Sunday, February 16, 2:00 pm, Monthly Program
A Program for Black History Month:
Black Swan Records and the Harlem Renaissance
The Story of the First Black-Owned Record Company, 1921-1923
A presentation by Bill Doggett
Black Swan Records was a beacon of promise, providing visibility through sound recordings for a generation of classically trained singers, musicians, and composers emerging out of the shadow of the Great Migration and the First World War. Obscure and forgotten in 2021, these gifted artists were cultural symbols of an earlier Black racial pride who had been rejected and forbidden to record by a white recording industry dominated by Victor, Columbia, and Edison. In a post-First World War era fraught with violent racial animus, Harry Pace’s Black Swan Records put out “open for business” signs within weeks of May 30-June 1, 1921, when the prosperous Black district of Greenwood, Tulsa, Oklahoma, was destroyed by vigilante white supremacist mobs.
What is profoundly significant in this remarkable story is that Pace, who obviously faced large systemic challenges by daring to defy the norms of an American society deeply enmeshed in racist ideology, still created a record company with a vision to create opportunity and visibility expressly for Black artists and did end up issuing important recordings of classical and blues/ jazz stars that today count as critically important documentation of that era.
Bill Doggett is a published scholar on race and performing-arts history with a national profile. He is the author of the San Francisco Historical Society Journal‘s Summer 2015 feature, “Emancipation Proclamation: San Francisco and African American Concert Singers: In Paradisum 18802000,” and co-author of “Racial Representation in Popular Songs and Recordings 1901,” for the Fall 2019 Journal of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. He was a 20202021 artist scholar for Manhattan School of Music’s inaugural Cultural Inclusion Initiative, the 2021 annual William Levi Dawson Lecture presenter for Tuskegee University, and the 2017 annual Valente Lecture presenter for UC Davis’s Music Department. His website is https://billdoggettproductions.com.
