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Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy: Gennett Records and the Rise of America's Musical Grassroots
Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy: Gennett Records and the Rise of America's Musical Grassroots
Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy: Gennett Records and the Rise of America's Musical Grassroots
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Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy: Gennett Records and the Rise of America's Musical Grassroots

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“A lively and anecdotal history” of the tiny family-run studio where jazz greats from Jelly Roll Morton to Louis Armstrong made their first recordings (Jazz Times).
 
From 1917 to 1932, in a primitive studio next to the railroad tracks, the Gennett family of Richmond, Indiana, recorded some of the earliest performances of jazz, blues, and country greats—including Jelly Roll Morton, Big Bill Broonzy, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Gene Autry, Bix Beiderbecke, and native Hoosier Hoagy Carmichael (whose “Stardust” debuted on Gennett as a dance stomp).
 
Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy is the first thoroughly researched account of the people and events behind this unique company and its outsized impact on American music. Alive with personal details and anecdotes from musicians, employees, and family members, it traces the colorful history of a pioneer recording company.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 8, 2013
ISBN9780253007698
Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy: Gennett Records and the Rise of America's Musical Grassroots
Author

Rick Kennedy

Rick Kennedy is professor of history at Point LomaNazarene University, secretary of the Conference on Faithand History, and author of various books and articles on thehistory of colonial New England. His previous books includeJesus, History, and Mount Darwin: An AcademicExcursion.

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    Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy - Rick Kennedy

    Introduction

    On a cool and drizzly April 5 in 1923, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band took a six-hour train ride from Chicago across hundreds of miles of flat Indiana farmland to downtown Richmond, a bustling industrial town of twenty-six thousand people near the state’s border with Ohio. The impressive, columned Pennsylvania Railroad Station, designed by famed Chicago architect Daniel Burnham, may have evoked a certain visual familiarity for the African American musicians arriving in Richmond from the Windy City. At the same time, the Richmond Item newspaper at the station’s newsstand captured the radical politics sweeping the state with a banner story about feuding Ku Klux Klan leaders.

    The seven band members headed a mile through downtown to First Street, which ran along a railroad trestle leading to the massive Starr Piano Company factory. Rows of multi-story brick buildings and an enormous lumberyard were secluded in a vast glacial gorge along the Whitewater River in an area the local people dubbed Starr Valley. The rotund bandleader, Joe King Oliver, and his six younger bandmates were the only African Americans amid hundreds of mostly German American artisans and woodworkers. The band unloaded their instruments in a single-story building along a railroad spur that previously housed large kilns for curing wood for the pianos. It was now the recording laboratory of Gennett Records, a division of the Gennett family’s Starr Piano.

    In 1923, Oliver’s outfit, which only played together for a year, was a dream ensemble of early jazz: Oliver and Louis Armstrong on lead cornets, brothers Johnny Dodds on clarinet and Baby Dodds on drums, Lil Hardin (the future Mrs. Armstrong) on piano, Bill Johnson on bass, and Honoré Dutrey on trombone. All but the attractive Miss Hardin hailed from New Orleans, and they were wildly popular in their adopted home of Chicago with young blacks and whites who filled the Lincoln Gardens on the city’s South Side to dance to the band’s dazzling, original jazz sounds.

    And yet, the band had never set foot inside a recording studio until they journeyed to Richmond. Ezra Wickemeyer, a thirty-year-old former office clerk in the factory, ran the recording session. The primitive studio was his kingdom, and few people outside of musicians gained entrance because he guarded his techniques. With an outgoing personality and a cigarette dangling from his mouth, Wickemeyer could startle people at first glance because of scars on his head, arms, and hands from severe burns received as a boy.

    He huddled the Chicago musicians around megaphone-like horns protruding through an opening in the wall. To achieve the right sound balance, he placed the players at various distances from the horns. Then he recorded snippets of them performing, which he played back through the horns to determine if everyone was positioned properly During this trial-and-error process, the twenty-three-year-old Armstrong’s powerful cornet overpowered Oliver and the rest of the band. So Wickemeyer placed him several paces back and closer to the studio door.

    While Armstrong’s actual distance from the band during the recording session became urban legend, there was no disputing his unmistakable sound. In the middle of Chimes Blues, Wickemeyer placed the young cornetist with the band for his first recorded solo. His bright tone and vibrant melodies, first captured on tinny Gennett 78-rpm (revolutions per minute) discs, would soon transform jazz and permanently elevate the solo instrumentalist in American popular music.

    Other memorable moments at Gennett Records followed. On October 31, 1927, an Indiana law school graduate and dazzling pianist named Hoagy Carmichael rounded up several musician friends and drove in the middle of the night on two-lane roads from Indianapolis to Richmond to record his new song. Because he had not written an arrangement, he sang the parts to the musicians ahead of time. The ragged instrumental rendition of Star Dust (originally a two-word song) barely sold as a Gennett release. But that debut recording inspired future refinements, and Stardust soon became one of the twentieth century’s most recognizable songs.

    Tenant farmer Charley Patton took his Stella guitar for the long train ride from Jackson, Mississippi, to Richmond for a session on June 14, 1929, arranged at the Gennett studio for Paramount Records. In a style all of his own, Patton sang and played guitar on fourteen of his blues and gospel songs. Though no one knew at the time, it was the era’s most prolific single day in Mississippi Delta blues recording and now ranks among the most significant sessions in blues history. Patton’s signature song from the session, Pony Blues, is still played today by Delta musicians.

    From 1916 to 1934, the small but prolific Gennett Records label produced thousands of 78-rpm discs (78s), first at a Manhattan studio, and beginning in 1921, from a second studio in Richmond at the Starr Piano factory. Far from the major cities, the Richmond studio mostly waxed obscure musicians passing through rural Indiana by train and car, ranging from vaudeville singers, hotel orchestras, and brass bands to sacred choirs, country blues wailers, and backwoods fiddlers. Interspersed in this long parade of forgotten musicians were several future icons of early jazz, blues, and country music. Thus, the little record label in Indiana became a remarkable musical story in a century in which America’s original sounds would be embraced by the world – and recorded music would become a multi-billion-dollar industry.

    As New Orleans jazz blossomed in the Chicago speakeasies and dance halls of early 1920s, the Indiana label became its Rosetta Stone, debuting not only the Oliver band with Armstrong, but also Bix Beiderbecke, Earl Fatha Hines, Freddie Keppard, Leon Roppolo, and other jazz pioneers. Piano solos recorded in Richmond by Jelly Roll Morton captured the genius of jazz music’s first great composer. The development of Carmichael from an obscure jazz player to a polished songwriter is documented almost exclusively on Gennett.

    When Gennett Records began producing 78s in the late 1920s for discount labels, it became a lightning rod for early American rural music. Hundreds of rare Gennett country (called old-time and hillbilly), sacred, and blues recordings preserved regional songs and music styles, from Appalachia to the Deep South. Musicians recorded by Gennett, such as Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Uncle Dave Macon, Lonnie Johnson, Bill Broonzy, William Harris, Gene Autry, and Fiddlin’ Doc Roberts, became part of the early evolution of country and rock music. Simply put, few record companies during the era documented the rise of America’s music genres as thoroughly as Gennett Records.

    The 1920s was a remarkable decade for the young recording industry Small record labels proliferated, in large part because of the legal triumph of Starr Piano and Gennett Records over dominant Victor Records in a landmark patent case. During the decade, record companies grew in parallel with America’s emerging jazz, blues, and country music styles. Gennett Records, in particular, embraced these new genres on the fringe of the music mainstream. In fact, Gennett was among the first record companies to cater to both the segregated white and black record markets. The Richmond studio might record a black jazz band in the morning and a white Appalachian string band in the afternoon.

    Despite the social barriers imposed between races, the cross-pollination between white and black approaches to jazz, blues, and country music is evident on the Gennett releases. The label advertised certain white jazz bands as black bands. Today, with the great attention paid to the divide between white and black cultures in America, we tend to forget that a healthy mutual respect existed between white and black musicians in the 1920s. Gennett held recording sessions for interracial jazz bands as early as 1923 and for an interracial Appalachian string band in 1927.

    Gennett discs sold modestly in Starr Piano stores, department stores, and mail order catalogs. Producing the two-sided, shellac 78s was a labor-intensive and expensive process. The typical retail price for a Gennett disc, between $.50 and $1.10, was relatively steep for 1920s consumers. Hit records sold by the thousands, not by the millions. Records were not promoted on the radio until a decade later. Gennett artists typically made little money on their discs. Then again, the label was receptive to almost anyone eager to make a disc, resulting in recordings of great originality

    With the 1930s Great Depression, Gennett Records, and a marvelous era in music recording, came to a crashing halt. Soon after Gennett’s demise, jazz enthusiasts pursued the label’s original 78s in secondhand stores. By the 1950s, Gennett records appeared on jazz, blues, and country anthologies of long-playing (LP) vinyl records, and later, on cassette tapes and compact discs (CDs). With Internet music downloads, hundreds of Gennett recordings are a credit card and a click of a computer mouse away. The music has never been more accessible.

    The recent proliferation of university jazz programs in the United States and Europe also assure Gennett Records recognition within academia. The Oliver and Morton recordings often head the list of required listening for courses in early jazz. Meanwhile, record collectors still cite original Gennett 78s by recording date, matrix, and serial number. Certain Gennett discs in the jazz and blues genres command thousands of dollars from dealers and through online auctions.

    My obsession with Gennett Records began in Richmond, Indiana. As a young reporter in the early 1980s for the city’s Palladium-Item newspaper, I lived among the company’s forgotten past: the industrial ghost town of Starr Piano in the Whitewater River gorge, the abandoned railroad station where musicians arrived for recording sessions, and the declining apartment building on Main Street that had been the grand Gennett mansion. The piano factory buildings were vacant for years, victims of vandalism, and were demolished. The recording studio building along the river was boarded up and finally torn down. On a brick wall of a lone surviving piano building, there remained a fading Gennett Records sign.

    The daily exposure to these ruins drove me to ask basic questions shared by music enthusiasts for decades: How did Italian piano manufacturers in a small Indiana town stumble across and record so many of America’s music innovators? How did young musicians in the 1920s make history with a most unlikely company in a most unlikely place?

    The answers led to this book’s first edition, published in 1994. Long before I had envisioned a book, my research involved casual conversations with former employees of Starr Piano. After leaving Richmond in 1983, my collection mounted: Gennett 78s, Gennett music on album and CD anthologies, details from books and old magazines, and interviews with Gennett relatives. While Gennett’s recording ledgers were preserved at Rutgers University, my grasp of the company’s day-to-day workings was sketchy. With Starr Piano and Gennett Records executives long deceased, the prospect of a detailed book was still a stretch.

    The breakthrough occurred when blues researcher Tom Tsotsi steered me to the John MacKenzie Collection at the Indiana Historical Society Library in Indianapolis. A Gennett collector from Portland, Oregon, MacKenzie spent decades researching the label. After he died in 1982, his wife, Joyce, had the foresight to donate his materials to the IHS library. The treasure trove was his interviews, conducted from 1961 to 1970, with former Starr Piano and Gennett Records employees. These voices breathe life into the story

    Among my many interviews, Richard Gennett and Henry Gennett Martin offered priceless insight as grandsons of Henry Gennett, the family patriarch who diversified Starr Piano Company into phonographs and records. They described in detail the family’s personalities, triumphs, and financial setbacks. Also, Marion McKay, a 1920s bandleader who visited the Richmond studio several times, detailed at age ninety-three the arduous recording process. Within weeks of the book’s original publication, all three men had passed away, leaving me indebted for their firsthand recollections.

    In the ensuing years, I found music enthusiasts equally captivated by the small-town milieu of Gennett Records. This revised and expanded book places Gennett more within the context of 1920s Richmond, including new details on Starr Piano, Goose Town (the enclave where black musicians stayed), and a local perspective on the company’s KKK records, which always raise eyebrows. Greater spotlight is placed on key studio employees Wickemeyer and Fred Wiggins, the Quaker operations manager who steered the label into new music genres. While Gennett Records ultimately influenced music on a global scale, it remains an intimate story about a family business from a bygone era when owners and employees walked each day to work at a piano factory in Indiana.

    This revised edition also expands upon Gennett’s dissemination of early blues and country music. Gennett as a 1920s jazz label remains its most enduring legacy, and the sessions are well documented by firsthand accounts from Armstrong, Carmichael, Baby Dodds, and others. While early blues and country music genres are more associated with the Victor, OKeh, Columbia, and Paramount labels, they were no more prolific in recording this music than Gennett Records, which produced thousands of blues and country records.

    The early rural traditions did not attract significant attention among scholars and record collectors until the 1960s. Music folklorists such as Gus Meade, Charles Wolfe, and Gayle Dean Wardlow tracked down forgotten blues and country musicians who recorded in the 1920s on several labels, including Gennett Records. Also, this revised edition is enhanced by Gennett’s correspondence with fiddler Doc Roberts (held at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky), which details a colorful relationship with an Appalachian music pioneer over several years.

    Finally, this revised edition arrives during a Gennett Records revival in Richmond. The local Starr Gennett Foundation has transformed the Starr Piano factory site into a public park with sculptures of Gennett artists and a performance pavilion in the surviving assembly building. The Gennett mansion is renovated, murals of Gennett musicians enliven downtown buildings, and music events are held year-round. This transformation was unimaginable in the early 1980s. I hope this book inspires its readers to visit Richmond for themselves in order to fully experience this fascinating story Because of the important music it preserved, the story of Gennett Records was always destined to live on. Now, it can be seen as well as heard.

    My pursuit of Gennett Records has been fostered by many people who make the journey deeply gratifying. A special thanks goes to my wife, Jane Kennedy Also, Dwight Weber and Jim Stump enthusiastically edited the drafts for both the original and revised editions of this book, while photographer and jazz historian Duncan Schiedt and music professor James Dapogny continued to provide insight and encouragement.

    For the book’s original edition, I am indebted to Richard Gennett, Henry Gennett Martin, photographer Jim Callaway, Marion McKay, Bud Dant, Sally Childs-Helton, Alexandria Gressett, Dick Reynolds, Frank Powers, Pete Whelan (publisher of 78 Quarterly), Jean Kennedy, Chuck Kennedy, Harry Leavell, Sam Meier, Bill Angert, Charles Wolfe, Stan Kandebo, Guy Norris, Charles Wolfe, Ivan Tribe, Paul Turk, Wayne Vincent, Gayle Dean Wardlow, Robert Highland, Tom Tsotsi, Phil Pospychala, Ryland Jones, Loyal Jones, the Wayne County (Indiana) Historical Museum, Richmond (Indiana) Palladium-Item, and the record sleuths of the International Association of Jazz Record Collectors.

    For the revised edition, I am grateful to Fred Gennett, Linda Gennett Irmscher, Judith Gennett, Patricia Kennedy-Zafred, Jerry Beuerlein, and Raina Polivka and Jane Behnken, both of Indiana University Press; Sue King and Doris Ashbrook, both of Richmond’s Morrisson-Reeves Library; Harry Rice of Berea College, John Tefteller, and Bob Jacobson and Terri Hardy both of the Starr Gennett Foundation; Steve Koger, David Sager, Charlie Dahan, Robert Helmich, Mel Helmich, Jason Rewald, and Teresa Braun.

    ONE

    A Music Dynasty in Victorian Indiana

    The rise of the formidable Starr Piano and its fabled Gennett Records label from the small Quaker town of Richmond, Indiana, smack in America’s heartland, sounds improbable today, if not fantastic. Yet it wasn’t unusual. Richmond was among several small towns in Indiana and Ohio that gave rise to nationally prominent manufacturing companies during the decades after the Civil War. From the late nineteenth century up to the stock market crash of 1929, a plethora of industrial innovations sprang from the region – the mass production of pianos and lawn mowers in Richmond, farm implements in Springfield, Ohio, the Wright brothers’ revolutionary airplanes and mechanical cash registers in Dayton, and the ornately crafted Cord and Duesenberg luxury automobiles in the small Indiana cities of Auburn and Connersville.

    In each of these industrial towns, similar social dynamics were at work. European entrepreneurs and skilled tradesman flocked to the Midwest, a region bolstered by untapped natural resources and growing populations. The cultural traditions of Old World craftsmanship were being meshed with America’s emerging, mass-production technologies. Finished products, distinguished by handcrafted workmanship, rolled off the assembly lines of the Midwest in large quantities. Because of the nation’s newly established railroad network, products from the small industrial towns of the Midwest could reach virtually every market in America and overseas. Often capitalizing on cheap labor costs, the families who owned these manufacturing firms made huge fortunes as evidenced by their grand mansions in these towns, where they exerted considerable influence as civil leaders and cultural patrons.

    It was amid these social and commercial dynamics that Richmond developed into one of Indiana’s first industrial centers. Settled primarily by Quakers beginning in 1806, Richmond was founded along the Whitewater River in east-central Indiana. On the eastern fringe of America’s grain belt, close to the Ohio border, Richmond is sixty-eight miles east of Indianapolis and seventy miles north of Cincinnati. Richmond’s transportation channels enabled the village’s industrial base to develop quickly. The Whitewater Canal along the Whitewater River helped link Richmond with the Ohio River valley. Among Richmond’s first manufacturers were cotton and wool mills that utilized the river for power. During the nineteenth century, the National Road (now U.S. 40) was routed through the heart of Richmond. The National Road became a primary passage for wagon trains crossing the central states to the West. By the Civil War era, the small, self-sufficient village had its own paper mills, tanneries, foundries, iron factories, and a neighborhood German brewery, as well as farm implement and carriage manufacturers.

    The exhaustively detailed History of Wayne County, Indiana, published in 1884, proclaimed that Richmond stands without a rival in the beauty of her location, the wealth of her surroundings, the solidity of her growth, and in the refinement, culture, and hospitality of its citizens.¹ The proud authors describe Richmond as a frontier-style Garden of Eden, attributing its low death rate to the pure air, which gave energy to a man and elasticity to his steps, and to an absence of stagnant pools and miasmatic bottomlands. Within a few years, however, it wasn’t pure air, hospitality, and solidity of growth that gave the small community of ten thousand people a growing reputation for excellence with consumers well beyond its rural Indiana borders. Rather, it was a booming piano manufacturing complex along the banks of the Whitewater River.

    THE RISE OF STARR PIANO COMPANY

    Piano making began in earnest in Richmond in 1872 when an Alsatian craftsman named George M. Trayser partnered with two business leaders in town, including a scion to one of its founding Quaker families, to establish a modest manufacturing company.

    The middle-aged Trayser arrived in Richmond with an impressive resume. He had apprenticed in piano building in Germany and France, and then had traveled across the American frontier to open a storefront factory in 1849 in downtown Indianapolis, Indiana. It is believed to be the first piano manufacturer west of the Allegheny Mountains. He built pianos and melodeons, the forerunner of the pump organ. In the 1860s, the U.S. Patent Office awarded Trayser patents for piano technology, which, he claimed in newspaper advertisements, enabled his pianos to stay in tune longer than those of his competitors. Later that decade, he moved his operations 165 miles southeast to Ripley, Ohio, east of Cincinnati. Situated along the Ohio River, Ripley was a tobacco-trading town of five thousand people where Trayser partnered with Milo J. Chase, a piano maker of considerable financial means from New England. They formed Trayser Piano Forte Company in a building two blocks from the river, a major commercial route for steamboats. Even though the piano company took Trayser’s name, Chase was its president and general manager, and he established a second location across the river in Maysville, Kentucky.

    In 1872, Trayser moved to Richmond, 125 miles northwest of Ripley, after securing backing from James M. Starr and Richard Jackson. Starr was from one of Richmond’s most prominent families; his father, Charles Starr, was a wealthy Quaker importer from Philadelphia who had helped to develop the town. In 1818, Charles had journeyed alone on horseback through the territories west of the Allegheny Mountains and connected with an enclave of Quakers in the new village of Richmond. He and his wife Elizabeth eventually settled there in 1825 when the population was less than seven hundred people. He purchased 240 acres in the heart of the village for $6,000 and sold off parcels at $100 per lot, on which homes and factories were built. He constructed Richmond’s first hewed-log house. He also established a cotton factory and further developed the downtown. In 1853, he was a prime driver in incorporating the Cincinnati, Richmond & Muncie Railroad and provided land for the town’s first railroad depot at North Tenth and E streets. It gave Richmond greater access to large urban markets with direct routes to Cincinnati and Indianapolis.

    James Starr was the third of his parents’ seven children to reach adulthood. He was nine months old when the family settled in Richmond. His early jobs included traveling book merchant and downtown grocer. As a young man, he was no stranger to heartbreak. In 1850, his wife of three years and a nine-month-old daughter both died. In 1853, he married Sarah King, and they became one of the town’s prominent couples. After Charles’s death in 1855, James managed his father’s considerable holdings in town and continued developing the residential and business districts. Described as a handsome man with a strong personality, James in 1863 bought controlling interest of the Richmond Gas Light Company, which, by 1868, illuminated 228 street lamps and 1,000 buildings.

    Starr’s business associate in the piano enterprise was Richard Jackson, a hard-driving Irishman who arrived in America in 1843 as a teenager and soon moved west. By the 1850s, the young Jackson operated a dry goods store in Richmond, considered the town’s first to operate strictly on a cash basis. He made a comfortable living and expanded his influence in town by financing the construction of several downtown buildings. After the Civil War, he operated a mill in Richmond, which burned to the ground in 1871.

    The following year, the Trayser Piano Company opened on property Jackson secured on North Fifth Street, near the railroad depot. Trayser served as president and Jackson as secretary-treasurer. The Trayser and Jackson households, as well as the factory, were all situated within a couple of street blocks of each other. Richmond proved an excellent location for the new enterprise as a growing village with numerous European wood craftsmen, especially from Germany. Trayser Piano sold the highly ornate pianos directly to consumers from the factory. In its literature, the firm offered a five-year guarantee on its pianos and claimed to have developed a sounding board that produced a beautiful tone, especially on the high keys.

    In 1878, the piano company reorganized and expanded. With Trayser well into his 60s and retiring, his former partner from Ripley, M. J. Chase, took over the factory operations. The firm, renamed Chase Piano Company, was recapitalized with a $100,000 stock issuance. James Starr rose to company president, with Jackson as secretary-treasurer. They established a sales room downtown at 710 Main Street. After the stock issuance, the owners purchased twenty-three acres of land on First Street, along the bottom of a vast gorge formed by the Whitewater River. They constructed a six-story brick factory on the east bank of the river, which supplied critically needed waterpower. While just a stroll from Richmond’s central business and residential neighborhoods, the factory was isolated from view in the gorge. As the company grew from one factory into a mammoth complex, this stretch of the Whitewater gorge came to be known in Richmond as Starr Valley. (During the 1920s era of Gennett Records, it also assumed such nicknames as Banjo Valley and Harmony Hollow.)

    In 1880, Jackson became seriously ill from an undiagnosed brain ailment, which baffled the skill of some of the ablest physicians in Richmond and elsewhere.² He died a year later at age fifty-four. James Starr’s youngest brother, Benjamin, a thirty-eight-year-old Civil War hero, replaced Jackson and became a company owner. Born in 1842, Benjamin was nineteen years old when he answered President Abraham Lincoln’s call for three hundred thousand volunteers to join the Union Army. On August 21, 1861, Benjamin and another of his brothers, Joseph Starr, enlisted in the Second Indiana Cavalry. A year later, Benjamin suffered a near-fatal head wound in battle, followed by a bout of typhoid fever. Joseph was briefly captured but escaped from the Confederates.³ Returning to Richmond, Benjamin partnered in a stove retail store, and then joined his older brother James as a part owner of Richmond Gas Light Company. Like brother James, Benjamin was widowed before age thirty in 1868. He remarried in 1873. By the time Benjamin joined Chase Piano Company, he was also highly visible in town, having served as a local school trustee and as a city council member.

    The piano company expanded along the Whitewater River. New buildings were added, and employment grew to 150 employees by 1883. However, Chase, who also obtained piano technology patents, had other plans. In the mid-1880s, he and his sons pulled up stakes in Richmond and established a piano factory in Grand Rapids, Michigan. (The Chase family became leading piano makers in Michigan for several decades.) His departure prompted yet another company reorganization in Richmond, and the Starr brothers further asserted themselves. The company was renamed James Starr & Co., with James as president and younger brother Benjamin as factory general manager. For several months, the factory continued to produce Chase brand-name pianos using the existing inventory of materials. Then the Starr brothers briefly produced the Queen brand piano, but by 1886, the pianos bore the Starr name.

    For James Starr & Co. and other American piano manufacturers, opportunity abounded in the late nineteenth century. For America’s emerging middle class, the piano embodied a respectability and civility to which many people aspired. While the wilds of the American frontier captivated Europe, Americans, on the other hand, sought to emulate the values and cultural refinement associated with England’s Victorian lifestyle. In photographs of American homes in the nineteenth century, the piano was a central element in rooms elaborately decorated with furniture, rugs, and draperies. Before the age of phonographs and radios, the piano was a fixture in the parlors of America’s middle class, a social centerpiece, particularly for women, who were expected to master the instrument out of what seemed to be a sense of cultural duty.

    A common image of courting in nineteenth-century advertising literature was the woman seated at the piano, playing sentimental classics to her anxious male caller. Certainly, the minds of these young couples were on other things besides Chopin nocturnes, but the piano stood as a moral institution. To a people who embraced a Protestant work ethic, the piano symbolized its virtues.

    ENTER THE GENNETT FAMILY

    By the early 1890s, the Starr brothers’ enterprise would be transformed once again when their handcrafted pianos were shipped in great numbers to outlets of the Jesse French Piano & Organ Company, based in St. Louis. Founded in 1873, the Jesse French company was a pioneering piano retailer in Middle America, with a chain of stores throughout the Southern states. During the 1880s, French’s retailing base expanded rapidly by selling several brands of pianos including the respected Starr keyboards. The tie between French and James Starr & Co. soon proved lucrative to both the retailer and the supplier. That relationship radically altered Starr’s position in the industry, after two associates of Jesse French company, John Lumsden and his son-in-law Henry Gennett, began merger negotiations with the Starr brothers in 1892.

    Born in 1852 as the eighth child in a family of nine children, Henry Gennett was the son of a prominent Italian entrepreneur in Nashville,

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