Bloomington & Indianapolisiupress.indiana.edu1-800-842-6796

INDIA

NA

$25.00

MUSIC

and the Rise of

America’s Musical

Grassroots

Gennett

RecordsREVISED & EXPANDED

REVISED & EXPANDED

REVISED & EXPANDED

REVISED & EXPANDED

Rick KennedyFOREWORD BY TED GIOIA

���

Jelly Roll,Bix, and Hoagy

In a piano factory tucked away in Richmond, Indiana, Genne� Records produced thousands of records featuring obscure musicians from hotel orchestras and backwoods � ddlers to the future icons of jazz, blues, country music, and rock ’n’ roll. From 1916 to 1934, the company debuted such future stars as Louis Armstrong, Joe “King” Oliver, Bix Beiderbecke, and Hoagy Carmichael, while also capturing classic performances by Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Blind Lemon Je� erson, Charley Pa� on, Uncle Dave Macon, and Gene Autry. While Genne� Records was overshadowed by competitors such as Victor and Columbia, few record companies documented the birth of America’s grassroots music as thoroughly as this small-town label. In this newly revised and ex-panded edition of Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy, Rick Kennedy shares anecdotes from musicians, em-ployees, and family members to trace the colorful history of one of America’s most innovative record companies.

Rick Kennedy is a veteran communications man-ager with General Electric Company and a former journalist. A freelance music writer for more than 30 years, he is author (with Randy McNu� ) of Li� le Labels – Big Sound: Small Record Companies and the Rise of American Music (IUP, 2001).

Jelly Roll, B

ix, and Hoagy

Jelly Roll, B

ix, and Hoagy

KE

NN

ED

YJelly R

oll, Bix, and H

oagyJelly R

oll, Bix, and H

oagyR

EV

ISE

D &

E

XP

AN

DE

D

future stars as Louis Armstrong, Joe “King” Oliver,

is a veteran communications man-

Li� le Labels – Big Sound: Small Record Companies and the

“Kennedy’s passion for and years of in-depth research of the Starr Piano/Genne� Record label story shines brightly in the new edition of Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy. Not only is it the de� nitive account of the company’s history, but of the tipping point in both the birth of the modern record business and the introduction of American cul-ture and music to the world.”

Charlie B. Dahan, Associate Professor, Recording Industry Studies, Middle Tennessee State University

“An exhaustively researched and lovingly detailed history of Genne� . Highly recommended.”

Krin Gabbard, author of Ho� er � an � at: � e Trumpet, Jazz, and American Culture

JellyRBHmec.indd 1 10/26/12 11:40 AM

Copyri

ghted

mate

rial

Indian

a Univ

ersity

Pres

s

Contents

Foreword by Ted Gioia xi

Gennett Records Timeline xv

Introduction xix

1 A Music Dynasty in Victorian Indiana 1

2 A New Wind Is Blowing through Chicago 49

3 Jazz Hysteria in the Hoosier State 91

4 Old-Time Music in the New Electronic Era 163

5 When Gennett Records Gets the Blues 205

6 Yet the Music Lives On 233

Suggested Listening: Fifty Classics by Gennett Records 253

Notes 257

Selected Bibliography 265

Index 267

Index of Songs 273

Copyri

ghted

mate

rial

Indian

a Univ

ersity

Pres

s

xi

Ask a group of people to name the U.S. cities with the most illustri-ous musical histories, and they will immediately think of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Someone is sure to mention New Orleans, San Francisco, and Detroit. Nashville will have its advocates, as will its cross-state rival Memphis. Philly and Boston will demand consideration. Perhaps a savvy straggler will offer up Seattle or Austin.

But it is unlikely that anyone will remember Richmond, Indiana.Yet they should. Over the course of many years studying American

music, I have found that my research has taken me again and again to events that took place in this small city on the central eastern border of Indiana. Richmond doesn’t even rank among the ten largest cities in the state, let alone the nation. Yet the course of American music was funda-mentally changed by the songs recorded within its city limits.

Where do I begin? Perhaps with the recordings of King Oliver’s Jazz Band, made in Richmond in 1923 – these were the most influential jazz sides of their day and introduced the world to Louis Armstrong. Then again, if you prefer cool jazz to hot, your focus will shift to the leg-endary Bix Beiderbecke, whose classic 1924 recordings also came from Richmond. But we can’t forget Jelly Roll Morton, the most important jazz composer of the era, who made history in Richmond, collaborating with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings on the first racially integrated jazz recording session.

If your tastes turn to blues, you will also encounter music from this small Midwestern city – for example, Charley Patton’s “Pony Blues,” a recording that single-handedly created the commercial market for Delta

Foreword

T e d Gioi a

Copyri

ghted

mate

rial

Indian

a Univ

ersity

Pres

s

xii For e wor d

blues. By the same token, the market for Texas blues was built by Blind Lemon Jefferson, whose final recordings were made far from the Lone Star State, again in Richmond. The father of black gospel music Thomas Dorsey recorded here, as did country music legend Gene Autry, and the great songwriter Hoagy Carmichael. No matter what style or genre, Richmond was at the crossroads. It may have been a tiny city, but the rest of America danced to its beat.

A company called Gennett Records drew these artists to Richmond, either to record for the label or to take advantage of their studio. An off-shoot of the Starr Piano Company, Gennett was a family-owned business that took on Victor Records and the burgeoning record industry and not only survived, but prospered – at least until the Great Depression devastated the nation’s music business. Gennett’s glory days lasted only two decades, but during that period the label was at the forefront of new sounds and styles, recording seminal artists who continue to delight and inspire us in the new millennium.

This is a grand story, and we are fortunate to have Rick Kennedy share it with us. First and foremost, he shares a fascinating account of milestone performances of American music and the iconic artists who created them. But Kennedy realizes that this is also a story about tech-nology and entrepreneurship, about the emergence of a new industry and the evolution of consumer tastes and lifestyles in early twentieth-century America. He draws on all these elements in recounting one of the most dramatic and unlikely success stories of its era.

The first edition of this book, published in 1994, was an important volume, much prized by those who care about this music and the people who made it. But Kennedy now offers a revised and enriched edition, drawing on his ongoing research into Gennett and its role both in its community and in the broader streams of American culture. The result is a definitive account of an important nexus point in our shared musical heritage.

Before I close, let me suggest that this book can be more than just a work of history. To some extent, it presents a roadmap and case study that can still enlighten and guide us today. The music business in our own time is in crisis, suffering from technological shifts and degraded stan-dards, but even more from a lack of confidence. The people running the

Copyri

ghted

mate

rial

Indian

a Univ

ersity

Pres

s

For e wor d xiii

industry today are like priests or shamans who have lost their faith – by turning music into a commodity they have forgotten the enchantment and power that comes from a potent, undiluted artistic vision.

The story of Gennett Records, in contrast, is a tale of a business that caught lightning in a bottle – or rather in the grooves of a 78. Gennett sought out the finest artists of the day; the label had faith in their talents and skills, and humility enough to allow them to blossom without a lot of interference from above. Even today, listeners can hear the authentic-ity and the audacity of this undertaking. And, perhaps, more than ever before, we could use a dose for ourselves.

In good times, we cherish our roots. In bad times, we desperately need to renew them. In either case, the story of some of the deepest roots in our music can be found in these pages.

Copyri

ghted

mate

rial

Indian

a Univ

ersity

Pres

s

xix

On a cool and drizzly April 5 in 1923, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band took a six-hour train ride from Chicago across hundreds of miles of flat Indiana farmland to downtown Richmond, a bustling industrial town of twenty-six thousand people near the state’s border with Ohio. The im-pressive, columned Pennsylvania Railroad Station, designed by famed Chicago architect Daniel Burnham, may have evoked a certain visual familiarity for the African American musicians arriving in Richmond from the Windy City. At the same time, the Richmond Item newspaper at the station’s newsstand captured the radical politics sweeping the state with a banner story about feuding Ku Klux Klan leaders.

The seven band members headed a mile through downtown to First Street, which ran along a railroad trestle leading to the massive Starr Piano Company factory. Rows of multi-story brick buildings and an enormous lumberyard were secluded in a vast glacial gorge along the Whitewater River in an area the local people dubbed Starr Valley. The ro-tund bandleader, Joe “King” Oliver, and his six younger bandmates were the only African Americans amid hundreds of mostly German American artisans and woodworkers. The band unloaded their instruments in a single-story building along a railroad spur that previously housed large kilns for curing wood for the pianos. It was now the “recording labora-tory” of Gennett Records, a division of the Gennett family’s Starr Piano.

In 1923, Oliver’s outfit, which only played together for a year, was a dream ensemble of early jazz: Oliver and Louis Armstrong on lead cornets, brothers Johnny Dodds on clarinet and Baby Dodds on drums, Lil Hardin (the future Mrs. Armstrong) on piano, Bill Johnson on bass,

Introduction

Copyri

ghted

mate

rial

Indian

a Univ

ersity

Pres

s

xx I n t roduct ion

and Honoré Dutrey on trombone. All but the attractive Miss Hardin hailed from New Orleans, and they were wildly popular in their adopted home of Chicago with young blacks and whites who filled the Lincoln Gardens on the city’s South Side to dance to the band’s dazzling, original jazz sounds.

And yet, the band had never set foot inside a recording studio until they journeyed to Richmond. Ezra Wickemeyer, a thirty-year-old former office clerk in the factory, ran the recording session. The primitive studio was his kingdom, and few people outside of musicians gained entrance because he guarded his techniques. With an outgoing personality and a cigarette dangling from his mouth, Wickemeyer could startle people at first glance because of scars on his head, arms, and hands from severe burns received as a boy.

He huddled the Chicago musicians around megaphone-like horns protruding through an opening in the wall. To achieve the right sound balance, he placed the players at various distances from the horns. Then he recorded snippets of them performing, which he played back through the horns to determine if everyone was positioned properly. During this trial-and-error process, the twenty-three-year-old Armstrong’s power-ful cornet overpowered Oliver and the rest of the band. So Wickemeyer placed him several paces back and closer to the studio door.

While Armstrong’s actual distance from the band during the record-ing session became urban legend, there was no disputing his unmistak-able sound. In the middle of “Chimes Blues,” Wickemeyer placed the young cornetist with the band for his first recorded solo. His bright tone and vibrant melodies, first captured on tinny Gennett 78-rpm (revolu-tions per minute) discs, would soon transform jazz and permanently elevate the solo instrumentalist in American popular music.

Other memorable moments at Gennett Records followed. On Octo-ber 31, 1927, an Indiana law school graduate and dazzling pianist named Hoagy Carmichael rounded up several musician friends and drove in the middle of the night on two-lane roads from Indianapolis to Richmond to record his new song. Because he had not written an arrangement, he sang the parts to the musicians ahead of time. The ragged instrumental rendition of “Star Dust” (originally a two-word song) barely sold as a Gennett release. But that debut recording inspired future refinements,

Copyri

ghted

mate

rial

Indian

a Univ

ersity

Pres

s

I n t roduct ion xxi

and “Stardust” soon became one of the twentieth century’s most recog-nizable songs.

Tenant farmer Charley Patton took his Stella guitar for the long train ride from Jackson, Mississippi, to Richmond for a session on June 14, 1929, arranged at the Gennett studio for Paramount Records. In a style all of his own, Patton sang and played guitar on fourteen of his blues and gospel songs. Though no one knew at the time, it was the era’s most pro-lific single day in Mississippi Delta blues recording and now ranks among the most significant sessions in blues history. Patton’s signature song from the session, “Pony Blues,” is still played today by Delta musicians.

From 1916 to 1934, the small but prolific Gennett Records label pro-duced thousands of 78-rpm discs (78s), first at a Manhattan studio, and beginning in 1921, from a second studio in Richmond at the Starr Piano factory. Far from the major cities, the Richmond studio mostly waxed obscure musicians passing through rural Indiana by train and car, rang-ing from vaudeville singers, hotel orchestras, and brass bands to sacred choirs, country blues wailers, and backwoods fiddlers. Interspersed in this long parade of forgotten musicians were several future icons of early jazz, blues, and country music. Thus, the little record label in Indiana be-came a remarkable musical story in a century in which America’s original sounds would be embraced by the world – and recorded music would become a multi-billion-dollar industry.

As New Orleans jazz blossomed in the Chicago speakeasies and dance halls of early 1920s, the Indiana label became its Rosetta Stone, debuting not only the Oliver band with Armstrong, but also Bix Beider-becke, Earl “Fatha” Hines, Freddie Keppard, Leon Roppolo, and other jazz pioneers. Piano solos recorded in Richmond by Jelly Roll Morton captured the genius of jazz music’s first great composer. The develop-ment of Carmichael from an obscure jazz player to a polished songwriter is documented almost exclusively on Gennett.

When Gennett Records began producing 78s in the late 1920s for discount labels, it became a lightning rod for early American rural music. Hundreds of rare Gennett country (called “old-time” and “hillbilly”), sacred, and blues recordings preserved regional songs and music styles, from Appalachia to the Deep South. Musicians recorded by Gennett, such as Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Uncle Dave Macon, Lonnie

Copyri

ghted

mate

rial

Indian

a Univ

ersity

Pres

s

xxii I n t roduct ion

Johnson, Bill Broonzy, William Harris, Gene Autry, and Fiddlin’ Doc Roberts, became part of the early evolution of country and rock music. Simply put, few record companies during the era documented the rise of America’s music genres as thoroughly as Gennett Records.

The 1920s was a remarkable decade for the young recording indus-try. Small record labels proliferated, in large part because of the legal triumph of Starr Piano and Gennett Records over dominant Victor Re-cords in a landmark patent case. During the decade, record companies grew in parallel with America’s emerging jazz, blues, and country music styles. Gennett Records, in particular, embraced these new genres on the fringe of the music mainstream. In fact, Gennett was among the first record companies to cater to both the segregated white and black record markets. The Richmond studio might record a black jazz band in the morning and a white Appalachian string band in the afternoon.

Despite the social barriers imposed between races, the cross-pollina-tion between white and black approaches to jazz, blues, and country mu-sic is evident on the Gennett releases. The label advertised certain white jazz bands as black bands. Today, with the great attention paid to the divide between white and black cultures in America, we tend to forget that a healthy mutual respect existed between white and black musicians in the 1920s. Gennett held recording sessions for interracial jazz bands as early as 1923 and for an interracial Appalachian string band in 1927.

Gennett discs sold modestly in Starr Piano stores, department stores, and mail order catalogs. Producing the two-sided, shellac 78s was a labor-intensive and expensive process. The typical retail price for a Gennett disc, between $.50 and $1.10, was relatively steep for 1920s consumers. “Hit” records sold by the thousands, not by the millions. Records were not promoted on the radio until a decade later. Gennett artists typically made little money on their discs. Then again, the label was receptive to almost anyone eager to make a disc, resulting in record-ings of great originality.

With the 1930s Great Depression, Gennett Records, and a marvel-ous era in music recording, came to a crashing halt. Soon after Gennett’s demise, jazz enthusiasts pursued the label’s original 78s in secondhand stores. By the 1950s, Gennett records appeared on jazz, blues, and coun-try anthologies of long-playing (LP) vinyl records, and later, on cassette

Copyri

ghted

mate

rial

Indian

a Univ

ersity

Pres

s

I n t roduct ion xxiii

tapes and compact discs (CDs). With Internet music downloads, hun-dreds of Gennett recordings are a credit card and a click of a computer mouse away. The music has never been more accessible.

The recent proliferation of university jazz programs in the United States and Europe also assure Gennett Records recognition within aca-demia. The Oliver and Morton recordings often head the list of required listening for courses in early jazz. Meanwhile, record collectors still cite original Gennett 78s by recording date, matrix, and serial number. Cer-tain Gennett discs in the jazz and blues genres command thousands of dollars from dealers and through online auctions.

My obsession with Gennett Records began in Richmond, Indiana. As a young reporter in the early 1980s for the city’s Palladium-Item news-paper, I lived among the company’s forgotten past: the industrial ghost town of Starr Piano in the Whitewater River gorge, the abandoned rail-road station where musicians arrived for recording sessions, and the de-clining apartment building on Main Street that had been the grand Gen-nett mansion. The piano factory buildings were vacant for years, victims of vandalism, and were demolished. The recording studio building along the river was boarded up and finally torn down. On a brick wall of a lone surviving piano building, there remained a fading Gennett Records sign.

The daily exposure to these ruins drove me to ask basic questions shared by music enthusiasts for decades: How did Italian piano manu-facturers in a small Indiana town stumble across and record so many of America’s music innovators? How did young musicians in the 1920s make history with a most unlikely company in a most unlikely place?

The answers led to this book’s first edition, published in 1994. Long before I had envisioned a book, my research involved casual conversa-tions with former employees of Starr Piano. After leaving Richmond in 1983, my collection mounted: Gennett 78s, Gennett music on album and CD anthologies, details from books and old magazines, and inter-views with Gennett relatives. While Gennett’s recording ledgers were preserved at Rutgers University, my grasp of the company’s day-to-day workings was sketchy. With Starr Piano and Gennett Records executives long deceased, the prospect of a detailed book was still a stretch.

The breakthrough occurred when blues researcher Tom Tsotsi steered me to the John MacKenzie Collection at the Indiana Histori-

Copyri

ghted

mate

rial

Indian

a Univ

ersity

Pres

s

xxiv I n t roduct ion

cal Society Library in Indianapolis. A Gennett collector from Portland, Oregon, MacKenzie spent decades researching the label. After he died in 1982, his wife, Joyce, had the foresight to donate his materials to the IHS library. The treasure trove was his interviews, conducted from 1961 to 1970, with former Starr Piano and Gennett Records employees. These voices breathe life into the story.

Among my many interviews, Richard Gennett and Henry Gennett Martin offered priceless insight as grandsons of Henry Gennett, the fam-ily patriarch who diversified Starr Piano Company into phonographs and records. They described in detail the family’s personalities, triumphs, and financial setbacks. Also, Marion McKay, a 1920s bandleader who visited the Richmond studio several times, detailed at age ninety-three the arduous recording process. Within weeks of the book’s original pub-lication, all three men had passed away, leaving me indebted for their firsthand recollections.

In the ensuing years, I found music enthusiasts equally captivated by the small-town milieu of Gennett Records. This revised and expanded book places Gennett more within the context of 1920s Richmond, in-cluding new details on Starr Piano, “Goose Town” (the enclave where black musicians stayed), and a local perspective on the company’s KKK records, which always raise eyebrows. Greater spotlight is placed on key studio employees Wickemeyer and Fred Wiggins, the Quaker operations manager who steered the label into new music genres. While Gennett Records ultimately influenced music on a global scale, it remains an intimate story about a family business from a bygone era when owners and employees walked each day to work at a piano factory in Indiana.

This revised edition also expands upon Gennett’s dissemination of early blues and country music. Gennett as a 1920s jazz label remains its most enduring legacy, and the sessions are well documented by first-hand accounts from Armstrong, Carmichael, Baby Dodds, and others. While early blues and country music genres are more associated with the Victor, OKeh, Columbia, and Paramount labels, they were no more prolific in recording this music than Gennett Records, which produced thousands of blues and country records.

The early rural traditions did not attract significant attention among scholars and record collectors until the 1960s. Music folklorists such as

Copyri

ghted

mate

rial

Indian

a Univ

ersity

Pres

s

I n t roduct ion xxv

Gus Meade, Charles Wolfe, and Gayle Dean Wardlow tracked down for-gotten blues and country musicians who recorded in the 1920s on several labels, including Gennett Records. Also, this revised edition is enhanced by Gennett’s correspondence with fiddler Doc Roberts (held at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky), which details a colorful relationship with an Appalachian music pioneer over several years.

Finally, this revised edition arrives during a Gennett Records revival in Richmond. The local Starr Gennett Foundation has transformed the Starr Piano factory site into a public park with sculptures of Gennett artists and a performance pavilion in the surviving assembly building. The Gennett mansion is renovated, murals of Gennett musicians enliven downtown buildings, and music events are held year-round. This trans-formation was unimaginable in the early 1980s. I hope this book inspires its readers to visit Richmond for themselves in order to fully experience this fascinating story. Because of the important music it preserved, the story of Gennett Records was always destined to live on. Now, it can be seen as well as heard.

My pursuit of Gennett Records has been fostered by many people who make the journey deeply gratifying. A special thanks goes to my wife, Jane Kennedy. Also, Dwight Weber and Jim Stump enthusiastically edited the drafts for both the original and revised editions of this book, while photographer and jazz historian Duncan Schiedt and music profes-sor James Dapogny continued to provide insight and encouragement.

For the book’s original edition, I am indebted to Richard Gennett, Henry Gennett Martin, photographer Jim Callaway, Marion McKay, Bud Dant, Sally Childs-Helton, Alexandria Gressett, Dick Reynolds, Frank Powers, Pete Whelan (publisher of 78 Quarterly), Jean Kennedy, Chuck Kennedy, Harry Leavell, Sam Meier, Bill Angert, Charles Wolfe, Stan Kandebo, Guy Norris, Charles Wolfe, Ivan Tribe, Paul Turk, Wayne Vincent, Gayle Dean Wardlow, Robert Highland, Tom Tsotsi, Phil Pospychala, Ryland Jones, Loyal Jones, the Wayne County (Indiana) Historical Museum, Richmond (Indiana) Palladium-Item, and the re-cord sleuths of the International Association of Jazz Record Collectors.

For the revised edition, I am grateful to Fred Gennett, Linda Gen-nett Irmscher, Judith Gennett, Patricia Kennedy-Zafred, Jerry Beuerlein, and Raina Polivka and Jane Behnken, both of Indiana University Press;

Copyri

ghted

mate

rial

Indian

a Univ

ersity

Pres

s

xxvi I n t roduct ion

Sue King and Doris Ashbrook, both of Richmond’s Morrisson-Reeves Library; Harry Rice of Berea College, John Tefteller, and Bob Jacobson and Terri Hardy, both of the Starr Gennett Foundation; Steve Koger, David Sager, Charlie Dahan, Robert Helmich, Mel Helmich, Jason Re-wald, and Teresa Braun.