Cover of BLUES, volume 1 of Origin Story

Origin Story  ·  Volume 1

BLUES

The First Music the Machines Went Looking For, 1920–1955

Where it sits on the century

19151920–19552030
$14.99Paperback
about 120 pages

$13.49 each from three copies, $11.49 from sixteen, and $299.00 for all thirty-one with every ebook and audiobook included. Postage is free on every order over $79.

This is the complete story of recorded blues in about three hours: the tent shows and vaudeville circuits where women built the market before a single guitar was recorded; the chair company in Wisconsin that sold the deepest music in America by mail order through a newspaper; the studio packed into the back of a car that went looking for musicians no scout could have named; the three-minute shellac side that turned a floating oral tradition into fixed, ownable property — and the composer credit that quietly decided, for a century, who got paid for it.

It takes the money seriously, because the business never took the artists seriously: what a session actually paid, why a hit that sold three-quarters of a million copies earned its singer nothing beyond her flat fee, who owned the publishing, what a manager’s contract could take, and how the value finally arrived — decades late, in box sets and lawsuits and estates, payable to whoever was standing nearest the paper.

And it answers the question most blues books decline to ask: how it ended. Not with a death — with a Chuck Berry record in 1955, on the blues’ own label, as the audience’s children chose the future.

Contains no song lyrics. Not one line. That is a deliberate rule, explained on the first page, and what replaces it is a description of what these records actually sound like — the guitar answering the voice like a second speaker, the stop-time bar where the band holds its breath, the amplified harmonica arriving like a horn section.

Format
Paperback
Trim
5.5 × 8.5 in
Pages
about 120
Chapters
26 in five movements
Period
1920–1955
Audiobook
2h 49m

The playlist

ORIGIN STORY: Blues — public, and sequenced to the order the records appear in Movement Three. The book describes them; the playlist plays them.

Volume 2
COUNTRYthe same field recorder, pointed at the other rack, and the same publishing empire built from both→Volume 4
RHYTHM & BLUESthe independents and the jukebox, taking up this story at the exact year it pauses here→Volume 5
ROCK 'N' ROLLthe two studios where this book ends, and what the audience’s children did next→

Free to read  ·  the opening

How volume 1 starts.

Origin Story · Volume 1 · BLUESIntroduction

The Customer Nobody Counted

In 1920 the American record business was one of the largest entertainment industries on earth, and it operated on an assumption so complete that nobody inside it thought of it as an assumption. The customer was white.

The business had reasons to think it knew its market. Records were sold alongside the machines that played them, the machines were furniture, and furniture stores in most of the country did not serve Black customers, or served them at a separate counter with a different manner. The catalogues ran from opera to dance bands to sentimental tenors to comic monologues, and a tenth of the country appeared in them almost exclusively as caricature: minstrel numbers, dialect comedy, plantation nostalgia written in New York by white men. Black Americans bought phonographs anyway (the machines turn up constantly in the household surveys and the sociology of the period) and the industry supplied them with nothing, because the industry had never asked, and no mechanism existed by which the answer might have arrived on its own.

The blues, meanwhile, already existed. It had existed for at least two decades as something people did, in work camps and on back porches and in travelling shows, a way of singing more than a repertoire, three lines to a stanza, the first line stated, then stated again, then answered. It had existed in print since 1912, when a Memphis bandleader named W. C. Handy began publishing compositions with the word in the title and discovered that sheet music with blues on the cover sold in numbers nobody could ignore. White vaudeville singers had been recording those published blues for years, politely, at a distance from the thing itself. What did not exist, anywhere, was a record of a Black singer singing the blues for the audience that already knew what it was.

This book is about the thirty-five years after somebody finally made one.

The introduction runs on for another 9 paragraphs, and then the book starts. 26 chapters · about 120 pages · $14.99

Contents

26 chapters, five movements.

Every volume in the series runs the same five, in this order. What each movement is for.

01The Room4 chapters
  1. 1A Song Plugger on Broadway
  2. 2The Tent and the Stage
  3. 3The Rooms the Industry Could Not See
  4. 4Who Was Actually There
02The Machine5 chapters
  1. 5Three Minutes of Shellac
  2. 6The Horn and the Microphone
  3. 7The Studio That Fit in a Car
  4. 8The Chair Company and the Mail Sack
  5. 9What the Machine Selected
03The Records7 chapters
  1. 101920–1926. The Queens’ Market
  2. 111926–1929. A Man Alone with a Guitar
  3. 121929–1934. The Crash
  4. 131933–1942. The Archive and the City
  5. 141945–1955. Electricity
  6. 15The Records the Canon Dropped
  7. 16The Rack, and the Records That Fell Through It
04The Money6 chapters
  1. 17The Flat Fee, and What It Actually Was
  2. 18Who Owned the Song
  3. 19The Broker, the Manager, the Scout
  4. 20Black Swan, and the Price of the Counter-Model
  5. 21What a Blues Record Actually Earned
  6. 22What These Records Earn Now
05The Ending4 chapters
  1. 23What Exhausted It
  2. 24What It Became
  3. 25What the Story Leaves Out
  4. 26Three Minutes, and Who Kept Them

Free to read  ·  reference

BLUES: the dates.

The book’s own timeline, in full and free to quote. 33 entries, 1920–1955. Where a date is contested the book says so at the point it appears; these are the ones that are not in serious dispute. All thirty-one timelines on one page.

1912
  • W. C. Handy begins publishing blues compositions in Memphis; the word enters the sheet-music trade.
1920
  • 14 February. Mamie Smith records two Perry Bradford songs for OKeh: the first blues-adjacent record by a Black singer aimed at a general catalogue.
  • 10 August, Crazy Blues, with Her Jazz Hounds. The race-record market is proven in one release.
1921
  • OKeh organises its dedicated race series. Harry Pace founds Black Swan, the first significant Black-owned label; Ethel Waters’s Down Home Blues carries it.
1922
  • Paramount, the Wisconsin Chair Company’s label, enters the race market; mail-order advertising in the Chicago Defender follows.
1923
  • June, Ralph Peer’s OKeh unit records in Atlanta: the first significant southern field trip. Columbia signs Bessie Smith; Downhearted Blues becomes one of the decade’s biggest sellers. Paramount signs Ma Rainey. December, Black Swan stops recording; bankruptcy follows.
1924
  • Papa Charlie Jackson’s self-accompanied blues sides for Paramount open the male country-blues market. Ma Rainey records See See Rider Blues with Louis Armstrong.
1925
  • Western Electric’s electrical recording system reaches Victor and Columbia. The microphone replaces the horn.
1926
  • Paramount’s first Blind Lemon Jefferson blues releases sell nationally. Reverend J. M. Gates begins his recorded-sermon career. Victoria Spivey records Black Snake Blues.
1927
  • The peak field-trip year: company units through Memphis, Dallas, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Bristol, Tennessee, where the country volume of this series ignites. The Mississippi flood displaces hundreds of thousands.
1928
  • Mississippi John Hurt records for OKeh; the sides fail. Tampa Red and Georgia Tom’s It’s Tight Like That starts the hokum craze. Peer founds Southern Music.
1929
  • June. Charley Patton records Pony Blues at Gennett’s Richmond, Indiana studio; Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie record When the Levee Breaks. October. The stock market crashes. December. Blind Lemon Jefferson dies in Chicago.
1930
  • The Mississippi Sheiks’ Sitting on Top of the World travels both racks. Son House, and Geeshie Wiley with Elvie Thomas, record at Grafton into a collapsing market.
1931
  • February. Skip James’s Grafton sessions, including Devil Got My Woman.
1932
  • Paramount ceases recording; the masters are eventually scrapped. Industry sales are a fraction of their 1927 peak.
1933
  • July. John and Alan Lomax record Lead Belly at Angola for the Library of Congress.
1934
  • Lead Belly is released (for time served, whatever the folklore says) and enters the Lomax management arrangement; it collapses within the year. Charley Patton dies in April. Decca launches at thirty-five cents.
1936
  • November. Robert Johnson’s San Antonio sessions at the Gunter Hotel, including Terraplane Blues and Cross Road Blues.
1937
  • June, Johnson’s Dallas sessions. Sonny Boy Williamson’s Good Morning, School Girl anchors the Bluebird beat. September, Bessie Smith dies after a road accident in Mississippi.
1938
  • August. Robert Johnson dies near Greenwood, Mississippi. 23 December. At Carnegie Hall, John Hammond’s From Spirituals to Swing plays Johnson’s records from the stage.
1941
  • August. The Library of Congress and Fisk University record Muddy Waters at Stovall, Mississippi. November. King Biscuit Time begins on KFFA, Helena: blues on daily radio.
1942
  • Wartime shellac restriction; the musicians’ union recording ban begins. Billboard launches its Harlem Hit Parade.
1944
  • Sister Rosetta Tharpe records Strange Things Happening Every Day; it crosses to the race chart’s top places the following spring.
1948
  • April. Muddy Waters’s I Can’t Be Satisfied on Aristocrat sells out its first pressing. WDIA in Memphis moves to all-Black programming. Sonny Boy Williamson is murdered in Chicago.
1949
  • Billboard renames the race chart: rhythm and blues.
1950
  • Aristocrat becomes Chess. The Weavers’ version of Goodnight, Irene (six months after Lead Belly’s death) tops the pop chart for months.
1951
  • March, Rocket 88, cut at the Phillips studio in Memphis, leased to Chess. Howlin’ Wolf’s first Memphis sides; B. B. King’s Three O’Clock Blues reaches the top of the rhythm-and-blues chart soon after.
1952
  • Little Walter’s Juke spends weeks at the top of the rhythm-and-blues chart. Harry Smith’s anthology of old 78s seeds the folk revival.
1953
  • Vee-Jay founded in Gary, Indiana. Howlin’ Wolf moves to Chicago, by his own proud account, in his own car, with cash.
1954
  • January. Hoochie Coochie Man, the electric Delta’s commercial peak. July. At the Phillips studio, a truck driver records Arthur Crudup’s blues, and the rock-and-roll volume of this series begins.
1955
  • July. Chess releases Chuck Berry’s Maybellene: top of the rhythm-and-blues chart, deep into the pop top ten. The audience’s children have voted, and this book’s era ends on its own label.
  • Afterwards
  • 1958. Muddy Waters tours Britain, electric, and scandalises the folk purists. 1961. Columbia’s Robert Johnson album begins the cult. 1963-64. Hurt, House and James are found alive; the revival stages them. 1964. The Rolling Stones record at 2120 South Michigan Avenue. 1969. Chess is sold. 1971. Memphis Minnie is credited on a British rework of the levee record. 1977. Alberta Hunter, eighty-two, begins her celebrated New York comeback. 1985-87. Willie Dixon’s settlements over British rock adaptations fund his royalty-recovery foundation. 1990. Johnson’s complete recordings go platinum. 1998-2000. Mississippi courts confirm Claud Johnson as Robert Johnson’s heir; the escrowed royalties, over a million dollars, reach the family. 2019, a press investigation reports, and the company disputes, the scale of master-tape losses in a 2008 vault fire.

Free to read  ·  where it comes from

The sources.

This series is written from published material and its byline claims method rather than credentials, so the sources are listed. They are given as books and categories of material rather than as page citations; where a claim in the text is contested, the text says so at the point of the claim.

A warning that belongs at the head of this list rather than the foot: the evidentiary base for this volume is the thinnest in the series. The primary business records (session ledgers, sales figures, contracts, correspondence) survive only in fragments: Columbia’s files partially, Paramount’s essentially not at all. What fills the gap is company advertising, the contemporary Black press, and above all recollection: interviews and memoirs collected decades after the events, from participants who were old, interested, or both. Much of what every history of this music asserts, this one included, rests on somebody’s memory of the 1920s as told to a researcher in the 1960s. The text has tried to say, sentence by sentence, which kind of ground it is standing on.

Memoirs by participants, all to be read as interested accounts: Perry Bradford, Born with the Blues, the source of most of what is told about the Mamie Smith sessions and coloured accordingly; W. C. Handy, Father of the Blues; Willie "The Lion" Smith, Music on My Mind; Ethel Waters, His Eye Is on the Sparrow; Big Bill Broonzy, Big Bill Blues, charming and demonstrably embellished; B. B. King, Blues All Around Me; Chuck Berry, The Autobiography; Willie Dixon, I Am the Blues.

Biographies and scholarship. Chris Albertson, Bessie, whose reading of the Columbia files supplies the only audited artist economics in this book. Sandra Lieb, Mother of the Blues, on Ma Rainey. Daphne Duval Harrison, Black Pearls, and Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, on the queens’ era. Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues, on Patton; Wardlow’s Chasin’ That Devil Music preserves the Speir interviews. Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow, Up Jumped the Devil, the sober corrective on Robert Johnson, alongside Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta, on how the myth was built. Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell, The Life and Legend of Leadbelly, and John Szwed’s Alan Lomax biography, on the archive and its contracts; Lost Delta Found restores John Work III’s suppressed share of the 1941-42 Fisk study. Robert Gordon, Can’t Be Satisfied, on Muddy Waters; James Segrest and Mark Hoffman, Moanin’ at Midnight, on Howlin’ Wolf; Peter Guralnick’s biography of Sam Phillips; Nadine Cohodas, Spinning Blues into Gold, on Chess. Alex van der Tuuk, Paramount’s Rise and Fall. David Suisman, Selling Sounds, on Black Swan and the early music trade. Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound, on the race and hillbilly racks. Paul Oliver, The Story of the Blues and Songsters and Saints; David Evans, Big Road Blues; Ted Gioia, Delta Blues; Marybeth Hamilton, In Search of the Blues, on the collectors; Amanda Petrusich, Do Not Sell at Any Price, on the 78 market.

The contemporary press: the Chicago Defender above all (its advertising pages are the nearest thing to a Paramount archive that exists) with the Black press generally, and the trade papers (Talking Machine World, Billboard) for industry figures, chart listings and the renaming of the race chart.

On the business. The mechanics in Movement Four (flat-fee session purchase, the two-cent statutory mechanical royalty of the 1909 Copyright Act, publisher-writer splits, the Peer arrangement at Victor) are set out in the industry histories above and in any reputable music-business text; Donald Passman’s standard work remains the clearest general explanation of the machinery, though it describes a later era. The Universal vault fire and the dispute over its scale were reported at length in the New York Times Magazine in 2019 and contested by the company.

Where figures are disputed (the sales of Crazy Blues and everything Paramount ever pressed, the details of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s death and finances, the terms and fairness of the Lomax arrangements, the completeness of any artist’s royalty accounting at any label in this book) the text says so rather than choosing. Those disagreements are not gaps in the record. For this volume more than any other in the series, they are the record.

What this book does not do

This is the first book in the series, so the terms are worth stating slowly.

This book quotes no song lyrics. Not one line, not one phrase, not the famous bit. That is a deliberate rule and it is absolute, and song lyrics are owned, licensing them is negotiated song by song and publisher by publisher, and there is no safe word count: the copyright office says so in as many words. A book that quotes a little is a book making a legal judgement it cannot check. So this one quotes none, and instead does the harder and more interesting thing, which is to tell you what a record actually sounds like and what its words are about. For this volume the rule has a second edge to it, because who owned the words of the blues (who got to write their name on the copyright line under a verse that had been passing from singer to singer for thirty years) is one of the actual subjects of this book.

It reproduces no album art and no photographs. There is nothing to look at here but words and one flat poster on the cover.

And it cannot play you a record, which is the real limitation, and there is no point pretending otherwise. What it can do is point. There is a playlist for this book, on the same app you may well be reading or listening on, sequenced to the order the records appear in these pages. It is called ORIGIN STORY: Blues. Search for it by name. Everything described in Movement Three is on it, in order, and the book is substantially better with it running.

One more honesty, particular to this volume. These are the oldest records in this series, and the record of the records is thin. Sales figures come from company ledgers that mostly no longer exist, from advertising copy, and from memoirs written decades later by people with reputations to defend. Where a number in this book is really a claim, the sentence says so. The gaps are not failures of research. For music made this long ago, by people this comprehensively ignored while they were alive, the gaps are the historical record.

Weigh that honestly, because in this volume the rule costs more than almost anywhere else in the series: the blues is a sung form, its greatest performers are singers, and the words are half of what they are famous for. What this book can do instead is tell you what a bottleneck slide actually does to a note, why a record made in a hotel room sounds like a hotel room, and who owned the copyright in songs that nobody had written down, the whole story, start to finish, in about three hours. Where the blues came from and where it was first recorded, which was not the same place. What made recording it possible and then profitable. Which records mattered and why. Who got paid, which in this volume is very close to being the whole plot. And how it ended, which happened on its own record label, at the hands of its own children.

Where the record is contested, this book says so. Where it does not know, it says that too. Sources are listed at the back.

Shelved under

MUSIC / History & Criticism  ·  MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Blues  ·  MUSIC / Business Aspects

Identifiers

Ebook ISBN
979-8-90623-875-7
Audiobook ISBN
979-8-90623-876-4
Paperback ISBN
not yet issued

Buy it

Paperback, $14.99, posted direct. Every ebook and audiobook comes free with the complete set.

Questions

About this volume.

What is Origin Story volume 1 about?

The First Music the Machines Went Looking For, 1920–1955. In 1920 the American record business was one of the largest entertainment industries on earth, and it believed its customers were white. It took a stubborn song plugger, a vaudeville professional named Mamie Smith, and a small label with nothing to lose to prove — in one August afternoon — that a tenth of the country had been standing outside the door with money in its hand. The industry spent the next thirty-five years chasing the audience it had refused to count, and this book follows every mile of the chase.

What years does BLUES cover?

1920–1955. The volume is numbered 1 because that is where the genre sits in the chronology of the music, not the order the books were written in — the first three written were volumes 17, 19 and 21.

What made BLUES possible?

The 78 and the field recorder. Movement Two of every volume is about the technology that made the genre possible and would not have ten years earlier.

Are there song lyrics in it?

None. Not one line, in this volume or in any of the thirty-one. Lyrics are copyrighted expression, licensing is negotiated song by song and publisher by publisher, and there is no safe quantity — so the rule is zero, and a program checks the manuscript, the EPUB and the narration script against it before the volume ships. What replaces them is a description of what the record actually sounds like, what it cost, and who was paid.

How long is it?

About 29,000 words: 26 chapters across five movements, roughly 120 minutes’ reading, 120 pages in the paperback. The audiobook runs 2h 49m.

What is in the back of the book?

A dated timeline of 33 entries, a source list, and a note on what the volume does not do. All three are reproduced free on this page.

Can I buy BLUES in print?

Yes, here. It is a 5.5 × 8.5 in paperback, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, about 120 pages, and it never goes out of print.