In the early 1920's working showboats still cruised the great rivers of the South and Midwest, like the Ohio, The Tennessee, and The Kanawha, and many of them featured string bands for their entertainment. One such band was the Tweedy Brothers, a trio of brothers from Wheeling, West Virginia, who used twin fiddles, accompanied by a piano, to play old breakdowns like "Old Aunt Dinah Get Your Nightcap On." In the fall of 1924, though, the boys, were traveling overland with a little folding organ in place of a piano. One afternoon they found themselves playing the county fair at Richmond, Indiana; in a 1976 interview, the piano player, Charles, recalled what happened.

"There was a man named Harry Gennett at the fair; he was high up in that Starr Piano Company, and he heard us play and thought it would be a good idea to have us over to record. So in January we did, playing into that old horn. They liked our records so much that they eventually gave us a new piano to carry around with us, for advertising. It had our names on it, and then it said, 'Donated by the Starr Piano Company. Richmond, Indiana."

Though they didn't know it at the time, The Tweedy Brothers, when they entered the Richmond studio on January 15, 1925, were one of the first really professional country bands, and the first one to record for Gennett. To be sure, the company had recorded several sides by fiddler William B. Houchens in 1922, and a few by the New York based studio singer Vernon Dalhart in late 1924, but it was only with the Tweedys that they discovered what would soon be marketed as "Old Time Music." The big major companies in New York, like Columbia and Victor, had been tentatively exploring this scene for a year, and finding a solid market for this music in the South and Midwest.

Between 1925 and 1934, the Gennett company issued around 323 records of old-time country music. They included the first recordings of some of the biggest names in the business: Gene Autry, later to win fame as a Hollywood singing cowboy but who recorded for Gennett a series of songs in imitation of his idol, Jimmie Rodgers; Bradley Kincaid, the "Kentucky Mountain Boy" who for years was one of radio's first stars, singing his trademark "Barbara Allen" over Chicago and later Boston stations; and Doc Roberts, one of the South's most influential fiddlers. In between were dozens of lesser known singers and string bands whose music is considered today the best and purest on commercial phonograph records. Some of the best include Dacosta Woltz's Southern Broadcasters, from Galax, Virginia; Ted Gossett's fiddle band from the coal fields of western Kentucky; the driving Young Brothers band from down near Chattanooga; and the mysterious and still untraced string band known only as "Sharp, Hinman, and Sharp." Even today many of these sides have been reissued on LP and CD.

By January 1928 Gennett had released enough old time records to issue a special catalogue of then, entitled New Electrobeam Gennett Records of Old Time Tunes; it was a 20-page document with photos of some of the company's "stars" like banjoist Chubby Parker, The Short Creek Trio, Doc Roberts, and Holland Puckett, and lists of their releases.  Most of these were issued in the 6000 numerical series. And though the Gennett issues were at first the "original" issue, many country records were later issued on "stencil" labels such as Challenge, Silvertone, Champion, Supertone, many of which were sold by chain stores and mail order giants like Sears. Many of the musicians I interviewed who recorded for Gennett recalled that the stencil labels often sold far more than the Gennetts, and that they got the bulk of the royalties from there.

Though Gennett later attracted musicians from all over the South, two sources were especially important to the series. One was the popular radio show "The National Barn Dance" over WLS in nearby Chicago, who provided many of visitors to the Richmond studio. A second source was the Kentucky--Southern Ohio region, which had attracted very few "field" sessions from the major companies, and for which Richmond was the closest place to record. One of the company's chief talent scouts was a man from eastern Kentucky named Dennis Taylor, who found musicians, rehearsed them, and then brought them up to the studio -- all for a cut of the royalties.

The result of all this was a very significant and unappreciated body of recordings that helped lay the foundation for modern country music.

Author:  Charles K. Wolfe

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