Revisiting: Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (2009)by David Suisman

 Revisiting: Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (2009)by David Suisman

   I look back on a post like this one and I chuckle because... who is going to read this post on a blog? If you are going to write something this detailed, a blog is not the right place for it, even if it is your own blog.  Still, I was at my best here, really trying to write a post that had some substance and context. I was a couple years away from learning my lesson, that this type of writing wasn't interesting to anyone- the level of detail and complexity- just not the right tone for a blog, but when I look back on it it's like, "Wow- I wrote that?"

Published 7/22/10
Selling Sounds:
The Commercial Revolution in American Music
by David Suisman
p. 2009
Boston: Harvard University Press

   The strangest fact about this book is that there is another book called The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (2007) that covers much the same thematic territory.  I was also immediately reminded of That Moaning Saxophone: The Six Brown Brothers and the Dawning of a Musical Craze (2004).  All three books are an example of a renaissance in academic Interdisciplinary Studies.  The back covers of those three books provides an additional ten titles which all proceed from the same cross-disciplinary viewpoint.  I don't think ANY of the books or the books listed on the back cover would be considered a "hit" within the publishing world except for Lizabeth Cohen's A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. (2003)  All of these titles represent a break down between departments in American Universities as well as a move away from trends in cultural theory during the 1990s.  The happy result is the production of relevant knowledge in readable language.

      Like the other books listed, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music, selects different strands of music culture in the period between the end of the Civil War and the start of the First World War.  Really, the relevant time periods here (time periods are important) are 1880-1917 and 1918-1929 (Great Depression)  Like all of the books listed, Selling Sounds focuses wholly on the United States market.  Suisman's analysis is strong as far as it goes.  He uses the term 'culture industry' with comfort and his opening chapter on Tin Pan Alley is a tour-de-force.

    I think... the limits of this book are best expressed in the failure to introduce similar analysis of different groups of ideas that were "out there" at the same time during the course of the time periods here.  There was certainly a heavy exchange between Germany, France, The United Kingdom and the United States.  Specifically, one of the intellectual ideas that pre-dates the time period covered here is the "Folk Music" movement in EUROPE in the mid 19th century.

       I think the influence is especially salient when one considers the role of white European immigrants in the founding of record labels that specialized in African American folk music and jazz influenced popular music. This leads me to the other main omission in Selling Sounds, which is, by the way, an amazing book.  The second omission is any treatment of hillbilly music, the analogue to Suisman's focus on "Race Records" in this book.  There is hardly any overlap in the time periods covered in this book (1880s-1929ish) and the time period covered in Selling Sounds: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (1920-1970s.)  By the way- the overlap is "the invention of broadcast radio."

      As Selling Sounds eases into chapters on the recording career of Enrico Caruso and the lost history of the player piano, we move into familiar culture studies territories.  However, Suisman writes with a light hand and doesn't engage in debates of interest only to specialists.   A strong late chapter is his set piece on The Black Swan, the earliest substantial African American owned record label.  It's actually seemed to me that the book emerged out of that chapter, which has a somewhat clunkier theoretical apparatus then the rest of the book.  Also is the chunky conclusion, with a 'pointing out paradoxes' hook that left me yawning.

     I don't think you can talk about modern music culture without adding in the underlying folk culture.  Certainly, it might surprise a trans-Atlantic Professor of History that one would seek to write an account of a specific aspect of American Culture without discussing the impact of ideas generated wholly within Europe or the United Kingdom. Additionally, this is an example of what David Hackett Fischer calls the fallacy of presentism in his book Historians Fallacies: Towards a Logic of Historical Thought. Fischer defines the fallacy of presentism as

"a complex anachronism, in which the antecedent in a narrative series is falsified by being defined or interpreted in terms of the consequent.  Sometimes called the fallacy of nunc pro tunc, it is the mistaken idea that the proper way to do history is to prune away the dead branches of the past, and to preserve the green buds and twigs which have grown into the dark forest of our contemporary world." (FISCHER: 135.)

   This fallacy is demonstrated in the omissions I just pointed out.  African American influenced music dominates the contemporary landscape.  Meanwhile, the intellectual discussion over folk music as practiced in Germany and the United Kingdom in the mid 1850s is a footnote to a footnote to a footnote, studied perhaps only in the John Hopkins Department of Comparative Literature.

  I don't think you can explain the commercialization of American music in the 20th century without reference to, first, the folk music culture of regular people living outside major cities as it existed before the Civil War, and second, the impact of ideas about Folk Music on the development of ideas about Popular Music in the 20th century.  That's a pretty big subject though, so I'm going to give Suisman a pass and instead congratulate him on what is an excellent book, inside or outside the University knowledge production system.