Black Music On Radio During the Jazz Age

Abstract

The first full decade of radio broadcasting in the United States coincided with the fabled or Roaring Twenties, a period of significant cultural upheaval on both sides of the color line. In America, middle-class flappers and flaming youth were in open revolt against the old-fashioned Victorian moral codes that were the foundation of their parents' puritanical culture. In their efforts to break with the past, these young rebels turned to African American culture - particularly music, dance, language, and humor. Ragtime, blues, jazz, the Charleston, the black bottom, the slow drag, black slang, and jokes all became fashionable within this subgroup of white Negroes, and symbolic of their generational revolt against the established social order. This sort of selective expropriation of African American culture by certain sectors of society was nothing new - it had been going on since slavery; and, more often than not, the outcome was contradictory. On the one hand, American popular culture was periodically infused with the latest black innovations in music, dance, and comedy, and these infusions both enriched the cultural mix and encouraged the cultural rebellion of disaffected segments of the population - most noticeably bohemian fringe elements in the 19th century and middle-class young adults after 1920. Yet the end result of this cultural transaction was often a misguided and condescending dilution of the original art forms. Once they entered the mainstream, African American song, dance, and humor were vulnerable to commercial exploitation; entrepreneurs, entertainers, and tunesmiths routinely appropriated black cultural innovations, then tailored them to appeal to a audience. Moreover, the African Americans who created these art forms and styles in the first place were not only victimized by the theft of their material, but were often forced to compromise their art, and even their integrity, in order to gain entrance into the entertainment industry, which was white-controlled and racially segregated. These cultural contradictions reached an important watershed in the 1920s, during which time they played a decisive role in determining the form and the context of black participation in the entertainment industry - which now included a new medium called radio broadcasting. 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: 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. …