Song: Slave to the Blues / Oh My Babe Blues
Artist: Ma Rainey and her Georgia Band
Record Label: Paramount 12332
Recorded: ca. December 1925
Location: Project V13 teaser
A rare song from a rare label. Here’s “Slave to the Blues” presented by the infamous Paramount Records label. Regrettably due to both its age and the somewhat non-standard practices of recording and pressing at the label, the audio quality leaves something to be desired, but I have tried to clear up some of the noise.
This year is rather auspicious as it is the 10 year anniversary of the 2010 teaser for Project V13 on the Fallout website and also the recent release of a new film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom on Netflix. This record happens to have been made two years before the recording session depicted in the film.
When logging into the now-defunct Fallout Online website, players were greeted with a series of Polaroid photographs being tossed onto the table offering shots of buildings and concept art while this song emanates from the glowing record player and radio combination console on the right.
Recorded in late 1925 in the winter, this song is one of the few songs from the 1920s used in Fallout and would have been the oldest recording used in the series.
A period Chicago Defender print ad for Ma Rainey’s “Bessemer Bound Blues”, recorded during the same session. Also listed are other Paramount Record titles.
Born Gertrude Pridgett, though otherwise known as Ma Rainey, she lived a fairly colorful life rife with intrigue and rumor. Even her birthplace is uncertain with various sources giving credit to Alabama or Georgia.
As her named suggests, she is dubbed the “Mother of the Blues”, combining elements of vaudeville and early “jass” (later spelled as jazz). She and her husband William “Pa” Rainey toured extensively throughout the South in the 1900s and 1910s with live performances in minstrel shows and vaudeville. It’s around this time she coined the term “blues” to describe her music as well as developing a relationship with Bessie Smith, also up and coming.
Though demand for recordings by black musicians was high, the color barrier meant that Rainey was not able to be shellacked until 1923 by signing with Paramount.
While she recorded with many jazz stars of the day and made over one hundred recordings with Paramount, the film focuses on her last years with the label which would also go bankrupt by the 1930s.
Regrettably, there are comparatively few photos of Ma Rainey, but her voice still echoes from the grooves.
Left: A still of the 1984 Broadway cast, Center: A Playbill for “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”, Right: A reverse shot of the same scene from inside the recording room from the 2020 film
Strictly speaking, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is not an biographical film, but rather a restaging of the 1984 August Wilson play of the same name which dramatizes a 1927 recording session in Chicago. Many of the scenes take place outside of the recording room and focuses on conversations between the band members. With the exception of Ma Rainey herself, while the roles of the musicians, the recording engineer and so on undoubtedly existed, the characters are largely fictional.
The title refers to a song and dance of the same name, and of course Ma Rainey’s version of it as yet to be recorded until near the end of the story. The above record label represents the central MacGuffin which is never directly seen in the film, but drives the plot forward. While much has been said about the characters portrayed in the film including the last film role of Chadwick Boseman, here’s a closer look at one of the more muted mechanical stars of the 1920s recording process documented in the film.
Triptych of a heat wave: an electric fan, an ice-cold 5¢ bottle of Coca-Cola, and a box of discarded lacquer discs.
A slight change to the script of the play is the changing of the setting from winter to summer as foreheads glisten with perspiration. While dialing up the oppressive heat brings more prominence to the electric fan and Coca-Cola scenes (the character Levee also attempts to repeatedly open a door for ventilation), the original recording session for “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” was in the winter of 1927. Perhaps the winter release of the Netflix film was meant to be a reminder.
This also has an impact on the recording session itself. The film depicts the recording session using smooth black lacquer discs (sometimes called acetate discs though they do not contain that material). As the recording engineer tosses the bad takes into the bin, it shows they are thin metal discs covered with a thin layer of nitrocellulose lacquer.
Industry films showing wax blanks used to make the initial recording before heading to the plating process. Note how the wax is polished to a shine, the disc is thicker, and of a lighter color than lacquer. The text intertitles indicate silent film footage. The first three rows date to the 1920s with the third for a Columbia Records pressing plant. The last row is a film from the 1940s showing RCA Victor still using wax recording blanks. All are for shellac 78 rpm records as the vinyl LP would be introduced in 1948.
Industry films showing lacquer covered blanks used to make the initial recording before heading to the plating process. Note how the blanks are glossy black and much thinner. The first row is from the late 1930s showing lacquer discs being used to eventually cut shellac 78s for Variety Records. 1948 would bring the invention of the vinyl LP and more common color footage. The second row shows updated footage from RCA Victor in the 1950s now using lacquer discs to press newly invented vinyl LPs. The last row also shows lacquer blanks for Capitol Records. If you don’t recognize Mel Blanc’s face, you may recognize his voice from innumerable Looney Tunes cartoons.
Contemporary film footage from record pressing plants during the 1920s more commonly show thicker one-inch discs made of wax being used in the record lathe. Lacquer discs were more commonly used in the decades following.
A wax disc would have melted in the sultry summer of Chicago which gets as hot as it does cold in the winter. While it was easy to keep a wax disc warm, cooling technology had not progressed so far during that period. Many of Ma Rainey’s recording sessions appear to have been made in the winter or at least the cooler months in Chicago and New York. A humorous anecdote about a 1930s Bob Wills recording session details packing the wax master recordings on couple hundred pounds of ice to beat the Texas heat.
Though phonograph cylinders were made of wax a few decades prior, these wax discs made during the recording process was the origin of the term “spinning wax” popularized by disc-jockeys.
Regardless of wax or lacquer, this recording is extremely fragile and unable to be played very much. Similar to today, the process still continues to metal plating where multiple more durable metal copies are mirrored before eventually stamping out the right side up grooves into a vinyl slab, or more appropriate for the era depicted in this film, a shellac record.
Production designer Mark Ricker called the record lathe the “fifth star of the movie”. There are scant details about where they obtained the record lathe except it was from a recreator in the Los Angeles area. It is possibly related to the work of Nicholas Bergh who had restored a working 1920s record lathe which was featured in the documentary film series American Epic. The series explores this period of early recorded music and the people in front of and behind the microphone including Ma Rainey. In addition, contemporary artists attempt to adapt their music to the rigors, quirks, and restrictions of a 1920s recording studio. Jack White also produced on the film as well as producing the extensive Rise and Fall of Paramount Records box sets. Admittedly, the two machines aren’t a perfect match, but there is a very similar brass weight driving the entire mechanism which spectacularly snaps and crashes to the floor in a recording session.
With lacquer discs being used to preserve radio broadcasts by the late 1930s, it is likely the record lathe was adapted to work with lacquer discs since they are still in use today and more common to come by than wax discs.
Also notable during the session is that all the instruments and the vocalist share one microphone. The request for a second microphone was likely for dramatic effect. Similar to the acoustic era, the early electric microphone era were still experimenting with proper placement. It is a testament to the power of Ma Rainey’s voice that it can be picked out amongst the surface noise as the instruments and vocals move in and out of focus.
These were the days before the invention of magnetic tape and a substantially reduced recording booth without hulking amplifiers, control boards, and tape machines reflects that. Multi-track recording, overdubbing, or even audio editing was very difficult to accomplish in the pre-tape era. One microphone, one take, and direct to disc, otherwise the recording had to be done over.
While wax could be remelted or perhaps shaved, a flubbed take on a lacquer disc could not. Despite what some of the characters say, 6, 7, 8, 9 takes for the first song of a set-list would be expensive. Paramount would go bankrupt in the following years.
Paramount Records had a storied history nearly rivaling Ma Rainey herself though the record itself largely serves as the MacGuffin in the story. While the name of the record label was never directly mentioned in the film, there are some loose references. The advertising placards around the door mention offerings from a chair factory which Paramount originated. The Wisconsin Chair Company added making phonograph cabinets to its list of operations before delving into making their own phonographs and a record label in 1918.
Like Ma Rainey’s manager, the roles of the recording engineer and the record producer were likely combined into one character, Sturdyvant of Hot Rhythm Recordings, as the sign outside says.
Due to the popularity of the “race records”, Paramount had actually rented or owned recording studios in New York, Chicago, and in Wisconsin. Jay Mayo Williams or “Ink” Williams served as an unofficial liaison between Paramount and the African-American community, even convincing Ma Rainey to record for the label.
However, the label was plagued by low-quality pressings and inconsistent recording practices. Some records even have other songs heard in neighboring rooms. Williams would leave to produce his own record label Black Patti and later was head of the race records department at Decca.
The coming of the 1930s and the Great Depression spelled the end for Paramount Records. Employees were let go or reportedly paid in the metal record masters. Though many were sold for scrap metal, local rumor has the disgruntled employees throwing the masters into the Milwaukee River.
As a result, much of the Paramount Records catalog has become exceedingly rare or outright lost to the ages.
As a coda, a final scene was added to the film which was not present in the original play. A white orchestra plays a restrained version of a composition heard earlier by the Levee character. The bandleader is not named, but strongly resembles Paul Whiteman, one of the most recorded of the dance bands of the day. His trademark mustache and oval head were frequently caricatured even on his own record labels. Though he never recorded for Paramount, he was at the Victor and Columbia labels at the time, in addition to the circumstances of the recording session in the film there is an added layer referring to the background of his controversial self-styled moniker “The King of Jazz”.
Listen to the flip side “Oh My Babe Blues” here.
