GOTCHA! DENIED

posted by James Reel

Last week, I attended opening night of Arizona Theatre Company’s very strong production of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Always on the lookout for some production error that can make me feel smug in my superiority, I was having trouble finding anything to criticize—aside from one actor’s momentary fumbling while pretending to play the bass—until I saw a sign hanging on the back wall of the set: Paramount Electrical Recordings. Aha! I thought; surely that was a mistake … wasn’t it?

By coincidence, I had just been reading about Paramount, a company completely unrelated to the film studio. It started out as a chair and cabinet manufacturer, then began building cabinets to house record players (this was very early in the 20th century), and slid into the record production business mainly to have material to give away with each purchase of a gramophone cabinet. (It was exactly like the free software you get when you buy a computer today.) The people at the Paramount corporate office didn’t really care about the record business, and did everything on the cheap; they actually used asphalt as a material in their pressings, which made for bad record surfaces to begin with, and they deteriorated very quickly, which is why most reissues of Paramount material today sound even scratchier than was the norm for the 1920s. Paramount, institutionally, also resisted switching from acoustical recording, where musicians played directly into a big horn, to newfangled electrical techniques, which would have meant investing in microphones, cables and many other pieces of equipment. The bosses at Paramount didn’t fully endorse electrical recording until 1929.

So what was a sign touting “electrical recording” doing in a play set in a Paramount recording studio in 1927? Gotcha!

Well, not quite. I had overlooked the fact, which I knew, that Paramount didn’t restrict its recording activity to its Wisconsin home office. Projects were outsoured to Chicago (where the action of Ma Rainey takes place), New York and the South, and it’s thanks to specialists in those areas that the company, almost by accident, made the earliest recordings of some very important figures in jazz and blues (Blind Lemon Jefferson, Alberta Hunter, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver and Fletcher Henderson, among others). And no matter how tight-fisted the corporate bosses may have been, the studios to which recording work was outsourced were often more technologically advanced.

A moment’s research confirmed that electrical equipment was, indeed, used for Paramount’s Chicago recordings by 1927, and so that sign on the ATC set was fully appropriate. You can find an interesting article on the subject here.

So, gotcha denied. But what if I had been right, and the sign had been anachronistic? Would it have mattered?

Historically, yes, but in terms of August Wilson’s drama, no. Indeed, it would have to have been a much different play if everybody, including the white studio managers, had to cluster around a single recording horn. It’s extremely important to the characters’ social relations that the white engineers be segregated from the black musicians (significantly, on ATC’s set, they’re in a booth, godlike, high above the studio floor). That would be possible only with the advent of microphones and cables and separate recording consoles. Even if Wilson had been wrong about recording history—and he was not—he would have been right dramatically.