The Race Records Boom

In August 1920, Mamie Smith recorded “Crazy Blues” for OKeh Records. It sold in the hundreds of thousands, mostly to Black buyers the industry had ignored, and every label scrambled to copy it. The catalogs they created were frankly named “race records” — recordings by Black artists, marketed to Black audiences, advertised in the Black press (Wald 2004).

The boom is the only reason most early blues exists in recorded form. Field units hauled equipment into Southern hotels and warehouses, recording whoever local scouts brought in: Charley Patton in 1929, Son House in 1930, Robert Johnson in 1936–37. The same expeditions recorded white Southerners for the parallel “hillbilly” catalogs — often the same week, in the same rooms.

This double catalog is the event that hard-coded segregation into the American music business. As Karl Hagstrom Miller shows, repertoire that Black and white Southerners had shared for generations was split by marketing category, not by sound; the labels decided that Black artists were “blues” and white artists were “country,” and a century of genre boundaries followed from that decision (Miller 2010). When this site calls blues and country siblings, this event is the wedge that separated them.