Record Cultures focuses on the development of the US recording industry during the pivotal 1920-1935 years, marked by a series of industrial, sociocultural and economic changes. Barnett deftly translates the dynamism of a diverse, largely experimental and unsettled industrial environment – illuminating the professional and personal lives of those connected to it (from talent scouts through to record labels’ owners, recording artists, radio hosts and listeners). Among its many themes and histories, the book retraces the energetic flourishing of independent record companies in the 1920s; the rush to capture and commoditise previously unrecorded vernacular music; the development of listening practices across media platforms; and the impact of the Great Depression on the organisation of the US recording industry. This multifaceted study draws from ‘classic’ cultural histories of the phonograph in the US (Read and Welch Reference Read and Welch1959; Gelatt Reference Gelatt1977) as well as from more contemporary analyses (Kenney Reference Kenney1999; Sterne Reference Sterne2003; Suisman Reference Suisman2009). Rather than replicating their contents, however, the book subtly modulates existing accounts through its reliance on extensive archival research (the author notably visited the Starr-Gennett Foundation and the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound of The New York Public Library, as well as many county archives). Throughout, the histories of individual record labels are concretely connected to both the everyday trajectories of sound recording technologies and the reception of key individual recordings of the period, such as Mamie Smith's 1920 hit “Crazy Blues”.

Barnett's agenda is two-fold. His first ambition is of an historiographical nature as the author seeks to resituate the US recording industry within ‘a larger media formation that included film and radio’ (p. 30). Within this context, the US recording industry is understood as ‘the earliest consolidation of entertainment media (predated only by the telecommunication consolidation of the telegraph and telephone industries)’ (p. 9), pointing to an early and exemplary moment of what Henry Jenkins (Reference Jenkins2006) termed ‘media convergence’ (in this regard, it is surprising that the theses of Jenkins, an important thinker of intermediality, are not explicitly discussed in Record Cultures). Not only was phonography part of a larger media formation, but recorded sound also played a foundational role in the structuring of other media, as Barnett claims that ‘[s]ound recordings have long been both the raw material used by and for other media of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and an industry all its own’ (p. 10). Recorded sound has the ‘ability to define intermedial relationships across contexts’ (p. 10), and Barnett explores how sound was incessantly displaced, ‘cannibalised’ (Young Reference Young2006) and remediated by newer media in the 1920s and 1930s. The novelty of the approach reveals usually overlooked connections between recorded sound, film and the radio, presenting the recording industry as porous and underlining its open-ended and connective character. As such, the ‘expansion’ proposed by Record Cultures is geographical – emphasising as it does regional, and particularly rural, aspects – as well as theoretical, calling for a widened understanding of the recording industry as a media industry ‘as opposed to the larger definitional scope of “the music industry”’ (p. 33).

The second ambition of the book is to highlight the role that record companies played in the fashioning and consolidating of musical genres, understood both as a marketing and ideological category, in the interwar period. The three emerging genres identified and analysed by Barnett are jazz, ‘race records’ (later blues), and ‘old-time music’ (later known as ‘hillbilly’ and ‘country’). Of particular interest is Barnett's conceptualisation of record companies as filtering agents, and his analysis of the processes by which racial segregation was replicated and magnified in the catalogues of record labels (which, apart from the Harlem-based Black Swan Records, were mostly owned by white entrepreneurs), where ‘foreign’ records had ‘separate matrix series and catalogs of their own’ (p. 98). The cultural ambivalence of sound recordings is highlighted: as well as contributing to reinforcing and standardising racist discourses, records could promote racial emancipation, political awareness and societal change.

The double agenda outlined by Barnett in the introductory chapter is reflected in the structure of the book. While the first three chapters attend to the industrial formation of genres, the last two insist on the metamorphosis and hybridisation of recorded sound in the 1920s and 1930s – exploring the specific contribution of sound recordings to other media industries, up until and after the Great Depression. Each chapter, starting from different premises, relates a different story. The earlier chapters offer situated accounts of record labels including Gennett, OKeh, Victor and Paramount. The last chapters, which are broader in scope, survey the changing relationships between the recording, radio and film industries through case studies of emerging ‘intermedial stars’ such as Paul Whiteman and Louis Armstrong, and examine the turbulent status of the phonographic trade in the aftermath of the Great Crash. What the author offers is a dynamic and nuanced panorama of the US recording industry in the 1920s and 1930s, highlighting its complexities, inconsistencies and inner contradictions. One of the main merits of Barnett's book lies in its refusal to homogenise or flatten phonographic history. Rather, it pays close attention to regional specificities, cultural tensions and differentiated industrial practices, while remaining keenly aware of wider moments and movements of convergence. This makes for a diverse, valuable and original companion to existing histories of the phonograph in the US, opening promising avenues for the study of recorded sound in an intermedial and intertemporal context, as ‘always already new’ (Gitelman Reference Gitelman2008).