Solonor's Inkwell

The way radio worked changed rapidly in the 1920’s. Two things served to organize the landscape of radio and to broaden its reach as a unified force across the country.

In 1926, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) was formed by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), General Electric (GE) and Westinghouse Electric to become the first major radio network. NBC set up several different networks around the country, the main ones being NBC Red and NBC Blue.

It was followed in January 1927 by a network of 47 affiliates known as United Independent Broadcasters, which struggled until it was bought by Columbia Records in April and was renamed the Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System.

However, Columbia wanted out by 1928, and they sold the network to the owners of a Philadelphia radio station who installed William S. Paley as president. He quickly renamed it the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and set about building a powerful network to challenge NBC.

The second change came in the form of government regulation. Until 1927, the radio waves were up for grabs, as stations competed with one another for time and listeners. Listeners of one program were frequently interrupted by overlapping programs. With the passage of the Radio Act of 1927, the new Federal Radio Commission (FRC) was given the power to license stations and to assign frequencies and power levels. Many low-power stations were denied licenses, and the power output of bigger stations was limited to prevent the wild frequency battles between stations.

Popular music continued along the same lines as it had been going since the beginnings of the jazz era. Tin Pan Alley still cranked out popular sing-a-long songs, like Ain’t She Sweet? and Ida, Sweet As Apple Cider, Irving Berlin standards, like Always and sentimental tunes, like Helen Morgan’s Bill, or novelty songs, like I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Ice Cream. And the big, popular bands, like those led by Paul Whiteman and  Nat Shilkret, were just as big and popular, cranking out a mix of Dixieland jazz and more sophisticated music.

However, there were three things that stood out from the crowd. Two of them were huge. One looms large only in retrospect.

First, this era belonged to the first music pop star:  Asa Yoelson, otherwise known as Al Jolson. He started out as a singer in a circus, moved on to Broadway, and by age 35 was a huge recording star with his own theater. He starred in many movies, including what is considered the film that ended the silent picture era and ushered in “talkies”–The Jazz Singer.

The recordings he made for Brunswick Records in the late 20’s are among his (or anyone’s) biggest hits: I’m Sitting On Top of the World, When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob Bob Bobbin’ Along, Sonny Boy, There’s A Rainbow Round My Shoulder, Little Pal, and I’m In Seventh Heaven

Listening to Jolson in 2014 is a little rough, because his style is so broad and melodramatic that it has made for easy parodying through the years. In fact, most people my age would sooner have heard Michigan J. Frog and his Jolson-like stylings or, more recently, a Jolson hit from the electrified Eric Cartman on South Park than the original. His singing was born of the need to fill a room without amplification and to be seen at the back of the theater.

There’s also the matter of that unfortunate carryover from his vaudeville days: blackface.

These days, Jolson’s performance of Mammy in the Jazz Singer is cringe-worthy. It doesn’t matter that he was a leading force for promoting African-American artists, or that he was instrumental in opening doors for the first Broadway production with an all-black cast at a time when black people were banned. Jolson also insisted on the hiring and fair treatment of black people at a time when membership in the KKK was at an all-time high. But his adherence to the minstrel show stereotypes turned him into a symbol of old-school racism.

The second stand-out was the dawn of country music. I wrote about Vernon Dalhart and Ernest V. Stoneman in the 1925 entry, but the big, earth-shattering event occurred in Bristol, Tennessee, between July 25 and August 5, 1927. That’s when Ralph Peer took recording out of the New York City studios and went out to record some “hillbilly” acts for Victor Records. In the same session, he managed to record both the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers.

The Carters were huge throughout the 20’s and 30’s with hits like Keep On the Sunny Side, Wabash Cannonball, Worried Man Blues and Can the Circle Be Unbroken (By and By). Their biggest made the top 40 in 1928. Wildwood Flower perfectly displays the guitar picking style of Maybelle Carter that combined rhythm and melody. Known as the “Carter scratch,” it turned the guitar into a lead instrument.

Jimmie Rodgers was among the first performers to write his own songs. He developed a yodeling style that combined folk and 12-bar blues that he turned into a series of 13 Blue Yodels. His first, Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas), was such a massive hit that he became an overnight sensation. He wound up in movies and recorded Blue Yodel No. 9 (Standin’ On the Corner) with Louis Armstrong on trumpet and Lil Hardin Armstrong on piano. Sadly, Rodgers was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1924, and he died in 1933 at age 35.

The last thing of note isn’t very obvious from listening to the records of the 1920’s, but it’s another beginning to something big. In 1928, the biggest recording artist in the history of ever had his first hit as a singer for Paul Whiteman’s band. Bing Crosby hit #1 with a jazzy version of Ol’ Man River.

On Christmas Eve 1906, wireless radio operators on board ships from the North Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico heard something startling through their headphones. Normally, the radio men would listen through the static for the dots and dashes of Morse code, but on that night a century ago, they heard something different. They heard music.

American RadioWorks: Hearing America – A Century of Music on the Radio

If you were a rich, white, young American in 1925, it must have seemed like the 20th Century was finally arriving. Hi-tech inventions like cars, airplanes, records, movies and radio were all over the place, and engineers were coming out with new amazing things all the time. There was even talk of being able to send moving pictures over the radio someday! Even President Coolidge was sworn in, live, on the radio.

Europe was a wreck after World War I, but that just meant American industry was the only game in town. The Stock Market was soaring. After surviving the Great War and the Spanish Flu Pandemic, it was time to party.

Sure, it was illegal to buy alcohol, but you could get around that if you wanted. For the first time, it wasn’t just the super rich who could afford some luxury. A lot of young people had the means to spend money on entertainment. You could catch a movie and see an epic like Ben-Hur or the great comic, Charlie Chaplin, in The Gold Rush. You could bring your favorite artists, like the Paul Whiteman Orchestra and Eddie Cantor into your living room and play their music any time you liked, thanks to the Big Three record companies: Edison, Victor and Columbia.

By comparison, radio was still a baby. In 1925, despite being around for 20 years and with stations popping up everywhere, the general public was just starting to buy receivers. They were big, ugly things, but the prices were coming down to the point where you could get a surplus production leftover AR-812 from RCA for $10 (about the same as $135 today).

So, what would I have heard on one of them newfangled boxes?

Well, assuming I could find a station that wasn’t simply news or classical music, there was both a ton of variety and a ton of repetition. Tin Pan Alley was in its prime, so there were plenty of the catchy tunes in the Top 40, like Irving Berlin’s tearjerker, All Alone, and Maceo Pinkard’s hot jazz tune, Sweet Georgia Brown. Many songs, like the aforementioned “All Alone,” were so popular that multiple versions were hits. There are versions of that song by Al Jolson, Paul Whiteman & His Orchestra, and John McCormack all in the year’s top hits.

However, there were no radio networks, yet, and no one to tell stations what “format” they should follow. So, among the perfectly enunciated phrases and rolling “R’s” of the classically trained singers, I heard Bessie Smith belt out St. Louis Blues with Louis Armstrong on cornet and Vernon Dalhart’s twangy folk songs, like Wreck of the Old ’97 and The Prisoner’s Song, and Ernest V. Stoneman’s Sinking of the Titanic and the amazing George Gershwin with Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra and Rhapsody in Blue. There seemed to be lots of ukulele, too, as in the year’s #1 hit by Gene Austin, Yes, Sir That’s My Baby or Cliff ‘Ukulele Ike’ Edwards in Paddlin’ Madelin’ Home (which also contains some pretty wacky scat singing).

I was also surprised at the number of songs that I knew from childhood like “Sweet Georgia Brown” (the Harlem Globetrotters theme), Tea For Two, and If You Knew Susie Like I Know Susie, The song Collegiate was adapted by Chico Marx in the movie Horse Feathers in 1932.

Overall, we’re off to a pretty good start. There’s variety and memorable tunes. The recording technology wasn’t the greatest, but spending a day listening to 1925’s top 40 songs isn’t the same kind of aural agony I seem to remember living through in 1974.

I have known for a long time about the seemingly seismic shift in music that happened the first time someone dropped the needle on a record of Chuck Berry’s Maybellene in 1955. In my head, people had spent hundreds of years listening to boring, bland pop songs when, suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, that blast of overdriven guitar came out of nowhere and shattered the windows. Sometimes it was Bill Haley and Rock Around the Clock, instead. Sometimes it was Elvis and That’s All Right or Mystery Train. Sometimes it was Ike Turner and Rocket 88…or a half dozen other songs. (Side note: The most perfect rock-and-roll song from that era is Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle & Roll.)

It doesn’t matter which was the first. At some point, the smooth, How Much Is That Doggy In The Window snoozefest was replaced by Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, then the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Sex Pistols, Clash and Lady Gaga. I’ve seen the documentaries and read the books.

But what did it actually feel like?

I mean, after spending years listening to “old people” music, how awesome it must have been to hear something come out of the radio that wasn’t Guy Lombardo. Right? (Sadly, my TARDIS has been back-ordered for so long, I don’t think I’m going to be making any trips to the past very soon.)

Yet, growing up in a house where nothing was played but country music, I was able to have a few, small musical epiphanies. While I didn’t feel like I was drowning in the steady stream of Johnny Cash, Buck Owens and George Jones that was my usual soundtrack, I wasn’t as appreciative of its awesomeness as I am now. So, when I got to listen to my mother’s 45’s from when she was a teenager–Clyde McPhatter, Jimmie Rodgers, Buddy Knox, Sam Cooke–or hear the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night at a cousin’s house, or, eventually, be in places where the radio was tuned to a pop station, it was an ear-opening experience.

Around the time I was beginning to carve out my own tastes in music, I began reading a lot of rock histories (Charlie Gillett’s The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll sticks out in my memory) and back issues of Rolling Stone magazine. Being a huge Beatle fan, the fact that John Lennon in his garb from the film How I Won the War was on its first cover was a big factor there. I got heavy into the progression of music from blues and country to rock-n-roll to rock and the explosion of genres that followed. And I always tried to imagine what it was like to go from listening to Bing Crosby to Elvis to the Beatles to whatever and to pick out the roots of earlier music hidden inside current songs.

So, that’s what this is. Sorta.

It’s partly a trip across 100 years of radio music, starting with 1925, when radio was just hitting its stride as something to which everyone had access. I thought it would be fun to follow radio music across the years to see how it has changed.

It’s partly a way to experience the sudden shift in tone from 1940’s big bands and jazz to 1950’s rock-n-roll. By immersing myself in listening to nothing but the music of the 20’s, then 30’s, then 40’s, etc., would I experience that same rush of excitement when hearing something new?

It’s partly to deconstruct the songs of one era by really listening to what came before. If you’ve heard enough of its predecessors, then maybe you can more readily hear things like Bob Wills’ Ida Red in Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene.”

So, here’s how we do it.

I went to Spotify and created a playlist for each year from 1925 onward. In order to pick the songs, I found a place called Bullfrogs Pond that has a spreadsheet of every song that has ever hit the Billboard Hot 100 (or something else for the really old stuff). (NOTE: It is a massive spreadsheet, and I don’t recommend that you download it unless you plan on spending a ton of time just trying to open the thing. I wound up cutting it down by extracting it as a comma-separated file and uploading certain columns to a SQL database.). From the spreadsheet, I determined that I would use the Top 40 songs of each year.

While the concept of “Top 40” radio wasn’t really invented until the 1950’s, if your time-travel machine landed in a certain year, it’s likely that you’d hear those songs. Granted, Top 40 leaves out huge swaths of non-pop genres–blues, country, jazz, metal, punk–but it does represent what most mainstream Americans would have been listening to on the radio…at least until the recent demise of radio as a primary means of listening to music.

Another small problem came from using Spotify. While you can find practically any song there, certain artists have not allowed their music on it. The biggest issue was the Beatles. It’s kinda hard to have a Top 40 list from 1964 to 1969 without them. So, I opted to do two lists for those years–one without Beatles and one with “fake” Beatles. There really weren’t any big songs I had to leave off besides those until I got to the Taylor Swift era. Fortunately, she’s only had one or two Top 40 hits before 2014 (hard to believe), and when the list for this year is published in May 2015, perhaps she’ll be on Spotify, too. In any case, you still get the flavor of a year’s music without these one or two skipped songs.

Please, subscribe to the playlists on Spotify and follow along. I will be writing about the years in small bites…sometimes four or five years at a time…sometimes focusing on a single year…and highlighting notable songs, genres, and styles. I think you will at least hear a lot of music, and that’s rarely a bad thing.