Wax Trash and Vinyl Treasures: Record Collecting as a Social Practice

Roy Shuker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351537186
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

The term 'record collecting' is shorthand for a variety of related practices. Foremost is the collection of sound recordings in various formats - although often with a marked preference for vinyl - by individuals, and it is this dimension of record collecting that is the focus of this book. Record collecting, and the public stereotypes associated with it, is frequently linked primarily with rock and pop music. Roy Shuker focuses on these broad styles, but also includes other genres and their collectors, notably jazz, blues, exotica and 'ethnic' music. Accordingly, the study examines the history of record collecting; profiles collectors and the collecting process; considers categories - especially music genres - and types of record collecting and outlines and discusses the infrastructure within which collecting operates. Shuker situates this discussion within the broader literature on collecting, along with issues of cultural consumption, social identity and 'the construction of self' in contemporary society. Record collecting is both fascinating in its own right, and provides insights into broader issues of nostalgia, consumption and material culture.

Chapter 1

The 78 era: creating a collector constituency

This chapter begins with the early development of record collecting, as the advent of recorded sound at the end of the nineteenth century created a new form of music collectible, associated with the emergence of what can be termed a gramophone culture. Record collectors active during the period 1903 to the 1950s and the advent of vinyl collected 78s and, in some cases, cylinders. This group established ‘record collecting’ as a major form of collecting, with its own set of practices, associated literature and appreciation societies. These collectors had a shared interest in sound recordings as both sources of listening pleasure and significant cultural artefacts, with associated notions of discrimination, musical canons and rarity. They also shared the dominant characteristics of collectors more generally, albeit with particular inflections of these: the thrill of the chase; obsession, linked to accumulation and completism; at times a preoccupation with rarity and economic value; and a concern for cultural preservation. The concern involved self-education and public, vernacular scholarship, drawing on the collection as a resource. These traits were subsumed into collecting as a significant aspect of social identity, involving the acquisition of cultural capital, overlaid with a patina of nostalgia.

Gramophone culture operated within a context that shaped the emergence and subsequent development of a collecting constituency and record collecting as a social practice. While there is frequent overlap between them, especially through their respective roles in shaping taste and discrimination (including canon formation), this context included a number of sites: physical and social spaces, practices and institutions which facilitated and shaped the production and consumption of recorded music and its collectors. These sites were:

•sites of production and promotion: the role of the early recording companies;

•sites of appreciation: record clubs and societies;

•sites of acquisition: music retail, and the second-hand market; and

•sites of mediation: the music press.

A consideration of these forms the second part of the chapter.

What I have termed the 78 era was over by 1960. The 78 was supplanted by vinyl during the 1950s, and the gramophone replaced by new forms of sound reproduction. But the passing of the 78 recording did not end interest in the era and its music. The recordings and the equipment used to play them have remained highly collectable. Since the 1960s, there has been a proliferation of interest in the period, with a considerable amount of scholarship devoted to documenting its music and the associated technologies. A good deal of this research has been undertaken by collectors. Today, there is an active network of 78 collector societies, specialist dealers and auction houses, and publications, with much of this accessible through the internet. The last section of the chapter briefly considers 78 collecting and collectors since the early 1960s.

The rise of gramophone culture

Collecting was a prominent part of the social life of the new middle classes, emerging along with industrialization and urbanization during the mid-to-late nineteenth century, with the collector’s ‘cabinet of curiosities’ a feature of many Victorian lounges (Blom, 2002). A mix of capitalism and consumerism, increased leisure time, disposable income and nostalgia made collecting a significant aspect of social identity for the middle classes of Europe, Britain and its colonies, and the United States. The state art galleries, museums and libraries of the Victorian era owed much to the generosity of those collectors who endowed and funded them.

Music was already well established as a form of collectible by this time. Prominent collectors had built up libraries of music publications, especially sheet music (Hermann, 1999; King, 1963); the collecting and publication, and in some cases field recording, of traditional folk songs had emerged as a major movement, initially in England and on the European continent, then in North America and throughout the world (Oliver, 2003); and both private collectors and institutions had long collected musical instruments. Record collecting as a social practice was a logical extension of such activities. Indeed, collecting ‘sound recordings’ was an activity accessible to a wider, more socially democratic constituency, since it did not necessarily require the same levels of capital investment as traditional music collectibles.

Edison invented the phonograph, a ‘talking machine’, in November 1877, a device which used cylinders to record and reproduce sound. The first commercially marketed recordings were produced by several companies, most notably Columbia. These early impressed tin foil records were very restricted in use, since they were destroyed once removed from the supporting metal cylinder. As such, they hardly made ideal collectibles. After some initial development, Edison abandoned the fledgling phonograph for a decade, turning instead to the development of electricity, but he eventually produced a considerably improved phonograph in 1887. Around the same time, Berliner further developed the new technology with his gramophone (1888), using a flat disc technique instead of the cumbersome cylinder. He tried several materials for the accompanying discs, before utilizing shellac in 1891, a compound derived from a natural resin secreted by the lac beetle. The shellac 78 became the industry standard, a position it maintained over the next half century. (On the development of sound recording, its technological and social impact, see Chanan, 1995; Copeland, 1991; Day, 2000; Millard, 1995.)

As Fabrizio observes, ‘A period of nearly 20 years elapsed between the invention of sound recording/replay and the point at which the majority of Americans could afford to buy a talking machine’ (Fabrizio, 1999). The resurrected phonograph was to be a business machine, but this application proved limited. However, an enterprising dealer equipped the phonographs with a coin-operated mechanism that played a cylinder, featuring a popular tune or comic monologue, through a set of ear tubes to the patron. These caught on hugely in the early 1890s, and were part of many public spaces and entertainment venues. In 1896, Edison and the Columbia label introduced the first machines targeting the home entertainment market in the United States.

The phonograph represented the true beginning of recorded sound technology, replacing ‘the shared Victorian pleasures of bandstand and music hall with the solitary delight of a private world of sound’ (Millard, 1995: 1). By 1900, several large commercial recording companies were operating on a stable national basis, and listening to the various new ‘talking machines’ was a popular pastime. A strong link between hardware and software was established from the start of sound recording, with companies marketing both their models of the phonograph and the recordings to be played on it. The terms ‘phonograph’ and ‘gramophone’ were initially both widely used, indicating the different models, but the latter came to denote all forms of ‘record player’. By the early 1900s, it had emerged as the fashion accessory of the day and was recognized as a familiar object in the home.

The recording industry took off around the turn of the century. In 1899, 151,000 phonographs were produced in the United States alone, and there was now a steady, though limited, supply of discs and pre-recorded cylinders. In 1897 only about 500,000 records had been sold in the United States, but by 1899 this number had reached 2.8 million, and continued to rise. In the United States, the period 1889–1912 saw the production of over 8,000 masters of Edison’s ‘Two-Minute Cylinders’, with total production running into the millions. Spoken word recordings by leading figures of the period formed an important part of the repertoire, which was associated with a concern with fidelity; ‘the illusion of real presence’, as Scientific American magazine termed it in 1877 (Thompson, 1996: 3). During the 1920s over 100 million records were sold in the United States alone, before the Depression brought the recording industry to the verge of collapse (Gronow, 1983).

The gramophone, as various historians of recorded sound have observed, played a role in defining modernity, being put to use in ways that sharply changed the culture of music in the home and turning music into a ‘thing’ (see Eisenberg, 1988; Kenney, 1999). The domestication of recorded sound increased the musical repertoire available to the home listener, while freeing up the experience of music from its physical location in place and time. As Gronow put it, ‘the musician became immortal’ (Gronow, 1983: 54).

The first record collectors

Those who first began collecting recordings, primarily 78s, although in some cases cylinders as well, established ‘record collecting’ as a major form of collecting, with its own set of collecting practices and associated literature. They also helped form the dominant image of the record collector as an obsessive personality, although this must be strongly qualified in relation to their sense of community, their role in cultural preservation and their sociability.

These first record collectors are difficult to profile extensively, since biographical material is sparse. My account is reliant on a handful of previously published profiles and recollections, scattered across a range of monographs, biographies and journal articles. Most are of collectors initially active in the 1940s. As might be expected, more material is available on collectors whose activities had a wider profile, through the writings and recordings they produced drawing on their collections. These include the folk collectors Alan Lomax and Harry Smith, blues aficionados John Hammond and Jerry Wexler, classical music collectors such as Compton McKenzie and Michael Corenthal, and prominent jazz collectors such as Brian Rusk.

They were concentrated in those countries and areas subject to the greatest penetration of gramophone culture, especially the United States, England and Western Europe, but also in Japan, New Zealand and Australia. As a group, it would appear that they were exclusively male and often of middle-class backgrounds. Of course this claim must be related to the point that it is usually members of socially dominant groups who leave the majority of surviving historical traces.

The field of record collecting was initially largely a male preserve. The biographies and recollections I have accessed are all by and about men, and few saw fit to comment on the absence of women from their collecting activities. Explanations for this situation include the point that time and disposable income, even more so than now, were more available to males. It would also have been difficult for women to break into the masculine peer groups who dominated early record clubs and societies. The gendered nature of related psychological and personality attributes have seen the subsequent common perception of record collecting as a male activity (see Chapter 2, for discussion of the gendered nature of contemporary record collecting).

This also appears to be very much a white group in the United States, where in the 1920s there was only a tiny black middle class, and they did not represent enough disposable income to be catered for by most recording companies. As the existence of ‘race records’ and associated labels (from Okey in the 1920s) indicates, black people bought records, but if any collected in any systematic way, no traces of this activity have survived. The middle-class location of collectors is supported by the professional backgrounds of the collectors profiled, while the earliest known American collectors of jazz and blues were university students. John Hammond, who studied at Yale, later reflected on the appeal of black culture: ‘All music fascinated me, but the simple honesty and convincing lyrics of the early blues singers, the rhythm and creative ingenuity of the jazz players, excited me most – certainly all those I liked best – were black’ (Hammond, 1977: 30).

What was collected?

The genre interests of these early record collectors in both the United States and the United Kingdom can be divided into two broad groups, with little overlap between them:

1.Those collecting in the classical repertoire, especially vocal (opera). Initial collecting interest was largely in this genre, in part as classical music was already a well-established and valued art form.

2.Those collecting within ‘popular music’, often collectively termed ‘Early American music’ or ‘old time music’, and including the various genres which progressively emerged: jazz, big band, c&w (country and western), r&b (rhythm and blues – usually referred to as ‘race’ music until the 1950s) and the various ‘ethnic’ musics associated with American immigrant groups.

While the classical collectors valorized the aesthetic qualities of recordings, the ‘popular’ collectors more frequently valued scarcity, combined with associated notions of authenticity. I draw here on both groups for examples of collecting practices.

Behind the collecting impulse

The early record collectors were motivated by a mix of motives: a love of the music, a concern with cultural preservation, scholarship and education. Michael Corenthal provides an evocative example of a love of the music of the 78 era and its performers:

Amid the usual assortment [of an accumulation of discs left by a husband to his widow] was a small box of these superb Wisconsin black and blue label Paramount recordings. Keep talking. Well, I [Corenthal] wasn’t about to let history go down the tubes so I captured these rare Black stylists of the 1920’s jazz and blues performances. One item of memorable fondness was Paramount #12252. This was a Paramount recording from October 1924 featuring Ma Rainey and her Georgia Jazz band. It wasn’t a bad little band at that, accompanying the principals were Louis Armstrong on cornet, Buster Bailey on clarinet, and Fletcher Henderson on piano. Right on. I can [now] appreciate Ma Rainey because I’ve had the opportunity to appreciate her extraordinary recordings. (Corenthal, 1986: 12)

At times lurking alongside such enthusiasms were usually less lauded, psychological tendencies: compulsion and addiction, with their associated tendencies of accumulation and completism, and the emphasis on the ‘hunt’ aspect of collecting. The case of Dr John Grams illustrates such a mix. In 1946, the release of the Columbia picture The Jolson Story led John to collect Al Jolson’s recordings.

Temporarily, he was satisfied owning the Jolson recordings on Decca Records released from the film and newer releases such as the Anniversary Song. One day, while visiting a radio store in Sheboygan, John saw jutting out of a wire rack a Brunswick release #4033 issued in 1928 featuring the younger Jolson performing at the height of his career Sonny Boy and There’s a Rainbow ’Round My Shoulder. John simply had to have this record, quite scratched and very dusty. When he approached the proprietor about this matter, the fellow seemed quite annoyed by his interest and demanded the astronomical sum of $2.00 for this shellac beater. (Corenthal, 1986: 123)

John was stunned, since new 78s were then selling at 53¢, but still bought it: ‘A collector was born and without any clue or system, John began addressing the problem of how to find other Jolson recordings from the past.’ Eventually he had them all.

Cultural preservation, education and scholarship

As Corenthal’s reference to ‘history’ indicates, cultural preservation was a major theme in the collecting activities of this group. Purchasing sound recordings was an important way for American immigrants to preserve their own folk culture, and motivated several prominent collectors, such as Ford Porter, ‘The Polka King’ (Corenthal, 1986: 98ff.). The collections they built up provided an invaluable archive for later compilations and re-releases of early American music, which otherwise would have been lost. In...