A Day in the Nation

Recording Card for "Daddy Swiped Our Last Clean Sheet and Joined the Ku Klux Klan" by Quartet.

"Daddy Swiped Our Last Clean Sheet and Joined the Ku Klux Klan,"from 1924, was one of the many songs that the Ku Klux Klan members recorded at Gennett Records’ studios in Richmond, Indiana, and New York City. While the owners of Gennett Records were not Ku Klux Klan members, they pressed thousands of Klan records because of their willingness to pay cash for the records.

Recording Card for "Snake Rag" by The King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band.

This is the recording card for King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band “Snake Rag.” Traveling from Chicago to Richmond, Indiana in 1923, it documents one of the first times that the King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band ever recorded. Member of the band at the time included Joe “King” Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Warren “Baby” Dodds. Other songs recorded during this time period included “Dippermouth Blues,” “Chimes Blues, “Just Gone,” and “Weather Bird Rag.”

Recording Card and Sounds Disc for "If Your Man Is Like My Man" by Mandy Lee and Ladd's Black Aces.

This recording card and sound disc for Mandy Lee and Ladd’s Black Aces’s "If Your Man Is Like My Man" from 1923 represents one of many jazz bands that recorded at the Richmond studios. Mandy Lee was an African American vocalist categorized by Gennett as a classic blues, jazz, and vaudeville singer. The Ladd’s Black Aces, also known as Original Memphis Five, was an all-white studio jazz band.

Who Was There

In 1922, the leader of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), one of the largest black organizations at the time, Marcus Garvey met with the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leaders in Atlanta, Georgia, to discuss ways in which they could continue racial separation in the United States. The meeting between the leaders of the two organization caused an uproar among other black leaders, because of the KKK’s history of violence toward black people. History has viewed this organized meeting as an outlier but have recognized that black people and KKK members met in more casual spaces. An African American woman, for example, might work as the maid for a local chapter’s Grand Wizard. However, black people and KKK members might have met in other locations where subordinate and dominant roles were not as well defined as black worker and white employer.

The recording cards of the Gennett Record Division of the Starr Piano Company demonstrate that black jazz performers recorded in the same studios and had records pressed by the same company as Ku Klux Klan musical groups, orators, and performers. Black performers and groups that recorded at Gennett studios in New York City and Richmond, Indiana, included King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, and Duke Ellington. At the other end of the spectrum, musical groups included the Logansport Ku Klux Klan Quartette who recorded “Women of the Ku Klux Klan” and the Quartet who recorded “Daddy Swiped Our Last Clean Sheet and Joined the Ku Klux Klan.” While owners of Gennett Records were not members of the KKK, they recorded and pressed their records because the KKK was willing to pay the fledging company much needed cash.

The roster of people and performers that recorded at the Gennett studios were not limited to black jazz artists and Ku Klux Klan quartets, but reflected the varied musical stylings and interests of people in the United States at the time as well as religious and political subjects. This included Italian operas, classical music, quartettes from Yale University, songs for children, and recordings of William Jennings Bryan’s speeches.

The diversity among the people, performers, and groups that recorded at Gennett Record studios in New York and Richmond leads one to ask, “Who crossed paths?” How did this possible interaction affect the way people viewed one another? Did Louis Armstrong have a run in with a Ku Klux Klan member? Answers to these questions may never be known. However, Gennett Records studios not only served as a site of cultural production and reproduction, but also was an important site of social interaction.

Kiron Johnson