Tim Brooks’ Lost Sounds: Discovering the Roots of Black America’s Music

Originally published Discoveries magazine, August, 2005

In 1958, photographer Art Kane gathered together fifty seven major American jazz musicians for a group photograph in New York. Kane’s photo would be called “A Great Day In Harlem” and would appear in an Esquire magazine article about jazz, which had come a long way by that time, musically and culturally. There were few color boundaries in jazz culture, as the photo shows, and this was nearly a decade before American blacks and whites would finally dismantle so many other societal rules of racial separation.

Six decades earlier, though, things were different. In the young days of recorded music, forty-two prominent American musicians would gather at the New Jersey estate of Thomas Edison for a similar photograph. Edison, of course, was largely responsible for the very existence of recorded music, and his own label was already hard at work documenting the music of the time.

And among the Edison recording artists appearing in that 1900 photo was only one black man. George Washington Johnson had been born into slavery in the 1840s. There was no cultural largesse or color-blindness that had led to his inclusion. He was there because of a particular song, one around which he had built an entire career.

Johnson recorded “The Whistling Coon” literally thousands of times direct to cylinder, the medium of the day, each recording being sold individually in the days before mass production. The song was a grotesque caricature sung and whistled by Johnson for a white audience: “You may talk until you’re tired but you’ll never get a word, from this very funny queer old coon / He’s a knock-kneed, double jointed hunky-punky moke, but he’s happy when he whistles this tune.” That song, along with three others, quite literally constituted the entirety of Johnson’s long professional musical life.

Putting Johnson’s story in its proper historical perspective is among the purposes of an expansive book covering the first thirty years of recorded music, and the prominent role that black American musicians played in it. Lost Sounds: Blacks And The Birth Of The Recording Industry, 1890-1919 by Tim Brooks (published by the University of Illinois Press) dedicates over fifty pages to Johnson’s unique musical role (and scandalous murder trial), and that’s just the beginning of the in-depth study (which includes many photographs, like the aforementioned Edison estate shot).

Most of the story of Bert Williams, an enormously successful and popular humorist and singer, takes place roughly a decade after Johnson’s heyday. Williams’s career would be characterized by a little more dignity and a little more acceptance than Johnson’s—but only a little. Advancements were made at a painfully slow pace in American society, and the music and entertainment its people consumed serve as a great metaphor for this sluggish social change.

Williams and his long-time partner, George Walker, were popular among blacks and whites, and their humor didn’t always involve race. One black reviewer pointed out that “chicken stealing gags and crap game songs are conspicuous by their absence, which is delightfully refreshing.” The most famous black American of the time, Booker T. Washington, wrote of Williams as being an asset to their mutual race as it strove for social acceptance. “The best reason I can give for liking his quaint songs and humorous sayings is that he puts into this form some of the quality and philosophy of the Negro race.”

This was higher brow entertainment in a time during which entertainment by blacks was usually one-dimensional representation of one’s self as inferior. Williams and Walker were better than that, and it could be heard in the appealing singing voice of Bert Williams, and yet the two black gentlemen would still perform in black face atop their naturally dark skin.

And therein lies the fascination of the subject, which Brooks covers with exhaustive (and necessary) research for what had indeed been a lost history of the music that preceded jazz.

Chapter after chapter, Brooks details the stories of solo singers, vocal quartets, and humorists. The self-mocking tradition of vaudeville and the beautiful depth of Negro spirituals get equal billing here.

The book unfolds not as merely a collection of character sketches of talented blacks of the time, but as the story of racial progress itself, while the Civil War gradually slipped deeper into the past of the wounded country.

Indeed, as time marched on into the 1920s, black artists emerged beyond the obvious musical categories allocated to them by the rules of society and business. The book’s greatest illustration for this development comes in the story of Roland Hayes, the child of ex-slaves on a poor farm in rural Georgia. Such humble and remote beginnings did not prevent the thoughtful young man from exposure to the beautiful and compelling voice of Enrico Caruso. The determined Hayes managed to nearly complete a college education (only to be dismissed before commencement without explanation), which included great training and development of his singing ability. A distinguished career as an operatic tenor followed, taking him to stages previously unattainable for black performers (including Carnegie Hall).

Very few recordings were made during his earlier years, and the independently-minded musician did what he could to control his career and market his own recorded product. Brooks’ thorough research produced a fascinating letter written by Hayes to a record agent in about 1918. It would shed light on the point where commerce and race at the time would meet: “[T]here isn’t a Phonographic Company in the U. S. that is willing to make classic records for Negroes; they will and do, make ragtime and Jubilee singers records, but they refuse absolutely to make standard art songs and operatic numbers for colored artists.

“Therefore it is up to the artist to make his or her own records and put them out at their own personal expense, which expense I assure you is very great.

“We as a race, I regret to say, must suffer this treatment or do what we can to offset it. I have done and am doing what I can in that direction. Every record I put out costs me so much that were I to put out double disc records I should have to charge at least $3.00 per record, and at that I should make almost no profit at all, as I am now doing on these. With me, it is a sacrifice, but I am willing to make it that my people may hear and become acquainted with the best, which I a humble artist of the race can give them.”

The career of Roland Hayes would break down barriers. Through music, he would help to make other brilliant careers possible, like that of Paul Robeson, whose music and political efforts in the 1930s and ‘40s would in turn do the same for those to follow in the pop music era.

But before Robeson, before jazz, before rock and roll, the three decades covered in Lost Sounds had to happen. It was a time when miraculous new technology provided a means to bring black voices to white ears, while allowing black America to hear diversity in its own musical voice. Because of this, Lost Sounds emerges as an important documentation of the ironies of a racist culture as it struggled to find itself.