute over broadcast royalties. Southern was already negotiating with ASCAP's upstart rival, Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), which had entered the field concentrating on public domain material, songs from abroad, and specialty items by niche market performers - particularly jazz, blues and hillbilly artists. As a result, such bandleaders as Jimmy Dorsey and Xavier Cugat rode a wave of renewed popularity with south-of-the-border songs, many imported by Peer's new BMI firm Peer International Corporation. Artie Shaw's 1940 RCA coupling of two Peer items, the Alberto Dominguez favorite Frenesi and another Mexican import, Adios, Mariquita Linda, kept on selling. The ASCAP walkout lasted only a matter of weeks, but long enough to establish BMI as a viable alternative, especially for songwriters hitherto outside the mainstream.

Through a Peer Southern department manager, the company became active after World War II in "serious" music publishing and promoting Charles Ives and other contemporary composers, including the American David Diamond. Ultimately the company's Classical Division published such major names as Heitor Villa-Lobos, Jan Sibelius, Wallingford Riegger, Virgil Thomson, and William Grant Still, among many others.

By the 1950s the Peer organization was operating smoothly on a vast international scale, coping easily with the nascent phenomenon of rock-and-roll. Such seminal artists as Buddy Holly, The Platters, the Penguins, Roy Orbison, Bobby Rydell, and even Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones, topped the charts with Peer songs. When Hollywood's Love in the Afternoon teamed Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn onscreen, the soundtrack featured an old waltz, Fascination, a longtime Peer catalogue staple. Other Peer hits of those years included Mockin' Bird Hill, a major record for Les Paul and Mary Ford, and a French import, The Three Bells, known familiarly as "The Jimmy Brown Song."

The 1950s also found Ralph Peer devoting time to avocational horticulture, particularly the cultivation of camellias. He brought characteristic energy and intelligence to his collecting, exchange, and correspondence with a worldwide network of camellia growers. International camellia organizations and individual growers came to know him as an unfailingly loyal colleague and tireless advocate, rewarding him with numerous honors and decorations, including, in 1955, the prestigious Veitch Gold Medal of Britain's Royal Horticultural Society. Founder and first President of the Los Angeles Camellia Society, he became President of the American Camellia Society in 1957, and was made a society Fellow. In 1958, Peer was appointed a director of the American Horticultural Society.

Ralph Sylvester Peer died in Los Angeles on January 19, 1960, leaving the firm under the leadership of his British born wife, Monique Iversen Peer. Their son, Ralph II, guides today's peermusic operation with his father's sure vision and steady hand.

================

Journalist and music historian Barry Mazor is currently at work on a full-length biography of Ralph S. Peer. His most recent book is Meeting Jimmie Rodgers – How America’s Original Roots Music Hero Changed the Pop Sounds of a Century (Oxford University Press, 2009).