The Birmingham Sessions

I’ve got an article in this month’s issue of The Old-Time Herald exploring Gennett Records’ 1927 trip to Birmingham. For two months the label set up shop in the Starr Piano store and waxed records of all sorts of local music makers: blues musicians, old-time string bands, jazz bands, Sacred Harp singers, society dance orchestras, gospel quartets, and more. The records, seldom heard today, offer a kind of cross section and time capsule of Alabama music as it sounded 90 years ago. My article dives into the specifics of these Birmingham sessions, placing them in the context of other “location recording” expeditions of the era—and takes a look at the many performers who came to the Starr store to record.

For many years, The Old-Time Herald has documented both the history and contemporary state of old-time string band music and other related traditions.They make room for long articles like this one, and they take great care with their photos and illustrations—as you can see in the spreads below. My article on the Birmingham sessions is a much-expanded version of a piece I published last summer in Birmingham magazine.

A quick excerpt follows. To read the whole thing, subscribe to the OTH. Thanks to the magazine’s editor, Sarah Bryan, for all her help—and to Joyce Cauthen for loaning some great photos, like the two below.

From “The Birmingham Sessions: Gennett Records and the Sounds of 1920s Alabama”:

“Southern Artists To Make Records,” a headline announced in July of 1927: “Making Of Phonograph Discs Is Birmingham’s Latest Industrial Effort.” Gennett Records had come to Birmingham from Richmond, Indiana, with a load of equipment and a team of engineers. The company planned to set up a temporary studio in the Alabama city and hoped to attract talent from across the South. Ambitions were high all around. The Birmingham News imagined the city becoming “a musical center of the South,” drawing in new streams of profit and acclaim; in a town whose name had been built from steel and coal, music was a local resource so far untapped—and it could be the foundation, the papers imagined, of a whole new industry.

Gennett had plenty to gain, too, from the enterprise. According to one trade magazine, the company expected from its Birmingham base “to make a specialty of Alabama negro folk songs.” Gordon Soule, the studio’s chief recording engineer, spoke auspiciously on his arrival: “The nation looks to the South,” he said, “for its Dixie melodies, its jazz orchestras, its ‘hot’ music. Our initial reception here in Birmingham has been beyond our expectations.”

The very same month, up in Bristol, Tennessee, the Victor label set up a temporary studio of its own, likewise inviting local musicians to audition. Victor’s twelve days in Bristol have become the stuff of American musical mythology: the sessions produced the first recordings of both the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, two iconic acts that helped shape the sound and the business of country music for generations to come. Scholars, fans, and tourists have all flocked to Bristol for years, and the impact of those sessions is well known […] Less familiar are the other field recording sessions conducted, in the same decade, by Victor’s contemporaries. Gennett’s trip to Birmingham offers a single case study.

As it happened, the Gennett sessions did little to advance the careers of the musicians who participated; most of these artists never recorded again. Birmingham, for all the newspaper’s excitement, wasn’t reborn into a mighty music hub. There were no game-changing discoveries, no Carters or Rodgers as there were that summer in Bristol. But the recordings made in Birmingham that July and August—nearly 170 sides altogether—represent a unique and valuable cross-section of the region’s musical culture. There are jazz bands and country blues singers, old-time string bands, gospel quartets, a ragtime pianist and singers of the Sacred Harp—a rich diversity of local sounds, all testament to a community steeped in music….