Spoken Word: Postwar American Phonograph Cultures

Abstract

This fine book about the significant cultures of nonmusical phonograph records in the half century after World War II discovers its central theoretical premise in chapter 3, in which Jacob Smith quotes the anthropologist Karin Barber, who insists that performances do not “just play to ready-made congregations” (p. 80). In fact, as Barber argues, performances “convene” audiences and “by their mode of address assign them a certain position from which to receive the address” (ibid.). Smith’s Spoken Word quite usefully invites us to consider the creation of various audiences that were convened by phonograph records, marketing efforts surrounding them, and popular and critical discourses of “value” in the second half of the twentieth century. Those audiences ranged from the children who were targeted by the Bubble Books series, suburban women to whom Caedmon Records marketed their (surprisingly) popular Dylan Thomas readings, and the young married couples that discovered sexology records that were recorded and promoted in the wake of the Masters and Johnson studies on human sexuality.