Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 23, Issue 2, Pages 212220

Sound Recordings and Popular Music Histories: The Remix

David Suisman

University of Delaware Perhaps popular music scholars have made too much of recordingsand too little. What if the ubiquity of recorded sound in the fabric of life today and the prominence of the media conglomerates on the landscape of business and culture have at once exaggerated the significance of recorded music and clouded our perception of how recordings have functioned? Or, put differently, what if the sound of recordings has been all wrong in the mix of popular music studiesby turns too loud or soft, overly compressed or modulated, mangled by Auto-Tune or muted by noise reduction? In my remarks for this Amplifier section, I want to highlight some recent work that listens with fresh ears to the history of sound recording and suggests new figurations for its place in the study of popular music. Given how much writing on sound reproduction has appeared in recent yearsand much of it has been excellentit may seem odd to assert that too little has been made of this subject. Yet recent scholarship also reveals that important dimensions of sound recording have remained muffled or heavily compressed. First, several works demonstrate that the reigning narratives of popular music have overestimated the divide between commercial recorded music and folk culture, and have underestimated the reach of recordings and their influence. For example, although Robert Johnson has long been apotheosized as a kind of sui generis folk genius, Elijah Wald has detailed the great degree to which his repertoire was shaped by the records on Mississippi Delta jukeboxes (Wald, Escaping). Similarly, commercial recordings also influenced Muddy Waterss musical formation, as Robert Gordon has established, although paradoxically it was a noncommercial recording session in 1941 for Alan Lomax on behalf of the Library of Congress that convinced Waters he could be a professional musician (Gordon). Critic John Jeremiah Sullivan drove home the same point in a thoughtful essay in Harpers, ending with an exchange between record collector Gayle Dean Wardlow and a minor prewar blues artist, Booker Miller, about the latters association with Charley Patton. Wardlow probed him on the way his relationship with Patton developedDid you meet him
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at a juke joint, Wardlow asked, or on the street? Miller responded, I admired his records (Sullivan). Probably no writer has called into question the alleged isolation of rural cultures from the commercial recording industry as provocatively as Karl Hagstrom Miller, whose Segregating Sound shows how idealized folk culture was mobilized to impose regimes of racial segregation within the recorded music industry (in the form of the racialized genres of blues and country) and reinforced segregation beyond it. All of these examples come from the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, but their challenge to the reification of a folk/commercial binary has broad implications. Indeed, it presses all scholars of popular music to check their assumptions about the reach of commercial networks and how people may be affected by them. A second signal that has barely been audible is buried in the history and significance of noncommercial recording and informal economies of exchange. A good deal of attention has already been focused on ethnographic and folkloric recording, but other kinds of noncommercial and informal recording existed, as well. For example, as Scott Spencer has shown, two recently discovered collections of homemade phonograph cylinders demonstrate the circulation of informally made recordings of Irish music in an underground diasporic exchange network that contributed substantially to the nationalist folk revival in Ireland (Early IrishAmerican Recordings; Wheels of the World). Gustavus Stadler has analyzed the alleged creation and dissemination of sound recordings of lynchings of African Americans. Alex Cummings has opened up the history of record-pressing by collectors and fan clubs and of bootlegging (Collectors; Music Piracy). David Novak has dissected the international trading culture of noise cassettes. Charles Hirschkind has studied the circulation of sermons recorded on cassettes in the contemporary Middle East. Together, these disparate works hint at an alternative history (or perhaps histories) of sound recording, based on informal or underground exchange networks and whole listening communities constituted as counterpublics, outside and often at odds with the market. A third dimension of sound recording that warrants amplification is ambient or incidental music, particularly in public or institutional settings. Although there are already two well-known versions of this storyone, an intellectual and aesthetic history that runs from Charles Ives and Erik Satie to Brian Eno, and the other a history of sound in cinemaother versions are possible and necessary. Alongside Saties musique dameublement and its descendants, there have been experiments in the application of music and

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sound in deliberate, systematic ways in a variety of commercial, educational, and military settings. A few works have laid a foundation for studying this subject and suggest the richness of what it may yield, including Linda Tylers excellent article on music in department stores, Joseph Lanzas (and others) work on Muzak (see also Sterne; Radano), and Alexander Russos critical examination of the battle over the soundscape on public buses in Washington, DC.1 Much remains unknown, however, about the self-conscious, applied use of music and sound for institutional purposes. I would welcome more research into the repertoire, technology, law, and business practices of music and sound used in this way, not to mention a more general consideration of the scope of these practices, especially beyond the United States. We know, for example, that in 1969 UNESCOs International Music Council denounced the abusive use. . . of recorded and broadcast music in public and private spaces, which begs the question, what would it mean to put such practices in global or international perspective? (qtd. in Schafer 97).

To this point, I have been discussing what I hear as silences in regard to sound recording and popular music studies, but I want to express the opposite concern, as well: the possibility that sound recording has been too loud in the critical mix and has been drowning out some of the quieter, subtler inputs, rendering inaudible the interplay among musical forces, and producing a notable amount of interpretive distortion. This is not to say that sound recording is not immanently connected to popular music. Rather, the point is that the part should not be confused for the wholethat recordings should not be taken for popular music itself. The tendency to frame popular music in terms of recording milestones has its roots in the pioneering jazz histories written by record collectors in the 1930s. It has intensified in recent years, however, visible in the growing number of books focusing on the recording of famous records (33 1/3; Bonomo; Gill and Odegard; Greenfield; Kahn; Marsh; Priore); on record labels (virtually every notable label has been the subject of at least one study); on record stores (Hornby); and on mix tapes (Sheffield; Bitner). To this might be added the recent trend of alternative rock bands organizing concerts and tours to reprise entire albums from their back catalogs (the Stooges and Fun House; the Pixies and Doolittle). Out in front of all these others, though, is probably Greil Marcus, Americas leading musical mythologist, who has exemplified and propelled the subsumption of popular

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music history by sound-recording history more than any other figure. His critical style as a writer is grounded in a form of imaginative (some would say fetishized) listening to records, and sound recordings define the subject of no fewer than four of his books (Stranded ; Invisible Republic; Like a Rolling Stone; When That Rough God ).2 Such a recordings-centered focus evokes, as Jed Rasula put it, the seductive menace of records. They are seductive, Rasula noted, because they are stable and can be pored over and analyzed by critics and scholars, offering them unique and valuable insights into the musical sounds of the past. At the same time, big epistemological problems attend the use of recordings in this way (hence, the menace). Much can be gleaned from recordings, but paradoxically they can also be obstacles to knowledge, because they obscure and distort the past in a variety of ways. Given the requirements of both the technology and the market, performing artists may have sounded different in the studio than they ever did elsewhere. Moreover, regardless of the mental and technical equipment we use, we can never hear a recorded performance of long ago with the same ears as a listener at that time. From an epistemological perspective, then, recordings are better evidence of themselves (as recordings, as artifacts of mediation) than they are of some external phenomenon (i.e., a performance, as it really happened ). Although this point has been well made by Theodor Adorno and a host of others, Rasula builds on it to make a second, more original argument. As a form of inscription, sound recording is already a form of writing about the past; musicians learn from records, they comment on others records in their own recordings, they construct their own narratives and histories in sound.3 This places critics and scholars writings in a kind of competition with sound recordings for discursive authority. Who has the power, Rasulas work asks, to write musical history? What does it mean for critics and scholars to compete with musicians, and what is the effect on written histories of the fact that they are inherently metahistories, once removed from the first-level histories inscribed in recordings by musicians themselves? Raising such questions, Rasula ends updespite himselfhewing ever more closely to the recordings-centered approach to popular music. What, then, would a history of popular music look like that did not assume the centrality of recordings? Well, it might look like Elijah Walds How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, a revisionist social history that challenges how popular music history is written. How the Beatles, it should be said, is really two books, split on either side of the colon in the title, and one is more successful than the

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other. The less successful seeks to explain the Beatles remarkable staying power and long-term impact. More specifically, Wald seeks to understand a puzzling historical contrast: Why do the Beatles, whose career began a half-century ago, remain basic to the musical lives of many young people today, whereas young people in the 1960s heard music that was 30 or 40 years old (i.e., from the 1920s and 1930s) as ancient, outmoded, and remote? To answer this question, Wald trains his sights not on the Beatles (although they do come in at the beginning and the end) but on the whole of American popular music from the 1890s to the 1970sand this is where it gets interesting. In Walds view, the history of American popular music has long been deformed by critics and scholars personal tastes and overemphasis on novelty and changeon rupture. People who write about music professionally, he notes, have an investment in historical breaks and divisions between genres that is fundamentally at odds with the ways most people experience and interact with music. Popular music history looks and sounds quite different, he shows, if approached from the bottom upfrom the perspective of fans and working musicians. For these groups, sharp historical breaks and divisions between genres were meaningless abstractions. Popular music just did not work that way in peoples real lives, in which the shock of the new and the comfort of the familiar, the innovative and the mainstream, often existed together, in peaceful harmony. I use the term harmony advisedly, for they did more than coexist; they existed, by and large, in mutually supportive relation to each other. If critics and scholars would elevate the Louis Armstrongs and Duke Ellingtons above the Paul Whitemans and Guy Lombardos, would lionize Elvis Presley and his fans and shun Pat Boone and his, the lines separating these individuals and groups were often not so clearly drawn. Armstrong repeatedly cited Lombardos Royal Canadians as his favorite orchestra. Ellington credited Whiteman as a musical influence. Many people were fans of Elvis and Pat Boone. The cutting edge and the dull middle, the vaunted and the (now-) despised: connecting these poles is the fact that music was not just something to be listened to. It was to be interacted with, or to use in interactions with othersparticularly on the dance floor. Until the mid 1960s, dancing was one of the foundations of popular music culture, at least as important as sound recordings (although sometimes the two overlapped). While critics and scholars might police stylistic boundaries (e.g., the jazz vs. swing debate), scrutinize disjunctures, and argue about aesthetic purity and

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corruption, such concerns were irrelevant to those in the dance hall, where most people came to dance, not to listen to and judge the music. (Indeed, Wald calls the commonsensical point that most people went to dances to dance one of the great, universal truths, often forgotten or underemphasized by music critics and historians [How the Beatles 63].) Accordingly, all working musicians knewbecause their livelihood depended on them knowing such thingsthat versatility was a great professional asset and that appealing to the greatest number of dancers meant balancing the old and the new. Sounds that were too novel or too foreign tended to drive dancers from the floor. Walds book, then, is notable for understanding music as a spatial, social, and economic phenomenon, as well as an aural and aesthetic one, and thus as a phenomenon that cannot be understood only through recordings. While Jed Rasula makes the important point that that musicians used sound and recordings to craft their own discourses and histories, Wald reminds us that there were other conversations going on as well, transcending the bandstand and recording studio, between musicians and their audiences, and among fans with one another, all of which helped shape the soundscape of popular music. Over the years, multiple definitions of popular have been at play in popular music studies: (1) popular as vernacular; (2) popular music as a style or genre; (3) popular music as commercial product; and (4) popular as a quantitative measure. The lastpopular as numbersis generally the most neglected in critical music histories, or at least the most selectively employed. Wald takes this quantitative notion of popularity seriously, however, and uses it as a jumping-off point for understanding the ways that music functions in the everyday lives of musicians and fans. As such, although recordings do factor prominently into his analysis, too, he looks and listens beyond recordings to take measure of the full spectrum of relations in which music was involved. The result is a narrative of popular music that emphasizes continuity as much as change, and shows music as having as vibrant and complex an existence beyond recordings as within them. This is a capacious and dynamic approach, and popular music studies may sound different if it brings some of these ideas into the mix. Notes
1. The use of music in commercial environments is also discussed in Suisman and DeNora.

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2. Recordings also factor heavily into Marcuss Mystery Train. 3. Rasulas focus is jazz records in particular, but the point can be extrapolated to records in general, albeit somewhat more loosely. On sound recording as inscription, see also Gitelman.

Works Cited

33 1/3 series. New York: Continuum, 2003. Bitner, Jason. Cassette from My Ex: Stories and Soundtracks of Lost Loves. New York: St. Martins Griffin, 2009. Bonomo, Joe. Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found . New York: Continuum, 2009. Cummings, Alex. Collectors, Bootleggers, and the Value of Jazz, 19301952. Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Eds. David Suisman and Susan Strasser. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2010. 95114. . Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright, 19091971. Journal of American History 97.3 (2010): 65981. DeNora, Tia. Music in Everyday Life. New York: Cambridge UP, 2000. Gill, Andy, and Kevin Odegard. A Simple Twist of Fate: Bob Dylan and the Making of Blood on the Tracks. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2005. Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999. Gordon, Robert. Cant Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters. Boston: Little Brown, 2002. Greenfield, Robert. Exile on Main St.: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2006. Hirschkind, Charles. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia UP, 2006. Hornby, Nick. High Fidelity. New York: Riverhead, 1995. Kahn, Ashley. Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece. New York: Da Capo, 2000. Lanza, Joseph. Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong. Rev. ed. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2004. Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock n Roll Music. New York: Dutton, 1975.

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. Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island . New York: Knopf, 1979. . Invisible Republic: Bob Dylans Basement Tapes. New York: Holt, 1998. . Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads. New York: PublicAffairs, 2006. . When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison. New York: PublicAffairs, 2010. Marsh, Dave. The Beatles Second Album. New York: Rodale, 2007. Miller, Karl Hagstrom. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010. Novak, David. Japan Noise: Global Media Circulation and the Transpacific Circuits of Experimental Music. Dissertation. Columbia U, 2006. Priore, Dominic. Smile: The Story of Brian Wilsons Lost Masterpiece. N.p.: Bobcat, 2007. Radano, Ronald M. Interpreting Muzak: Speculations on Musical Experience in Everyday Life. American Music 7.4 (1989): 44860. Rasula, Jed. The Media of Memory: The Seductive Menace of Records in Jazz History. Jazz among the Discourses. Ed. Krin Gabbard. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995. 13462. Russo, Alexander. An American Right to an Unannoyed Journey? Transit Radio as a Contested Site of Public Space and Private Attention, 19491952. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 29.1 (2009): 125. Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World . Rochester, VT: Destiny, 1994. Sheffield, Rob. Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time. New York: Crown, 2007. Spencer, Scott. Early Irish-American Recordings and Atlantic Musical Migrations. The Irish in the Atlantic World . Ed. David Gleeson. Charleston: U of South Carolina P, 2010. 5375. . Wheels of the World: How Recordings of Irish Traditional Music Bridged the Gap between Homeland and Diaspora. Journal of the Society for American Music 4.4 (2010): 43749. Stadler, Gustavus. Never Heard Such a Thing: Lynching and Phonographic Modernity. Social Text 28.1 (2010): 87105.

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Sterne, Jonathan. Sounds Like the Mall of America: Programmed Music and the Architectonics of Commercial Space. Ethnomusicology 41.1 (1997): 2250. Suisman, David. Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009. Sullivan, John Jeremiah. Unknown Bards: The Blues Becomes Transparent about Itself. Harpers Magazine November 2008: 8594. Tyler, Linda L. Commerce and Poetry Hand in Hand: Music in American Department Stores, 18801930. Journal of the American Musicological Society 45.1 (1992): 75120. Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. New York: Amistad, 2004. . How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

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