Lost Sounds by Tim Brooks

I feel sorry for anyone out there working on a book like this. Tim Brooks’ Lost Sounds is such an accomplishment that no other study on his subject need ever be written.

Like early films, early sound recordings have been scattered, lost , poorly preserved, left to languish in vaults and archives, in a tragic neglect of the roots of a truly American industry. Brooks has a wide personal collection of his own, and goes to great lengths to track down every extant recording from the given time period as possible. However, Lost Sounds is much more than a catalogue, but is also a comprehensive cultural history of race relations and African-American culture during a crucial period in American life, stretching from the Reconstruction era up through World War One. The music featured includes blues, spirituals, swing, solo performers and choral groups, and the roots of jazz, not withstanding a comprehensive appendix (by Dick Spottswood) of Caribbean and South American recordings made by American companies in the same time period. Music is the lens, but the picture is much broader and richer in scope.

Sources for Lost Sounds include wax cylinders and metal discs, but also trade newsletters for the nascent industry, period urban newspapers, files belonging to the grandfather or recording, Thomas Edison, cultural histories, auto/biographies of entertainment figures, and theatrical histories. Other primary sources include black newspapers, city directories, census records, and period scrapbooks. From this wealth of material, Brooks structures the book as a series of profiles of the musicians, composers and singers featured in these recordings, profiles that mix biographical information with that artist’s interactions with the industry. This framework puts the focus on the black artists rather than the mostly white entrepreneurs that ran and profited from the early recording companies, though some are mentioned in conjunction with their star artists. It is a powerful way to look at the history, and enables the reader to see certain key themes that emerge over the course of the text and still resonate in the recording industry today.

The first part of the book concerns George W. Johnson, whom Brooks labels the first black recording artist, whose life tells a powerful story, both of race relations during the time and the early beginnings of the recording industry. Johnson began as a “street artist” on New York City’s lower West Side, but grew up in northern Virginia in the tail end of slavery. At the time when he started recording, wax cylinders could not be duplicated and so singers made batches of twenty or thirty in one afternoon, and were paid “per round” approximately twenty cents, for records that were then sold for $1-1.50. These records were mainly played at “phonograph concerts” and musical slots machines, including “The Laughing Song,” which became the best-selling record of the 1890s and was Johnson’s own distinctive composition. Johnson was discovered by Len Spencer, a white man who worked for the New Jersey Phonograph Company and later became very wealthy doing so, after a period of years when Spencer assembled his own minstrel troupe for records and made other stereotypical recordings, like Johnson’s rendition of “The Whistling Coon.” Surprisingly, many of Johnson’s songs, even those with stereotypical black subjects and dialects, were successfully “covered” by contemporary white artists. Towards the end of Johnson’s life, his recording income was gone, and he took a job as doorman at Spencer’s lavish office building, and even lived in a back storage closet, where he later died.

Johnson’s story, compellingly related by Brooks, reveals some of the key racial dynamics that still exist in the recording industry today that have clearly persisted and evolved over decades. Musicians were exploited, while only owners of recording companies profited. The most popular recordings exaggerated and exploited racial stereotypes for both black and white audiences, perpetuating images from the era of slavery. Most companies practiced dubious methods of attributing songwriting credits, leaving historians like Brooks to reconstruct the talents and abilities of black composers and songwriters and reminiscent of the struggles of artists like Little Richard. Many songs written or popularized by black artists were then recorded by white artists, as happened often in the early years of rock ‘n’ roll. Finally, white recording company owners and producers developed and encouraged paternalistic relationships with their black artists, often lending them money from their own pockets, arranging for housing and jobs, all the while profiting from the artist’s work and encouraging the artist to remain financially dependent on the record company. A similar dynamic existed later between Muddy Waters and the Chess brothers at Chess records, one scrupulously avoided by wary musicians like Chuck Berry who saw the widespread practice as degrading and racist.

The story of Bert Williams, the “first black superstar of the 20th century,” shows a shift in racial attitudes at the beginning of the 1900s. Black artists and critics openly resent “coon songs,” and voice preferences for “respectable” black music, leaving behind artists like George Johnson in favor of those could appeal to white audiences and also serve as a model of the culture and sophistication achieved by black Americans. Williams therefore walked a delicate line that many black performers walk today, attempting to maintain credibility within the black community, serve as a positive role model, while still providing white audiences with the “black” catchphrases and slang they had come to expect. Williams was a huge success in vaudeville and on Broadway, a brilliant comedian in his time and a well-loved recording artist, singer and songwriter. One of his greatest triumphs was being the only black performer in the legendary Ziegfield Follies on Broadway, a true marker of his mainstream acceptance, yet as a light-skinned Bahamian, he often performed in blackface. Another struggle during Williams’ career occurred when he was torn between staying in (less profitable) black theater and entertainment world or working in the more lucrative white world where he knew he was always the “shuffling darkey.” It was this split that caused W.C. Fields to say, “Bert Williams was the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew.” In later years, Williams would earn a tribute from another musical legend when in 1940 Duke Ellington composed and recorded “A Portrait of Bert Williams.”

These are just two of the fascinating profiles that make up the bulk of Lost Sounds. A perennial concern for the historian is how to judge cultural products in a time with different standards of taste and decency than our own, but Brooks is always careful to maintain a tone of respect for the performers as artists, regardless of their involvement in coon songs, minstrel performances, or that ilk. He consciously refuses to judge them harshly in the light of current racial politics, but emphasizes repeatedly that these stories and recordings are an essential part of black American history and should be regarded as such. Tragic stories are told honestly and without melodrama, and every musician profiled is human, with both dignity and foibles.

Brooks’ work is even more stunning because he is not a professional historian or cultural critic, but is part of the entertainment industry as the Executive Vice-President of Research at Lifetime Television. However, a glimpse of his resume reveals a long-standing interest in cultural preservation, as a past president of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections and a frequent contributor to record research publications over the past 30 years. He is also the author of Little Wonder Records: a History and Discography. His work is truly a legacy that will live on for generations, as will Lost Sounds.

In short, Lost Sounds is a definite work that belongs on any musical shelf, along with such classics as David Toop’s Rap Attack and Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop. No overview of modern African-American culture is complete without it. In fact, I’ll go a few steps further and say that everyone involved in the current recording industry should read it, especially those of color — it’s lessons are scarily relevant and have much to teach us.