Race Record

race records, sound recordings of the early 20th century that were made exclusively by and for African Americans. The term is sometimes said to have been coined by Ralph S. Peer, who was then working for OKeh Records. It was used especially from the 1920s to the 1940s to indicate the audience for whom the recordings were intended. Use of the term faded as white audiences were also exposed to blues and jazz and began to appreciate Black performers and to seek out and purchase their recordings.

Although the first phonograph recordings were made as early as 1901, few were made by African Americans, and many of those were novelty acts. Early Black recording artists included George W. Johnson, a former slave; The Unique Quartette; Louis (“Bebe”) Vasnier; and the team of George Walker and Bert Williams. It was not until 1920 that Black musicians and singers began to be recorded with any regularity. That was the year in which Black composer and pianist Perry Bradford championed a young Black female entertainer named Mamie Smith. Her first recording—a version of Bradford’s “Crazy Blues” (1920)—was so successful that the General Phonograph Company’s OKeh label launched a series called “Original Race Records.” The series was advertised exclusively to African Americans in Black-owned newspapers. Over the next several years, Black musical director Clarence Williams signed and recorded for OKeh many leading blues, jazz, and gospel artists, including Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and Lonnie Johnson.

Other white-owned record companies were quick to target the Black market with their own “race record” lines. Blues singers Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Clara Smith recorded for Columbia; Leroy Carr, Henry Thomas, and Robert Johnson recorded for Vocalion; and Alberta Hunter, Charley Patton, and Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded for Paramount, which billed itself as the “Premier Race Label.” In the 1930s Decca Records produced a “Sepia Series.”

Annual sales of race records during the 1920s reached five million copies. The success of the race records market helped to facilitate the rise of Black-owned record companies, among which the short-lived Black Swan label of Harry Pace is recognized as the first. Pace’s motto was “The only genuine colored record. Others are only passing for colored.” African American artists who recorded for Black Swan included Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters, and pianist and bandleader Fletcher Henderson. When Pace sold the label to Paramount in 1924, the Chicago Defender, a newspaper for African Americans, credited him with having forced white-owned record companies to acknowledge the demand for Black performers, to publish race music catalogs, and to advertise in Black newspapers.

Because race records had been marketed directly to the Black community, most white Americans of the era were initially introduced to the musical styles of blues and jazz through the recordings of white jazz musicians such as Paul Whiteman, who could take no credit for the styles’ origins. The popularity of radio soon changed perceptions. Already in the 1930s race records no longer formed a discrete commercial category, and by the 1940s it had long been apparent that the market for music by Black performers crossed ethnic lines. Furthermore, jazz and blues styles were developing under the influence of both Black and white musicians. After World War II the terms race records and race music were abandoned.