Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music.(Book review)

Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music. by David Suisman. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 20009. 356 pp. ISBN 978-0-674-03337-5. Cloth.

I am greatly relieved that Dr. Suisman, who teaches in the History Department at the University of Delaware, resists a purely chronological, fact-based approach to this fascinating, complicated, important topic. Instead Suisman topical approach embraces a wide range and variety of topics, ranging from player-pianos to Tin Pan Alley to the ever-changing nature of the music industry. Selling Sounds also takes a refreshingly inter-disciplinary approach as the author draws upon the writings and documents produced by attorneys (copyright laws), music historians (Enrico Caruso), and contemporary cultural critics (the internet).

Not surprisingly, the author has coedited [with fellow University of Delaware history professor^ Susan Strasser] a wideranging collection that nicely complements Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music. Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) contains an eclectic mix including "'Her Voice a Bullet''': Imaginary Propaganda and the Legendary Broadcasters of World War II" by Ann Elizabeth Pfau and David Hochfelder and "Collectors, Bootleggers, and the Value of Jazz, 1930 1952" by Alex Cummings. History departments, it would seem, have changed greatly since I bailed out of a history undergraduate program in the early 1970s because they told me that oral histories, field research (indeed, anything not written in a scholarly book or journal article), and music weren't elements that constituted the proper study of "real history." Indeed.

Selling Sounds doesn't contain much original research, per say, but it's rife with interesting comparisons, observations, and analysis that draw from a wide range of previously published sources. Suisman owes a tip of the hat to scholars as diverse as Tim Brooks for his book, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919 (University of Illinois Press, 2004) and Lawrence Levine, who wrote Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Harvard University Press, 1988). In addition to these acknowledged classic books, Selling Sounds also learned from the writings of journalist and record collector Jim Walsh, whose scores of articles on pioneering recording artists appeared in Hobbies magazine beginning in 1952 and continuing until 1985. Suisman doesn't always live in the past as he also cites Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (University of California Press, 2004) for a more contemporary assessment of the digital age.

Selling Sounds doesn't merely explore the recording industry but also examines the commodification of sounds as reproduced on sheet music, mechanically reproducing pianos, music publishing. Suisman study begins during the 1880s and carries forth into the 21st century. In Chapter 5, "Musical Properties," he writes about the varied issues related to intellectual property and copyright laws that first emerged as a national debate around 1900 and continues to the present day. Suisman points out that we are currently obligated to follow laws that are struggling to deal with the realities of digital sound, downloading, and a sea change in the recording industry that have been washing over sonic landscape since the early 1990s.

Throughout his book the author underscores the point that was once a highly fragmented sound industry that consisted of separate entities--radio, record companies, films, and television is now utterly entangled into what is now a far more centralized web of closely allied (and owned) companies and corporations. The recording industry had strong, very early ties to the District of Columbia, while the film industry quickly found a home in southern California. Today, however, these national and international entities thread across both all types of mediums and political boundaries to control much of what we hear today.

As a decades-long student of the sound industries, particularly of recordings and radio, I was particularly struck by Suisman's description of the roles played by song pluggers found on pages 58-75. I knew about the practice, of course, but I didn't understand the extent to which song pluggers helped to shape popular tastes during the teens and twenties. I also appreciated the "Epilogue" in which he describes "The Most Wanted Song" (an interesting 1996 collaboration between two conceptual artists and a composer) that serves to close the book back near where it begins Tin Pan Alley in New York City.

The virtues of Selling Sounds are numerous: clarity of writing, a multi-faceted approach to the subject, smart arguments, and depth of research. Its shortcomings are thankfully very few. Suisman draws upon black American musical culture so often (Chapter 7, "Black Swan" for example) that I sometimes wondered why the critical role of the quasi-hillbilly artist Vernon Dahlart played in selling sounds across the United States during the 1920s or a transitional figure such as Uncle Dave Macon didn't figure more prominently into this narrative. Indeed the role played by country music in participating and shaping our commercial sounds is strangely absent. This minor complaint aside, Selling Sounds remains an important, multi-layered book that holds great appeal to American music scholars with lowbrow to highbrow interests that extend from Reconstruction to the present day.