The rise and fall of Ace Records: a case study in the independent record business.

The Rise and Fall of Ace Records: A Case Study in the Independent Record Business

The record industry in the United States was controlled until

the 1950s by a half dozen major companies, which produced

music directed primarily toward the white middle class. The

following article uses the history of Ace Records, a small,

regional, independent company, to examine the nature of the

record industry in the 1950s and 1960s. The article explains

the shifts in demography and technology that made possible

the growth of the independents, as well as the obstacles and

events that made their demise more likely. It also traces the

changes that such companies, by recording and promoting

rhythm and blues and early rock 'n' roll, introduced to the

cultural mainstream.

Ace Records was one of the small, independent record companies that served as catalysts for the rock 'n' roll revolution in the music business during the 1950s. These companies developed the national market for rhythm and blues (R&B) and rock 'n' roll. They democratized the music business by bringing previously neglected songwriters, musicians, and ethnic and regional groups into the national record market. In the process, they dramatically increased the dollar volume of record sales and took control of the Billboard Top Ten rankings. The music establishment initially fought these changes through publicity campaigns, lawsuits, and congressional hearings, but, unable to stem the tide, by the late 1950s and early 1960s the large record corporations were also recording rock 'n' roll. They often moderated its rawness and energy with a standardized and "whiter" sound, and they coopted many of the stars of the independent companies or the companies themselves. Few of the independents survived this exercise of corporate muscle, but they played an important role in the history of the phonograph record business.

In spite of the importance of the independent record companies, few have been studied.(1) The literature has focused on the musicians and their songs and provides essentially anecdotal information about the company owners. Charlie Gillett's The Sound of the City contains the most complete information on the independents but, given the scope of the book, does not examine any in great detail.(2) Business files are not readily available. Independents were often owned by one person, who was necessarily more concerned with selling records in a very competitive market than with preserving data for historians. Files were lost; owners died or left the music business. Even the documentation on Ace Records, whose owner is alive and marginally active in the music industry, is sparse, for a fire and a leaky roof destroyed most of the Ace files, and others have been lost since 1963, when the company ceased to be a factor in the music business. Enough information about Ace is available, however, to give scholars a better understanding of the independent record company in the 1950s and, through it, of the rise of rock 'n' roll.

The Ace story is worth telling for other reasons as well. Most successful independents were based in heavily populated U.S. cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where there were large numbers of black people to whom they could sell blues and R&B records. King Records of Cincinnati was one exception, and Ace was an even more improbable major player. It was located in highly segregated Jackson, Mississippi, and owned by an ambitious white Mississippi entrepreneur who could neither read music nor play an instrument. Ace used New Orleans, with its rich tradition of black music, as its recording site, pioneering as that city's first successful local record company and providing experience and opportunity to New Orleans musicians, black and white, who would continue to record long after Ace was defunct. Ace followed the pattern of many independent labels in first recording the blues, migrating to R&B (or black rock 'n' roll), and then trying to compete with the major companies by recording teen idols. For both its typical and its unique characteristics, therefore, Ace Records is a useful case study of success and failure in the music business.

Other factors besides the entrepreneurial talents of the independent record company owners created the conditions necessary for the companies' emergence into the popular music mainstream. The nature of the music business, technological changes in the reproduction of sound, the transformation of radio, and the rising economic power of adolescents all played a role.

The Music Business before Rock 'n' Roll

Six major record companies (Columbia, RCA, Decca, Capitol, MGM, and Mercury) dominated the record business in the late 1940s and the early 1950s; of the 163 records that sold over one million copies, all but 5 were recorded by one of the major record companies. The largest two, Columbia and RCA, each sold 25 percent of all records; these two, plus Decca and Capitol, placed over 75 percent of all the records listed in the Billboard top sellers chart.(3) Their initial refusal to record true rock 'n' roll and R&B cost them this dominance (see Figure 1).

Columbia and RCA, the giants of the business, promoted their records over CBS and NBC, their radio and television broadcasting networks. The majors, so defined because they had their own recording studios and distribution systems, produced for whites who could afford home entertainment and who also constituted the cultural mainstream of the post-Second of Composers, Artists, and Publishers (ASCAP), represented the economic and cultural interests of the white, middle-and upper-class urban elites, who valued the European secular and religious musical traditions. Early in the twentieth century, they had condemned jazz for its African and African American origins and, after Jewish composers such as Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Ira Gershwin began incorporating jazz into popular songs, as being Jewish.(4) In time, however, this new music acquired respectability as show tunes and white jazz gained popularity, and the popular music establishment defended this new orthodoxy against the perceived threats of "hillbilly," blues, R&B, and rock 'n' roll music.

Neither ASCAP nor the major record companies had much interest in music created and performed by ordinary people, especially that which could be identified with an unpopular ethnic or regional group. Southern music (blues, R&B, rock 'n' roll, rockabilly, and country music) was considered too primitive and inappropriate. This was also true of the urban blues (electric guitar blues such as that of Chicago or rhythm and blues), which had its origins in the South, and of Hispanic-American music. Cultural elitism, with its accompanying paternalism, was the ruling variable. The gatekeepers were, in their view, keeping the "riffraff" out and preserving the integrity of what they believed to be the "proper" American culture. Billy Rose, an ASCAP member, eloquently expressed the attitudes of many members of his organization in 1956 testimony before a congressional investigating committee:

Not only are most of the BMI [Broadcast Music, Inc.] songs junk,

but in many cases they are obscene junk pretty much on the level with

dirty comic magazines. . . . It is the current climate on radio and TV

which makes Elvis Presley and his animal posturings possible. . . .

When ASCAP's songwriters were permitted to be heard, Al Jolson,

Nora Bayes, and Eddie Cantor were all big salesmen of songs. Today

it is a set of untalented twitchers and twisters whose appeal is largely

due to the zootsuiter and the juvenile delinquent.(5)

Both rural southern whites and rural and urban blacks were treated as marginal groups. Because these two groups did buy some records, the majors had subsidiary record labels to appeal to rural southern whites ("hillbilly music") and to blacks ("race" music until 1948 when it was renamed "rhythm and blues" in order to give less offense), but this market was too small to draw much corporate attention. When shellac shortages occurred during the Second World War, the majors abandoned these minority markets in order to concentrate on the more profitable white, middle-class market. The independents filled the gaps, aided by the social and technological changes created by the war.(6)

By 1950, the music establishment had yielded a bit on country music but not at all on black music. Southern white outmigration into northern and western industrial cities spread the geographical scope of country music. During the Second World War, country music was so popular with U.S. soldiers, regardless of regional origin, that the majors released a limited number of country songs, often first converting them into the mainstream style. It was relatively easy for ASCAP to accept a few country music songwriters (who were white) into its ranks, but blues and R&B were usually excluded. Although jazz had become respectable, the genre had little mass appeal. The "acceptable" black singers, such as Nat King Cole, the Mills Brothers, and Sarah Vaughn, sang in a white style.

A self-defeating act by ASCAP in 1940-41 created unusual opportunities for independent record companies. Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) was created by radio station owners in 1940 to license music that ASCAP would not license. Both organizations licensed songs for airplay, collected royalties, and distributed proceeds to the copyright owners. Unlike ASCAP, BMI was willing to let any songwriter or publisher join, thus opening the gates to the musicians rejected by ASCAP. BMI grew in importance when ASCAP, in a gambit to increase royalty rates dramatically, boycotted radio stations for most of 1941; BMI songs replaced ASCAP songs.(7)

ASCAP favored long-established songwriters and publishers, for it distributed only 20 percent of the royalties in a given year to the people whose songs created those royalties; the remainder were distributed to persons whose songs had been popular in the past but were no longer. Such a system made it very difficult for a new songwriter or publisher to survive on royalties but provided a steady income for those who had been long-standing members of the "club."(8)

ASCAP controlled the bulk of American popular music between the society's founding in 1912 and the 1940s. ASCAP decided who could belong to the organization. Each music publisher had one vote for each $500 in royalties earned in the preceding year. By 1958 three music publishing companies controlled 51 percent of the publishers' vote. Writers got one vote for each $20 in royalties earned in the preceding year; in 1958, less than 5 percent of the writers controlled 51 percent of the writers vote. Since writers depended on music publishers, the latter held the power.(9) ASCAP instigated lawsuits and congressional hearings in an unsuccessful effort to weaken BMI and, in the process, to beat back the rise of rhythm and blues and rock 'n' roll. That seems to have been the primary motivation of the payola hearings of 1960, for the argument throughout the hearings was that R&B and rock 'n' roll would never be played on radio (and thus records sold) were it not for bribery on the part of the independents.(10)

The Impact of Technology and Demography

Technological Change * Technological changes enabled small companies to enter the market and, ultimately, to revolutionize the music business. The majors had controlled the market because they had the capital necessary to own and operate the studios and the expensive disk recording and cutting equipment. Performers were recorded directly onto master disks. Without access to such machines, which few could afford, one could not make records. One result of the Second World War, however, was the acquisition of tape recording technology from the Germans in 1945. Small businesses could afford tape recorders; portable machines meant that one could record anywhere. One's "recording studio" could be and often was a storefront office. Mastering and pressing plants rarely operated at full capacity and liked the little jobs that took up some of the slack.

In the late 1940s, recording industry engineers discovered how to overcome the limitations of the 78 RPM disk, the standard until the early 1950s; in doing so, they inadvertently helped the small companies. The 78 RPM record was fragile, low fidelity, and limited to ten minutes of playing time on each side. Listening to a classical work, a Broadway show, or a movie soundtrack, the kind of music the majors and ASCAP liked, meant tolerating poor sound quality and frequent interruptions. Peter Goldmark of Columbia solved these problems by inventing the microgroove plastic record, which produced high fidelity sound. Goldmark's team also had to invent better microphones and loudspeakers to match the higher quality sound. Columbia created the 33 1/3 RPM Long Playing (LP) record. To compete with Columbia's new LPs, RCA developed the 45 RPM plastic record, which produced even better fidelity than the LP. To market this new record, RCA sold the necessary record changers or record players below cost and used them as promotional prizes, virtually giving them away in order to sell the records. Since the 45 RPM …