http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VbOo6bmuso
This video is awesome! It tells me exactly what I need to know!
Tuesday, 11 December 2012
Sinatra- Live album 1950's
http://www.allmusic.com/album/live-in-australia-1959-mw0000615722
So when Sinatra was in Australia in '59, they recorded some tracks on 2 stops on the tour. It wasnt officially released until 1997 but it was recorded then.
Also there are some recordings of Billie Holiday from 1934 to the 50's which also werent released as an album until later.
http://www.amazon.com/Rare-Recordings-1934-1959-Lester-Young/dp/B000WCN8VY
So when Sinatra was in Australia in '59, they recorded some tracks on 2 stops on the tour. It wasnt officially released until 1997 but it was recorded then.
Also there are some recordings of Billie Holiday from 1934 to the 50's which also werent released as an album until later.
http://www.amazon.com/Rare-Recordings-1934-1959-Lester-Young/dp/B000WCN8VY
Trying to find the first ever live album
This is proving more difficult than first anticipated! I thought looking for the date of the first live album released would be simple... It isnt.
http://www.rollingstones.com/release/got-live-if-you-want-it/
So the Stones seem to be the first ones to release an album (based on the fact I cant find anything earlier than 66) but they kinda disowned it coz they didnt like it... this is a great start isnt it?
Anyhow, the link is there =)
http://www.rollingstones.com/release/got-live-if-you-want-it/
So the Stones seem to be the first ones to release an album (based on the fact I cant find anything earlier than 66) but they kinda disowned it coz they didnt like it... this is a great start isnt it?
Anyhow, the link is there =)
Saturday, 8 December 2012
Alan Lomax Field Recordings
http://www.last.fm/music/Alan+Lomax+Field+Recordings
Alan Lomax is a folklorist and ethnomusicologist. He began making field recordings with his father, a fellow folklorist, John Lomax, of American folk music for the Library of Congress’ Archive of American Folk Song. Throughout his six decades of pivotal work, Lomax travelled all over the United States, as well as to the Carribean, Ireland, Great Britain, Spain (where he was hounded by Franco’s fascist police), and Italy. Aside from turning the Archive of American Folk Song into one of the most important music resources in the world, Lomax wrote numerous books on music, hosted radio shows in the United States (CBS) and Britain (BBC), and even brought a concert series to New York called The Midnight Special.
Alan Lomax has played an incredibly important role in the preservation of classic folk music, and helped introduce such artists as Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and Jelly Roll Morton to the world.
http://www.radioopensource.org/lomax/
We’re listening in awe and gratitude to the all-American sounds that Alan Lomax recorded and saved for all time. There’s outlaw minstrel Huddie Ledbetter, known as Lead Belly, singing a cocaine ode “Take a Whiff on Me” in 1934. Then Woody Guthrie accompanying himself, Pete Seeger and others on “Bound to Lose,” playing a guitar with a label on it: “This Machine Kills Fascists.” And then there are the strangely uplifting choruses of prison work songs from the Angola Convict Sugar Plantation in Louisiana and the Parchman Farm Penitentiary in Mississippi — songs like “Rosie,” which Lomax recorded in 1947 with prisoners, “C. B. and the Axe Gang.” As John Szwed writes in his vivid biography of the protean Lomax, “This was as close as twentieth-century people were going to come to the sound of slavery.”
Alan Lomax with unidentified man. [Library of Congress photo]
Alan Lomax (1915 – 2002), The Man Who Recorded the World in Szwed’s subtitle, was the son of a proper folklorist at the University of Texas. The old folklore compiled texts; the new would revel in the truth of sound that had body language in it, too. Together in the early Thirties, father John and his teenage apprentice had set out across the South with early Edison recording equipment on what John Lomax used to call a “hobo-ing” trip. What Alan ended up compiling was a sort of unofficial, non-commercial people’s soundtrack of the Great Depression. Homegrown songs of spirit seem in retrospect to be pouring out of the suffering soil wherever Alan Lomax turned. Makes you wonder: what is the music of the meltdown today, and where’s to find it?
John Szwed [Martha Rose photo]
Alan Lomax brought a roaring confidence to new fields opening up in the 30s. There was something of the great Edison in Lomax’s recording chops as the tech kept improving. He had something of John Hammond’s talent-spotting gift in the period when Hammond was signing Billie Holiday and the Count Basie band for Columbia Records. “He’s got an infallible ear for the un-commercial,” Hammond said dismissively. There was also something of Orson Welles in Lomax’s showmanship — maybe something of Elvis Presley in Lomax’s fantasies. Lomax was open to rock’n'roll, despite its commercialism, and he was soft on Elvis — not least, John Szwed remarks in our conversation, because Elvis did what Alan wanted to do: liberate the white man’s hips! Even as he coopted so much black musical style, Elvis was the herald of a great healing shift in racial cultures.
Alan Lomax grew up to be a walking trove of all the world’s musics — especially its songs. By the end he’d built “folksonomies” of song elements and delivery styles, a whole anthropology in which the ways people sing marked the main links and differences between the cultures of continents. John Szwed is talking about an ecstatic genius whom many friends found “oppressive” if only because of his certainty that nobody anywhere knew what he knew about songs. “But Lomax was arguably one of the most influential Americans of the twentieth century,” Szwed writes, “a man who changed not only how everyone listened to music but even how they viewed America.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/20/arts/alan-lomax-who-raised-voice-of-folk-music-in-us-dies-at-87.html?scp=1&sq=alan%20lomax%20obit&st=cse
Alan Lomax is a folklorist and ethnomusicologist. He began making field recordings with his father, a fellow folklorist, John Lomax, of American folk music for the Library of Congress’ Archive of American Folk Song. Throughout his six decades of pivotal work, Lomax travelled all over the United States, as well as to the Carribean, Ireland, Great Britain, Spain (where he was hounded by Franco’s fascist police), and Italy. Aside from turning the Archive of American Folk Song into one of the most important music resources in the world, Lomax wrote numerous books on music, hosted radio shows in the United States (CBS) and Britain (BBC), and even brought a concert series to New York called The Midnight Special.
Alan Lomax has played an incredibly important role in the preservation of classic folk music, and helped introduce such artists as Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and Jelly Roll Morton to the world.
http://www.radioopensource.org/lomax/
We’re listening in awe and gratitude to the all-American sounds that Alan Lomax recorded and saved for all time. There’s outlaw minstrel Huddie Ledbetter, known as Lead Belly, singing a cocaine ode “Take a Whiff on Me” in 1934. Then Woody Guthrie accompanying himself, Pete Seeger and others on “Bound to Lose,” playing a guitar with a label on it: “This Machine Kills Fascists.” And then there are the strangely uplifting choruses of prison work songs from the Angola Convict Sugar Plantation in Louisiana and the Parchman Farm Penitentiary in Mississippi — songs like “Rosie,” which Lomax recorded in 1947 with prisoners, “C. B. and the Axe Gang.” As John Szwed writes in his vivid biography of the protean Lomax, “This was as close as twentieth-century people were going to come to the sound of slavery.”
Alan Lomax with unidentified man. [Library of Congress photo]Alan Lomax (1915 – 2002), The Man Who Recorded the World in Szwed’s subtitle, was the son of a proper folklorist at the University of Texas. The old folklore compiled texts; the new would revel in the truth of sound that had body language in it, too. Together in the early Thirties, father John and his teenage apprentice had set out across the South with early Edison recording equipment on what John Lomax used to call a “hobo-ing” trip. What Alan ended up compiling was a sort of unofficial, non-commercial people’s soundtrack of the Great Depression. Homegrown songs of spirit seem in retrospect to be pouring out of the suffering soil wherever Alan Lomax turned. Makes you wonder: what is the music of the meltdown today, and where’s to find it?
John Szwed [Martha Rose photo]Alan Lomax brought a roaring confidence to new fields opening up in the 30s. There was something of the great Edison in Lomax’s recording chops as the tech kept improving. He had something of John Hammond’s talent-spotting gift in the period when Hammond was signing Billie Holiday and the Count Basie band for Columbia Records. “He’s got an infallible ear for the un-commercial,” Hammond said dismissively. There was also something of Orson Welles in Lomax’s showmanship — maybe something of Elvis Presley in Lomax’s fantasies. Lomax was open to rock’n'roll, despite its commercialism, and he was soft on Elvis — not least, John Szwed remarks in our conversation, because Elvis did what Alan wanted to do: liberate the white man’s hips! Even as he coopted so much black musical style, Elvis was the herald of a great healing shift in racial cultures.
Alan Lomax grew up to be a walking trove of all the world’s musics — especially its songs. By the end he’d built “folksonomies” of song elements and delivery styles, a whole anthropology in which the ways people sing marked the main links and differences between the cultures of continents. John Szwed is talking about an ecstatic genius whom many friends found “oppressive” if only because of his certainty that nobody anywhere knew what he knew about songs. “But Lomax was arguably one of the most influential Americans of the twentieth century,” Szwed writes, “a man who changed not only how everyone listened to music but even how they viewed America.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/20/arts/alan-lomax-who-raised-voice-of-folk-music-in-us-dies-at-87.html?scp=1&sq=alan%20lomax%20obit&st=cse
Alan Lomax, Who Raised Voice Of Folk Music in U.S., Dies at 87
Correction Appended
Alan
Lomax, the legendary collector of folk music who was the first to
record towering figures like Leadbelly, Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie,
died yesterday at a nursing home in Sarasota, Fla. He was 87.
Mr. Lomax was a musicologist, author, disc jockey, singer, photographer, talent scout, filmmaker, concert and recording producer and television host. He did whatever was necessary to preserve traditional music and take it to a wider audience.
Although some of those he recorded would later become internationally famous, Mr. Lomax wasn't interested in simply discovering stars. In a career that carried him from fishermen's shacks and prison work farms to television studios and computer consoles, he strove to protect folk traditions from the homogenizing effects of modern media. He advocated what he called ''cultural equity: the right of every culture to have equal time on the air and equal time in the classroom.''
Mr. Lomax's programs spurred folk revivals in the United States and across Europe. Without his efforts, the world's popular music would be very different today.
Mr. Lomax was a musicologist, author, disc jockey, singer, photographer, talent scout, filmmaker, concert and recording producer and television host. He did whatever was necessary to preserve traditional music and take it to a wider audience.
Although some of those he recorded would later become internationally famous, Mr. Lomax wasn't interested in simply discovering stars. In a career that carried him from fishermen's shacks and prison work farms to television studios and computer consoles, he strove to protect folk traditions from the homogenizing effects of modern media. He advocated what he called ''cultural equity: the right of every culture to have equal time on the air and equal time in the classroom.''
Mr. Lomax's programs spurred folk revivals in the United States and across Europe. Without his efforts, the world's popular music would be very different today.
''What
Caruso was to singing, Alan Lomax is to musicology,'' the oral
historian Studs Terkel said in 1997. ''He is a key figure in
20th-century culture.''
In an interview, Bob Dylan once described him as ''a missionary.''
Mr. Lomax saw folk music and dance as human survival strategies that had evolved through centuries of experimentation and adaptation; each, he argued, was as irreplaceable as a biological species. ''It is the voiceless people of the planet who really have in their memories the 90,000 years of human life and wisdom,'' he once said. ''I've devoted my entire life to an obsessive collecting together of the evidence.''
To persuade performers and listeners to value what was local and distinctive, Mr. Lomax used the very media that threatened those traditions. By collecting and presenting folk music and dance in concerts, films and television programs, he brought new attention and renewed interest to traditional styles.
''The incredible thing is that when you could play this material back to people, it changed everything for them,'' Mr. Lomax once said. Listeners then realized that the performers, as he put it, ''were just as good as anybody else.''
Mr. Lomax started his work as a teenager, lugging a 500-pound recording machine through the South and West with his father, the pioneering folklorist John A. Lomax. They collected songs of cowboys, plantation workers, prisoners and others who were rarely heard.
''The prisoners in those penitentiaries simply had dynamite in their performances,'' Mr. Lomax recalled. ''There was more emotional heat, more power, more nobility in what they did than all the Beethovens and Bachs could produce.''
Discovering the Greats
One prisoner recorded by the Lomaxes in Angola, La., was Huddie Ledbetter, known as Leadbelly, who began his singing career after John Lomax helped secure his release in 1934. Alan Lomax produced Leadbelly's albums ''Negro Sinful Songs'' in 1939 and ''The Midnight Special,'' prison songs performed with the Golden Gate Quartet, in 1940. The Lomaxes held part of the copyright to his song ''Goodnight Irene,'' and the royalties they received when the Weavers' recording of it became a huge pop hit in 1950 helped finance their research trips.
Alan Lomax recorded hours of interviews with the New Orleans jazz composer Jelly Roll Morton in the 1930's, an early oral-history project that resulted in both a classic 12-volume set of recordings and a 1950 book, ''Mister Jelly Roll,'' which remains one of the most influential works on early jazz.
In an interview, Bob Dylan once described him as ''a missionary.''
Mr. Lomax saw folk music and dance as human survival strategies that had evolved through centuries of experimentation and adaptation; each, he argued, was as irreplaceable as a biological species. ''It is the voiceless people of the planet who really have in their memories the 90,000 years of human life and wisdom,'' he once said. ''I've devoted my entire life to an obsessive collecting together of the evidence.''
To persuade performers and listeners to value what was local and distinctive, Mr. Lomax used the very media that threatened those traditions. By collecting and presenting folk music and dance in concerts, films and television programs, he brought new attention and renewed interest to traditional styles.
''The incredible thing is that when you could play this material back to people, it changed everything for them,'' Mr. Lomax once said. Listeners then realized that the performers, as he put it, ''were just as good as anybody else.''
Mr. Lomax started his work as a teenager, lugging a 500-pound recording machine through the South and West with his father, the pioneering folklorist John A. Lomax. They collected songs of cowboys, plantation workers, prisoners and others who were rarely heard.
''The prisoners in those penitentiaries simply had dynamite in their performances,'' Mr. Lomax recalled. ''There was more emotional heat, more power, more nobility in what they did than all the Beethovens and Bachs could produce.''
Discovering the Greats
One prisoner recorded by the Lomaxes in Angola, La., was Huddie Ledbetter, known as Leadbelly, who began his singing career after John Lomax helped secure his release in 1934. Alan Lomax produced Leadbelly's albums ''Negro Sinful Songs'' in 1939 and ''The Midnight Special,'' prison songs performed with the Golden Gate Quartet, in 1940. The Lomaxes held part of the copyright to his song ''Goodnight Irene,'' and the royalties they received when the Weavers' recording of it became a huge pop hit in 1950 helped finance their research trips.
Alan Lomax recorded hours of interviews with the New Orleans jazz composer Jelly Roll Morton in the 1930's, an early oral-history project that resulted in both a classic 12-volume set of recordings and a 1950 book, ''Mister Jelly Roll,'' which remains one of the most influential works on early jazz.
More History
http://www.loc.gov/folklife/lomax/
The Alan Lomax Collection (AFC 2004/004) contains approximately 650 linear feet of manuscripts, 6400 sound recordings, 5500 graphic images, and 6000 moving images of ethnographic material created and collected by Alan Lomax and others in their work documenting song, music, dance, and body movement from many cultures. The collection includes field recordings and photographs Lomax made in the Bahamas, the Caribbean, England, France, Georgia, Haiti, Ireland, Italy, Morocco, Romania, Russia, Scotland, Spain, the United States, and Wales, 1930s-2004.
All of the material in the collection has been indexed and is available for research at the American Folklife Center. For more information contact the Folklife Reading Room. Many of the sound recordings, photographs, and videos may be accessed online through the Association for Cultural Equity,
founded by Alan Lomax in 1983.
In March 2004, the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress acquired the Alan Lomax Collection, which comprises the unparalleled ethnographic documentation collected by the legendary folklorist over a period of sixty years. The acquisition was made possible through a cooperative agreement between the American Folklife Center (AFC) and the Association for Cultural Equity, and the generosity of an anonymous
donor. The Alan Lomax Collection joins the material Alan
Lomax collected during the 1930s and early 1940s for the
Library's Archive of American Folk Song, and its acquisition brings
the entire seventy years of Alan Lomax's work together under one roof
at the Library of Congress, where it has found a permanent home.
"The Alan Lomax Collection contains pioneering documentation of traditional music, dance, tales, and other forms of grassroots creativity in the United States and abroad," said James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress. "We are extremely pleased that this collection has come to our American national library, where its creator did such important work in the 1930s."
From the time he left his position as head of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress in 1942 through the end of his long and productive career as an internationally known folklorist, author, radio broadcaster, filmmaker, concert and record producer, and television host, Alan Lomax amassed one of the most important collections of ethnographic material in the world.
The collection has been housed in several large rooms at Hunter College in New York City. It includes more than 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of motion picture film, 2,450 videotapes, 2,000 scholarly books and journals, hundreds of photographic prints and negatives, several databases concerning portions of the archive, and over 120 linear feet of manuscript such as correspondence, fieldnotes, research files, program scripts, indexes, and book and article manuscripts.
Sonny Terry (obscured), Woody Guthrie, Lilly
Mae Ledford, Alan Lomax, New York, 1944. Photographer unknown.
Included in the collection are sound recordings of traditional singers, instrumentalists, and storytellers made by Lomax during numerous field trips to the American South, the Caribbean, Britain, Scotland, Ireland, Spain, and Italy; original video footage, shot in the South and Southwest, Washington, D.C., and New York City, that was used as the basis of Lomax's American Patchwork television series, as well as videotapes of all the programs in the series; 16mm footage of performances by Howling Wolf, Son House, and others during the Newport Folk Festival in 1966; videotape of folk dance performances; and work elements and originals of numerous films made by Lomax.
Alan Lomax believed that folklore and expressive culture are essential to human continuity and adaptation, and his lifelong goal was to create a public platform for their continued use and enjoyment as well as a scientific framework for their further understanding. His desire to document, preserve, recognize, and foster the distinctive voices of oral tradition led him to establish the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), based in New York City and now directed by his daughter, Anna Lomax Wood.
ACE will continue to produce the Alan Lomax Collection compact-disc series on Rounder Records and to administer rights to repertoire contained in the collection, working from digital copies of original materials that the Library of Congress will be housing. ACE plans to donate CD and DVD copies of hundreds of hours of audio and video recordings to regional libraries in the United States and abroad. Over the next few years, ACE will work closely with the American Folklife Center to create databases for the audio, video, and film collections, to raise funds for preservation and for fellowships, and to make Lomax's ethnology of performance style available to researchers.
The Lomax family has a long history of collaboration with the Library of Congress. Alan's father, John Avery Lomax, began a ten-year relationship with the Library in June 1933, when he set out with Alan, then eighteen, on their first folksong gathering expedition under the Library's auspices. Together they visited Texas farms, prisons, and rural communities, recording work songs, reels, ballads, and blues. John Lomax was named "Honorary Consultant and Curator of the Archive of American Folk Song," which had been created in the Library's Music Division in 1928. Alan became the Archive's "Assistant in Charge" in 1937, and he continued to make field trips and supply recordings to the Archive of American Folk Song until 1942. He was the first to record such legendary musicians as Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter, McKinley "Muddy Waters" Morganfield, and David "Honeyboy" Edwards, as well as an enormous number of other significant traditional musicians. He also recorded eight hours of music and spoken recollection with Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton in 1938, and four hours of the same format with Woody Guthrie in 1940.
After he left the Library of Congress, Alan Lomax continued his work to document, analyze, and present traditional music, dance, and narrative through projects of various kinds throughout the world. With his father and on his own he published many books, including American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934) and Our Singing Country (1941). He received many honors and awards, including the National Medal of the Arts, the National Book Critics Circle award for his book The Land Where the Blues Began, and a "Living Legend" award from the Library of Congress. According to folklorist Roger Abrahams, he is "the person most responsible for the great explosion of interest in American folksong throughout the mid-twentieth century."
The Association for Cultural Equity administers the rights to the use of materials in the Alan Lomax Collection, and carries on Lomax's mission through the cataloging and dissemination of materials. In partnership with the American Folklife Center, ACE seeks to ensure that Alan Lomax's legendary collection remains accessible to general and specialized audiences.
"We are delighted that our agreement with ACE makes it possible to combine Alan Lomax's earliest documentary material, which he collected during his time at the Library of Congress, with the material he collected during the rest of his life, " said American Folklife Center director Peggy Bulger. "His entire collection will now be in available in one place. The collection is simultaneously a monument to one of the greatest cultural documenters of the twentieth century and a priceless storehouse of traditional artistry." The collection has served as the basis for many publications, films and videos, commercial recordings, broadcasts, multi-media products (notably Lomax's "Global Jukebox"), and major research endeavors (such as his Choreometrics, Cantometrics, and Parlametrics projects).
According to Michael Taft, head of the Center's Archive of Folk Culture, "the Alan Lomax collection may be the largest single collection we have ever received, and we are committed to fulfilling Alan Lomax's dream of making his unparalleled collection widely available to the world."
Alan Lomax Collection
The Alan Lomax Collection (AFC 2004/004) contains approximately 650 linear feet of manuscripts, 6400 sound recordings, 5500 graphic images, and 6000 moving images of ethnographic material created and collected by Alan Lomax and others in their work documenting song, music, dance, and body movement from many cultures. The collection includes field recordings and photographs Lomax made in the Bahamas, the Caribbean, England, France, Georgia, Haiti, Ireland, Italy, Morocco, Romania, Russia, Scotland, Spain, the United States, and Wales, 1930s-2004.
All of the material in the collection has been indexed and is available for research at the American Folklife Center. For more information contact the Folklife Reading Room. Many of the sound recordings, photographs, and videos may be accessed online through the Association for Cultural Equity,
founded by Alan Lomax in 1983. In March 2004, the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress acquired the Alan Lomax Collection, which comprises the unparalleled ethnographic documentation collected by the legendary folklorist over a period of sixty years. The acquisition was made possible through a cooperative agreement between the American Folklife Center (AFC) and the Association for Cultural Equity
, and the generosity of an anonymous
donor. The Alan Lomax Collection joins the material Alan
Lomax collected during the 1930s and early 1940s for the
Library's Archive of American Folk Song, and its acquisition brings
the entire seventy years of Alan Lomax's work together under one roof
at the Library of Congress, where it has found a permanent home. "The Alan Lomax Collection contains pioneering documentation of traditional music, dance, tales, and other forms of grassroots creativity in the United States and abroad," said James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress. "We are extremely pleased that this collection has come to our American national library, where its creator did such important work in the 1930s."
From the time he left his position as head of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress in 1942 through the end of his long and productive career as an internationally known folklorist, author, radio broadcaster, filmmaker, concert and record producer, and television host, Alan Lomax amassed one of the most important collections of ethnographic material in the world.
The collection has been housed in several large rooms at Hunter College in New York City. It includes more than 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of motion picture film, 2,450 videotapes, 2,000 scholarly books and journals, hundreds of photographic prints and negatives, several databases concerning portions of the archive, and over 120 linear feet of manuscript such as correspondence, fieldnotes, research files, program scripts, indexes, and book and article manuscripts.
Sonny Terry (obscured), Woody Guthrie, Lilly
Mae Ledford, Alan Lomax, New York, 1944. Photographer unknown.Included in the collection are sound recordings of traditional singers, instrumentalists, and storytellers made by Lomax during numerous field trips to the American South, the Caribbean, Britain, Scotland, Ireland, Spain, and Italy; original video footage, shot in the South and Southwest, Washington, D.C., and New York City, that was used as the basis of Lomax's American Patchwork television series, as well as videotapes of all the programs in the series; 16mm footage of performances by Howling Wolf, Son House, and others during the Newport Folk Festival in 1966; videotape of folk dance performances; and work elements and originals of numerous films made by Lomax.
Alan Lomax believed that folklore and expressive culture are essential to human continuity and adaptation, and his lifelong goal was to create a public platform for their continued use and enjoyment as well as a scientific framework for their further understanding. His desire to document, preserve, recognize, and foster the distinctive voices of oral tradition led him to establish the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), based in New York City and now directed by his daughter, Anna Lomax Wood.
ACE will continue to produce the Alan Lomax Collection compact-disc series on Rounder Records and to administer rights to repertoire contained in the collection, working from digital copies of original materials that the Library of Congress will be housing. ACE plans to donate CD and DVD copies of hundreds of hours of audio and video recordings to regional libraries in the United States and abroad. Over the next few years, ACE will work closely with the American Folklife Center to create databases for the audio, video, and film collections, to raise funds for preservation and for fellowships, and to make Lomax's ethnology of performance style available to researchers.
The Lomax family has a long history of collaboration with the Library of Congress. Alan's father, John Avery Lomax, began a ten-year relationship with the Library in June 1933, when he set out with Alan, then eighteen, on their first folksong gathering expedition under the Library's auspices. Together they visited Texas farms, prisons, and rural communities, recording work songs, reels, ballads, and blues. John Lomax was named "Honorary Consultant and Curator of the Archive of American Folk Song," which had been created in the Library's Music Division in 1928. Alan became the Archive's "Assistant in Charge" in 1937, and he continued to make field trips and supply recordings to the Archive of American Folk Song until 1942. He was the first to record such legendary musicians as Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter, McKinley "Muddy Waters" Morganfield, and David "Honeyboy" Edwards, as well as an enormous number of other significant traditional musicians. He also recorded eight hours of music and spoken recollection with Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton in 1938, and four hours of the same format with Woody Guthrie in 1940.
After he left the Library of Congress, Alan Lomax continued his work to document, analyze, and present traditional music, dance, and narrative through projects of various kinds throughout the world. With his father and on his own he published many books, including American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934) and Our Singing Country (1941). He received many honors and awards, including the National Medal of the Arts, the National Book Critics Circle award for his book The Land Where the Blues Began, and a "Living Legend" award from the Library of Congress. According to folklorist Roger Abrahams, he is "the person most responsible for the great explosion of interest in American folksong throughout the mid-twentieth century."
The Association for Cultural Equity administers the rights to the use of materials in the Alan Lomax Collection, and carries on Lomax's mission through the cataloging and dissemination of materials. In partnership with the American Folklife Center, ACE seeks to ensure that Alan Lomax's legendary collection remains accessible to general and specialized audiences.
"We are delighted that our agreement with ACE makes it possible to combine Alan Lomax's earliest documentary material, which he collected during his time at the Library of Congress, with the material he collected during the rest of his life, " said American Folklife Center director Peggy Bulger. "His entire collection will now be in available in one place. The collection is simultaneously a monument to one of the greatest cultural documenters of the twentieth century and a priceless storehouse of traditional artistry." The collection has served as the basis for many publications, films and videos, commercial recordings, broadcasts, multi-media products (notably Lomax's "Global Jukebox"), and major research endeavors (such as his Choreometrics, Cantometrics, and Parlametrics projects).
According to Michael Taft, head of the Center's Archive of Folk Culture, "the Alan Lomax collection may be the largest single collection we have ever received, and we are committed to fulfilling Alan Lomax's dream of making his unparalleled collection widely available to the world."
History of Live Recording
http://www.peermusic.com/peermusic/index.cfm/about-us/ralph-s-peer/
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).
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.
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).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)