The First Black Recording Star? Probably!

"Emerson needed more musicians, preferably cheap and loud. What about that middle-aged black man with the melodious whistle and hearty laugh he’d seen performing for coins at the Hudson River ferryboat terminal? Johnson listened to the proposition of the neatly dressed young man and said, “Why, sure . . . how much did you say you would pay?” “Twenty cents a song,” said Emerson, “and you can work all afternoon.” “Well, suh, just show me where you want me to go,” said Johnson, throwing in one of his hearty laughs for free. Emerson had his second recording artist."

--From Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919, by Tim Brooks.

One could make a case that the American music industry was born when the inventor Thomas Edison first devised a way to record sound on tinfoil-coated cylinders in 1877, famously consigning his own voice to posterity (it should be noted that a recently uncovered audio fragment of the French folk song “Au Clair de Lune” made in 1860 by a Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville may now be considered the earliest recording of a human voice). Edison’s experiment yielded sounds that were barely audible, and after a few plays, the tinfoil was destroyed. He put his invention aside to work on new projects, such as the electric light, and others picked up where Edison left off, improving upon his invention to the degree that he became angry that it had been co-opted by others. In 1886 Edison produced a more durable wax cylinder that that could hold a permanent recording.

The equipment required to play these cylinders was too expensive for most people to afford, so the majority of the phonographic machines in the early 1890s were sold to exhibitors and coin-slot operators. They would play a disc over and over to a fascinated public. But it was not the singing voices of the popular stage stars that people heard—top entertainers considered the phonograph a novelty and beneath them (and those who produced the recordings couldn’t afford to hire a star anyway). The voices were almost always male, with strong elocution to override the still-fledgling technology. As the only other people likely to own a machine were white middle-class hobbyists, the men who were recorded were also white, but that color barrier would be broken sooner than many in the United States, and the results would open doors for blacks in the mainstream entertainment industry. In Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919, the author Tim Brooks looks at the early black recording artists who helped popularize the nascent industry. Some such as Bert Williams and George Walker, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, W.C. Handy, and Harry T. Burleigh, are widely documented and well known. Many others are less familiar, big stars of their era who drifted into obscurity. One such artist was George W. Johnson, an ex-slave, who in the 1890s had two of the best-selling records in America, one of which was "The Laughing Song", which you can access, along with one other hit (I'll warn you here, the title might irritate) here.

Born on a Virginia plantation in 1846 or thereabouts, Johnson learned to play the flute and to read along with the plantation owner’s children. After the Civil War (he was set free in 1853 but was conscripted as a laborer by Confederate forces), he made his way to New York City sometime in the 1870s. He made his living whistling and singing for coins at the Hudson River ferryboat. It was there that he was noticed by an employee of the New Jersey Phonograph Company. This is as far as I'm going to take you: You must borrow the book from the library, or buy it to find out the rest. But it's all fascinating stuff, well worth time spent on a gray afternoon curled up in a chair (although I must admit the book is kind of big)