The Significance of Electrical Recording to Rural Music

After Victor tasted the success of Vernon Dalhart's "The Wreck of the Old 97" in 1924, the artistically stodgy company began to realize that there might be some money in these homespun tunes, but a citified company like Victor had little knowledge of where to procure more. In 1927, they turned to Okeh Records executive Ralph Sylvester Peer. Peer's company had recorded "Crazy Blues" by Mamie Smith, a black blues "shouter", and the sales success of that record, both to white and black audiences, made Peer aware that a market existed for niche recordings of artists other than those promoted by the mainstream Victor, Columbia, and Edison companies. In 1924, Peer had taken acoustical recording equipment to Atlanta at the behest of local Okeh dealer Polk Brockman. Brockman asked if Peer would try to record a local musician that he managed, Fiddlin' John Carson, largely as an experiment. Peer made the trip, and later pronounced the Carson recordings "pluperfect awful" sounding, and the experiment in field recording a failure from a technical standpoint. However, when the 500 copies of '"Cluck Old hen" that Peer provided Brockman sold out within weeks, Peer again realized that there was something worth investigating further in rural music, just as there had been in blues. Peer had Carson come to New York to record subsequent selections in the controlled environment of the Okeh studio. It is possible today to find later releases of Carson's first Atlanta recordings imprinted "Recorded In Atlanta" on the label, as Okeh did on later field recordings by other artists (i.e., "Recorded In Asheville" or "Recorded In Kansas City").

The deal Peer cut with Victor paid him a salary of $1.00 per year, with the provision that he own the publishing rights to any song he recorded. This lucrative arrangement paid off many times over for Peer and allowed him to found Peer Southern Music Publishing Company, now peermusic -- the largest privately held music publisher in the world. The payment of royalties based on authorship and record sales as conceived by Ralph Peer is the basic business model for the entire music industry today.

Peer contacted his old associate, Ernest V. Stoneman, who had first recorded for Okeh in 1924, and asked him how to go about finding more rural music in the most efficient and cost-effective way. Stoneman recommended that Peer arrange an extended recording session in Bristol, a city straddling the Virginia and Tennessee border, centrally located in the hotbed of traditional American music that is the Southern Appalachians.

It was electrical recording equipment that Peer brought with him to Bristol in late July 1925. The significance of that fact cannot be overestimated. Electrical recording equipment was indeed portable, something that professional acoustical recording equipment never was, in spite of numerous attempts. By bringing the studio to the musicians, a broad scope of performers was recorded at Bristol -- according to musicologists, a veritable cross-section of period American music from that region; an event that would not --and could not -- ever be repeated. Peer returned to Bristol in 1928, but on the second visit, his ear was more jaded and he was seeking hits. The ethnomusicological purity of the traditional rural music and artists recorded at the 1927 Bristol Sessions will never be duplicated.

The sensitivity of the microphone allowed previously incapturable voices and instruments to be recorded -- the sounds of native singers, native musicians, and native instruments. Prior to electrical recording, the banjo and violin had been the most successfully recorded folk instruments. Now, dulcimers, autoharps, guitars, jaw harps and other mountain instruments were recorded in sparkling clarity. Sara Carter's voice was put on record and she sounded for all the world just as she did singing on her porch in Poor Valley.

Because of the worldwide distribution capabilities of the mighty Victor Talking Machine Company, recordings made at the Bristol Sessions were heard around the world.

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