The musicians were working-class Southerners, and depictions of the sessions often portray a savvy record company producer discovering talented but unknown performers.
However, a recording session three years earlier, on Aug. 13, 1924, has a stronger claim to launching country music as a genre. That session instead featured a classically trained singer living in New York City who had previously recorded opera, pop and jazz.
A legendary recording session
In the early 1920s, after years of catering to urban middle- and upper-class listeners – and with emerging competition from radio – recording companies were seeking new markets. They found potential new audiences in Black people craving performances by Black entertainers, as well as among rural white people yearning to hear music that reflected their own tastes and experiences.
After attempting to satisfy these new markets with records made in established Northern studios, recording companies soon determined that it would be easier to discover new talent by recording “in the field” – that is, closer to where the audiences for the new records lived. Many of these commercial “location sessions” – to differentiate such sessions from noncommercial documentary recording by John and Alan Lomax and other folklorists – occurred in the South.
At a June 1923 location session in Atlanta, OKeh Records producer Ralph Peer recorded two performances by a musician from the north Georgia hills named Fiddlin’ John Carson. That 78 rpm release quickly sold out its pressing of 500 copies, demonstrating country music’s commercial potential.
Peer moved on to work for Victor Records and produced the Bristol recording sessions. Among the musicians Peer recorded there were newcomers Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. The so-called “Bristol Sessions” generated modest sales and didn’t outperform other Appalachian sessions of the late 1920s.
The musicians were working-class Southerners, and depictions of the sessions often portray a savvy record company producer discovering talented but unknown performers.
However, a recording session three years earlier, on Aug. 13, 1924, has a stronger claim to launching country music as a genre. That session instead featured a classically trained singer living in New York City who had previously recorded opera, pop and jazz.
A legendary recording session
In the early 1920s, after years of catering to urban middle- and upper-class listeners – and with emerging competition from radio – recording companies were seeking new markets. They found potential new audiences in Black people craving performances by Black entertainers, as well as among rural white people yearning to hear music that reflected their own tastes and experiences.
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