Excerpted from Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy, Revised and Expanded Edition: Gennett Records and the Rise of America’s Musical Grassroots by (footnotes omitted) by Rick Kennedy © 2013. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or printed without permission in writing from the publisher.
Chapter 1: A Music Dynasty in Victorian Indiana
The rise of the formidable Starr Piano and its fabled Gennett Records label from the small Quaker town of Richmond, Indiana, smack in America’s heartland, sounds improbable today, if not fantastic. Yet it wasn’t unusual. Richmond was among several small towns in Indiana and Ohio that gave rise to nationally prominent manufacturing companies during the decades after the Civil War. From the late nineteenth century up to the stock market crash of 1929, a plethora of industrial innovations sprang from the region – the mass production of pianos and lawn mowers in Richmond, farm implements in Springfield, Ohio, the Wright brothers’ revolutionary airplanes and mechanical cash registers in Dayton, and the ornately crafted Cord and Duesenberg luxury automobiles in the small Indiana cities of Auburn and Connersville.
In each of these industrial towns, similar social dynamics were at work. European entrepreneurs and skilled tradesman flocked to the Midwest, a region bolstered by untapped natural resources and growing populations. The cultural traditions of Old World craftsmanship were being meshed with America’s emerging, mass-production technologies. Finished products, distinguished by handcrafted workmanship, rolled off the assembly lines of the Midwest in large quantities. Because of the nation’s newly established railroad network, products from the small industrial towns of the Midwest could reach virtually every market in America and overseas. Often capitalizing on cheap labor costs, the families who owned these manufacturing firms made huge fortunes as evidenced by their grand mansions in these towns, where they exerted considerable influence as civil leaders and cultural patrons.
It was amid these social and commercial dynamics that Richmond developed into one of Indiana’s first industrial centers. Settled primarily by Quakers beginning in 1806, Richmond was founded along the Whitewater River in east-central Indiana. On the eastern fringe of America’s grain belt, close to the Ohio border, Richmond is sixty-eight miles east of Indianapolis and seventy miles north of Cincinnati. Richmond’s transportation channels enabled the village’s industrial base to develop quickly. The Whitewater Canal along the Whitewater River helped link Richmond with the Ohio River valley. Among Richmond’s first manufacturers were cotton and wool mills that utilized the river for power. During the nineteenth century, the National Road (now U.S. 40) was routed through the heart of Richmond. The National Road became a primary passage for wagon trains crossing the central states to the West. By the Civil War era, the small, self-sufficient village had its own paper mills, tanneries, foundries, iron factories, and a neighborhood German brewery, as well as farm implement and carriage manufacturers.
The exhaustively detailed History of Wayne County, Indiana, published in 1884, proclaimed that Richmond “stands without a rival in the beauty of her location, the wealth of her surroundings, the solidity of her growth, and in the refinement, culture, and hospitality of its citizens.” The proud authors describe Richmond as a frontier-style Garden of Eden, attributing its low death rate to the pure air, which “gave energy to a man and elasticity to his steps,” and to an absence of “stagnant pools and miasmatic bottomlands.” Within a few years, however, it wasn’t pure air, hospitality, and solidity of growth that gave the small community of ten thousand people a growing reputation for excellence with consumers well beyond its rural Indiana borders. Rather, it was a booming piano manufacturing complex along the banks of the Whitewater River.
The Rise of Starr Piano Company
Piano making began in earnest in Richmond in 1872 when an Alsatian craftsman named George M. Trayser partnered with two business leaders in town, including a scion to one of its founding Quaker families, to establish a modest manufacturing company.
The middle-aged Trayser arrived in Richmond with an impressive resume. He had apprenticed in piano building in Germany and France, and then had traveled across the American frontier to open a storefront factory in 1849 in downtown Indianapolis, Indiana. It is believed to be the first piano manufacturer west of the Allegheny Mountains. He built pianos and melodeons, the forerunner of the pump organ. In the 1860s, the U.S. Patent Office awarded Trayser patents for piano technology, which, he claimed in newspaper advertisements, enabled his pianos to stay in tune longer than those of his competitors. Later that decade, he moved his operations 165 miles southeast to Ripley, Ohio, east of Cincinnati. Situated along the Ohio River, Ripley was a tobacco-trading town of five thousand people where Trayser partnered with Milo J. Chase, a piano maker of considerable financial means from New England. They formed Trayser Piano Forte Company in a building two blocks from the river, a major commercial route for steamboats. Even though the piano company took Trayser’s name, Chase was its president and general manager, and he established a second location across the river in Maysville, Kentucky.
In 1872, Trayser moved to Richmond, 125 miles northwest of Ripley, after securing backing from James M. Starr and Richard Jackson. Starr was from one of Richmond’s most prominent families; his father, Charles Starr, was a wealthy Quaker importer from Philadelphia who had helped to develop the town. In 1818, Charles had journeyed alone on horseback through the territories west of the Allegheny Mountains and connected with an enclave of Quakers in the new village of Richmond. He and his wife Elizabeth eventually settled there in 1825 when the population was less than seven hundred people. He purchased 240 acres in the heart of the village for $6,000 and sold off parcels at $100 per lot, on which homes and factories were built. He constructed Richmond’s first hewed-log house. He also established a cotton factory and further developed the downtown. In 1853, he was a prime driver in incorporating the Cincinnati, Richmond & Muncie Railroad and provided land for the town’s first railroad depot at North Tenth and E streets. It gave Richmond greater access to large urban markets with direct routes to Cincinnati and Indianapolis.
James Starr was the third of his parents’ seven children to reach adulthood. He was nine months old when the family settled in Richmond. His early jobs included traveling book merchant and downtown grocer. As a young man, he was no stranger to heartbreak. In 1850, his wife of three years and a nine-month-old daughter both died. In 1853, he married Sarah King, and they became one of the town’s prominent couples. After Charles’s death in 1855, James managed his father’s considerable holdings in town and continued developing the residential and business districts. Described as a handsome man with a strong personality, James in 1863 bought controlling interest of the Richmond Gas Light Company, which, by 1868, illuminated 228 street lamps and 1,000 buildings.
Starr’s business associate in the piano enterprise was Richard Jackson, a hard-driving Irishman who arrived in America in 1843 as a teenager and soon moved west. By the 1850s, the young Jackson operated a dry goods store in Richmond, considered the town’s first to operate strictly on a cash basis. He made a comfortable living and expanded his influence in town by financing the construction of several downtown buildings. After the Civil War, he operated a mill in Richmond, which burned to the ground in 1871.
The following year, the Trayser Piano Company opened on property Jackson secured on North Fifth Street, near the railroad depot. Trayser served as president and Jackson as secretary-treasurer. The Trayser and Jackson households, as well as the factory, were all situated within a couple of street blocks of each other. Richmond proved an excellent location for the new enterprise as a growing village with numerous European wood craftsmen, especially from Germany. Trayser Piano sold the highly ornate pianos directly to consumers from the factory. In its literature, the firm offered a five-year guarantee on its pianos and claimed to have developed a sounding board that produced a beautiful tone, especially on the high keys.
In 1878, the piano company reorganized and expanded. With Trayser well into his 60s and retiring, his former partner from Ripley, M. J. Chase, took over the factory operations. The firm, renamed Chase Piano Company, was recapitalized with a $100,000 stock issuance. James Starr rose to company president, with Jackson as secretary-treasurer. They established a sales room downtown at 710 Main Street. After the stock issuance, the owners purchased twenty-three acres of land on First Street, along the bottom of a vast gorge formed by the Whitewater River. They constructed a six-story brick factory on the east bank of the river, which supplied critically needed waterpower. While just a stroll from Richmond’s central business and residential neighborhoods, the factory was isolated from view in the gorge. As the company grew from one factory into a mammoth complex, this stretch of the Whitewater gorge came to be known in Richmond as Starr Valley. (During the 1920s era of Gennett Records, it also assumed such nicknames as Banjo Valley and Harmony Hollow.)
In 1880, Jackson became seriously ill from an undiagnosed brain ailment, which “baffled the skill of some of the ablest physicians in Richmond and elsewhere.” He died a year later at age fifty-four. James Starr’s youngest brother, Benjamin, a thirty-eight-year-old Civil War hero, replaced Jackson and became a company owner. Born in 1842, Benjamin was nineteen years old when he answered President Abraham Lincoln’s call for three hundred thousand volunteers to join the Union Army. On August 21, 1861, Benjamin and another of his brothers, Joseph Starr, enlisted in the Second Indiana Cavalry. A year later, Benjamin suffered a near-fatal head wound in battle, followed by a bout of typhoid fever. Joseph was briefly captured but escaped from the Confederates. Returning to Richmond, Benjamin partnered in a stove retail store, and then joined his older brother James as a part owner of Richmond Gas Light Company. Like brother James, Benjamin was widowed before age thirty in 1868. He remarried in 1873. By the time Benjamin joined Chase Piano Company, he was also highly visible in town, having served as a local school trustee and as a city council member.
The piano company expanded along the Whitewater River. New buildings were added, and employment grew to 150 employees by 1883. However, Chase, who also obtained piano technology patents, had other plans. In the mid-1880s, he and his sons pulled up stakes in Richmond and established a piano factory in Grand Rapids, Michigan. (The Chase family became leading piano makers in Michigan for several decades.) His departure prompted yet another company reorganization in Richmond, and the Starr brothers further asserted themselves. The company was renamed James Starr & Co., with James as president and younger brother Benjamin as factory general manager. For several months, the factory continued to produce Chase brand-name pianos using the existing inventory of materials. Then the Starr brothers briefly produced the Queen brand piano, but by 1886, the pianos bore the Starr name.
For James Starr & Co. and other American piano manufacturers, opportunity abounded in the late nineteenth century. For America’s emerging middle class, the piano embodied a respectability and civility to which many people aspired. While the wilds of the American frontier captivated Europe, Americans, on the other hand, sought to emulate the values and cultural refinement associated with England’s Victorian lifestyle. In photographs of American homes in the nineteenth century, the piano was a central element in rooms elaborately decorated with furniture, rugs, and draperies. Before the age of phonographs and radios, the piano was a fixture in the parlors of America’s middle class, a social centerpiece, particularly for women, who were expected to master the instrument out of what seemed to be a sense of cultural duty.
A common image of courting in nineteenth-century advertising literature was the woman seated at the piano, playing sentimental classics to her anxious male caller. Certainly, the minds of these young couples were on other things besides Chopin nocturnes, but the piano stood as a moral institution. To a people who embraced a Protestant work ethic, the piano symbolized its virtues.
Enter the Gennett Family
By the early 1890s, the Starr brothers’ enterprise would be transformed once again when their handcrafted pianos were shipped in great numbers to outlets of the Jesse French Piano & Organ Company, based in St. Louis. Founded in 1873, the Jesse French company was a pioneering piano retailer in Middle America, with a chain of stores throughout the Southern states. During the 1880s, French’s retailing base expanded rapidly by selling several brands of pianos including the respected Starr keyboards. The tie between French and James Starr & Co. soon proved lucrative to both the retailer and the supplier. That relationship radically altered Starr’s position in the industry, after two associates of Jesse French company, John Lumsden and his son-in-law Henry Gennett, began merger negotiations with the Starr brothers in 1892.
Born in 1852 as the eighth child in a family of nine children, Henry Gennett was the son of a prominent Italian entrepreneur in Nashville, Tennessee, who had operated a wholesale grocery business in the city since 1833. Henry was four years old when his father died. As a young adult, he joined his older brothers in the family business. At age twenty-three, he married Alice Lumsden, a member of a prosperous Nashville family. Her father, the England-born John Lumsden, had established a successful tannery business in Nashville, operated an insurance company, and held extensive land assets. For a brief period, Henry and Alice Gennett lived with the Lumsdens in their Nashville mansion. Lumsden’s other sons-in-laws happened to be Jesse French and Oscar Addison Field, French’s partner in the piano retail business. Through Gennett’s personal relationships with these three men, he also became involved in the retail piano operations. In the late 1880s, Gennett teamed with Lumsden in operating a chain of retail music stores in the South. By 1891, Gennett moved his family to St. Louis, where he became vice president of the Jesse French company.
Lumsden stayed in Nashville, but he maintained significant holdings in the Jesse French Company, despite his expressed concern with French’s aggressive, and potentially unsavory, method for retail markup. In a revealing letter to Gennett in the 1890s, Lumsden warned of price gouging in a French retail store. “We have in the store a good stock of cheap pianos,” Lumsden wrote. “Mozarts cost $83, Waverlys $100, Majestics $100, so you can see we have a house full of trash. And these pianos are priced from $250 to $350. The better grades only come in when these can’t be forced off. I want to give you the facts so that you may see the drift of the business.”
By 1892, the Jesse French executives sought to align with a piano supplier closer to its southern operations. A primary supplier, James Starr & Co. had continued to build upon its solid reputation, winning awards at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1892. Back in Richmond, Benjamin and James Starr were eager to establish an alliance with the French executives. Gennett and Lumsden soon began merger negotiations with the Starr brothers.
On April 7, 1893, the new Starr Piano Company was organized and significantly recapitalized with a $100,000 stock issuance. Gennett and Lumsden acquired about half ownership in Starr Piano, and along with French, joined the Starr brothers on the company’s board of directors. Benjamin Starr, Lumsden, and Gennett were the newly organized company’s primary officers, with Lumsden as president. French never actively participated in Starr Piano, but he remained a director for several years.
While the company reorganized, the white-bearded James Starr, now seventy years old, continued to slow his business activities. He removed himself from the day-to-day operations of Starr Piano and sold his holdings in the local gas company. (Two years earlier, his and wife Sarah’s adopted son, Edward, had died at age twenty-eight.) He continued to serve on several boards and remained a beloved local philanthropist in town, financing the public Starr Park near his mansion on North Tenth Street. In 1895, he financed the construction of a small Baptist church for local African Americans. After Sarah died in 1897, James Starr took a second residence in Washington, D.C.
Initially, the Starr brothers must have felt jinxed by their new Southern partners. In early 1894, a huge fire in Starr Valley nearly destroyed the entire manufacturing complex and halted production for several months. Not long after the facilities were back up and running, a Whitewater River flood shut them down again. With the demands of putting the operations in Starr Valley back on solid footing, Gennett sold his interest in the Jesse French operations in St. Louis and moved his family to Richmond. After Lumsden died in 1898, Gennett assumed the presidency of Starr Piano.
Despite the setbacks and leadership changes, Starr Piano had made strong progress in a booming industry. By the 1890s, the rate of U.S. piano production was five times as fast as the nation’s population growth. More than a hundred firms manufactured pianos in the United States. Many American piano manufacturers evolved into full-blown corporations fueled by high levels of capitalization and expanded distribution networks. Through its alignment with French’s established retail network, Starr Piano was positioned to become one of the industry’s major players. The manufacturing plant in the Starr Valley rapidly expanded as the owners poured money into the company; in 1897, the capital stock of Starr Piano was doubled, to $200,000.
In the new century, the Gennett family assumed full control of Starr Piano. In 1898, Henry Gennett’s eldest son, Harry, became a vice president at the mere age of twenty-one after having been mentored in the factory by Benjamin Starr. Under the tutelage of the factory craftsmen, Harry also became a capable piano builder. In 1900, the grand old man of Richmond’s piano heritage, James Starr, died at age seventy-six. Three years later, brother Benjamin died at age sixty-one after having recently been sworn in as a state senator. The brothers were both buried in Earlham Cemetery next to Earlham College on Richmond’s West Side. No Starr family members were now involved in running Starr Piano. In 1905, Henry Gennett appointed his second eldest son, Clarence, twenty-six, as treasurer of Starr Piano, and his third son, Fred, nineteen, as secretary. Henry’s wife, Alice, possessed a strong personality and continued to be closely involved in the piano company that her father had greatly influenced.
Jesse French, brother-in-law and long-time business partner of Henry Gennett, questioned the business ethics involved in the Gennett family’s swift and complete control of Starr Piano. French had introduced his brother-in-law to the piano business and was a principal investor in the reorganization of Starr Piano Company in 1893. Yet in a deposition filed in 1908, French, sixty-two years old and living in St. Louis, claimed that Henry Gennett “determined to secure the entire control of the Starr Piano Company by depreciating the value of its stock, declining to pay dividends, increasing the salaries [of Gennett family members] to such an extent, keeping the business secret, that we felt it was an uncertain quantity.” French claimed that company founder James M. Starr was afforded the same ill treatment, “until he was forced out of the directory and sold his stock.”
Gold Medals for Excellence
French may have had another motive for lashing out at Henry Gennett and his sons. By the time of his 1908 deposition, French had become a direct competitor to Starr Piano with his Krell-French Piano Company, formed in 1896, which operated a large factory in nearby New Castle, Indiana. The once-congenial relationship between the French and Gennett families deteriorated over their business differences. “The Gennett family made up their mind to force us [French family] to sacrifice the [Starr Piano] stock so that they could ultimately get it at the price they feel like they can compel us to sell for,” French told attorneys in the deposition, which involved a dispute between Starr Piano and another piano maker. “When I joined hands with Mr. Gennett and family to organize The Starr Piano Company, it was done with the kindliest of motives to benefit the Gennett family, little thinking the results would turn out as they have.”
French’s claims aside, all agreed that Henry Gennett, a distinctive, tan-skinned Italian with a black moustache, was a dynamic and hard-driven leader. Though he was short and slightly built, he more than compensated for his small physical stature with an outgoing, confident personality and a reputation among employees as a bold decision maker. Known for his impeccable attire, Henry would walk through the Starr factory complex in a white suit and a white Panama hat, holding a fancy cane with a gold knob. In his later years, he was chauffeured around town in a black Packard; one relative laughingly said that Henry had to climb up in order to get into the back seat
Henry was not a craftsman, but a creative merchandiser. The family’s long-time chauffeur, Howard Thomas, relayed a typical example of Henry’s style to his grandson, Richard Gennett. While driving Henry’s twelve-cylinder Packard down Main Street in Richmond one morning, Thomas was stuck behind a slow-moving wagon loaded with corn on its way to one of the Whitewater River grain mills. Henry told Thomas to pull into the local Starr piano store at Tenth and Main Street. He charged into the store and ordered a Starr salesman to follow the corn wagon to the mill and sell the driver a Starr piano. Henry figured that the farmer delivering the corn would soon have cash in his pocket, making him ripe for a big purchase.
With such leadership style, Henry Gennett further developed the Starr Piano Company into one of the nation’s largest mass producers of pianos. By 1915, more than 250 U.S. companies were manufacturing pianos, with about twenty-five of them controlling 75 percent of the market. Starr Piano was among this elite group, which also included the Baldwin Company and the Wurlitzer Company, both in nearby Cincinnati.
The highest grade Starr pianos won gold medals for excellence at various exhibitions, including the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, the Tennessee Centennial Exposition of 1907, the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in 1909, and the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915. Henry heavily promoted the Starr Minum grand piano, one of the best-selling baby grands in the Midwest. The Starr upright pianos of the 1910s possessed a quality of tone and durability that rivaled the Steinway or Baldwin up-rights. Like his competitors, Henry saw huge potential in the new player pianos, which Starr Piano produced with a vengeance beginning in 1906. The company even marketed a small player piano for apartments called the Princess, which stood just four feet, four inches tall. Wisely, however, Henry was never convinced that the player piano would supersede the conventional instruments, as many in the industry had predicted.
In addition to the Starr-name pianos, the company under the Gennett family mass-produced a wide variety of lower-cost pianos. Starr Piano manufactured more than fifty styles of grand, upright, and player pianos under such brand names as Richmond, Trayser, Remington, and French. Also, pianos were stenciled with the names of retailers who bought wholesale from the Starr factory for sale in their department stores or mail-order catalogs.
Some competitors found the practice unscrupulous. In 1901, Starr Piano began shipping low-cost pianos with a Chase brand-name stencil for the Gimbel Brothers retail chain in Philadelphia. This led to a multi-year dispute with the A. B. Chase Piano Company of Norwalk, Ohio, a producer of premium pianos with no ties to the Chase Piano Company, which had operated in Richmond’s Starr Valley in the 1880s. A. B. Chase Piano claimed that the Gimbel Brothers chain and Starr Piano were tricking consumers into buying inexpensive pianos from Starr Piano by deliberately misrepresenting them as the higher-quality A. B. Chase keyboards. In 1903, Calvin Whitney, president of A. B. Chase, wrote to Starr Piano: “How would you like to have us associate ourselves with some of the relatives of James M. Starr and make a very cheap piano, and sell it at half the price at which you sell the ‘Starr’ and put it in the hands of dealers, who would advertise it as the original Starr piano, made by the original company, in the original way? You are stenciling a piano ‘Chase’ and the dealer can buy two of them for less money than that of ours.”
Whitney took his case to the trade media, where Musical Times magazine attacked the Gimbel Brothers chain, adding that Starr Piano “should be included in condemnation. No manufacturing plant should lend its aid to disreputable work of this kind and the Starr Piano Company did not do it unknowingly.” Finally, Starr Piano’s application to register the Chase trademark led to a formal complaint from A. B. Chase Piano Company in 1908 with the U.S. Patent Office. The company prevailed in stopping Starr Piano from registering the trademark, and the stenciled Chase brand piano was discontinued.
Starr Piano’s indiscriminate approach to the wholesale distribution of its lower-cost pianos also did not sit well with all of its retailers. Wilson Taggart, a Starr salesman from 1914 to 1924, recalled the wrath of an Ohio piano retailer who stormed out of his office and announced that he wanted nothing to do “with any company that would make stuff for a mail-order house.” Starr Piano also manufactured pianos under the name of A. J. Crafts of Richmond, Virginia. “He [A. J. Crafts] had the biggest and fanciest stencil you ever saw,” Taggart said. “He put that on the board on top, you know. That old devil, I betcha, was getting $100 apiece for those pianos over the price of the Starr Piano.”
None of these issues slowed the powerful Starr Piano from building its enormous distribution network. By 1915, Starr retail stores were established in the major cities of Ohio and Indiana, as well as in Detroit, Michigan; Chicago, Illinois; and San Diego and Los Angeles, California. Through the Jesse French chain stores, Starr pianos were sold in the cities of the South and Southwest. In addition, retail agencies essentially made Starr pianos available nationwide. Because Starr pianos were constructed for durability, by the 1910s the company even exported instruments to South America, where heat and humidity could ruin a cheaper piano.
Part of Starr Piano’s aggressive merchandising strategy involved wholesaling to independent retailers on a consignment contract, which meant that Henry Gennett’s team had to keep after the stores not paid up on their inventory. From Starr Valley, Taggart heard amusing stories from the Starr account executive in charge of hunting down unpaid accounts from independent stores around the country. “He stopped in Denver where some gal was way behind [in payments],” Taggart said. “So he made a date to see her in his hotel room. He said he had a funny feeling, so he just backed up and jerked the door open real quick. There was a fella out there listening. She was going to compromise him so that she could get out of that piano debt!”
As early as 1907, enamored with the business potential of vast and unsettled California, Henry established Starr’s Pacific Division in Los Angeles to handle his piano distribution in the West. Starr Piano held 70 percent of the new division, with the remaining 30 percent owned by Harry Holder, a former Richmond resident and confidant of Henry. After forming the Pacific Division, Henry increased his interest in California, where he made significant real estate acquisitions in the Los Angeles area.
By 1915, Gennett’s sprawling Starr Piano Company factory in the Whitewater gorge was a mass-production machine. Many piano companies had become assembly operations using finished parts from a growing number of specialty piano suppliers. However, the Starr Piano complex was a self-sufficient, highly departmentalized manufacturing plant. With the exception of large metal castings supplied by Swayne, Robinson & Co., an iron works plant two hundred yards up the hill from Starr Valley, the piano factory basically produced all the essential components in a piano. The factory’s massive lumber inventory was said to ensure production for five years. Starr Piano was producing 15,000 pianos annually by 1915. By then, more than 100,000 Starr pianos had been sold nationwide.
The Starr factory complex now spread over thirty-five acres along the river gorge. Two long rows of factory buildings, divided by a secondary railroad spur for hauling materials and finished products within the complex, covered more than 300,000 square feet. Impressed by the self-contained, modern manufacturing complex, trade magazines in the early 1900s praised the massive industrial park in Starr Valley as a model of scientific efficiency. About 750 people worked in the Richmond factory by 1915, including more than 50 women and numerous adolescents, and the Starr national sales network around the country totaled another 400 people.
Starr Piano became an industrial cornerstone of Richmond. Even though the company never had a glowing reputation for its wages and benefits, Starr Piano operated for many years without laying off workers. The guaranteed paycheck attracted the townspeople, who commonly spent their entire careers amid the sawdust in Starr Valley, an area that gets unmercifully hot and sticky in the summer. And, like the railroad and newspaper businesses, the piano business gets into the blood. The village’s tradesmen and laborers, from woodworkers to piano polishers, were proud of the pianos that put Richmond on the map. “Even in the 1940s, when Starr Piano was nearing its end, there were employees still around the plant who had worked for my grandfather as far back as the turn of the century,” said Henry Gennett Martin, grandson of Henry Gennett. “A typical Starr worker seemed to stay down there at the factory for the duration.”
The stature of Starr Piano placed the Gennett family among the elite of Richmond, now an industrial boomtown that claimed to have one of the highest percentages of millionaires of any U.S. community. In 1898 along a stretch of East Main Street lined with stately Victorian homes, Henry and Alice Gennett completed construction of one of the most stylish mansions in town. They hired a prominent local architect, John A. Hasecoster, who designed a three-story mansion in a Colonial Revival style at 1829 East Main Street on two city lots. A yellow ceramic brick facade and a white-columned portico distinguished the mansion’s exterior. The front hallway, lavishly wood-paneled, led to a large stone fireplace. Starr Piano’s access to America’s best lumberyards was evident in the dramatic treatment of oak, mahogany, and sycamore throughout the house. On the first floor, there was a spacious music conservatory, where Alice Gennett hosted the Richmond Civic Orchestra and organized recitals at a Starr grand piano. A billiard room for Henry and his sons adjoined the conservatory. On the third floor, in an exquisite ballroom with an enormous chandelier, Henry and Alice hosted gala dance parties for Richmond socialites. The Gennett family lived there for the next thirty-eight years. “Papa loved that house,” recalled their daughter, Rose Gennett Martin. “He would stand on the lawn and just look at it.”
The Gennetts actively supported Richmond’s vibrant cultural scene. In 1899, the family opened the 1,200-seat Gennett Theater downtown. For the grand opening on December 23, the family brought in a stage star of the day, Cornelia Otis Skinner, who performed in Henry James’s play The Liars. In 1905, the theater was remodeled, and the family formed the Gennett Theater Company, with Alice Gennett as president. She was also an active member of the Richmond Musical Club, which sponsored recitals. Starr Piano also helped finance Richmond’s annual May Festival, supported the Richmond Symphony, and underwrote the costs of bringing leading classical soloists to the city – all of this in a town of fewer than thirty-thousand people in rural Indiana!
“The Starr Piano Company and the cultural life of the community, in the latter’s musical phases, have been inextricably interwoven from the beginning of the company’s existence and are drawn closer with each succeeding year,” reported the Richmond Palladium in 1913. “Its effect is seen also, in the large number of its employees and attachés who are among the city’s leading amateurs and are included in its choral and orchestral organizations. The inter-relationship of the Starr Piano Company and the civic body in short, is one of the finest manifestations of our social life and should never be minimized in the consideration of the forces, that, welded together, give this city its individual social atmosphere.”
In 1915, with the Starr factory steaming along at peak production and Starr stores established nationwide, the Gennett family formally amended the company’s original articles of incorporation in order to pursue “every kind of instrument, machine, device, process and material necessary and suitable in and about the production, preservation, use and control of sound vibration for musical, commercial and other economic purposes.”
The legal jargon did not imply that the Gennetts had lost faith in pianos. On the contrary. Their piano business continued to expand, despite growing competition from the latest American craze: the phonograph. But by 1915, forces within the tightly controlled phonograph industry were making it possible for new companies to enter the competition. The business had become fair game, and the Gennett family, through Starr Piano’s amended articles of incorporation, simply declared that it wanted a piece of the action.
The Gennetts had successfully established Starr Piano nationally as a leading piano maker, while the family at home maintained a profile as philanthropists with high cultural aspirations for their quaint Indiana community. Now, they were about to enter a very different business arena in the new, brash world of records and phonographs. No one could have suspected in 1915 that, within five years, the Indiana firm, with its fledgling Gennett Records division, would lead a group of other small record companies into a series of lengthy court battles against the record industry’s undisputed giant, Victor Talking Machine Company of Camden, New Jersey. The eventual outcome of these court cases would change forever the competitive nature of the developing record industry.
Courtroom Showdown: Victor vs. Starr Piano
Few people benefited more from the genesis of America’s recording industry than the patent lawyers. From Thomas Edison’s cylinder phonograph of 1877 to the national craze over disc-playing phonographs four decades later, the developing industry was awash in patent litigation. Suits piled up one on top of the other as powerful entrepreneurs wrestled with a flurry of advances in sound recording.
The outcome of bitter patent lawsuits between phonograph kingpins heavily affected the fortunes of the competing firms. Such was the case in Starr Piano’s landmark court victories over the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1921–22. However, in order to appreciate the events surrounding the creation of Starr Piano’s Gennett Records, its court battles with Victor, and its overall impact on the emerging recording industry, one must trace the tangled web of inventions, corporate wars, and legal shenanigans that shaped the phonograph and record industry before Starr Piano began pressing records during the World War I era.
Edison’s phonograph in 1877 was initially treated as a scientific novelty; attendees of industrial exhibitions marveled at hearing their own voices played back to them. In fact, Edison saw little commercial promise for his cylinder machine and nearly abandoned the invention for about a decade as he concentrated on developing the light bulb. Yet until the advent of digitally recorded compact discs in the 1980s, the conventional needle and turntable record player remained faithful to Edison’s original principles of sound reproduction.
Edison’s first recorder consisted of a brass cylinder with a spiral groove around it and two diaphragm-and-needle units. A horn was fixed permanently, with a steel point mounted in the diaphragm. The steel point made contact with a piece of tin foil wrapped around the brass cylinder. When words were spoken into the horn, the diaphragm vibrated from the sound waves produced by the voice. In turn, the steel point, or stylus, moved vertically, producing a “hill-and-dale” pattern of indentations on the tin foil. Upon replaying the tin foil, the reproducing needle converted these indentations into sounds waves, which reproduced the voice spoken into the horn.
While Edison focused full attention on the light bulb in the early 1880s, his phonograph was further advanced by Chichester A. Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter, who replaced the tin foil with a cardboard cylinder coated with wax. Their invention was patented in 1886. Bell and Tainter also experimented with flat discs for sound reproduction, but everyone stayed with the wax cylinder. When Edison returned to the cylinder phonograph in the mid-1880s, he further refined the Bell-Tainter wax-cylinder concept. By the 1890s, Edison’s skillfully crafted cylinder phonographs, marketed through his North American Phonograph Company, were sold in large quantities to America’s elite, while stage celebrities raced to be recorded onto Edison’s wax cylinders.
At the same time, a German immigrant named Emile Berliner developed a new machine he called the gramophone, which recorded and played flat discs. In contrast to Edison’s “hill-and-dale” etching method, Berliner’s recording stylus etched sound vibrations in a lateral zigzag motion onto a zinc plate. From this zinc master disc, Berliner produced a copper disc matrix by means of an electroplating process. This matrix was used to stamp out playable discs made of a heat-softened shellac compound.
Though it was not apparent then, the disc player was inherently more practical than Edison’s cylinder machine. Discs were more easily duplicated and were easier to store and handle than wax cylinders. Still, in the 1890s, cylinder phonographs from Edison’s National Phonograph Company and the American Graphophone Company (later known as Columbia Phonograph, the name used henceforth in this book) hit the market first and controlled the industry. Edison and Columbia’s cylinders generated high-quality sound reproduction, especially of the human voice.
But Berliner persisted. In 1895, he established the United States Gramophone Company, which licensed his patents to the Berliner Gramophone Company, manufacturer of the machines. They were sold through yet another organization, National Gramophone Company. Berliner’s gramophone operated with a special spring motor, supplied by Eldridge Johnson, a machinist in Camden, New Jersey. By 1897, Johnson was mass-producing spring motors by the hundreds from his small shop.
Buyers were soon attracted to the Berliner machine by the aggressive marketing of National Gramophone Company, headed by master promoter Frank Seaman. In 1898, Seaman’s National Gramophone Company claimed sales of Berliner gramophones of more than $1 million. The Columbia and Edison cylinder machines were suddenly threatened by this new contraption.
Columbia responded by waging war in the courts. Despite vast differences between Berliner’s patent for recorded discs and the Columbia-held, Bell-Tainter patent for cylinder recording, Philip Mauro, Columbia’s lawyer, concocted the “floating stylus” theory. In essence, he claimed that Berliner’s recording stylus copied the manner in which Columbia’s recording stylus “floated” along the grooves of the wax cylinder.
Mauro marched into court and charged Berliner with patent infringement. Amazingly, the court initially sided with Mauro in 1899; its injunction against further sales of Berliner gramophones lasted about a year. Yet even stranger things would happen. With the court injunction, the companies involved with the Berliner gramophone were in limbo, especially Johnson, the chief supplier of gramophone spring motors. Unlike Berliner, who had other business interests, Johnson had sunk almost all his money into gramophone technology. Having brushed with bankruptcy, Johnson soon realized he could not depend entirely upon the Berliner gramophone.
Rapidly Changing Phonograph Technology
In the late 1890s, Johnson had developed another disc-recording method using Berliner’s lateral recording technique, but with a soft-wax master disc instead of a zinc disc. From the wax master, Johnson produced a metal stamper, which was used to produce the shellac-based records. Johnson believed the zinc master discs caused the scratchy sound in Berliner’s shellac discs. Berliner apparently never pursued wax masters, figuring they would infringe on the Bell-Tainter patent for producing wax master cylinders.
After the injunction on Berliner’s gramophone was lifted, Johnson seized the opportunity to market a new gramophone, which played shellac discs derived from wax masters. The sound produced by Johnson’s machine was better than Berliner’s. Johnson wagered his remaining savings on a risky promotional campaign and managed to generate public enthusiasm. The new market entrant aroused the ire of Seaman, the original sales agent for Berliner’s gramophone, who was now selling another disc player not affiliated with Berliner. Seaman sued Johnson, claiming that Johnson’s Consolidated Talking Machine Company was nothing more than a thinly veiled Berliner Gramophone Company.
The court did not agree. In 1901, Johnson won a stunning victory in Philadelphia. He was free to sell his improved gramophone as long as he did not use Berliner’s “gramophone” name. No matter. The word soon disappeared from the American vernacular, as disc-playing machines overtook cylinder machines and also became known generically as phonographs. During the court case, Johnson had stayed on good terms with Berliner and paid royalties for Berliner’s patent for lateral disc recording. Johnson, however, had clearly advanced the concept by developing an improved spring motor and the wax master. Johnson merged with the Berliner organization, which acquired 40 percent of Johnson’s company. Johnson now owned Berliner’s original gramophone patent. He also created a new company name inspired by his “victory” in court: the Victor Talking Machine Company, which would become the dominant phonograph and record manufacturer over the next three decades.
But soon after Victor Talking Machine Company was formed, Johnson was handed the shock of his life. In December 1901, the U.S. Patent Office awarded one Joseph W. Jones a patent for the lateral engraving of wax master discs, the same basic process already being commercialized by Johnson. Johnson, like Berliner, had not originally sought to patent his method, figuring the original Bell-Tainter patent covered all types of wax recording.
This time, Johnson was outsmarted. In 1896, Jones had handled basic chores in Berliner’s Washington, D.C., laboratory when Berliner experimented with wax discs. Jones took good notes. In 1897, he filed a claim for laterally engraving a groove of even depth on a wax blank master, which the U.S. Patent Office accepted four years later. Meanwhile, Johnson’s nearly identical patent was filed in 1898 and accepted in 1905, years after his machine hit the market. Jones had no phonograph for sale, just a legal document from the U.S. Patent Office that caused Johnson headaches for years.
Enter once again Columbia attorney Mauro, still fuming from his failure to stop the Berliner gramophone. With Victor Talking Machines overtaking the original cylinder machines, Columbia desperately wanted to produce its own disc player. Mauro snatched up the Jones patent for $25,000, and in 1902 Columbia began selling the Columbia Disc Graphophone.
Johnson was livid. But as Victor prepared to battle Columbia in the courts for patent infringement, cooler heads prevailed, and the two companies agreed to pool their patents in 1902. Collectively, Victor and Columbia now owned all key aspects of manufacturing disc machines and lateral-cut records. Victor and Columbia had essentially monopolized the disc recording industry.
Victor, maker of the Red Seal Record, moved to take the market for classical music discs by signing exclusive contracts with the opera giants, most notably the tenor Enrico Caruso. In 1908 Columbia introduced the first double-sided discs and signed up a slew of opera singers and stage entertainers. Despite Columbia’s headway, Victor maintained the industry lead. Besides, the Victor-Columbia lock on America’s booming disc phonograph market allowed both companies to reap fortunes. By 1912, Columbia’s disc business was firmly established as its cylinder business waned. Columbia soon dropped its cylinder machine, thus leaving Edison the last industrial titan committed to his original invention.
Yet even Edison’s people weakened. In 1910, they began secretly exploring a disc-playing phonograph. Two years later, Edison introduced his Diamond Disc Phonograph. Where Columbia and Victor phonographs played only lateral-cut discs, Edison’s phonograph played only vertical, “hill-and-dale,” Edison-brand discs. The vertical-cut disc employed the original engraving technology developed by Edison decades before for his cylinder machines.
By 1915, the stage was set for new competitors in the phonograph industry. For one thing, several basic patents related to the manufacture of phonograph machines had expired. Even though Victor and Columbia’s lateral-cut records and companion phonograph machines dominated the market, Edison’s vertical-cut discs and Diamond Disc Phonographs created a commercial opportunity for a second method for recording discs that was less safeguarded by patents. Finally, with both lateral-cut and vertical-cut records now on the market, enterprising companies saw potential for developing phonographs with tone arms that could play both types of records.
Enter Henry Gennett’s Starr Piano. With an army of skilled wood craftsmen in Richmond and an established chain of music stores, Starr Piano was a natural for the phonograph business. Tooling in the Richmond factory was well suited for producing wooden phonograph cabinets and the necessary metal fabrications. By 1916, Starr Piano manufactured and retailed in the company stores a Starr brand phonograph that played both vertical-and lateral-cut discs simply by changing the needle’s position.
Starr Piano was not alone. Six new companies entered the phonograph business in 1914. A year later, another half-dozen or so threw their hats into the ring. By 1916, there were close to fifty phonograph makers. Yet, this increased competition did not materially affect Victor; its assets grew from $13.9 million in 1913 to $21.6 million in 1915. By 1916, more than half a million phonographs were being sold across the country, a number that would quadruple in three years.
In addition, in 1916, Starr Piano established a record division to produce discs for the Starr phonographs. Ever the dealmaker, Henry Gennett bought into the recording business after acquiring recording equipment and a stack of vertical-cut masters from a bankrupt Boston company. He set up a primitive recording studio in Starr Piano’s new office at 9–11 East Thirty-Seventh Street in New York City. The company began recording discs, using the vertical-cut technology developed by Edison. The records bore either green or blue Starr labels and were sold with the phonographs in the Starr retail stores.
Initially, Starr records were pressed by a custom pressing outfit, most likely the Scranton Button Works in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which offered record pressing as early as 1915. By 1917, Starr Piano had constructed a six-story phonograph manufacturing and record-pressing facility in Starr Valley in Richmond. Starr Piano’s Manhattan recording studio, with access to the city’s marching bands, orchestras, and stage entertainers, produced the bulk of master discs that were used to press records on the Starr label at the Richmond facility. In 1921, the Gennett family established a second recording studio in Starr Valley in a single-story building along a row of Starr factory buildings.
Despite the plethora of new phonograph companies, the dominance by Victor and Columbia remained virtually invincible. New phonograph and record manufacturing firms, thrown together by eager investors between 1915 and 1920, often shut down as quickly as they opened. First of all, Victor threatened to slap lawsuits on anyone who attempted to produce records using the more popular lateral-cut method. Equally hard to crack was consumer loyalty to the superior Columbia, Victor, and Edison products, not to mention their established network of retail outlets and exclusive distributorships.
The smaller phonograph and record companies that did survive in this environment were generally divisions of large manufacturers of furniture products with established retail access. By the 1910s, the conspicuous tin horns on the first phonographs were hidden inside stylish cabinets. Phonographs, right along with the piano, were increasingly regarded as desirable pieces of furniture. The early phonographs and their companion records were sold together in furniture and department stores, as well as in music stores. For example, the department stores carrying Edison Diamond Needle Phonographs sold them right along with the Edison discs, and the same approach applied to Columbia and Victor.
Likewise, Starr Piano’s network of stores sold Starr phonographs along with an undistinguished selection of popular and classical records on the Starr label at prices ranging from $.65 to $1.00. The Aeolian Company, a leading manufacturer of pianos and organs, produced the Aeolian-Vocalion phonograph and vertical-cut Vocalion records. Wisconsin Chair Company built phonograph cabinets for Edison before it began selling its own phonographs as a sideline in 1915. Within two years, Wisconsin Chair introduced its Paramount record label. The General Phonograph Company, financed by a mighty German firm, the Lindstrom Company, issued the OKeh record label. Brunswick-Balke-Collender, known for billiard and bowling equipment, also produced phonographs and records.
These leading manufacturers entered the phonograph and record business just as manufacturers began riding the 1917–18 industrial boom created by American involvement in World War I. Companies with advanced mass-production capabilities soon became part of the American war machine. Edison’s factories, for example, were engaged in the mass production of wooden rifle parts. Starr Piano took advantage of its forty-mile proximity to Dayton, Ohio, where warplanes were being built near the Wright brothers’ historic airplane factory. The Gennett family secured major government contracts for the production of propellers, flaps, rudders, and wooden supports for aircraft wings, as well as accessories for hot-air balloons. The war created a peculiar situation for the many German craftsmen at Starr Piano, who were now producing parts for a war against their old homeland. (While government contracts were a financial boon for Starr Piano, U.S. aircraft contributed little to the Allied war effort. American aviation had advanced marginally beyond the original Wright Flyers of the 1900s, and American-made aircraft were not involved in the legendary dogfights over Europe.)
As the end of World War I approached, Starr Piano was near its industrial peak. Starr pianos continued to sell in huge quantities, while Starr phonographs rode the general wave of popularity for the newest gadget in home entertainment. But the Gennett family was forced to reassess the Starr record label, which faced hurdles beyond the Victor-Columbia lock on the market.
For one, Starr records were only sold with Starr phonographs in the Starr stores. Independent dealers hesitated selling records with a name so strongly associated with Starr pianos. For retailers carrying other brands of pianos, Starr records presented a potential conflict of interest. Worse, Starr records were vertical-cut. These records were a losing proposition because they could not be played on the ubiquitous Victor and Columbia phonographs, which played only lateral-cut records. Of the vertical-cut discs, only the Edison discs made respectable market inroads.
So Henry Gennett and his sons took bold measures. On the urging of his youngest son, Fred, the family in 1917 created the Gennett label, thereby minimizing the association with the piano company in order to widen the label’s distribution base. The Gennett family now could more easily strike deals with independent distributors. Ultimately, the Starr Piano name only appeared in fine print at the bottom of the record label. The first records issued under the new ornately lettered Gennett label were a series of classical discs.
Then Gennett made a second, even more fortuitous, move. In 1919, the company introduced lateral-cut discs for $.85 apiece, without paying a licensing fee to Victor for the patented recording technology. It was a direct and dangerous assault by little Gennett Records on the recording titan. That year, in issues of Talking Machine World, a leading phonograph trade magazine, Starr Piano advertised that its Gennett records could improve the tone of all phonographs. The not-so-subtle message was that Gennett’s new lateral-cut discs could be played on the prominent Victor and Columbia phonographs.
As expected, in 1919 Victor Talking Machine sued Starr Piano in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, charging infringement of Johnson’s patent. In addition, Victor sought a temporary injunction against Starr Piano to cease production of the Gennett lateral-cut records until the case was settled. On the surface, the confrontation resembled the battle between David and Goliath. Besides its enormous financial resources and a file cabinet full of U.S. patents for recording technology, Victor had a long and impressive track record in winning patent infringement suits. Victor’s Eldridge Johnson had successfully defended his 1905 patent for the lateral-cut recording process in several cases, including a 1911 court decision in which Johnson’s patent was ruled valid over the nearly identical Jones patent of 1901!
The Gennett family, on the other hand, had no patents to wave back in Victor’s face. Their defense was lack of invention on the part of Johnson’s patent. In other words, they argued that the general concept of lateral-cut recording belonged in the public domain and should not be protected by a series of confusing and often contradictory patent rulings. Once and for all, the Gennetts were determined to break the monopoly.
The Gennett family had another factor in its favor. In similar cases, the courts often rendered decisions totally inconsistent with previous rulings. In the early days of the record business, any outcome was possible when phonograph-related patents were at issue. And while Gennett Records was a tiny player in a business ruled by Victor, the Richmond parent company of Starr Piano was booming and had the financial clout to handle protracted litigation with just about anyone.
Also, Starr Piano was not on its own. The company received enthusiastic support from other small record companies – General Phonograph (OKeh), Aeolian Company (Vocalion), Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company (Brunswick), and Canadian Compo Company. They joined Starr Piano in the suit. None of them had made substantial inroads with vertical-cut records, and all stood to gain enormously from free access to the lateral-cut recording technology. Starr Piano hired a veteran patent lawyer, Drury W. Cooper, to defend the case, one that would break forever the cozy Victor-Columbia lock on the lateral-cut recording industry.
In early 1920, Victor suffered its first setback when both the U.S. District Court and the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied the temporary injunction. When a patent in question has been held valid in an earlier ruling, as was the case with the Johnson patent, a temporary injunction is usually granted. Not this time. Starr Piano’s attorneys effectively attacked the validity of Johnson’s patent in view of the earlier 1901 Jones patent. Even though Johnson’s patent had been successfully defended in court in the past, Starr Piano cited rulings surrounding the Johnson patent that appeared contradictory.
In refusing to issue a temporary injunction against Starr Piano, the Circuit Court of Appeals in January 1920 noted that possibly “Jones had a prior patent and was a prior inventor. If so, it then became incumbent upon Johnson, in order to succeed, to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he was, in fact, the inventor.” The court added that because of the questionable correctness of previous cases, the case should be moved for an early trial. Starr Piano’s opening-round victory enabled the company to continue pressing lateral-cut discs, knowing that final settlement of Victor’s impending patent infringement suit would be held up in court for months, possibly years.
The prominent U.S. District Court Judge Learned Hand presided over Victor Talking Machine v. Starr Piano, which began in 1920 and dragged on several months into early 1921. During the testimony, Starr Piano’s attorneys hauled motion picture equipment into the courtroom for close-up observation of the Gennett recording stylus and the grooves it cut into wax master discs. “At the trial, witnesses appeared who had been brought from Europe, and practically all the experts in the art contributed their information for the consideration of the judge,” Starr Piano wrote in a press statement. After months of technical badgering, Starr Piano’s original defense, which had buried Victor’s temporary injunction, proved convincing to Judge Hand. In a decree issued on February 11, 1921, Judge Hand concluded that Victor’s attorneys could not prove that Johnson had invented the concept of lateral-cut recording on a wax master disc.
Hand acknowledged that certain tools and methods relating to lateral-cut recording had been developed and legitimately patented by Victor. But the general concept, he concluded, existed years before Johnson’s patent. Judge Hand also ruled that Victor had legally “abandoned” Johnson’s patent, because the lateral-cut recording process had been in commercial use several years before the patent was awarded.
The final crushing blow in the dispute was handed down on April 4, 1922, in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where Judge Augustus Hand (a cousin of Learned Hand) massacred the once-intimidating Johnson patent. He agreed that Johnson’s keeping his patent secret for several years constituted abandonment. Then, after assessing numerous recording patents leading up to Johnson’s own, Judge Hand affirmed that previous inventors were already familiar with the concept of lateral-cut recording:
The most that can be said of the Johnson patent suit is that it disclosed a method of cutting out a lateral undulatory groove of substantially constant depth by an improved form of stylus. Everything except the improved tool which his specification discloses seems to have been old, and the improved tool was apparently a matter of workmanship, and at any rate is not an element in the claims in suit.
Augustus Hand ruled that Johnson’s patent for lateral-cut recording was directly foreshadowed by Jones’s patent, and even earlier by Bell and Tainter’s nineteenth-century patent for recording with a soft wax cylinder! “Nothing remained but work for skilled artisans in order to fabricate a satisfactory sound record,” Hand wrote. “Nothing was achieved worthy of a patent in producing the Johnson matrix. It seems evident that Johnson invented nothing new in the way of a matrix laterally cut out of wax, and that he did not think that he had done so. He, at most, by more experienced workmanship, produced better results through methods that were undoubtedly older than had formerly been secured.”
The piano company from Indiana soundly defeated mighty Victor. Fred Gennett wasted no time in issuing a press statement: “The history of this case is almost three years of continued and intense litigation, an embraced in its scope the entire art of record making from its first inception to the point whereby this decision restricting patents was broken and the manufacture of records become public property.”
The Public’s Appetite
The decision attracted little public attention, as the ramifications of this complex case involving new technologies were not grasped. After all, the decision did nothing immediately to affect Victor’s dominant position in the recording market. Victor’s sales of phonographs and records by the end of 1921 had reached an astounding $50 million. However, Starr Piano and its Gennett Records had helped set the stage for dramatic change in the competitive nature of the recording business. “Other companies have likewise entered the field imbued with the success of the Starr Piano Company in defending its position,” Starr Piano wrote in its press statement. “The Brunswick record, the Vocalion record, the OKeh record, and many others of lesser fame have been dependent upon the success of this litigation equally with the Starr Piano Company for their continuance in business.”
Indeed, the court decisions gradually opened the floodgates. With lateral-cut recording technology securely in the public domain, smaller recording labels switched to this process. New labels were formed. The heightened competition between labels in the 1920s promoted improvements in recording processes, reduced record prices, and generated more recording activity than could have been imagined before the advent of Gennett Records.
The informal alliance between Starr Piano’s Gennett Records Division and the other small competitors did not end with the Starr court victory. Through the 1920s, the Gennett family maintained loose business ties with these other record companies, as hundreds of Gennett master discs were pressed for several different labels. With the onset of the Roaring Twenties, the Gennett family’s small, Indiana-based record company had earned a respectable place in the rapidly evolving recording industry.
Ezra Wickemeyer and the Richmond Recording Studio
Starr Piano entered the 1920s in the right business. While the radical industrial shift to a peacetime economy after World War I caused a national recession, the nation was poised for years of unprecedented consumerism. U.S. troops returned from European battlefields seeking domestic stability. Within a short time, the public appetite for household goods, such as pianos and phonographs, was stronger than ever. Meanwhile, competition between a growing number of new record labels, abetted by Starr Piano’s winning its legal battle with Victor Records, sparked a proliferation in the sheer number of new record releases available to phonograph owners.
Times were good in Richmond’s Starr Valley. By 1920, the company was annually producing about 15,000 pianos, 3,000 phonographs, and 3,000,000 records. With the switch to lateral-cut records in the early 1920s, the Gennett label prospered, with a sizable catalog offering classical, sacred, popular, and military band music, as well as specialty foreign-language and instructional discs.
While Gennett Records was now among the nation’s larger record companies, it was still dwarfed by the East Coast’s recording giants. Victor and Columbia secured exclusive contracts with most of the era’s leading classical and pop artists. Whenever Gennett produced hits by promising entertainers, Victor and Columbia seemed to snatch them away with a lucrative contract. Furthermore, they pressed their records with better materials and had better sound quality than the Gennett discs, which were recorded in both the New York and the Richmond studios but were all pressed in the Richmond plant.
Yet the competitors’ dominance did not keep the frugal Gennett Records division from churning out thousands of new releases, which sold by the millions through Starr Piano stores and independent distributors, known in the business as “jobbers.” In fact, most Gennett discs that surface today in antique stores or on Internet auctions are the blue-labeled, acoustically recorded discs of the early 1920s.
By 1922, Gennett’s Richmond recording studio, hidden back in the Starr Piano factory complex, busily recorded musicians at a pace comparable to the company’s Manhattan studio. The previous year, construction of the Richmond studio was largely the handiwork of Ezra Wickemeyer, a key figure in the Gennett Records story. From August 1921 to mid-1927, he was the “recording director” in Richmond, waxing thousands of musicians near his childhood neighborhood.
Wickemeyer never knew a world without Starr Piano. Born in Richmond in 1893 as the son of a German immigrant carpenter, he grew up with his parents and four siblings in his maternal grandmother’s two-story brick house at 300 South Third Street only twenty-five yards from the steep ridge overlooking Starr Valley, on which the Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O) Railroad locomotives thundered toward downtown. This intimate neighborhood, with its narrow streets and houses nestled together just south of downtown, was a German enclave where workers took the short stroll each morning to the piano factory and returned after a long day with sawdust stuck to the sweat of their arms.
As a twelve-year-old boy in February 1905, Wickemeyer made headlines across the state after surviving a dramatic gas explosion at the family home. Newspaper accounts reported that his mother smelled natural gas and instructed young Ezra to lead a repairman to the basement. The man foolishly lit a match, and the blast collapsed two exterior walls. In flames and screaming, the boy fought his way out. His mother, in the kitchen with her four other children, led them through a blown-out wall. Newspapers reported that Grandma, in the backyard when the blast occurred, collapsed from emotion. The strange, bombed-out house attracted hundreds of curiosity seekers for days. “Although suffering intensely, the boy (Wickemeyer) displayed nerve and presence of mind,” Richmond’s The Evening Item published in a page-one story.
The young boy grew into an outgoing, stocky man of average height with a receding hairline and eyeglasses. The severe burns suffered as a child left prominent, thick scars on his hands, face, and upper forehead, which may have explained his ever-present hat. He was also rarely seen without a cigarette daggling from his lips. After high school, Wickemeyer worked as a grocery clerk and attended Richmond Business College. In 1914 at age twenty-one, he became a stenographer (writer of office shorthand) at Starr Piano, where his uncle and future father-in-law were woodworkers. His sister also became a Starr Piano employee. When the Gennetts expanded the company’s product scope, Wickemeyer moved into the recording division. On his military draft card filed in 1917, he reported living at his parents’ home in Richmond while working as a “recorder of phonograph records” at Gennett’s Manhattan office. After serving in World War I, he returned to Richmond and worked in the Starr Piano office. He married a local woman, Katherine Helmich, and they rented an apartment at 112 S. Seventh Street, a half-mile from Starr Valley. When the Gennetts decided to establish a second recording studio in an existing building at the piano factory, Wickemeyer’s stenographer days ended. “Uncle Ez was known as a guy who could put things together, and he set up the Richmond studio, and that got him involved in the recording end,” said his nephew Robert Helmich.
The single-story, rectangular studio building was situated along a row of factory and warehouse buildings on a concrete floodwall against the Whitewater River. The building had previously been a kiln for curing wood used in manufacturing pianos. Next to the studio was the factory’s flood pump house. In the spring, the small river’s active waters moved swiftly past the back of the studio. A secondary railroad spur ran along the buildings, about three feet from the studio’s front door, for slow-moving cars hauling freight through the crowded Starr factory. The trains could generate enough commotion to interrupt recording sessions, so the studio was generally aware of their schedule. In later years, a red light outside the studio alerted the entire factory that recording sessions were under way.
Over the decades, musicians have described how train noise interrupted sessions or completely ruined recordings at the Richmond studio. The culprits were the steam locomotives of the C&O line, which passed above Starr Piano along the high eastern ridge of the gorge near the Wickemeyer homestead. From the railroad line, one has a bird’s-eye view of the entire Starr Valley below. This railroad line, situated about fifty yards from the recording studio, produced noise and vibration at the most unpredictable times. In fact, some collectors of vintage records are convinced that certain Gennett discs contain the faint sound of churning trains in the background. “It could be a nuisance with the railroad tracks down there, but you didn’t think a lot about it and went on,” said Marion McKay, a 1920s bandleader who recorded numerous times at the Richmond studio.
The recording studio, about 125 × 30 feet, adjoined a control room on the other side of the wall. A potbelly stove kept the room warm. Sawdust between the interior and exterior walls was a feeble attempt at soundproofing. This was before the era of acoustic wall tiles, so the studio was “deadened” by monk’s cloth draperies from ceiling to floor. On one wall hung a large Mohawk rug, which had once been on a floor in Harry Gennett’s home. The Richmond studio could end up so dead that people standing twenty feet apart practically had to yell at each other to be heard. On occasion, Gennett staffers faced the wrath of musicians of large orchestras who complained they couldn’t hear each other’s instruments. In such cases, the Gennett technicians tried to improve the room’s resonance by simply pulling back the drapes.
Before the advent of electronic recording in the mid-1920s, recording companies engaged in “acoustic” recording. The process required musicians to gather around and play into a couple of large megaphone-like horns, one to two feet in diameter. The horns transferred the sound, via a diaphragm, to the recording stylus, which engraved the sound vibrations onto a polished, soft wax master disc. Because the horns, the diaphragm, and stylus were all connected as one piece, the horns moved with the stylus as it inscribed grooves across three inches of the rotating wax master. Consistent with industry practice, the Gennett studios experimented with horns of various sizes, depending upon the type of instruments or voices to be reproduced. In the Richmond studio, the horns, affixed to a multi-pronged pipe, protruded from a small opening in the wall. Just behind and under the horns, through the opening in the wall, was the large recording machine, also called a recording lathe, which turned the blank wax master disc. In order to avoid picking up excess noise during recording, a curtain at the opening in the wall enclosed the horns. The curtain also kept the musicians from being distracted by Wickemeyer or one of his technicians who operated the large recording lathe. After a disc was etched, Wickemeyer pulled open the curtain and directly faced the musicians a few steps away.
Because no electricity was involved in operating the system, the Gennett turntable on the recording lathe operated by a cable and pulley system, much like a grandfather clock. The center pin on the turntable was attached to one end of the cable, which had a large weight on the other end. When the weight was lowered down a shaft, the turntable spun. If the studio had been extremely cold overnight, the grease on the turntable’s gear would gum up by morning, and recording would have to be delayed until the room was heated. The pulley system occasionally gave the turntable an inconsistent rotation speed. Thus, while a 78-rpm disc should be recorded while rotating 78 times per minute, some early Gennett discs were cut at uneven speeds or entirely at speeds slightly faster than 78 rpm. Because early phonographs were spring-wound, the discrepancy was not very noticeable to record buyers. But some Gennett discs played on an electronic phonograph seem to slide in and out of tune. However, by 1923 the Richmond studio evidently had installed an electric motor to regulate the turntable speed, as virtually no pitch variation is detectable on Gennett’s classic jazz recordings of 1923–24.
The cutting stylus on the recording lathe, which etched sound vibrations from the recording horns onto the polished wax master, could be made of glass, mica, diamond, or, most often, sapphire. The Gennett staffers brushed powdered graphite into the grooves of the wax master to ensure smooth etching by the stylus. Recordings were made on a blank wax disc, consisting primarily of the carnauba wax commonly used in candles. The blank disc, about 13 inches in diameter and 1.5 inches thick, was first polished to a mirror-like finish on two large machines, called the “shaver” and the “polisher.” Preparing the wax discs could be tedious. The shaving machine was not always reliable, recalled Gennett staffer Rena Clark, and hard impurities in the wax discs could damage the machine’s delicate sapphire shaver.
With the Richmond studio situated in the hinterlands, its business depended on signing bands passing through town. Thus, the company’s front office would frequently book recording time for artists without giving the studio staff much advance notice. A band might show up at the studio, and only a couple of wax discs would be polished and ready for recording. Clark would scramble to polish the rough wax discs on the sensitive machinery while the band stood around waiting.
Before actual recording began, Wickemeyer established the sound balance by placing the performers at various distances from the horns. Balancing took place only after numerous wax test records of the performers were made and played back through the horns. Certain musicians, such as banjo players, sat on high stools in front of the horns. Naturally, louder brass players were positioned in back. If necessary, Wickemeyer made dozens of wax takes until he felt the sound balance was correct. In addition to establishing sound balance, the test pressings played back through the acoustic horns exposed some musicians as simply incompetent. Wickemeyer would politely send them on their way. Other, more diplomatic sound engineers pretended to record them, knowing full well nothing would be released.
Once Wickemeyer settled on the proper placement of musicians, actual recording could begin. During the recording, the engineer would flick on a red light in the studio to alert the musicians that two minutes and thirty seconds had passed and that the song should end soon. Generally, the Gennett policy was to produce three master discs of each song attempted by the musicians. Each song was given a master number, which was inscribed in the inner circle of the wax disc. If the first take of a song was designated No. 6543, for example, then the second and third takes were designated 6543-A and 6543-B, and so on.
The Richmond studio’s location in the bottom of a humid river gorge made recording during the summer months unpleasant enough. But in order to keep the wax discs soft during recording, the unventilated studio had to be kept uncomfortably hot throughout the year. In recalling his recording sessions in Starr Valley, McKay remembered first and foremost the horrendous climate in the studio: “The temperature was always way up. It could be in February and still 80 to 85 degrees in there.” The small fans placed to each side of the recording horns offered little relief. In photographs taken in the Richmond studio, the musicians appear as if they had performed in a sauna.
What with the studio temperature, the need for numerous test recordings, and the company’s desire to process as many songs as possible in a one-day session, the musicians were put through an exhausting exercise. “Wickemeyer was a good guy to work with, pretty reasonable,” said McKay. “They [the Gennett staff] didn’t give you any problems; they had plenty of their own problems getting the right sound and balance. You had to be pretty patient sitting through all the playbacks. But nobody minded since recording was such a new thing to everybody. We didn’t know any different.”
In fact, the musicians who recorded in the Starr factory almost universally held a nostalgic affection for those long, tedious recording sessions by the railroad tracks. “How could you forget it?” asked Bu Dant, a horn player with Hoagy Carmichael’s 1928 pickup band for a late-night session in Starr Valley. “When I think of all the places where I’ve recorded music, that spot in the old piano factory in Richmond had to be one of the most unusual.” Baby Dodds, drummer for King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, held a similar sentiment, when he said in the late 1950s, “I’ve made a lot of recordings, but the biggest kick I got out of any recording session was when the King Oliver band went out to Richmond, Indiana, to record for the Gennett Company.”
After a recording session concluded, and the musicians went on their way, the studio staffers took the fragile wax master discs, which were gently packed in cloth-lined boxes, to the plating department in another building in the Starr factory. Copper-plated master discs were then made from the wax masters. Because the studio used powdered graphite in cutting the original wax master disc, rough spots could appear on the copper plating. The staffers very carefully scraped away the rough spots with the help of magnifying glasses, dentist chisels, and engraving tools. If they failed, the copper master was melted down and used again. For example, master discs from a historic Bix Beiderbecke recording session in Richmond were destroyed for this very reason.
From the copper master, a few test pressings and a “mother” disc were produced. The mother disc, from which final record pressings were derived, was made from very highly durable shellac-based materials. It was sent to the matrix department for storage. Meanwhile, the test pressings went to the Starr Piano administrative building, where Gennett family members, company managers, studio engineers, or whoever was available, played them on a phonograph to determine which selections would be pressed into finished records. In one case, the company sent test pressings of fiddler Doc Roberts, one of their most reliable recording artists in the late 1920s, to his Kentucky farm for his evaluation. But that was rare. Such decisions fell almost exclusively to the small Gennett staff in Richmond, which also evaluated the metal master discs shipped in by railroad from the Manhattan studio. In fact, the control the Richmond staff exercised over the selections was a regular source of consternation at the New York studio, where the staff regularly complained about the quality of discs that Wickemeyer recorded in Richmond.
When the best takes were selected, the matrix department pulled the corresponding mother discs, from which they produced metal “stampers.” The stampers were used to press the shellac-based records sold to the public. After about 500 records, the stamper would wear out. New metal stampers were then duplicated from the mother disc, and the pressing would continue.
No recording artist ever got rich from the releases selected by the Gennett staff. Some musicians were paid a basic flat fee, anywhere from $15 to $50 per recording session. Many of the black artists received even less. Most of Gennett’s more popular artists signed a royalty contract that guaranteed quarterly payments of one penny for each copy of each side sold. (Later, an additional royalty payment of one-half cent per release was paid when selections were also issued on the Gennett discount labels.)
A breakage allowance of up to 10 percent of these minuscule royalties could be deducted to cover the costs of records broken during shipping. Occasionally, Gennett provided its recording artists with a stack of personal discs to be used for promotional purposes. One must remember that most entertainers in the 1920s viewed their record releases as vehicles for promoting their live shows, not as primary sources of income. The obvious exceptions were the leading artists on the Victor and Columbia labels, such as crooner Rudy Vallee or bandleader Paul Whiteman.
Musicians traveled to the Gennett recording studios on their own dime, and once they arrived, the number of songs to be waxed was uncertain. Some Gennett contracts with performers stated that the company was not obligated to produce more than three recordings during a session. If the musicians showed promise, however, the Gennett staff would have them churn out as many songs as possible, usually over a period of one or two days.
Gennett’s meager payment to artists, combined with an efficient plating and pressing organization employing fewer than a hundred people in the Starr Valley, enabled Gennett Records to churn out millions of records profitably in the early 1920s. As America became the melting pot of nationalities, the Gennett Records catalogs during the period reflected wildly diverse musical tastes: the National Marimba Orchestra, Green Brothers Xylophone Orchestra, Gonzalez’s Mexican Band, Lieutenant Matt’s 106th Infantry Band, the Knights of Columbus Band, the Orpheus Trio, the Italian Degli Arditi Orchestra, the Hawaiian Guitars, and the Heidelberg Quartet. Gennett also pressed records in German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Hungarian, and Czechoslovakian, which were popular with the wave of immigrants pouring into New York.
Easy Money
For many of Gennett’s classical releases, the New York studio organized a group of area musicians for its Gennett Symphony Orchestra. The studio recorded classical soloists, such as the famed violinist Scipione Guidi and pianist Herman Ostheimer. The Richmond studio also pressed records by classical music ensembles in the Midwest, including the nearby Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.
During the early 1920s, the Gennett studios also recorded such popular singers as Arthur Hall, Sam Ash, George Wilton Ballard, Henry Burr, Al Bernard, Arthur Fields, Harry “Singing Sam” Frankel, Harry McClaskey, and Ernest Hare, a popular New York entertainer who sang in blackface in New York. These singers also appeared prominently on popular sheet music of the day. Because Gennett Records did not bind these artists to long-term contracts, the company lost many of them to competing labels.
Such was the case with Wendell Hall, a “hillbilly” singer who often performed in cheesy hillbilly garb. In 1922, Starr Piano chartered a Pullman car and brought Pittsburgh piano dealers to Richmond for a factory tour and party. A huge buffet luncheon, with a stuffed pig as the centerpiece, was set up in the administration building. As dealers were gathering, a shabbily dressed, red-haired Hall arrived, wanting to make a few records. Hall had worked as a song plugger for Forster Music in Chicago, and traveled the Midwest to play in music stores and theaters. So he knew how to work a crowd. Hall eventually found his way to the buffet line and later pulled out his ukulele and entertained the amused audience with his collection of original hillbilly songs. “He looked like a tramp,” said Starr Piano salesman Wilson Taggart, whose job at the luncheon was to hobnob with dealers. “He and his darned old ukulele, there was just something about him.” With typical Gennett Records spontaneity, Wickemeyer took Hall down to the recording studio the same afternoon, where Hall knocked out one song after another.
Hall’s “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo” and “Red Headed Music Maker,” back-to-back on a blue-labeled Gennett disc, was an instant success. It was one of the first “hillbilly” records ever released and one of the better selling discs waxed in the Richmond studio. (Original copies often appear on Internet record auctions.) Yet Hall wasn’t as dumb as his image suggested. At the afternoon recording session, the Gennett staff gave him a souvenir test pressing, a common courtesy extended to the studio’s recording artists. Hall promptly presented the test record to Victor Records as part of his bid to record for America’s dominant label. Within a few months, he recorded “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo” for Victor, which became one of America’s best-selling records in 1923. Hall soon became a popular radio personality.
Novelty acts like Hall and comedy records were easy money for the record labels, as consumers were eager to buy anything new on disc, and Gennett recorded several. Found in antique stores and Internet record auctions is the odd Gennett Laughing Record, which finds a group of people laughing hysterically at a series of muffed violin solos. Such a disc met the fundamental Gennett Records objective of making profit by selling enough records to exceed the low production costs. Hardly art, but great business.
Gennett’s Physical Culture exercise package, a three-record set of twelve exercises set to music, featured enthusiastic instructions from one Clarence Nichols, dubbed the New York Physical Director. The Physical Culture record sleeve showed a hefty woman in a slip working out next to her Gennett phonograph. The Gennett exercise collection promised an invigorating workout for the body without dieting, gym grind, or long hours of training.
In addition to countless discs by local hotel dance orchestras, Gennett Records produced thousands of sacred music records, mostly by the Criterion Male Quartette and by gospel baritone Homer Rodeheaver. White gospel records were enormously popular in the 1920s, as a Christian evangelical revival swept across the Heartland. Gennett’s Richmond studio, with ready access to the tent gospel groups touring the Midwest, became a leading supplier of sacred discs. The Richmond pressing plant also custom-pressed thousands of discs for the singing Rodeheaver family’s personal Rainbow record label.
William Jennings Bryan, the famous orator, statesman, and three-time U.S. presidential candidate, traveled to Richmond in 1923 to record portions of the Cross of Gold speech, his famous oration from the 1896 Democratic presidential convention. The speech covered both sides of a disc, which Gennett Records issued in early 1924. The studio recorded and issued additional speeches by Bryan, as well as him gently reciting the Lord’s Prayer and the Bible’s 23rd Psalm, backed by a string accompaniment of “Rock of Ages.” Gennett sold Bryan’s religious records during Christmas on a seasonal red label. Bryan died in 1925. Long after Gennett Records closed down, Fred Gennett expressed particular pride in the discs by Bryan and other dignitaries, as opposed to the musical releases.
Recording the Ku Klux Klan
Gennett Records also profited from the early 1920s popularity of the Ku Klux Klan, which exploited the unease created by the mass migration of European Catholics and Jews to the United States after World War I. Indiana became a Klan hotbed, with state membership exceeding 250,000 during the early 1920s, representing the largest Klan contingent of any state in the nation. While Klan behavior is traditionally associated as an affront to African Americans, its political bent in Indiana in the early 1920s was grounded in a radical Protestant patriotism with strong warnings against immigration and the growing influence of Catholics and Jews. For example, the 1924 literature from Whitewater Klan 60, the Richmond-based klavern, wrote, “We honor the Christ as the Klansman’s only criterion of charter,” then attacked the “Roman Catholic Hierarchy,” noting that the men who assassinated presidents Lincoln, McKinley, and Garfield were all Catholics.
Klan musical discs recorded by Gennett captured these political winds blowing in the state. Pressed with red labels and gold KKK lettering, the records often listed the performers as “100 percent Americans” and featured vocal numbers with piano or band accompaniment. The Klan took old hymns and politicized them with new lyrics, such as “The Bright Fiery Cross” (based on “The Old Rugged Cross”), “Cross in the Wildwood” (“Church in the Wildwood”), or “Onward Christian Klansman” (“Onward Christian Soldiers”). Other Klan records recorded and custom-pressed by Gennett included “The Pope’s Warning,” “There’ll Be a Hot Time, Klansman,” “You’re Going to Leave the Old Home, Jim,” “Johnny Join the Klan, Come to the Cross,” and “Daddy Swiped Our Last Clean Sheet and Joined the Ku Klux Klan.”
The discs never appeared in Gennett record catalogs. The company recorded and pressed them for direct payment from the Klan. Gennett shipped the discs to the Klan headquarters in Indianapolis or to various Indiana klaverns. Both the Richmond and New York studios recorded Klan discs. The labels of some discs included a post office address in Indianapolis for the American, a Klan-affiliated organization, which took orders for the records. “The Gennett studio did all kinds of custom pressing because you got paid up front,” said Richard Gennett. “That was good business. But none of the Gennetts were members of the Klan.”38 Gennett Records’ assistant sales manager Clayton Jackson recalled the company waxing “a helluva lot of records for them [KKK]. We used to load them on passenger interurban cars [commuter trains] and take them [records] to Indianapolis.”
It is ironic that Gennett Records, a pioneer label for African American and other ethnic music, would press Klan discs. However, it reflected the Gennett family’s business pragmatism in an era of extreme Klan popularity in Indiana. A large part of the Klan appeal in Indiana was attributable to the charismatic David Curtis Stephenson, who headed a Klan region covering twenty-three states from his office in Indianapolis. A forceful speaker, Stephenson wielded tremendous political clout in the Indiana capital before his imprisonment in 1925. Klan popularity in the state steeply declined after he was found guilty of second-degree murder in the highly publicized suicide death of school teacher Madge Oberholtzer, who poisoned herself after having been molested by Stephenson.
During the Stephenson–Klan popularity wave, the organization was highly visible in Richmond. Marketed like a fraternal organization, the Klan had hundreds of members living close to Starr Valley. Historian Leonard Moore, in his exhaustive study of the Klan in 1920s Indiana estimated that one of every three native-born, white Protestant males in Richmond in the early 1920s was a member. In a town of almost 26,000 people during 1921–27, Moore tallied 3,183 Klan members in the membership logs, including 30 percent of the town’s physicians and 20 percent of its lawyers. Local members, who paid $6 annual dues, also included ministers, city councilmen, and small business owners. They met on Friday nights in large numbers in the Pythias Building downtown. Moore found no examples of Klan-related violence or disturbances reported in the Richmond newspapers during 1922–25. However, the local Klan members could create an intimidating presence and burned crosses in the 1920s in the neighborhood directly north of the downtown railroad depot, known as Goose Town, where African Americans and Catholic Italians resided.
The Gennett family’s lack of Klan involvement reflected the hands-off attitude of other Richmond industrial leaders. The heart of the Klan membership in Richmond included small-business owners, sole proprietors, lower-level white-collar employees, and laborers. Gennett studio engineer Wickemeyer and several of his family relatives were Klan members, according to the membership rosters, along with many other Starr Piano employees, including plant foreman Frederick Hufer. Members posted Klan literature in the Starr factory buildings. While the Gennett family employed blacks in their homes, the Starr factories never employed blacks in the 1920s. African Americans represented about 6 percent of Richmond’s population during the era.
The Klan presence in Richmond created occasional tensions at Starr Piano. One morning in the early 1920s, C. A. Rhinehart and W. R. Rhinehart, two Klan members who drove an ice truck in nearby Muncie, entered the administration office near the entrance of the Starr factory and laid $400 on the table with the idea of making one thousand records. Clayton Jackson, Gennett’s assistant sales manager, took the cash and pointed them toward the recording studio. Jackson claimed that Harry Gennett, Henry’s eldest son, became incensed. However, that didn’t stop the Rhineharts from producing several Klan records in Richmond, including W. R. Rhinehart–credited songs “Klansman Keep the Cross A Burning,” “There’ll Be A Hot Time, Klansman,” and “That Dear Old Fiery Cross.” The ice deliveryman who authored these fire-themed lyrics also provided the lead vocals to piano accompaniment.
In another incident, Taggart recalled Clarence Gennett objecting to a Klan test record he heard playing on a phonograph in the Starr front office. After Gennett ordered the disc destroyed, Taggart quietly instructed a staffer to “send the wax down to the electroplating room so we each got a copy of it before we destroyed everything. Clarence never knew that.” Taggart added: “Some of the Catholics took up the fact that they [Gennett Records] were making records for the KKK.”
The most overt Klan action in Richmond occurred on October 5, 1923, when thousands of local and area members assembled in Glen Miller Park and paraded down East Main Street. Coincidentally, it was the same day that King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, with Louis Armstrong on cornet, recorded a second series of important discs at the Richmond studio. “The largest Ku Klux Klan demonstration ever given in Wayne County was viewed last night by approximately 30,000 people,” reported the Richmond Item. “Fully 6,000 members of the Klan participated in the monster parade, which in magnitude and impressiveness has had few equals in the city.” The paper also reported “several hundred members of the women’s branch of the mysterious order” in the parade, and a student band from Earlham College, the local Quaker college, played “Hail! Hail! The Gang’s All Here.” The competing Richmond Palladium & Sun Telegram, which held an antagonistic attitude toward the local Klan, reported only 1,500 participants and emphasized that the local mayor forced Klan members to keep its ceremonies in the park open to the public. “I sat on the front lawn of my grandfather’s house [Henry Gennett’s estate] on Main Street and watched the Klan parade down the street,” said Richard Gennett, son of Fred Gennett. “The Klan was a big thing in Richmond back then. We put out the [KKK] records because they paid us. That was all. We did a lot of vanity records for all kinds of people.”
Halcyon Days in Starr Valley
Specialty pressing for private individuals was a profitable sideline for Gennett Records. Collectors have prized numerous personal recordings by Gennett over the years, such as a rare 1922 disc by bandleader Joe Kayser. However, the primary company revenues were always derived from the standard Gennett releases in the Gennett Records catalog. These discs were sold in a Gennett record sleeve with an emblem depicting three girls in dresses dancing gleefully below the slogan, “The Difference is in the Tone.”
The Gennett releases were shipped by railroad car or truck to the numerous Starr Piano stores, which had large Gennett Records displays set up near the Starr phonograph retail area. Gennett discs in the early 1920s sold for $.85 to $1.10 each, a range comparable to competing labels. Jackson said Gennett Records considered the break-even point for a particular release to be 18,000 to 20,000 copies, though many Gennett releases later in the decade never approached such sales figures.
The independent dealers purchased the Gennett records wholesale, directly from the Starr plant, at 55 percent off the retail price. Small department stores and variety stores around the nation could obtain Gennett records through independent jobbers, who purchased large quantities of records at a discount from a Starr Piano store. They drove around the countryside with the discs piled up in their cars and called on small retailers. “When we had a hit on the East Coast, we’d ship records to beat hell to New York,” Jackson said. “We had two dual-wheel trucks and we’d send loads of records on those two trucks. We’d send them trucks to New York, and they’d bring records back through Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. We kept cycling them back this way.”
Starr Piano salesmen commonly promoted Gennett Records during sales calls for the piano company. While Starr Piano employees were paid paltry salaries, the salesmen loved to travel for the company, because the Gennett family demanded that they stay in the best hotels in order to enhance the company’s image. Once, when Taggart stopped in Iowa for the piano company, he met with one of Starr’s independent jobbers in order to promote the Criterion Quartette’s new release of “Iowa Corn Song” on the Gennett label. “I had more fun than a barrel of monkeys on that trip,” said Taggart. “This old man [the jobber] would always hunt up a cheap hotel. I’d always stay at the best. In those days, they had listening booths in the record stores. So I’d go into a music store, slip into one of those booths, and put this ‘Iowa Corn Song’ on, and the people would stack up trying to hear it.”
The early 1920s were the halcyon days for Gennett Records. Back in Richmond, Taggart would encounter Henry Gennett making the rounds of the Starr Piano factory when the division’s record business was booming. “He used to come around in the morning, rubbing his hands together, round and round,” Taggart said. “This was when the record business was pretty good. He’d ask ‘How are the checks coming in today?’ I’d tell him what we got in our end of it. He said, ‘Well, you’re holding up the piano business right now.’”
Clearly, Henry Gennett, who turned sixty-five in 1918, had provided the vision behind Starr Piano. But in the years leading up to 1922, he had essentially turned over day-to-day management to his sons, while he and his wife, Alice, took long trips to exotic spots around the world. Henry also maintained a close connection with Starr Piano’s thriving Pacific Division in California. He enjoyed long stays along the Santa Barbara coast. California had also become a second home to Henry and Alice’s only daughter, Rose. The family sensed that Henry was considering a permanent move to Southern California, where the family owned property.
During these prosperous years, the Gennett sons – Clarence, Fred, and Harry – raised families in stately homes, all within a couple of blocks of their parents’ mansion on East Main Street. The sons, as well as their sister, Rose, each married members of prominent Richmond families living nearby. The eldest son, Harry, who lived at 65 South Twenty-First Street, helped his father manage the piano manufacturing operations. His wife, Grace, was the daughter of Henry Robinson, president of Robinson & Co. (later Swayne, Robinson & Co.), a machining and casting factory across the road from Starr Piano and a major casting supplier to the piano factory. Like his father, Harry Gennett was a short man, but more robust. Probably the best liked of the Gennett sons at Starr Piano, Harry was known for his humor, infectious laugh, and private philanthropy. He took an interest in the welfare of Starr employees and personally secured work permits for Richmond boys under the legal working age who sought employment at the piano factory. Eventually, Harry would take over as president of Starr Piano.
The middle son, Clarence, who lived at 102 S. Eighteenth Street and served as company treasurer, was more removed from the manufacturing operations in the Starr Valley. His wife, Ruby, was the daughter of John Hasecoster, the prominent architect and designer of the Gennett mansion on East Main Street. Clarence’s father-in-law lived a few houses away. In 1915, Clarence and his wife purchased a vacation home in Nantucket, Massachusetts, where the family spent much of the summer. More of a social lion and small-town aristocrat, Clarence was actively involved in numerous social and civic organizations, including the Richmond Country Club. Like his father, he served on the boards of local companies. He was active in the local Presbyterian Church and even found time to moonlight as a sheriff’s deputy.
Some Starr employees found Clarence aloof. “He was a stiff-shirt; he thought he was top-stuff,” said Harold Soule, former recording engineer at the Richmond studio. “He used to drive down the street in his electric car. He wouldn’t even spit on you, let alone look at you.”5Clarence’s niece Florence Gennett offered a more gentle assessment, noting that he “tried to be well-mannered. He wasn’t very down to earth. I used to see him downtown. I’d say ‘Hi, Uncle Clarence!’ He would nod his head slightly and say, ‘How do you do, Florence.’ No smile. Nothing else. He’d just go on his way.”
The youngest son, Fred, supervised Starr Piano sales accounts and the Gennett Records division. A thin man of medium height, with receding black hair and horn-rimmed glasses, Fred resembled a scholar more than a Midwestern businessman engaged in the pioneer recording industry. Personable and unassuming, Fred was the prototypically conservative Indiana executive. Like his brothers, he went to work in the family piano business right out of high school, and became a company officer at age nineteen. In 1907, he married Hazel Reid, daughter of a local fence manufacturer, Pettis Reid, whose family spearheaded the construction of Richmond’s Reid Memorial Hospital. A true blueblood, Hazel held local offices in the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Daughters of American Colonists.
Fred and Hazel and their four children lived comfortably, employing an African American maid and a groundskeeper, in a spacious two-story, wood-frame mansion with a large pillared porch at 144 South Twenty-First Street, twenty blocks (1.5 miles) from the Starr Piano factory. Fred routinely walked to work each morning, and neighborhood women would say that they could set their clocks by his passing. Fred’s house was filled with music. On their Starr phonograph, Fred and the children cranked up test pressings or new Gennett releases. When they grew tired of the discs, they simply returned them to the Starr factory to be melted down. Richard Gennett said that his father fancied himself a good pianist, though his skills were limited. Hazel, on the other hand, was an accomplished violinist and pianist and sang in the church choir.
Unlike brother Clarence, Fred was a bit more private. He did not attend church, and he had a particular aversion to Catholicism. Neither was he active in the local country club. He spent many free hours around the house, working in the yard or planting a garden. Richard said that his father didn’t drink or smoke, at least around the kids, and eschewed crude language. “Whenever I would cuss, Pop would stare down at me and say ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’”
Fred shared his father’s fascination with California and spent weeks at a time with his father on the West Coast. He was actively involved in the development of the Pacific Division and once expressed the desire to move the company’s piano manufacturing operations to the West Coast. But, as with many projects Fred envisioned or initiated, he did not follow through. He was easily bored with details, a personality trait that cost the company money in later years.
In April 1922, while Henry Gennett was conducting business at Starr’s Pacific Division in Los Angeles, he became ill. He promptly returned to Richmond, where his health continued to deteriorate for about a month. On a Friday night, June 2, 1922, he died at Miami Valley Hospital in nearby Dayton, Ohio, with his wife and son Harry at his side. Henry was sixty-nine years old.
His body was laid out for viewing the next day at his home. That evening, hundreds of his employees assembled at the downtown Starr Piano store and walked as a group to the Gennett mansion, where hundreds of other local friends paid respects. On Sunday morning, members of the local Elks lodge assembled to attend the funeral in the open area of the mansion’s main floor, with the casket positioned in front of the huge fireplace. The room was packed. Richard Gennett remembered that a Starr employee service pin, awarded to company workers, was attached to his grandfather’s coat lapel but was removed by someone just before the casket was closed. Henry’s body was cremated in Cincinnati, and the ashes were sent to California, the state he loved.
Henry died at the financial peak of Starr Piano and Gennett Records. Shortly after his death, a letter from the company’s accountants arrived in Starr Valley. Taggart accidentally opened it and learned that the estimated net worth of Starr Piano was $7 million. From the viewpoint of many Starr Piano employees, including Taggart, Henry’s hard-driving demeanor had been key to the company’s national prominence. “One time we had sent down a whole mess of records that were to go to Los Angeles,” Taggart said. “When we would get them ready, we would take them down to the packing room and then they were supposed to go in with a carload of pianos. We got a telegram back one day saying there were no records in that car. Right away, old Henry jumped on me. I got the books out which showed where the packing room had receipted for them when we took them down [to the train car]. Henry gathered together Harry, Clarence, Fred, myself, and the packing room boss. He said, ‘Well now, I’ll tell you boys, whoever is to blame for this foul up, I want him fired right now. Let’s clean it up.’ He never fired the packing room boss or anybody. He would make decisions though. The old man had the reputation that when orders for pianos and records would slow up, he’d go out himself and get some orders. None of those boys would.”
Harry became company president upon his father’s death. He regularly sought business counsel for years from his mother, Alice, who served as company vice president and board director and often visited the plant. In fact, the three sons frequently met with their mother at noon at the Gennett mansion to brief her on company activities. “She had a very strong personality,” said grandson Henry Gennett Martin. “She never settled for being in the background. She was a matriarch.” Florence Gennett, Harry’s daughter-in-law, recalled the considerable faith that Harry held in his mother. “He thought she was just about the smartest person that ever was,” Florence said. “She had helped Grandfather Gennett build up the business. She had involved herself in it. She really knew about it. He [Harry] would always side with his mother in any arguments with the other brothers.”
The gradual financial slide of Starr Piano and its record division began with Henry’s death. Certainly, the company soon faced enormous challenges beyond the control of the sons. By 1923, the arrival of the cheap home radio seriously affected the piano, phonograph, and recording industries. The annual production of pianos in the United States declined by more than half between 1923 and 1929, with the production of player pianos falling some 86 percent in the same period. Another deadly blow was the onset of the Great Depression in late 1929. In the 1930s, the surviving Gennett family members were locked in bitter disputes over the direction of Starr Piano and its confusing web of subsidiaries. Family friction only contributed to the company’s steady losses, leading to the sale of the company in 1952 at a fraction of the financial worth it had attained during Henry Gennett’s life.
Fortunately for music history, the Gennett family kept their record label in operation throughout the 1920s. Had Gennett Records closed down at its financial peak in the early part of the decade, the label would be long forgotten, a faded memory surviving only in the dusty piles of 78s in antique stores. But when home radio began to impact the sale of pop and classical records, Gennett Records and its competitors responded aggressively, pursuing previously neglected market segments, such as urban black and rural white customers.
A leader in pursuing these market segments, the small Gennett label was among the first companies to record America’s indigenous music genres: jazz, blues, and old-time music, the precursor to country music. As Henry’s ashes were being sprinkled into the Pacific Ocean in mid-1922, a new American music from New Orleans was evolving in noisy dance halls on the south side of Chicago. His youngest son, Fred, along with Fred Wiggins, the Starr Piano store manager in Chicago, were unknowingly about to secure for the small Indiana record label a permanent place in the annals of American recorded music.
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