Artist Songwriter Song News Classical Composers Entire Site Page 1  Page 2  Page 3 Most available evidence indicates that the practice of "field" or location recording - travelling to sometimes remote locales to capture the work of regional artists on portable equipment - had gone on since the industry's first days. But there is no doubting that it began in earnest in the early 1920s, and that its most vigorous practitioner was Ralph S. Peer. By the end of 1923, he had taken equipment designed by OKeh technical director Charles Hibbard to Atlanta, Chicago, and St. Louis, recording artists for the label's "race," "hillbilly," and mainstream catalogues. Among attractions recorded this way, often under Peer's close supervision, were King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, Erskine Tate's Vendome Orchestra of Chicago, the Clarence Williams Blue Five, Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orchestra, Louis Armstrong's Hot Five, the Jenkins Family, Kelly Harrell, blues singer "Sippie" Wallace, and the family of Ernest V. "Pop" Stoneman, whose 1925 hit, The Titanic, numbers among the earliest "event songs" - those celebrating and romanticizing actual occurrences - recorded in the country field. In 1924 and '25 Peer expanded his reach to Cincinnati, Dallas, Cleveland, Detroit, Asheville, North Carolina, and, significantly, New Orleans, where he recorded some of the Crescent City's leading jazz bands in situ, doing much to justify folklore historian Archie Green's praise of him as "a cultural documentarian of the first rank." As he did, attracting scores of performers from sometimes far-flung and rural retreats, a business idea took root in his mind. By securing copyright protection for original material recorded under his supervision, Peer became de facto publisher and recipient of royalties earned by those compositions under the 1909 U.S. Copyright Act. In a general sense, that had been common record industry practice all along; but the idea of actively encouraging early country and black artists to generate original material to record, avoiding already copyrighted selections, was his innovation. That way, Peer paid each artist a $25 talent fee per selection, and a percentage of royalties earned. By late 1925, when he left OKeh, Ralph S. Peer was certain of his own value as a recording man, but unsure what to do with it. A preliminary approach to the Victor Talking Machine Company foundered on his salary demands. Brief ventures in promoting experimental automobiles and apple pies, though prescient in their grasp of marketing principles, came to nothing. He returned to Victor, this time proposing a novel arrangement: he would draw no salary at all, as long as he could control copyrights on all original material recorded under his aegis. He could furthermore promise that several key attractions who had recorded for him at OKeh - bandleader Moten, blues singer Wallace and "hillbilly" standout Harrell among them - would come over to Victor with him. The company accepted, and Peer hit the road in early 1927 to put the new association into action. Between January and March he set up Victor's brand-new "Orthophonic" electrical recording equipment in Atlanta, Memphis, and again in New Orleans. By summer he was off again to points south, his first stop Bristol, Tennessee. A small city (population 25,000 in 1927) straddling the Virginia-Tennessee border, Bristol is now celebrated by historians as the scene of modern country music's "big bang," its origin on record. While hardly the first location recording of such material, Peer's two weeks in Bristol did assemble a virtual Who's Who of early "hillbilly" and gospel performers, who committed 69 examples of their singing and playing to posterity: they included Whittier, the Stonemans (with fiddler "Uncle Eck" Dunford), gospel singers Alfred G. Karnes and Blind Alfred Reed, and many others - but above all two particular acts: Alvin Pleasance Carter of nearby Maces Springs, recording with his wife Sara and sister-in-law Maybelle as the Carter Family - and, no less significantly, the personable Mississippi-born singer and guitarist Jimmie Rodgers. Recognizing great potential in both, Peer soon began managing and steering their careers, carefully selecting the material they recorded. As scholar Charles Wolfe has remarked, "Peer sensed he was developing a new commercial art form...and that this art form was to be derived from, though not fully reflective of, traditional mountain music." The same field trip that took Peer to Bristol found him, some weeks later, in Savannah, Georgia, where he recorded Blue Steele's "territory" band playing Girl of My Dreams, a new waltz by trombonist Charles "Sunny" Clapp. By year's end the song was a national hit, and remains a beloved standard. Further trips the following year yielded such seminal bluesmen as Furry Lewis, Ishmon Bracey, Will Shade, Jim Jackson, and Blind Willie McTell. A series of New York dates, meanwhile, featured music by Trinidad-born songwriter Donald Heywood, targeted at new arrivals from the Caribbean and West Indies. Again and again, while steadfastly denying any motive other than effective business, Peer displayed a knack for making making music history by doing the right thing at the most appropriate time. In 1929, on his watch at Victor, jazz bands of black and white musicians began recording together regularly for the hitherto socially conservative industry leader. A mid-November field trip to New Orleans yielded four titles by the "Jones and Collins Astoria Hot Eight," including (reportedly at Peer's specific behest) white clarinetist Sidney Arodin. New York sessions organized around comb-playing "blue-blower" Red McKenzie also included such Harlem stars as Coleman Hawkins on tenor sax and bassist George "Pops" Foster. Peer's publishing operation, now officially known as Southern Music, by 1928 controlled more than one-third of all non-classical music recorded by Victor. In 1928 it split into four distinct companies, to accommodate ever greater and more diversified revenue. Southern Music, now the group's flagship firm, extended its reach well into the mainstream pop market with such standards-in-the-making as Carmichael's "Georgia on My Mind," "Rockin' Chair" and, somewhat later, "Lazybones," his first collaboration with Georgia-born Johnny Mercer. When Hollywood's Hal Roach studios followed Warner Brothers into sound movies it signed Leroy Shield at Victor to write soundtrack music, with Peer handling copyright business. Income from the Roach films eventually helped Peer underwrite expansion of Southern's operations in Europe and South America. Page 1  Page 2  Page 3