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After the death of John Lumsden in 1898 and Benjamin Starr in 1903, Henry Gennett assumed leadership of the prosperous company. Henry Gennett’s oldest son, Harry, was Vice-President, and his middle son, Clarence, was treasurer. Fred Gennett, the youngest of Henry's three sons, was employed as secretary. In 1915 the Starr Piano Company decided to venture into the growing market for phonographs and records, which slowly began to replace sheet music and player piano rolls as the preferred format for popular music. With the construction of a New York recording studio and the manufacture of a Starr-made phonograph, Henry Gennett established a record division to produce discs as early as 1916. These early records featured a green Starr label. In 1917 the company constructed a building in the Whitewater Gorge factory complex that was devoted to the manufacture of phonographs and records.

In American Record Labels and Companies, coauthors Allan Sutton and Kurt Nauck explain:

[The Gennett label was] introduced in October 1917 by the Starr Piano Company as successor to its Starr label. Gennett took its name from Starr executives [Henry,] Fred, Harry, and Clarence. The Starr Piano Company filed a belated trademark application of the Gennett brand on August 3, 1920, claiming use since January 1917 on phonographs, but the application made no mention of Gennett records.

 

Like their predecessors, the first Gennett releases were fine-groove, vertically-cut discs. Early Gennett label designs were very plain, but in 1920 Starr introduced a hexagonal design with an elaborate scrollwork border that would remain in use for the next seven years. The more expensive Art Tone Gennett label was at first used rather indiscriminately for material ranging from dance numbers and brass band selections to classical and operatic excerpts. Eventually the Art Tone label evolved into a concert and operatic series. Despite its premium price, Art Tone generally offered little more than familiar snippets by studio free-lancers and obscure concert performers. The early catalog was dominated by Helen Ware’s violin solos. By 1923 the Art Tone label had given way to what were listed in the Talking Machine World Advance Record Bulletins simply as “Gennett Green-Label Records,” a premium-priced series that relied heavily on readily available studio performers like Charles Hart, Henry Moeller, and Frederic Baer.

 

Starr converted to lateral recording in early 1919, and for several months Gennett discs were offered in both formats before the vertical cut was finally abandoned in the summer of 1919. Starr’s announcement that it was producing lateral discs, made in the Talking Machine World for March 15, 1919, triggered a lawsuit by the Victor Talking Machine Company (Victor Talking Machine Co. v. Starr Piano Co., 263 F. 82) in which Victor alleged that Starr had infringed Eldridge Johnson’s patent #896,059. The case was finally decided in Starr’s favor by the U.S. Supreme Court in an October 1922 decision that held the Johnson patent to be essentially worthless. (86-87)

Text © 2000 by Allan R. Sutton; All Rights Reserved

The two major record companies of the period, Victor and Columbia, had an agreement regarding the superior lateral cut technology that extracted licensing fees from any other company wishing to produce lateral cut records. The Starr Piano Company did not pay the licensing fee upon release of its first lateral cut records in 1919, which explains the patent infringement lawsuit filed by the Victor Talking Machine Company. The decision in favor of the Starr Piano Company would help create opportunities for various small record labels to enter the lucrative market for lateral recordings without paying the fee. Many of these labels recorded diverse styles of early American popular music (often for the first time), and the availability of lateral technology helped encourage these labels to release more recordings. The Starr Company’s successful defense against Victor’s charges ended up diversifying the music industry and setting the stage for continued industry development, which furthered the spread of early popular music.

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