In the century that followed, Americans eagerly embraced the steady stream of new inventions, but rarely were they content to used them as originally intended. The phonograph is a good example.

Like television, the record player was meant for serious business. TV was intended to be an educational tool and the phonograph was invented to take dictation. In fact, it captured the human voice remarkably well. It was far less efficient for capturing music. But it was music the public wanted, not dictation. Entrepreneurs soon set up the first nickelodeons in major cities, where Americans could pay to hear recordings through stethoscope-like headphones. What they listened to most often was not speeches, or vaudeville routines, but music — square dances, hymns, banjo virtuousos, and brass bands.

Suddenly Edison had several competitors who were eager to satisfy America’s musical hunger. They recorded all types of music, and sold it for less than Edison. They even dropped the price of record players into a range that middle-income Americans could afford. Record sales kept climbing until 1921, when they reached an annual total of 100 million records.

Then came radio. To insiders in the recording industry, it looked like certain doom. Record sales were already dropping. Who, they reasoned, would be foolish enough to buy music when he could hear it for free? Yet, the end was not quite nigh. As the Post observed:

By the late 1920’s, when all else flourished, the phonograph industry was given up for dead. Actually, it continued to sell records in the millions, if fewer and fewer machines. The low mark, reached in 1933, was equal to what had seemed a booming business in 1907. [“Comeback,” Jan. 28, 1939]

By 1939, it continued, the record companies were surprisingly spry and cheerful for being dead.

Last year, about 35,000,000 records were sold, equal to 1912, and all makers were far behind their orders. The three best-selling Christmas gifts nationally in December were records, motion-picture cameras and projectors, and electric razors, in that order. The fourth quarter’s business more than doubled the fourth quarter of 1937. The sales curve rose from 1933 through 1938 identically with the rising curve 1907-12.

Part of the reason for the resurgence was the arrival of portable phonographs and combination radio-phonograph. Another reason, though, was the phonograph’s arch enemy.

On the one hand, the radio created a wider appreciation of the best music. On the other, it roused a rebellion with its overlong and blatant commercials.

The Post also observed that Americans had created an additional market within the recording industry.  Even as early as the 1930s, there was a booming business in record collecting. Not content to own a few records, collectors were hunting down and buying up obscure labels and forgotten artists. They were also sampling genres they’d never heard before — particularly classical music.

The negative of this very early and unidentified recording scene was found in the Edison laboratories. The long horn piped the sound to a wax-grooving machine on the balcony.

Neither Alexander Graham Bell nor Thomas A. Edison could foresee the fifty different kinds of record collectors who are the most picturesque proof of the way Americans have recently taken to the music that goes round and round on a platter. ["Meet the Platterbug," May 27, 1939]

Any kind of collector is usually a mystery to the outsider, to whom the accumulation of stamps, ivory elephants, old dental tools or hourglasses necessarily pointless. The possessor of a fine lot of antique dueling pistols, for instance, can only purr over them — firing them off would be too risky. Although usually literate, the august bibliophile seldom reads his folio Shakespeare, and, unless books are to be read, what were they for? But the record collector does make a good deal of sense to the uninitiated because, with a few screwball exceptions, he actually plays as well as loves his crowds. Each playing wears an irreplaceable disk down a little father. But he puts it on the turntable anyway, because it isn’t he record as such that he wants; it’s the music on it.

It is more difficult to understand why record collecting should be largely a man’s activity. Women led in supporting music in America. Yet only three or four women are at all conspicuous in any department of the record mania. Perhaps that is because the collector’s favorite spot for his record racks is in clothes closets—and no woman could bring herself to spoil good closet space for any purpose whatever. In any case, this is undeniably a stag affair. High-hat record shops report that most of their sales are classical and, of classical disks sold, men buy 90 per cent.

From the business point of view, all this is just another symptom of the way records have boomed since the bottom of the depression. A hundred million discs were sold at the glorious high point in 1921, when popular radio was still little more than a gleam in the engineer’s eye. By 1933, after radio had gradually relegated the phonograph to cobweb gathering in the cellar, only 10,000,000 sold — a 90 per cent drop. Record and phonograph makers were bitterly asking themselves why they were staying in business. Now and again the sheriff raised the same question. But then the cure of record sales suddenly jerked skyward, doing 35,000,000 last year, well on the way to 55,000,000 this year. Still groggy with delight, the platter industry is going giddily to town, riding a huge wave of phonograph-consciousness of which collectors are the seething foam on top.

The paradoxical theory that radio produced this unexpected boom is pretty plausible. While smothering the phonograph with fresh, free entertainment, radio was also educating its public into listening to music, classical stuff as well as popular, and liking it more and more. A public that really like something presently begins to want what it wants when it wants it, and there the phonograph has the bulge.

Radio musical fare is necessarily table-d’hote, confining the listener to what program departments see fit to give him. To get his music a la carte, to hear Wagner or Bob Crosby or a ‘mother-o’-mine’ tenor when the mood is on him, the new music fan turned to records. Simultaneously, radio was encouraging him to do so by developing techniques that accomplished great improvements on both disks and phonographs— things like electrical recording and devices for playing records through the sensitive amplifying radio mechanism. Resulting combination radio-phonographs sold more than 200,000 last year at high prices, and those detachable turntables that make a phonograph out of any radio have swept the country.

Others trying to account for the record boom, point to the huge recent increase in nickel-in-the-slot phonographs in taverns and dog wagons, each steadily wearing out disks day and night, with the proprietor making a profit from the nickels and the record companies falling over themselves to supply up-to-the-minute replacements.

Others lay a lot of it to the swing-jitterbug craze… As new and frantic dances replaced the old bored attitude on the dance floor and reintroduced the vibrating chandelier to American life, the phonograph became the same necessity it was back in the days of the toddle and the camel walk. If you wanna cut a rug, you wanna cut a rug, and the radio gives out the appropriate swing only after midnight.

Radio, like the recording industry, has been slated for extinction several times, yet it, too, has missed every appointment. In the 1950s, television was going to kill radio, as well as motion pictures. The VCR, and then the DVD, was going to kill television. And now, the internet has come along, and it’s going to kill radio, television, newspapers, books, conversation, and all social life. It’s also going to finish off the recording industry. Again.

Read “Meet the Platterbug”, originally published May 27, 1939.

The Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Recording Industry The Saturday Evening Post

His name, I presume, will mean little to people born in the ‘90s, or ’80, or ‘70s, or even the late ‘60s. The days of Mitch’s great fame lay far back in the early 1960s, when he produced a number of albums that invited listeners to “Sing Along With Mitch.” The music was principally choral, usually with no more accompaniment than a lone harmonica. But they were so well received that Miller was given his own television program, which lasted five years.

Long before his sing-along days, though, he was a pop-music star-maker, and the subject of “The Shaggy Genius of Pop Music,” from the April 12, 1956, Post. (The article made much about Miller’s shaggy, wild appearance because he wore a mustache and goatee 55 years before it became de rigueur for young men.)

Mitch Miller, one of the world’s truly great oboe players and thus a musical longhair by most standards, is Columbia’s “Pop A & R man,” which means he is Artists and Repertoire director for the company’s most popular records division. He finds the songs, elects the artist, suggests the musical arrangement, often conducts the orchestra and supervises the actual recording, a chain-reaction experiment involving the potential gain of millions of dollars.

During the past seven years, with unorthodox ideas and inexhaustible energy, Miller has proved his point. Stores here and abroad have sold some 80,000,000 Miller-made records, a more impressive total than most of his major competitors combined can claim. He often has half a dozen hit songs making the radio-and-jukebox circuit at the same time, and he once nonplused his competitors by having eight of these songs among the top ten listed in the Billboard box score. He has racked up seventy hits—a hit is any record which sells over 200,000-and thirty-five of those were “smashes” that passed the 500,000 mark. He had three records that topped 2,500,000, an achievement comparable to, let’s say, to three conquests of Mt. Everest.

Miller began his music career as an oboe player of great promise:

His first big chance came when the first oboeist in the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra committed suicide. Miller, who at seventeen had already astounded his teachers at the Eastman School of Music, got the job. “I guess you got to be nuts to play that instrument in the first place,” he says thoughtfully. “Maybe a lot of them do go crazy.” For the next twenty years or so, Miller was probably the highest-paid oboe player in the world, traveling regularly from recording rooms to theaters, concert halls and radio studios.  By 1947, Miller had almost exhausted the possibilities of the oboe. He had played with most of the top orchestras and had hundreds of recorded solos to his credit.

Ten years later, as Columbia’s pop guru, he was “committed to making some 400 sides a year,” which required him to listen to thousands of songs — about 40 tunes a day. Throughout these years, Miller worked at such a hectic pace, it’s remarkable that he lived to reach his 99^th birthday.

Miller [is] an adrenaline-saturated man who rarely needs more than four hours’ sleep at night. Suspendered, and often tieless—because he is afraid the wrong colors or patterns will clash with his beard—Miller nevertheless makes an awe-inspiring sachem, and his barrel chest, lethal cigars and visored cap only add to the effect. There is always a tidal wash of visitors, and the Columbia switchboards handles an average of 110 incoming calls for him every day.

There is an atmosphere of frenzy when Miller is generating voltage in the office, and the tension is not lessened by a discordance of sound from pianos or phonographs in other offices, or by the mumbo-jumbo chatterings of artists and publishers as they mill around the inner sanctum.

At the moment, Miller’s most merciless adversary is time. To meet the ravenous appetite of the pressing plants he makes twelve round-trip flights to California and eight round trips to Chicago every year, in a pursuit of songs and talent. As a result, he often works twelve hours a day for five days in New York, then rushes to the airport, barely making a Friday-night plane for points west. He is a frequent club speaker, he emcees a C.B.S. radio network show on Sunday nights and he is often a guest on network television shows. And in addition to all this, he is the mastermind behind the sale of 90,000,000 Little Golden records for children, an enterprise owned by Simon & Schuster, the book publishers.

Miller’s 1950s pop hits sound dated now, but the thinking behind his choice of songs could still be valid for today’s music producers.

Rosemary Clooney became a star after Miller had her sing C'mon-a-My House in an American accent.

Some three years ago, as some radio listeners may recall with a shudder, an obscure night watchman in a Pittsburgh factory composed a soggy lamentation aptly entitled “Cry.” It was on the verge of drying out from disuse in Columbia offices when Miller… concluded that the world needed a catharsis. “The Korean War was on and there was a feeling of uncertainty,” Miller says, “and the kids couldn’t make any plans. I read a book once that it’s bad to hold back tears. You let then out and save yourself a lot of tension.” So Miller dredged up a lachrymose but unknown youth named Johnny Ray and together they recorded. It went over 2,000,000 and made Ray a star.

When the leaves began to fall and there’s a nip in the air, Miller tends to think in terms of vasodilators that will warm the tissues. He puts out the waltzes, for instance, or campus songs or melodies with a strong beat. During one of these November chills, Miller came across a raucous oddity called “Mule Train” in which he could almost see the dust and the heat waves in the desert. Miller frantically tracked down Frankie Laine in a Minneapolis night club and played a crude arrangement of the tune over the long-distance. Two days later in Chicago a somewhat reluctant Laine belted the number into a recording microphone, and Miller subsequently dubbed in horsewhip cracks with two blocks of wood. The disk eventually sold over 2,000,000 and Miller now looks back on the experience with an awed respect for his own clairvoyance. “Suppose I had released it in summer?” he says soberly. “It would never have been a hit.”

While the season might affect how the public would respond to a new song, there were some things, Miller believed, that every pop hit demanded.

“I know what I want in a song. I’ve said it in different ways, but I usually tell people: Keep it sexy, keep it simple, keep it sad. A good number has to have self-identification. People want to think: ‘This could be me. If I could write words or music to express myself, this is how I’d say it.’ Most amateur writers don’t seem to get that at all… A singer who has that certain something can sell records to people who may never see him or her in the flesh and don’t care if they do.”

One of the nuggets Miller uncovered in this sort of musical blind man’s bluff was an ex-serviceman named Anthony Dominick Benedetto, who had vainly pleaded to be heard in person. Piqued but persistent, Benedetto spent his last five dollars to make a crude recording of Boulevard of Broken Dreams, and when he heard it, Miller flipped, as the saying goes. Presently, with his named changed to plain Tony Bennett, the young man recorded a love song called Because of You which sold 1,500,000 copies and made him a name overnight. “Whatever I’ve got,” he now says humbly, “I owe to Mitch.”

Sexy, Simply, Sad: How Mitch Miller Defined Pop Music in the 1950s The Saturday Evening Post

In “Hillbilly Boom,”[PDF download] Zolotow reports on the efforts of Art Satherley, who scouted country music for Columbia Records. In March of 1942, Satherley was auditioning potential recording artists in a Dallas hotel when he met Albert Poindexter.

On that historic morning in March, Satherley, a scholarly and dignified man who speaks with a British accent and looks somewhat like an Oxford professor of Greek history, placed his pince-nez on his nose and patiently listened as Poindexter and his companions dreamily strummed and thrummed and twanged their way through the thirty-five lays of despair. Finally, Satherley selected twelve to be recorded. The best of the twelve, thought Satherley, was a lilting love song called Rosalita. Another of the twelve was a ballad having to do with a husband who is having a wild time in a night club in the company of a blonde when his wife catches him in flagrante delicto, she forthwith drawing a revolver, shooting out the lights and beating him gently about the face. Although he was not particularly impressed by this saga of marital infidelity, Satherley recorded it because he liked its steady, insistent rhythm. He was otherwise unimpressed, however, because he says that in hillbilly circles it is very common to hear songs about men and women who are unfaithful to each other, and who are always shooting it out with guns.

“To be honest about it,” Satherley recently confided, “I never dreamed it would be the hit it turned out. We only released it because we needed a contrast to put on the other side of Rosalita.”

Released in March, 1943, Rosalita was promptly forgotten. Instead, millions of Americans began to walk around advising pistol-packin’ mama to lay that pistol down. By June it became one of the biggest selling records in the history of American recording and by December, 1943, it had sold 1,600,000 copies, and the manufacturer had orders on hand for 500,000 more which he could not fill because of the wartime shortages of labor and shellac…

The Hit Parade for a long time refused to recognize the existence of “Pistol-Packin’ Mama” because the opening line went “Drinkin’ beer in a cabaret,” and the radio networks are not permitted to publicize people who look upon the malt when it is amber. This is a ruling of the Federal Communications Commission. The publishers of Pistol-Packin’ Mama haled the Hit Parade into court, and finally the lyric was altered to read “Singin’ songs in a cabaret,” and Pistol-Packin’ Mama became No. 1 on the Hit Parade…

Satherley has a gloating air of triumph as he recites these and other statistics which prove that hillbilly music has come into its own. After “Pistol-Packin’ Mama,” among the biggest recordings of the past twelvemonth have been “There’s a Star-Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere,” by Elton Britt and his band, and “No Letter Today,” by Ted Daffan and his Texans, both of which have gone over the million mark. Six large radio stations now have gigantic programs devoted solely to hillbilly music, and WLS broadcasts five solid hours of the National Barn Dance every Saturday, In Nashville, Tennessee, the Grand Ole Op’ry [sic] is aired over WSM for four hours. NBC broadcasts portions of these two programs on a national hookup, and has a third sorghum show entitled The Hook ‘n’ Ladder Follies.

Almost as remarkable are the grosses amassed by hillbilly units which play one-night stands all over the country in county auditoriums, schools, barns and theaters. Obscure performers playing in hamlets like Reeds Ferry, New Hampshire, will draw $5600 in a single night. On the road, hillbilly troupes will consistently outdraw legitimate Broadway plays, symphony concerts, sophisticated comedians and beautiful dancing girls. When a unit, say, like Roy Acuff and his Smoky Mountain Boys is scheduled to hit a town like Albany, Georgia, farmers will pour into Albany from a 200-mile radius, and night after night Acuff will play to audiences of 4000 in places where Betty Grable or Tommy Dorsey or Bob Hope would only succeed in drawing boll weevils…

A hillbilly unit waiting backstage before a performance. On the road, troupes of this kind have consistently attracted larger audiences than many a big-time Broadway production.

It is no mystery to Satherley, who, for some twenty-five years, has been crusading for hillbilly music among his cynical Broadway friends, Satherley dislikes the term “hillbilly,” and he keeps talking about ” folk music,” “country rustic” or “mountain music.” He says that the explanation of the hillbilly phenomenon is quite simple. He explains that most Americans either live on farms today or came from farms, and that the strains of a hoedown fiddle or a cowboy plaint are their own native folk music and the one they will always respond to, no matter how far they have gone from the farm. He also believes that the congregation of groups of young men in Army camps has much to do with the boom in hillbilly music.

Because much of the hillbilly talent is employed in farming or ranching, Satherley must seek out his talent in the bayous, the canebrakes, the cotton plantations, the tobacco regions…

Although all hillbilly music sounds monotonously alike to the urban eardrum, it includes many types of music.

The qualities Satherley says must always be present in fine hillbilly music are simplicity of language, an emotional depth in the music, sincerity in the rendition, and an indigenous genuineness of dialect and twang, “I would never think of hiring a Mississippi boy to play in a Texas band,” he says, “Any Texan would know right off it was wrong.”

But, above all, sincerity, even if it is awkward unpolished sincerity, is the criterion used to judge the performer. “A true folk singer who is not synthetic can be recognized because he doesn’t ‘do’ a song; he cries it out with his heart and soul,” Satherley says.

After sincerity, Satherley strives to project the meaning of the lyrics. “The person who listens to mountain music wants to hear a story,” Satherley explains. “My singers must get the picture of the words. I’ve got to instill into them a picture of what they are singing about. If they’re singing about a dead person, I impress on them that their best friend is lying dead and ‘you’ll never see him again.’ I tell them, ‘Sing It in the extreme.’ In folk music, we don’t care about trick ways of phrasing or hot licks; we concentrate on the emotions. The country people — these so-called hillbillies — are tremendously sensitive people, with deep emotions. Whereas the sophisticated city person likes these humbug boy-girl love songs, with everything pretty-pretty, the mountaineer is a realist. His songs deal with loneliness, misery, death, murder.”

Read “Hillbilly Boom,”[PDF download].

The Post Discovers Country Music… in 1944 The Saturday Evening Post

When Hollywood began filming Westerns, it offered a new, equally improbable style of hero: the strong, silent, shy cowpoke. He was a sturdy, fair-playing, boisterous cavalier who righted wrongs, laughed heartily at bunkhouse pranks, and carelessly broke the wills of stallions and the hearts of women. Despite his improbability, he drew the admired imitation of men and boys, who affected Gary Cooper’s drawl and Tom Mix’s contagious smile.

The high heroic standards of these cowboys seemed to leave little creative room for new heroes. Yet, such a hero emerged in the 1930s: a man who was so dedicated to righteousness that he abandoned his personal life and identity. The Lone Ranger donned a mask to become the champion of law (and spend a lot of time explaining why he dressed like an outlaw to serve justice).

The mask was necessary to keep the hero aloof from the everyday life. Folk heroes were required to live apart from the public. It explained to children why they didn’t keep bumping into Batman at the supermarket.

You have to consider certain rules of the fantastic and the practical when creating a hero. Trendle described these rules in 1939 when he told J. Bryan, III, how he invented the hero for a low-budget program on his Detroit radio station.

The Logic of the Fantastic

Hi-yo, Silver! by J. Bryan, III, October 14, 1939

“… the program had to be dramatic, because drama was inexpensive, required no-name stars, and could be home-cooked.

“Now follow his reasoning step by step: Drama, but what kind of drama—for adult or kids? For kids, because they are less critical, and therefore the program need not be so expensive or elaborate. Besides, Trendle believed that most parents buy advertised products because their kids coax them into it.

“What kind of kid drama? Trendle knew that kids’ favorites were crime stories and Westerns. He dismissed crime because he wanted his program to be completely wholesome. He also wanted one that would lend itself to premiums from future sponsors. A crime program admitted little more than masks, badges, and weapons, but a Western opened the field of costume and saddlery as well.

“Western drama of what period? Not contemporary, because the script writer would be cramped by having to defer to probability. Drama postulates a hero. What kind would this one be? Young or mature? Mature, because it is better to respect than to envy. Finally, how to distinguish him from a thousand other Western heroes? Trendle wasn’t sure about this.

“He unveiled [the concept] before his studio staff, in December, 1932. Their first objection was that the hero had no mystery and little romance. Why not make him a sort of benevolent outlaw and give him a mask? Fine! Then it was suggested that he needed something distinctive as an identification. How about a super-horse …?

“His first script was revised 15 times before Trendle gave it a trial broadcast, late at night, and unannounced except to the office staff and the sales force. They reported that they liked the story, but they didn’t like the Ranger’s way of talking; his language seemed to have an Eastern flavor. Trendle stood firm. The Ranger was an Easterner, he said. He might even be from Harvard. At least he was an educated man, and he was going to talk like one. The signature to this first script was: “Come along, Silver! … That’s the boy! … Hi-yi! (hearty laugh). … Now cut loose, and awa-a-ay! (Hoofs pounding harder and fade-out).”

The radio audience grew slowly until Trendle offered a free toy gun to the first 300 listeners who wrote the station. Nearly 25,000 children responded. (There were few opportunities for free toys in 1933.)

The publicity garnered much needed publicity, but the Lone Ranger was soon succeeding without giveaways. Kids admired his unswerving dedication to justice without a trace of personal flaws.

“No secular myth has ever grasped the popular fancy with such strength. It is hard to see why … The Ranger is carved from … cold marble. He has no vices; he hasn’t even any relaxations. He never laughs; he never even smiles.

“[The original] Ranger was a happy-go-lucky swashbuckler who laughed at the discomfited crooks as he rode off. Trendle saw him as a sterner character, ‘the embodiment,’ in his own phrase, ‘of granted prayer.’ So presently all suggestions of humor were erased; the Ranger never smiled again. Trendle didn’t like the “Hi-Yi,” either … History does not preserve the name of the genius who finally evolved ‘Hi-Yo!’ ”

The Lone Ranger’s radio program lasted from 1933 to 1954—2,956 episodes.

Sixty years ago, on September 15, 1949, the Lone Ranger debuted on television, running for 221 episodes more than eight years.

The Arrival of the Family Hero

Heroes Showing Up for Duty, October 31, 1942

In time, the stern, rigid character of the Lone Ranger was succeeded in popularity by more human heroes. A decade later (on September 12, 1959), the next generation of Western heroes emerged. The Cartwright family on Bonanza became the most popular show on television. (It was also remarkable that it was broadcast in color from its first episode.) The single father dealing with three cowboy sons had far less of the righteousness of the Lone Ranger, but public tastes had shifted away from the austere, masked figure. Bonanza appeared on NBC between 1959 and 1973, a span of 430 episodes.

Ultimately, the ideal of the lone dispenser of justice grew too distant from television audiences. Peaking in the 1960s, when horses galloped through most of primetime programming on all three networks, the cowboy faded into the sunset.

The return of the Western is repeatedly announced, but never arrives. The Lone Ranger lives on, though, in innumerable television heroes, who borrow his stern, unyielding quest for justice.

If he stages a comeback, he’ll need a stronger disguise than just a mask. We can believe almost any improbability in a hero, but in our globally networked world, a secret identity is unimaginable.

Click here to read “Hi-yo, Silver!” by J. Bryan, III, October 14, 1939 (PDF).

How Heroes are Made The Saturday Evening Post

Ralph

Wilmington, Delaware

Diane Rehm Biased? The Saturday Evening Post