Black music on radio during the jazz age

African American Review, Summer, 1995 by William (English bishop) Barlow

A major source of radio programming during the Jazz Age was live and recorded music. Initially, the use of phonograph records was widespread among broadcasters due to records' utility and cost; they provided a cheap, ready-made solution to the problem of what to offer listeners via the airways. But in 1922, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) began to demand that radio stations pay an annual fee in return for the use of recorded music copyrighted by ASCAP members. The owners responded by forming their own trade organization, the National Association of Broadcasting (NAB), which then took the lead in opposing the fee demands. While a number of the better financed stations eventually cut a deal with ASCAP, especially after a federal court upheld the legality of the music organization's position, the NAB remained steadfast in its opposition to the yearly licensing fee. Toward that end, many NAB members refused to include ASCAP songs in their programming. This impasse led, in part, to an upsurge in live music broadcasts within the fledgling radio industry.

There were two major categories of live music broadcast on radio in the 1920s: "potted palm" concert music performed by amateurs, and popular big-band dance music performed by professionals. Potted palm was an industry term for classical and semi-classical concert music played by amateur musicians, who volunteered their services to the stations free of charge. It was a popular trend in radio programming during the early 1920s, providing broadcasters with an inexpensive alternative to ASCAP-controlled music. But as the radio industry moved toward network and commercial broadcasting, the novelty wore off; by the end of the decade, potted palm music was fast becoming a relic. Concurrently, popular dance music's star was on the rise in the radio industry. Large dance bands made up of professional musicians were prominently featured on live remote broadcasts from hotel ballrooms, dance halls, and nightclubs. In addition, some stations hired dance orchestras for live weekly broadcasts from their respective studios, while others scheduled regular appearances by product-sponsored dance bands like the Cliquot Club Eskimos, the A&P Gypsies, the Ipana Troubadours, and the Lucky Strike Orchestra. The musicians in these various dance orchestras were invariably members of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM), which was one of the most segregated unions in the American Federation of Labor. Consequently, there were no African American musicians in these bands.

For the most part, the popular dance music associated with the Jazz Age had black roots. Pioneering African American dance bands led by James Reese Europe and Fletcher Henderson in New York City; Erskine Tate, Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton and Joe "King" Oliver in Chicago; Bennie Moten in Kansas City; and Kid Ory in Los Angeles first injected big-band jazz into the cultural mainstream. Unfortunately, these groups were seldom heard on radio in the 1920s. Instead, it was the commercially successful white dance bands of the era, such as those led by Ben Bernie, Vincent Lopez, B. A. Rolfe, and Paul Whiteman - the self-proclaimed "King of Jazz" - that were regularly featured on the airways, giving their popularity an added boost. The same tendency also held true for radio vocalists during the Jazz Age. Much of the popular vocal music of the day, including the songs written by Tin Pan Alley tune-smiths, was rooted in jazz and/or blues - as was the case with dance music. However, the singers who achieved stardom on radio in the 1920s were predominately white interpreters of black song - Al Jolson, Rudy Vallee, Eddie Cantor, and Sophie Tucker. The decade's greatest African American vocalists - luminaries like Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Leroy Carr, and Florence Mills, to name but a few - were only occasionally heard on radio, if at all. The hundreds of other black artists who recorded on race record labels in the 1920s were not played on the airways - even though they were not a part of ASCAP's catalog.

In spite of this pattern of musical expropriation and racial exclusion within the radio industry, however, some African American musicians did manage to get on the air during the Jazz Age. They performed live in the studios of local stations, or they were featured on special remote broadcasts from hotels, nightclubs, and dance halls in urban centers like New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. In 1921, jazz pianist Earl "Fatha" Hines and vocalist Lois Deppe were the first African Americans to perform on KDKA, Westinghouse's pioneering station in Pittsburgh, and the broadcast created something of a sensation in the local black community. According to Deppe,

A lot of people had crystal sets, and there was a radio buff on Wylie Avenue who had a loudspeaker sticking out his window. The street was all blocked with people and we were just mobbed when we came back. (qtd. in Stanley Dance, The World of Earl Hines [New York: Scribner, 1977] 134)