1920s: Wax and Wire

In 1920 jazz was a band sound: cornet, clarinet and trombone weaving three lines at once, the way New Orleans marching bands had done it. King Oliver brought that sound to Chicago and recorded it in 1923 with a second cornet player named Louis Armstrong standing next to him. Listen to "Dippermouth Blues" and you hear the ensemble rule: nobody stands out for long.

Armstrong broke the rule. On the Hot Five and Hot Seven records he made for Okeh between 1925 and 1928, the band backs off and one man improvises. Improvising means making up the melody as you go, on the spot, over a set of chords. Everyone in the band had always done a little of it. Armstrong did it for a whole chorus, then for a whole record. "West End Blues" in 1928 opens with twelve seconds of unaccompanied trumpet that musicians are still studying.

Jazz split into several things at once. Jelly Roll Morton composed it, planning every chorus of "Black Bottom Stomp" like an architect. Fletcher Henderson and his arranger Don Redman wrote it for a big band with sections, which is the blueprint for swing. Bix Beiderbecke played it cool and lyrical, a whole other emotional temperature. Paul Whiteman dressed it in strings and sold it to people who would never have entered a South Side cabaret, and commissioned "Rhapsody in Blue" to prove it belonged in a concert hall.

Duke Ellington ended the decade at the Cotton Club in Harlem, writing music for a floor show and a radio wire that carried it across the country. The band he built there is the seed of the orchestra he led for the next forty-five years. Jazz went into the 1920s as a dance craze. It came out as a music with composers, soloists and a canon.

W. C. Handy had published blues sheet music since 1912, and Black singers had been singing it in tent shows for longer than that. What the 1920s added was the record. After "Crazy Blues" sold in 1920, every label wanted a woman who could sing the blues with a jazz band behind her. Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters and dozens more filled the "race record" catalogs Okeh, Columbia and Paramount created for Black buyers. These are the classic blues singers, and Bessie Smith is the one whose records still sound like a storm.

The second wave came from the country. In 1926 Paramount released records by a blind Texas street singer named Lemon Jefferson, alone with his guitar, and they sold. Suddenly the companies wanted men with guitars from the South: Blind Blake, Lonnie Johnson, Tommy Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Willie McTell, and in June 1929 Charley Patton, the Dockery Farms entertainer who had taught half the Delta. Patton is where the line runs to Son House, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf.

A third thing was happening on the piano. Leroy Carr in Indianapolis sang the blues softly over an easy piano and guitar and became the most popular male blues singer of his time. Pine Top Smith in Chicago cut a record in December 1928 that put a name on a rolling left-hand style: boogie-woogie. Both point at the city blues of the next two decades, and boogie-woogie is a direct ancestor of rock and roll.

The blues also learned to be funny and dirty on record. Tampa Red and Georgia Tom's "It's Tight Like That" in 1928 started a craze for hokum, sly party songs with a two-guitar bounce. Georgia Tom was Thomas A. Dorsey, and within four years he would be the father of gospel music. Hold on to that.

In 1922 two Texas fiddlers walked into Victor's New York office in cowboy clothes and asked to make a record. In 1923 an Atlanta fiddler named John Carson cut two sides for Okeh that a producer called awful and that sold out in days. In 1924 a light-opera tenor called Vernon Dalhart recorded "The Prisoner's Song" and it became the first country record to sell a million. The companies had not planned any of this. They now knew there was a market for rural white Southern music and no name for it. They settled on "hillbilly."

Radio found the same audience the same year. On November 28, 1925, a 77-year-old fiddler played an hour on WSM in Nashville, and George D. Hay's barn dance never stopped. By December 1927 it was called the Grand Ole Opry.

The decade's big bang came in a hat warehouse in Bristol, on the Tennessee-Virginia line, in the summer of 1927. Ralph Peer set up Victor's new microphones, advertised in the paper, and in two weeks recorded 76 sides by 19 acts. Two of them were the Carter Family, who sang the old songs in three-part harmony over Maybelle Carter's thumb-and-finger guitar, and Jimmie Rodgers, a railroad brakeman who sang the blues and yodeled at the end of every verse. The Carters are the root of the harmony tradition and bluegrass. Rodgers is the root of the country singing star. "Blue Yodel," recorded that November, borrowed its opening line from Black Memphis blues singers, and Howlin' Wolf later said his howl was a yodel he could not manage. Country and blues were never separate rivers.

Pop in 1920 meant sheet music. Publishers on West 28th Street in Manhattan, the block nicknamed Tin Pan Alley, hired pianists to plug new songs to performers, and a hit was a song that sold in the parlor. Paul Whiteman changed the unit of measurement. His Victor record of "Whispering," cut in August 1920, sold in the millions and made the dance-band arrangement, not the sheet, the thing people bought.

Most of the songwriters were the children of Jewish immigrants writing in a Black rhythmic idiom, and singers have been recording their songs ever since. George Gershwin went from "Swanee" to "Rhapsody in Blue" to "Fascinating Rhythm" in five years. Irving Berlin wrote "Always" and "Blue Skies." Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote Show Boat in 1927, the first Broadway musical whose songs carried a serious story, and put "Ol' Man River" in the mouth of a Black dockworker. Hoagy Carmichael, a law student in Indiana, recorded a tune called "Star Dust" in 1927 that has been put on record more than 1,500 times since.

The microphone remade the singer. Before 1925 a pop vocalist had to fill a theater or shout into a horn. After it, Gene Austin, Rudy Vallee and a young Bing Crosby could sing quietly, close, as if to one person, and the record and the radio carried it. They called it crooning. Every intimate pop vocal since, from Sinatra to Billie Eilish, descends from that change in the room.

Al Jolson stood on the other side of the line. He was the biggest star on Broadway, a belter who sang in blackface, and when The Jazz Singer put him on film in October 1927 he became the face of the talkies. The stage tradition he came from was dying in that same moment, and the film is where you can watch it happen.

Black sacred music came into the decade in two shapes. The Fisk Jubilee Singers had been touring the spirituals in concert arrangements since 1871, and Paul Robeson, with pianist Lawrence Brown, gave the first full recital of spirituals in New York in April 1925 and made them concert music for a mixed audience. The other shape lived in the Pentecostal storefront church, where the Church of God in Christ sang with tambourines, hand claps and a piano played like a barrelhouse.

Arizona Dranes carried that second sound into an Okeh studio in Chicago on June 17, 1926. Blind, classically trained, and the first star of her denomination, she made the first gospel records with piano, and the piano is doing boogie-woogie ten years early. Blind Willie Johnson, a street evangelist from Texas, recorded "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" in December 1927 with a slide guitar and no words, and it is on the Voyager spacecraft now. Preachers sold records too. Rev. J. M. Gates of Atlanta cut a sermon called "Death's Black Train Is Coming" in 1926 and it outsold most blues singers.

White Southern gospel got its own record in 1927 when the Stamps Quartet recorded "Give the World a Smile" for Victor, the sound of the shape-note singing schools and songbook companies that were about to boom. And in Chicago a blues pianist called Georgia Tom, who had been writing sacred songs on the side since 1921, was about to change his name back to Thomas A. Dorsey. Gospel as we know it starts with him, in the next chapter.

Folk in the 1920s was not yet a genre you could buy. It was a field of study. John Lomax had published Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads in 1910 after collecting them on horseback, and spent the 1920s working in a Dallas bank before the Library of Congress work that made him famous. Carl Sandburg, the poet, published The American Songbag in 1927: 280 songs, a hundred never printed before, gathered from hoboes, union men and college students, with piano arrangements so families could sing them. It stayed in print for seventy years.

The irony is that the record companies were doing the same work by accident. Every "hillbilly" and "race" field session captured ballads, hymns and dance tunes that had lived only in memory. When Harry Smith assembled his Anthology of American Folk Music in 1952, almost everything on it was a commercial 78 from 1927 to 1932. The folk revival of the 1960s was built on records this decade made to sell, and singers this decade forgot.

In Cuba the son came down from the eastern hills into Havana in the early 1920s and became the island's pop music: guitar, tres, bongo, maracas, claves, a bass, and a singer trading lines with a chorus. Victor was recording Havana's sextets by the middle of the decade. The Trio Matamoros formed in Santiago in 1925 and recorded "Son de la loma" for Victor in New York in 1928. Rita Montaner recorded "El Manisero," the peanut vendor's street cry, for Columbia around 1927. Two years after this chapter ends, Don Azpiazu's band would play it on Broadway and set off the rumba craze. The seed is here.

In Buenos Aires the tango had been a dance. Carlos Gardel made it a song. From "Mi Noche Triste" in 1917 he turned the tango-cancion into a form for a solo singer with a story, recorded hundreds of them for Odeon, and in September 1928 conquered Paris. He is the first Latin American recording star with a global audience, and the model for every singer-idol who followed.

In October 1920, in a physics laboratory in Petrograd, Lev Termen noticed that a radio circuit he had built for measuring gases changed pitch when he moved his hand near it. He built a cabinet with two antennas and played it without touching anything. He demonstrated the theremin to Lenin in 1922, toured Europe, and arrived in New York in December 1927 to play Carnegie Hall. RCA licensed it for mass production in 1929. It is the first electronic instrument anyone had heard of, and its wail runs from 1950s science fiction to "Good Vibrations."

In Paris in April 1928, Maurice Martenot, a cellist and wartime radio operator, presented the ondes Martenot: a keyboard, a ring on a wire, and a tone you could bend like a voice. Messiaen and later Radiohead wrote for it. Electrical recording, radio and these first instruments all arrive in the same five years because they are the same technology, the vacuum tube, pointed at music from different sides. The synthesizer is forty years off, but the door is open.