Crash Course Timeline Music History Index: The 1920s, the 1930s & Early Popular Genres

The roots of this haphazard history of American popular music originally started about a year earlier and at least one music blog before this one. The former timeline started with the 1820s - when the United States as we (sort of) know it was just over 30 years old - and continued up to the 1920s. It introduced a multiplicity of themes and pathways, among them: the homesickness genre, a product of the Industrial Age and families scattered as wide as they’ve been in human history; the interaction between popular music and waves of immigration; the bloodthirsty/God-is-on-our-side anthems of America’s wars, both civil and others; the massive, popular, semi-utopian “Jubilee” concerts that followed; the noteworthy spasm of Christmas carols that bloomed alongside the commercialization of that holiday; the odd devotional number; marching bands and the arrival of modern brass instruments; the maudlin borderline hackery of the late Victorian era; the establishment and growth of Tin Pan Alley and its remarkable marketing machinery; and, perhaps more important than any of them in terms of what came later, minstrelsy. No less significant: literally all of that moved about the country by way of sheet music, the first conduit for the mass marketing of popular music.

All of that both informed and laid the foundation for much of what followed, but it also existed and operated in a vastly different and slower world. I think citizens of the 21st century can conceptualize, even appreciate those times, but actually wrapping one’s head around all that silence requires more imagination that most of us have. So, I took down those posts (twice, in fact) and restarted this follow-up project from a different foundation: the dawn of recorded sound, aka, the beginnings of a time when people could hear music without having friends who knew how to play it and, by the same devices, listen to a song until it either inspired them or made them puke.

Recordings existed well before the 1920s - singers ranging from John McCormack and Eddie Murray to the famous tenor Enrico Caruso (who recorded for one label's “high-class series”) - but I decided to start with the 1920s for several reasons. The ability to record sound came several decades before (by memory, the mid-1870s), but even 40 years later the sound remained limited - e.g., the recordings literally could not pick up pitches on the high end and some instruments all together - and, therefore, terrible. It took a decade or five for all the tinniness/recording-in-a-bucket-inside-a-box to the leech out, but recording and records (it’s all still 78 rpm at this point) reached the lofty heights of reasonable listening experience as early as the mid-1920s and continued to improve into the 1930s. Once film and radio arrived, they opened avenues for musical artists to spread their presence and influence across multiple mediums - i.e., the essence of modern stardom. That brings the story to the beginning of the modern era, at least in my mind. That said, keep in mind that the entire concept and culture of radio belongs to the 1930s - i.e., a time when the collapse of the consumer market made something one owns and turns on for entertainment the thriftier choice over something one buys and collects. As you’ll see if you read the posts below, a lot of them end with the Great Depression.

That gets ahead of the story, so, pulling back ten years, people call the 1920s the Jazz Age, but that does a real disservice to proliferation of genres that started and blossomed in jazz’s shadow. While none of them actually started in the 1920s, the way communications shrunk the world made once regional sounds available to a national audience - and one with resources to burn. That included the beginnings of country music - which, incidentally, came from the folk traditions of the 19th century - and at least three kinds of blues - e.g., 1) the female royalty of the early 20s, 2) the lone, often haunted blues men of the late 20s, and 3), at the tail-end, boogie-woogie. To back up even further, all of those borrowed something from ragtime - aka, the first “scary” (read: black) music to spook establishment white audiences - and Tin Pan Alley blended all that with popular sounds and themes from earlier eras, and that’s what the 1920s sounded like. Innovation meets mass-marketing, basically; strip away technologies that forever expand availability and accessibility and it’s not so different today.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 16: Robert Johnson, the Devil's Own

Or so they say...

If you watch Netflix’s Robert Johnson: Devil at the Crossroads, you’ll get a taste of how much of the legendary blues artist’s reputation rests on a mix of rumor and projection. It’s worth the time, if for the interviews alone, but that documentary (part of their Remastered series?) also confirms most of what I read about Johnson around the web, but I’ll be damned if I can keep up with them for visuals…

The biggest surprise I found when researching Robert Johnson was how few recordings he left behind: Wikipedia puts the number at just 29 songs, if with 13 alternate takes over his entire career. That just builds the legend, of course, but the way people wax about both his voice and his playing points to something heard only by people with the right kind of ears. After a week plus with his catalog, I hear the singular voice, but I'm taking the rest on faith. (And Wikipedia has some good notes on his musicianship and the quality of his voice and his use of “microtonality” in the depths of its entry.) With that, time to introduce the man himself…

Robert Johnson was the 11th child in a family, most born out of wedlock, but he still had a good anchor in his life. Charles Dodds, the man who raised him, did pretty well for himself between managing land and making furniture - too well for prominent local whites in Hazelhurst, Mississippi. His success came at the right before one of those spikes of White resentment that, unfortunately, seem baked into the American DNA, so Dodds fled town on threat of lynching. He left behind his wife, Julia, who reconnected with Johnson’s biological father, Noah Johnson, but he stepped out of the picture again before long. Johnson eventually reconnected with Dodds wtih a move to Memphis, Tennessee. Having learned the terrible lesson of the times, Dodds had adopted a new identity as Charles Spencer. Johnson carried the Spencer name through his childhood.

Most sources agree Robert Johnson lived in Memphis for a while. Most also agree he had some decent state-provided education during that time, but only one source offers anything concrete that hints at his love for music: that’s Blackpast.org, who references people who remember him playing a diddley-bow, i.e., “…wire attached to nails sticking out of houses. A person could then hit the wire with a stick and use an empty bottle that slides along the wire to change the pitch.” The story picks up with Johnson following Son House and Blind Willie Johnson around the blues juke joint circuit asking for tips on how to play. Son House (covered earlier in this series) recalls that, while Johnson wasn’t too bad on the harmonica, he wasn’t so good on the guitar:

“such a racket you’d never heard!… ‘Get that guitar away from that boy,’ people would say, ‘he’s running people crazy with it.’”

Crash Course Timeline, No. 15: Big Bill Broonzy's Achingly Slow Climb to Blues Royalty

Later days, I'm guessing.

“’He treated his life story as a set of fluid possibilities, as opposed to fixed events,’ Riesman says. ‘And his imaginative powers were formidable. As Studs Terkel said, “Bill is telling the truth — his truth.”’”
- National Public Radio retrospective, 2011

In other words, everything I’m about to tell you about Big Bill Broonzy could be a lie, but at least it’s a good one. There’s a main narrative, then a counter-narrative reconstructed by Broonzy’s biographer Bob Riesman, who most sources quote extensively. Also, most of them misspell Riesman’s name as "Reisman." The ground is thin, in other words, but let’s walk it anyway.

The man who became Big Bill Broonzy was born somewhere between 1893 and 1903. Some sources insert “Broonzy” as a final surname, some don’t, but they all agree on some variation on Lee Conley Bradley for a birth name, while also generally agreeing he did not have a twin sister (Laney, by name). Other stories from his early life - e.g., serving in World War I (of which, I’m still on maybe), and moving to the Mississippi Delta region during a flood, etc. - are generally read as thoughts he borrowed to serve as memories of his own; a site called broonzy.com pushes that line the hardest. One story supported by two sources claims he made a fiddle from a cigar box as a teenager and played picnics with a young guitarist named Louise Carter - segregated picnics, according to Wikipedia. In a fun twist, a couple sources say Broonzy learned to play his improvised fiddle from an uncle named Jerry Belcher, a man Riesman doesn’t think ever existed. Now, moving on to things that most sources agree on…

Big Bill Broonzy did start on the fiddle. There’s also general agreement that he left music behind, married, and worked as a sharecropper in the fields around Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The story of how he got back into music starts 1) with something his wife, Gertrude, did and 2) makes most sense in the context of him serving in World War I. Sometime before the Great War, but also after or during a drought that devastated his farming plot, someone offered Broonzy $50, a new violin and $14 dollars in tips to perform at a three-day picnic(!?); the sources that mention the story agree that Gertrude spent the money before he got his advance, which forced him to play the picnic. A site called culturalequity.org fleshed out that story the best, while also noting a period of inactivity from (circa) 1918 to Broonzy moving to Chicago in 1920 - and without a wife. So, again, I’m inclined to accept that Broonzy might have served in Europe (also, culturalequity felt like the best source; read that in full for the most thorough history).