Songs for the Swan

by “The Fat Cat” (Matthew Rivera)

An ad reads: “Every time you buy a Black Swan record you buy the only record made by colored people.” It was true, and it worked, until it wasn’t true.

Black Swan was not the first Blackowned record label (that would be Broome Records, founded in 1919), but its scale and popularity far outsized that of any similar ventures. Black Swan was one of the most successful Black businesses of its day, record company or not (Davis and De Loo, 1), and W.E.B. DuBois was on its board of directors. The Black Swan story, then, is as much about changes in music as it is about changes in Black politics and culture during the vital period of its existence from 1921 to 1923. Musically, these were liminal years between the Blues Craze that Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” sparked in 1920 and the new-found musical depths of Bessie Smith’s “Down Hearted Blues” in 1923. They were also turbulent Post-War years, as DuBois’s Black sovereignty and Marcus Garvey’s Black Nationalism contrasted Booker T. Washington’s directives for assimilation. Harlem was becoming the epicenter of Black America, and it was there that Harry

Pace, former business partner of W.C. Handy, established the Pace Phonograph Company, issuing the recordings he made in his basement office at 257 West 138th Street on the Black Swan label.

With over 200 songs released on double sided 78rpm records, Black Swan had the largest catalog of any Blackowned label until Vee-Jay in the ‘50s. It also had a remarkably diverse catalog, recording not only Jazz and Blues, but spirituals, Black classical musicians, and even some West Indian music. It launched the career of the pivotal pianist and bandleader Fletcher Henderson, who had come to Manhattan to study chemistry at Columbia but took a career turn when he became the label’s music director. Ethel Waters rose to fame through Black Swan, her “Down Home Blues” selling over 100,000 copies. Waters and Henderson both made history as the first African Americans to broadcast over radio during a national tour to promote Black Swan in 1922. It was on this same tour that Henderson heard a young New Orleans cornet player named Louis Armstrong some two years before Louis would join Henderson’s orchestra and take New York by storm.

Early 1922 was the peak of Black Swan’s pride and optimism: “We are so thoroughly established in the hearts of those who regularly buy Black Swan Records that we are bound to secure, with your cooperation, the fullest opportunity for our own music and musicians”

(Black Swan Ad, New York Age, January 21, 1922, 6).

But by the summer of 1923 Black Swan had essentially folded. The label’s early success put Pace in a bind: sales were outnumbering his manufacturing capacities, and the large record plants refused to take his orders. Perhaps a journalist at the New York Age had this difficulty in mind when they reported Black Swan surviving “keen, unscrupulous, underhanded, malicious and persistent opposition from several of the large white companies in the record industry” (January 28, 1922, 6). Pace resorted to pressing records in Wisconsin with the New York Recording Laboratory, a company that owned a small label called Paramount. Meanwhile, the big labels were hiring Black recording directors to begin their own segregated “Race” catalogs, and Pace made his most fateful decision: partnering with a white businessman named John Fletcher, who become the new president of the company in the spring of 1922. Fletcher owned the Olympic Disc Record Corporation and could guarantee an increase in manufacturing, but under his leadership Black Swan began to issue pseudonymous recordings of white artists. Black Swan had officially foreclosed on its initial purpose of recording “our own music and musicians.”

Part triumph, part tragedy, part mystery, Black Swan’s own records tell the story best. The differences between Black Swan’s artists and artists on other contemporary “Race Record” catalogs is one illustration of what made the label unique. The twist is that Paramount—the small label owned by the very company Pace had initially used to press Black Swan—became the behemoth of the Race Record industry starting in late 1923. The tent-posts of its catalog—Ma Rainey, Papa Charlie Jackson, and Blind Lemon Jefferson—would never escape the Race label. Ethel Waters and Fletcher Henderson, however, would appear in both Race and the mainstream catalogs of the white companies (Waters on Columbia, Henderson on just about everything).

One of the stories Black Swan tells us then is about a music and people on the move. Moving where? Listen: “Woke up this morning / the day was dawning / I had nobody to tell my troubles to,” Ethel Waters sings on “Down Home Blues.” Maybe you’ve heard this before, but can you say where?

The voice is fierce in its solitude, confident in its strength, but where racism suggests Blackness has a place to be put, this music complicates the very idea of place itself.

The music lives in the ears that find it.