Jelly Roll,Bix,and Hoagy:Gennett Studios and the Birth of Recorded Jazz

by Rick Kennedy

Indiana University Press, 1994

They came and went. Some were clean and workmen. Others were literally filthy and ruined many cuts by being scared or musically poorly organized. -R.P. Gennett<not a published quote>

Henry Gennett (soft G, second syllable accented), of the Starr Piano Company, first recorded and pressed records with the "Gennett" label in the mid teens to complement a line of phonographs also manufactured and sold by Starr. In 1919, Starr began producing lateral-cut (as opposed to Edison's "hill and dale") discs. Victor Talking Machine Co., which held the patent, sued, but Gennett, joined by the independent Vocalion and OKeh labels, won the suit, placing lateral-cut 78's into the public domain. The suit "...opened the floodgates...[for]... improvements in recording processes, reduced record prices, and generated more recording activity than could have been imagined before the advent of Gennett records." Henry died in 1922, and his son Fred Gennett took over the recording division of Starr.

My grandfather was a thin, orderly man who delighted in taking his grandchildren out to dinner. I don't remember him ever expressing an interested in music. During the ten or so years that Fred and his sidekick Fred Wiggins made records, however, Gennett Studios on the Whitewater River in Richmond, Indiana produced a formidable array of groundbreaking recordings. "His fundamental goal was to produce records with the least overhead (not to mention shellac) possible. This meant giving an enormous body of unknown musicians their first crack at recording." The Gennett studios, hot, stuffy, and primitive, recorded anyone who knocked at their door, and released anything that would possibly sell.

In August of 1922, Gennett and Wiggins raided the Friars Inn ("a hopping joint") in Chicago, and brought the New Orleans Rhythm Kings (NORK) back to Richmond, producing the first recordings of "authentic" New Orleans jazz. In April of 1923 they recorded King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band [with Louis Armstrong] ("the first genuine masterpieces in jazz history"...also the first "authentic" black New Orleans jazz recordings). That July, Jelly Roll Morton joined NORK in Richmond <disguised as a Spaniard, I read elsewhere> for the first interracial session in jazz history. Legendary first recordings were made by Iowa cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and Indiana's Hoagie Carmichael.

The budget Champion label was devised in 1925, mostly for sale to rural customers, and in 1924 Starr contracted to manufacture records for Sears on the Silvertone, Challenge, and Conqueror labels. Many of these recordings were of old-time music, intentionally made without appreciable treble or base for playing on old, cheap, spring-wound phonographs (my dad<whom the beginning quote is from>, a chemistry student on summer vacation, engineered a number of these). The budget labels featured such artists as the Tweedy Brothers, who drove around West Virginia with a Starr Piano on a flatbed truck for advertising purposes, Ernest Stoneman, Bradley Kincaid, and Doc Roberts. The Sears contract provided Gennett with a plethora of WLS (World's Largest Store) Barn Dance regulars; disaster songs by Vern Dahlhart on the Challenge Label are displayed prominently in 1927 Sears catalogue reprints.

Blues artists were retrieved from traveling minstrel and medicine shows and from nearby Louisville and Cincinnati. The studio in Richmond recorded the first of Charlie Patton and the last of Blind Lemon Jefferson for the Paramount label; Yazoo estimates that one-fifth of its classic reissues are of Gennett artists. Gennett recorded "Cross In the Wildwood" for the Ku Klux Klan ("'...you got paid up front. That was good business.'") and supplied discs for Gospel labels and for Irish Music House and Malhoof Hebrew in New York. Fred Gennett recorded Hopi Indians as souvenirs for tourists ("possibly the first pure ethnic discs ever issued by a commercial record label.") and in 1927 sent engineer David Soule to Birmingham to record "a cross section of Alabama culture" ranging from a Baptist church service to Jaybird Coleman's "Ah'm Sick and Tired of Tellin' You (To Wiggle That Thing)."

The depression killed Gennett records and almost killed Starr Piano. Family members breathed a sigh of relief and retreated to various aspects of Heating and Cooling.

Rick Kennedy, formerly journalist for the Richmond Pal-Item and presently media relations manager with General Electric in Cincinnati, spent as many years writing this book as Gennett was in business. In addition to conversations with family members (no easy feat) and former employees, he drew on interviews preserved by the Indiana Historical Society and published accounts by various musicians. Kennedy's uncluttered prose and efficient organization is indispensable to the reader in wading through the vast tumble of musical styles and artists. A jazz enthusiast, he has covered the jazz musicians more thoroughly, but, as he states, the documentation is better.

This is only peripherally a book about my family; it is a book about the studio and about musicians who recorded for Gennett. In overview it is a book about the fast-moving music and recording industries of the twenties, when "new" kinds of music were being recorded and sold to people who had never heard them before, and that is some neat story.

-Judith Gennett (Bryan,TX)

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