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Before OKeh would bet on records made by Black artists for Black buyers, somebody had to go and find out whether that market existed. The company sent Ralph Peer. He went into barbershops and pool halls and asked people whether they would buy records made by their own artists, and came back with the answer: yes, they will. That is Barry Mazor’s account of how Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” got made in 1920 - not the story Perry Bradford told for the rest of his life, and Barry has a line for that: the least-heard sentence in the history of music is “I don’t deserve that much credit for this.”
Host Nate Wilcox is joined by Barry Mazor, author of “Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music,” in a conversation first recorded in 2022 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic - the story of the music told forward, in the order it actually happened.
Bristol, Barry points out, is two weeks in a fifty-year career. Peer was not a folklorist and never pretended to be one; the Lomaxes carried a recorder in the trunk of a car, while Peer hauled equipment Barry compares to a mainframe computer, and he went looking for novelty rather than for survivals. He was the son of a sewing-machine salesman in Independence, Missouri, who started stocking Columbia talking machines, and by the age of ten Ralph was riding the trolley down to the Columbia warehouse in Kansas City to fetch records for the store. He stayed in the business for the rest of his life.
Nate runs through the list of what Peer recorded at OKeh and then at Victor, and it is hard to believe it is one man’s work: Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, Sylvester Weaver’s “Guitar Rag,” Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, Jelly Roll Morton, W.C. Handy, Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra, the Memphis Jug Band, Blind Willie McTell, one of the first Cajun records ever made, Fiddlin’ John Carson, and then the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. He put Rodgers in the studio with Louis Armstrong. He put Fats Waller in front of Eddie Condon, Jack Teagarden and Gene Krupa. And Barry makes the case that none of it rested on Peer’s own taste - he once said it was almost important not to know too much about the music, because you could get caught up in it.
What it rested on was the song. Barry explains why the record business ignored roots music for thirty years - the money was in sheet music, sheet music needed buyers who could read notes, and the big labels sold records the way Britannica sold encyclopedias, as self-improvement - and why Peer saw that the real money was in the publishing. Sara Carter did not want to sing “Single Girl, Married Girl.” Peer picked it on a day A.P. had wandered off, and she laughed about it for years afterward: whatever song she didn’t like but he told her to do turned out to be their biggest seller.
Also: the “Wreck of the Old 97” lawsuit, and the misheard word in Vernon Dalhart’s record that proved who copied whom; the Depression, when Jimmie Rodgers went from 500,000 copies to 5,000 and Peer wrote to tell him he was still top of the heap, but the heap was a lot shorter; and how Peer walked away from Victor owning his own publishing company.
MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE
* “’Tain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” Sara Martin, with Fats Waller on piano
* “Single Girl, Married Girl” The Carter Family
* “Cocaine Habit Blues” The Memphis Jug Band
* “Besame Mucho” Jimmy Dorsey and His Orchestra, with Bob Eberly and Kitty Kallen
This episode originally dropped in 2022.
Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas, and Danny Park.
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