NARRATOR: In April 1923, an African-American cornet player living in Chicago, and other members of his band, were making their very first recording -- traveling five hours by train to a tiny Midwestern city to play in a small, ramshackle studio, in a region widely controlled by the Ku Klux Klan.

And on that day, that musician made some of the most historic recordings in all of music.

His name was Louis Armstrong.

Just one of the magical stories of "The Music Makers of Gennett Records."

ANNCR: This program is made possible in part by -- Visit Richmond, Wayne County, Indiana.

A getaway to culinary trails, a local art scene, and a soul music heritage, with itineraries including the Chocolate Trail, the Antique Alley Trail, and more.

Information at Visit Richmond.org.

The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.

Mentoring and nurturing the next generation of music leaders.

music.indiana.edu.

Earlham College, offering the epic advantage of funded internship or research experience for every student.

Education grounded in the Quaker values of respect, integrity, peace, simplicity, and community.

Earlham.edu.

The Al Cobine Recognition Endowment.

And by WTIU members -- thank you.

CARMICHAEL (actor): The studio was primitive, the room wasn't soundproof, and just outside was a railroad spur with switch engines puffing away noisily.

Yet this obscure recording studio in a small Indiana city saw a history-making parade of musicians.

They made the name Gennett one of the greatest names in recorded music -- Hoagy Carmichael.

NARRATOR: During its heyday in the 1920s, the area around the Whitewater River in Richmond, Indiana, was known as "Harmony Hollow."

The place gained an impressive reputation -- first for making elegant pianos shipped all over the country.

And later for the Gennett Recording Laboratory, where some of the greatest names in all of music came to launch or enhance their early careers.

In the wake of Gennett's success, these innovators helped create the soundtrack to the Jazz Age, recording and distributing distinctly American styles of music all over the world -- all from a tiny studio in Indiana.

Gennett is a microcosm of the broader American social fabric, as well as the creative essence of America.

DAHAN: Blues, jazz, country, ethnic -- If they thought there was a market for it, they would take a risk with it.

SKAGGS: There was just this rough beauty that came out of those records.

FEINSTEIN: The music is so incredibly important, because we had this influx of immigrants from all over the place.

And the contribution to American popular music came not only from Jews, and Russians and Eastern Europeans, but from the Irish, from the Italians, from the Germans.

Everybody contributed to the melting pot of American popular song at that time.

And that's the beautiful thing about the Gennett recordings, because they reflect exactly that -- that very thing that was happening in American history.

MARSALIS: All the different types of artists that came from all over the country playing all different types of music -- Gennett is a part of that history, and that tradition is very important.

[JAZZ MUSIC] [SOUND OF HORSE HOOVES] MAN: Richmond was not unusual to a lot of the industrial towns in the Midwest at that time.

You had this influx of German artisans that had moved to the region.

And all this skilled labor created this area of the country that was an absolute fireball of power in terms of industrial strength.

NARRATOR: Seeking greater religious freedoms and economic opportunity, a group of Quakers crossed into the new Indiana territory in 1806 and founded the town of Richmond.

The Starr family was one of the founders of the town and county.

A descendant to the family, James Starr, partnered with George Trayser, a former woodworking apprentice, in 1872, to form a company that made handcrafted pianos.

Within six years, they purchased 23 acres along the Whitewater River in Richmond and expanded the facility, constructing new buildings to help support what would eventually grow to more than 700 workers in the plant.

The Starr Piano Company was churning out one full-sized piano in less than 12 minutes.

SURLES: It was this mark of reaching a certain socioeconomic status to have a piano in your home, and there was really a lot more emphasis on the value of music.

Music was a way to uplift the spirit.

DAHAN: Everything's done by hand, or by very early versions of machinery.

It's their quality that really starts to stand out.

They start winning awards at the various World Expositions.

And so they get a great reputation.

NARRATOR: In and around Richmond, large manufacturing plants were a common sight, aided largely by the development of the National Road and several major rail lines that ran through the city.

As well as pianos, Richmond entrepreneurs manufactured farm equipment and lawn mowers by the thousands.

By the 1920s, Richmond, with about 25,000 residents, had more millionaires per capita than practically any other city in the Midwest.

KENNEDY: Starr Piano was just an incredible example of self-sufficiency, because virtually everything on a piano was built in the valley.

These guys were able to produce these pianos in very high volume.

They were able to ship them on the railroad spur right downtown and there they were sent all over the country.

NARRATOR: In 1893, a new investor took interest in the Starr Piano Company, Henry Gennett.

He and his father-in-law, John Lumsden, lived and worked in Nashville, Tennessee, marketing pianos and other musical instruments.

Now they were looking for a new investment opportunity.

DAHAN: They decide to get into not just the distribution and retail business, but in the piano manufacturing business.

And one of their best-selling pianos is the Starr Piano, which is being manufactured in Richmond, Indiana.

This is the great industrial period where we have these entrepreneurs like Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt and Carnegie, and this rapid expansion of American business and American entrepreneurship.

So Henry Gennett and John Lumsden are sort of in that class.

NARRATOR: The two bought in as major partners in the Richmond company, and Henry became the new manager of the firm.

Gennett then moved his family to Richmond, including his wife Alice, their three sons, Harry, Clarence, and Fred, and his daughter, Rose.

KENNEDY: He had a big mansion on Main Street that was at that time called "Millionaire's Row."

Once Henry saw a large wagon go through downtown full of corn.

This is during the harvest season, and he sees this guy and he sends one of his salesmen, says, "Follow that wagon down to the mill, because this guy's going to have cash in his hand and he's going to be a great candidate for a piano."

That's the way Henry Gennett thought.

[GUITAR MUSIC] NARRATOR: By 1903, Henry Gennett was in full control of the day-to-day operations of the factory, and made his three sons top managers in the firm.

KENNEDY: Starr Piano not only had this tremendously efficient factory in the valley in Richmond, they also had a well-established network of stores throughout the Midwest that went all over to Los Angeles.

BURDETTE: At that time, there was a lot of money and a lot of focus on the arts, part because of the sponsorship of the Gennett family, who built a theater and made great efforts to bring culture and entertainment into this place on the edge of Indiana in the middle of the Midwest.

NARRATOR: At the turn of the century, a new musical device was beginning to make inroads into American culture -- the phonograph.

When Thomas Edison first recorded into his "talking machine" back in 1877, he hardly imagined a use for recordings in the public sphere beyond dictation and recording legal and business transcriptions.

However, two New York companies, Columbia Records and the Victor Talking Machine Company, used this technology to develop small phonograph players, known as Victrolas, and recordings cut on shellac and wax discs.

Known as 78s -- because they rotated at 78 revolutions per minute on the Victrola, the companies determined that they could record some of the more popular music of the time and sell the units and the 78s to a commercial audience.

It was a technology and a market that immediately interested the Gennett family.

DAHAN: On June 12, 1915, they decided to expand their articles of incorporation, to go from just manufacturing pianos to now any instrument that's in the process of musical vibration, so the phonographs and sound recordings, and this was a natural move, because the phonograph was taking over American living rooms.

NARRATOR: With Henry Gennett's two oldest sons, Harry and Clarence, busy with day-to-day operations of the piano factory, investigation into this new phonograph market fell to the family's youngest son, Fred, who was still in his 20s at the time.

KENNEDY: He looked more like a professor than he did like an executive in the brash world of phonograph records and pianos.

He always liked the next new gimmick, the next new thing on the horizon.

He was kind of a dreamer that way.

NARRATOR: As the Gennett family embarked on this most recent business opportunity, no one could have been able to imagine the lively musical possibilities that they would soon discover.

Before long, the "Gennett" name would become one of the most significant in the early recording industry, bringing in acts to the Richmond facility that would forever change American music.

SURLES: This is like the fabric of America's musical history, and it's all captured on this one little label.

MARSALIS: Because they recorded people, we have a fantastic recording of the sound of our nation.

GIDDINS: Gennett is a fascinating company, because it recorded everything.

They start up basically the jazz record business.

The jumping-off place is Gennett.

[MUSIC] [SOUND OF TRAIN BRAKING] NARRATOR: In the spring of 1917, the Gennett factory was switching over its assembly lines to help support the company's new phonograph machines.

That same month, the U.S. Government made its own startling announcement.

[SOUND OF ARTILLERY] NARRATOR: Within weeks, the American war machine was in full production.

As American doughboys marched in the fields of France, they heard some of the new jazz rhythms that followed them into the cities and hamlets, including the exciting sounds of groups like the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, who made the first jazz recordings in New York in 1917.

When the war ended, Gennett ramped up production of its own phonograph line and 78-rpm records, which Fred Gennett planned to market throughout the Starr company's large network of piano stores.

BYNUM: The war was such a traumatic event for everyone, that many people do feel sort of displaced, dislocated.

Jazz is a musical representation of that same kind of desire for finding a sort of new understanding of what it means to live in this post-war world.

[MUSIC] NARRATOR: Fred Gennett initially opened a production studio in Manhattan to record some of the city's top talent.

And by 1920, he decided to open a second studio in Richmond, converting an old kiln used to dry wood for pianos, and turning it into a small, wooden studio where musicians and engineers would attempt to make some of the world's first recordings.

HOOD: It's not a very normal place to make music.

There are anecdotes of hanging one of the Starr family's treasured Persian rugs on the wall to try and absorb some of the reflections that would normally bounce around this warehouse turned into a recording studio.

NARRATOR: Recordings at the Gennett studios were often challenging for both the technicians and the musicians, who were both learning the intricacies of the new recording industry.

KENNEDY: On the top of the ridge, on the eastern ridge of the gorge, the C&O Railroad would thunder by to go downtown.

That was a little less predictable and created vibrations through the entire valley.

HOOD: There were probably days that the freight train ruined one of the most seminal jazz cuts ever almost recorded.

NARRATOR: Another challenge was that in order to keep the wax master malleable to allow the needle to cut into the wax, the temperature had to be kept consistently hot throughout the year.

Gennett installed a pot-bellied stove in one corner to maintain a consistently hot temperature in the studio.

HARBISON: They kept the place 85 or 90 degrees, so even if you weren't recording in the summer, it had to be that hot just for the equipment to work.

So you always see the musicians in their shirt sleeves or in their undershirts and they look like they've just been out running or something.

NARRATOR: Another challenge dealt with the length of the song being recorded.

FEINSTEIN: They could record up to about three and a half minutes of music and they could not exceed that amount of time.

If they went over time, they ran out of space on the record.

So they had the pressure of having to stop in a certain amount of time, so they had to keep track of what the length of the thing was and if anybody made a mistake, they had to go back and start all over again.

There was no overdubbing.

There were no retakes.

KENNEDY: About 10 seconds before the record was going to be completed, a light would flash on inside the studio alerting the band, "You better wrap it up or we're going to have to do this over again."

BURDETTE: It really was a mix of high technology for its time and seat-of-your-pants figuring out how to do this given the resources we have.

NARRATOR: One of the biggest challenges the Gennetts faced was how to determine which musical acts to record.

FEINSTEIN: There are these major labels, mainly in New York, selling millions of records.

And year by year from the '10s through the '20s, the sales of records gets greater and greater, and yet, they are only recording certain kinds of music.

They're recording mainly classical and opera, and a lot of pop songs that came from Broadway and Tin Pan Alley.

But they're completely ignoring and turning up their noses at other kinds of American ethnic music, like hillbilly or gospel or jazz.

They are completely ignoring it.

[MUSIC] DAHAN: Gennett, just like every other record company, they've gotta find a new market, new consumers, new demographic.

They start releasing Polish music to sell back to Polish immigrants in Chicago, They start manufacturing Jewish music to Jewish immigrants in New York City.

NARRATOR: Exercise records.

High school band concerts.

Even a record of a man laughing for nearly three minutes.

Gennett's initial recording library was unusual, and perhaps not too terribly attractive to the masses.

HOOD: It seems wildly diverse, and I think that was a byproduct of its location and its sort of egalitarian nature.

Anybody could walk through that door and try to make a record.

HARBISON: All the music that Gennett recorded was more democratic.

It was an easy day trip, especially from Chicago or from Pittsburgh or Cincinnati or Indianapolis, where people could get on the train when they had a day off, motor in, record, catch the train home.

It was a great location to get musicians from a wide variety of cultures from the Midwest and the Southeast.

[MUSIC] NARRATOR: Luckily for the Gennetts, a new source of amazingly modern music was about to be delivered to their doorstep, coming originally from an area 900 miles due south of the eastern Indiana town -- in a notorious Red Light district of New Orleans known as Storyville.

GIDDINS: Wherever there's corruption, political or sexual or gambling or whatever else, there's going to be music.

NARRATOR: Many of the best early blues and jazz players performed nightly in Storyville clubs.

But when America entered the First World War, the Federal Government shut down the Storyville district, fearing that it might corrupt the minds and wills of young men who might soon be heading off to fight.

This encouraged many musicians to seek new opportunities in cities in the North.

It was a time when many African-Americans in particular were looking to escape the oppression they faced in the South.

This sparked the Great Migration.

BYNUM: We're talking about this movement of African-Americans from the South, rural and urban, to northern industrial centers, places like Chicago or Detroit, where there's a significant manufacturing base that would provide industrial employment.

COOPER: With them bringing their cultural expressions with them, their religious sensibilities.

They're bringing with them all of the things that characterize their identity, which includes music.

NARRATOR: Chicago was one of the major beneficiaries of this mass migration to the North.

African-Americans found new opportunities as factory workers, meat packers, Pullman porters, and many other careers that did not exist for them in the South.

And when Congress enacted the 18th Amendment in 1919, ushering in the era of Prohibition, the Chicago night scene exploded with the opening of hundreds of nightclubs and speakeasies, where musicians from the South could find jobs, and their first opportunities to record their sounds at the Gennett Studios.

COOPER: You have the New Orleans style that's being codified, not only in terms of having a broader outreach in a big urban city like Chicago, but a national outreach on recordings due to Richmond recordings.

Them going to Richmond and making these recordings -- this was really unheard of.

NARRATOR: Fred Gennett reached out to the manager of the Starr Piano store in Chicago, Fred Wiggins, to check out some of the local groups, hoping to identify some new acts for the studio.

KENNEDY: Fred Wiggins is the contact with the club called the Friar's Inn, which was very close to their piano store, and a young group called the New Orleans Rhythm Kings are playing there.

So they go to the Friar's Inn and watch these guys play.

Now, "Let's start recording these guys in a meaningful way," which they do.

DAHAN: The very important thing about Gennett Records and Starr Piano is that it's in Richmond, Indiana, and when they expand the facilities in 1920, they have the only permanent recording facility essentially between New York and San Francisco.

They're able to find local or regional musicians and cost-effectively bring them into a studio to record.

So they have essentially a monopoly on Middle America.

[MUSIC] NARRATOR: Gennett made their first recordings with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings in 1922.

And their records were widely popular.

KENNEDY: The New Orleans Rhythm Kings were a white band comprised mostly of musicians from New Orleans.

They were real characters, and they had adopted this jazz style they learned mostly from the African-Americans and Creoles in New Orleans.

DAHAN: It was incredibly profitable and it sort of proved this pipeline between Richmond and Chicago.

So you have some of the greatest jazz musicians of all time coming down from Chicago to Richmond to record.

NARRATOR: Funky Stella, Cross-Eyed Louise, Roughhouse Camel, Cocaine Buddy.

In the New Orleans district of Storyville, these were the names of some of the most notorious nightclub owners in the city.

But at the turn of the 20th century, there was only one name that folks mentioned more than any other as the top musician in the most popular clubs.

His name was "Jelly Roll" Morton.

[PIANO MUSIC] SURLES: His piano technique really blended elements of ragtime, but pushed ragtime into jazz in a way that was highly influential.

NARRATOR: A part-time pimp and pool shark, Morton was one of the most celebrated names in the New Orleans music scene.

Born Ferdinand Joseph LeMothe, he was of Creole descent.

He liked to say that his family roots "went way back to the shores of France."

But in reality, he was born in New Orleans around 1890.

Other musicians in Storyville often commented, "Ain't nobody better at the piano than Jelly Roll.

Just ask him."

GIDDINS: A lot of people just couldn't forgive his braggadocio, all of that.

He was a genius.

He's one of the great figures in jazz history.

He was a dandy.

He had one tooth that was made of diamond.

He was sort of duded up.

He always looked good.

NARRATOR: Morton would often brag to other jazz musicians, saying, "Whatever those guys play today, they're playing Jelly Roll.

I was rocking the cradle of jazz before those guys were even born."

Morton often stated that he invented jazz, though it was a claim that was questionable, at best.

However, the one thing Morton did earlier and more prolifically than any other musician near the turn of the century was to figure out how to take the intricate rhythms of jazz and write them down, becoming the first successful composer in jazz history.

By the early 1920s, he was working in Chicago, composing jazz works for the Melrose Music Publishing Company.

KENNEDY: Fred establishes a relationship with the Melrose Brothers so that Gennett Records and the Melrose Music Publishing company can work in tandem to promote this new music in Chicago.

NARRATOR: With his reputation and his original jazz compositions in tow, "Jelly Roll" Morton accepted an invitation to record at the Gennett Studios.

[MORTON RECORDING PLAYING] KENNEDY: In July of 1923, he comes to the studio with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings when it was one of the very first interracial recording sessions ever, and they produced several beautiful sides together.

DAHAN: At the end of the day for the Gennetts, the only color that mattered was green.

It didn't matter what the color of the performer was.

It didn't matter what the color of the audience was.

A dollar was worth a dollar, and however they could get that dollar from you, they were going to put that out.

WALLARAB: One of the great aspects of the story of jazz is very early on, the integration of these white and black musicians, especially in the recording studios, where they couldn't perform publicly together.

NARRATOR: For the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, the Gennett session was an opportunity to record with an early jazz pioneer.

But for Morton, the stakes were much riskier.

KENNEDY: When he arrives in Richmond, the members of the band had to tell the local hotel that he was a Latin American in order to allow him to stay in the hotel that night, because they recorded for two days.

NARRATOR: Gennett would record additional sessions with the Rhythm Kings and with Morton separately.

But by the summer of 1923, there were no hotter-selling jazz records in the United States than the integrated sessions between "Jelly Roll" Morton and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings.

COOPER: Music has a history of transcending racial boundaries long before our society can catch on, right?

So Gennett was really at the forefront of documenting this creative moment that's interracial at its core.

NARRATOR: When Henry Gennett died unexpectedly at the age of 70 in 1922, his three sons were already well-positioned to take over the day-to-day operations of the firm and the fledgling Gennett Recording Laboratory.

HARBISON: Gennett's in at the very seminal point of this.

Suddenly a kid growing up in Florida and a kid growing up in small-town Illinois could listen to the same jazz recording of artists that grew up in New Orleans.

That did not happen in the past, and they could listen to it over and over again and make it a part of their very musical soul.

[JAZZ MUSIC] [OMINOUS MUSIC] DAHAN: When we think of the Ku Klux Klan and its resurgence in the 1920s, everyone thinks of Mississippi and Tennessee.

They think of Georgia.

But the biggest resurgence in Klan activity was in Indiana.

NARRATOR: The early 1920s was a time in which America witnessed a great shift in population and cultural norms -- fueled by a combination of the Great Migration, which saw thousands of new African-Americans moving into northern cities, along with a surge of immigrants coming from Europe, escaping the devastation of their homelands right after World War I.

PIERCE: The elements were there that allowed them to believe in nativist thought, and to believe that there needed to be some kind of organized effort to withstand what they thought as an incursion into the community.

That if they were going to be there, they had to be controlled and be regulated.

NARRATOR: Some in the state searched to find a group of people willing to try to control and regulate social forces from what they perceived to be "outsiders."

For many, their answer was the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that was originally formed in the South in the 1860s, but saw a sudden resurgence right after the First World War.

The Klan's primary targets -- African-Americans, Catholics and Jews, were groups they thought threatened the way of life of many Protestant Americans in the region.

BYNUM: There's a reason why the Klan symbols in the 1920s are the American flag and the Christian cross.

I mean, it's making a very specific symbolic play to core ideas about what it means to be both American and Christian.

That moves beyond simply straightforward racism to include anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and nativism.

These "isms" become part and parcel with the Klan in the 20th century.

NARRATOR: Several Klan rallies around Indiana attracted tens of thousands of members and attendees.

Richard Gennett, one of Fred Gennett's sons, recalled sitting on his grandfather Henry's front porch one day and watching a Klan parade marching down Main Street during the early 1920s.

KENNEDY: Richmond at that time, you had a very large population of Klan members.

There was a large population of Klan members that worked in the Starr Piano company.

NARRATOR: As Italian immigrants, the Gennett family was not sympathetic to the cause of the Klan.

Still, the Starr Piano factory employed dozens of Klan members in the plant, and Gennett agreed to record dozens of Klan records during the decade.

[KLAN RECORDING PLAYING] DAHAN: They paid cash on the barrelhead.

They paid up front.

They pressed a lot of records.

These records never appeared in the Gennett catalogs.

These records were never in any of their marketing materials.

NARRATOR: The Klan records pressed by Gennett never included the Gennett logo on them.

Most were simply inscribed with Klan logos, such as "100 Percent Americans" and others.

Most of their music were spinoffs of standard Christian hymns with altered lyrics, such as "Onward Christian Klansman."

Still others were Klan originals -- [SONG PLAYING "DADDY SWIPED THE LAST CLEAN SHEET"] NARRATOR: According to one story, Clarence Gennett, Henry's second oldest son, grew upset when he heard that a pirated Klan record was making its way around the manufacturing floor.

Clarence demanded that the record be destroyed immediately and that no others be allowed to be distributed throughout the company.

PIERCE: The Klan was fighting against, purportedly, a loss of values, and one of their examples was this sinful jazz music.

It just inspires you, gets in your bones, or gets into your soul somewhere, and it's like a demon and it just possesses you.

And now you're dancing wildly.

You don't wanna do it, because clearly in your right mind, you wouldn't do it.

And you're now making a fool of yourself.

That's what they believed.

NARRATOR: By 1925, the beginning of the end was near for the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana.

Indiana Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson was arrested and found guilty for the murder of a young secretary he had raped.

And financial scandals eventually destroyed the political careers of Indiana Governor Ed Jackson, as well as the mayor of Indianapolis, both of whom were backed by the Klan.

By 1926, the Klan had crumbled and essentially fallen apart in the state -- at the same time that Gennett was in the midst of recording and distributing many of the boldest and most influential jazz recordings in American history.

BYNUM: The whole melting pot metaphor is right there to see in what Gennett records as music, from jazz and African-American music, blues and jazz, the bluegrass and sort of hillbilly rock of the Appalachian mountains.

You really do get a sense from the musical catalog that comes out of Gennett of this kind of broad melting pot metaphor that's central to how we think about the nation's formation.

Gennett really is an important story about how Americans come to understand who we are as a people.

[JAZZ MUSIC] [GUNSHOTS] NARRATOR: On January 1, 1913, the New Orleans Times Picayune reported the arrest of a 12-year-old who had fired a pistol into the air in a New Year's Eve celebration.

The youngster was Louis Armstrong, the son of a prostitute and a father who abandoned the family shortly after his birth.

GIDDINS: Louis Armstrong grew up in a field that was so violent and so corrupt that it was known as the Battlefield.

He is surrounded by an area where people are being knifed in clubs.

NARRATOR: After the incident with the pistol, the authorities sent Armstrong to the Colored Waif's Home.

Known in the neighborhood as "Little Louie," he joined the marching band.

He played the cornet, the same instrument played by his idol in the Storyville club scene, Joe "King" Oliver.

HARBISON: The youth learn from the mentor by emulation and apprenticeship.

And Armstrong, like everybody that came before him and after him, learned by finding a mentor and being an apprentice, learning everything that he could from that person.

NARRATOR: When the government shut down the Storyville district at the start of World War I, Oliver left New Orleans to tour several American cities, ultimately landing in Chicago.

There he played at the Lincoln Gardens, a club with ties to city gangsters, where he put together a band of many top talents.

DAHAN: This is the greatest assemblage of musicians in the history of music up until that point.

MARSALIS: Individuals will always stand out, but the achievement of that style is how they played together and how it is a kind of amalgam of ragtime style, blues style.

All of those things meet in a crossroads of their way of playing, and how they fulfilled the requrements of all of those styles in a virtuosic manner.

[JAZZ MUSIC] NARRATOR: In 1922, Armstrong received a note from Oliver, the man he affectionately called "Papa Joe," asking him to come to Chicago and play in the band.

Armstrong was so young and naive, he knew of no other life than in New Orleans.

As he boarded the train, he wore an old, threadbare tuxedo jacket, the nicest piece of clothing he owned.

His mother packed him a sandwich to eat on the train and told him to be sure to wear his long underwear, because she had heard that up north, even in the summer, it was always cold.

GIDDINS: Louis Armstrong by this point had a big reputation in New Orleans, but he always said he was not going to leave New Orleans until he got a call from Mr. Oliver.

He comes up to Chicago, and he walks into the Lincoln Gardens, and, of course, he's a total rube.

He's a hell of a player, but he's got -- he's wearing a funeral director's jack coat and his hair is sort of parted in the middle, and he's a country boy.

These personalities, they were good enough -- when they come together, they create a sound where very often, you're not even thinking about the component parts.

They could do things that were magical.

NARRATOR: By April 1923, King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band was the most popular act in Chicago.

The long lines that wrapped around the club each night captured the attention of the Gennett Studios.

SURLES: They then encouraged the band, they said, "Hey, do you wanna come make a record in Richmond?"

And they did.

People didn't see this so much as a way to make a lot of money, but it was exciting, it was new technology.

It was getting your music out in a way that kind of immortalized your sound.

NARRATOR: Over a two-day period, on April 5th and 6th, 1923, King Oliver and his talented second cornet player, Louis Armstrong, would be recorded and distributed around the world, featuring Armstrong's first solo on the song "Chimes Blues."

KENNEDY: It's been described as almost like hearing the birth of the creation of jazz when you hear the original "Chimes Blues" on Gennett.

You are going to hear the sound that defined the 1920s.

When Louis Armstrong gets in front of that recording horn, there's a whole new sound to jazz.

[ARMSTRONG RECORDING PLAYING] [ARMSTRONG RECORDING PLAYING] MARSALIS: Louis Armstrong, for some reason, his sound has a spiritual essence in it that anything on a recording when his sound touched it, it was sympathetic, and it went through that recording and it could go right through you and touch you with the emotional intensity that he had.

That is a mystery -- no one knows why.

NARRATOR: During the King Oliver recording sessions, the engineers at Gennett had a particular challenge with the strength of Armstrong's performance.

KENNEDY: Louis Armstrong's sound was so powerful, he kind of overpowered the rest of the band, and there's always a concern if it's too loud going through the horn, it can create a vibration, and he actually caused the needle to skip on the blank wax.

DAHAN: Louis Armstrong was considerably louder than everyone else, and most importantly, his tone was clearer than everyone else.

So they positioned him further back in the studio.

GIDDINS: As a metaphor, this is the great origin story.

Because it's basically saying that Armstrong already is alien, he's so modern.

He's so new.

And also that his brilliance, it literally is going to dwarf everything that preceded him.

DAHAN: That is one of the greatest assemblages of musicians at the top of their game, in the prime of their career, doing something new, doing something different.

It's perfection.

NARRATOR: Fred Gennett was impressed by the massive popularity of his newest recording find, and immediately booked a second session for King Oliver's band to record in Richmond that fall.

KENNEDY: October 5th in 1923, the King Oliver band returns from Chicago for its second recording session in Richmond on the very day that you had one of the largest Klan rallies in the region occur in Richmond, and they marched down Main Street and were no more than a mile away from the recording studio -- in this very same day that you have these beautiful recordings being made by an African-American band.

COOPER: To come down to Richmond, Indiana, which again, highly segregated and racialized environment, but they were able to transcend that.

It's the consciousness that allows one -- that actually demands and requires one to transcend fear.

So I think when you listen to that recording, you gotta listen to it with that type of ear of the experience that undergirds what they had to go through.

NARRATOR: The King Oliver sessions at Gennett produced 14 sides of the most memorable music in early jazz history.

GIDDINS: You feel like somebody has opened a window and the future is shining in here.

The Oliver recordings definitely moved the needle for jazz, because it introduces Armstrong, whose presence you cannot miss.

It's suggesting where the future is going to be.

So it's all happening on these early recordings.

[SOUND OF TRAIN RUNNNING] NARRATOR: Most fans of early jazz envision a lively club scene in the shadows of the speakeasies in many American cities.

Practically no one imagines bucolic Midwestern farm scenes.

And yet, at the dawn of the Jazz Age, two of the biggest acts to explode onto the American music scene were born and raised in the Midwest -- Leon "Bix" Beiderbecke of Davenport, Iowa and Hoagland "Hoagy" Carmichael from Bloomington, Indiana.

[MUSIC] (VOICEOVER): Master Leon "Bix" Beiderbecke of Davenport is the most unusual and most remarkably talented child in music that there is in this city.

He has never taken a music lesson, and he does not know one key from another.

But he can play in all completeness any selection."

-- Davenport Daily Democrat.

[MUSIC] NARRATOR: Born March 10th, 1903, Leon "Bix" Beiderbecke was a gifted musical prodigy, who, by the age of six, could outplay his grade school music teacher and improvise notes on the piano.

Bix grew up in a home where the classics were celebrated and taught on a daily basis.

GIDDINS: He was born to a prosperous German-American family that looked down its nose at anything that was popular.

It was a very Victorian, classical music kind of home.

All that salon piano wasn't wasted on him, either.

Because one of the things that distinguishes Beiderbecke from all the musicians of that period is that he really understands Debussy and Ravel and the classical composers, and it begins to come out in his music.

MARSALIS: Bix Beiderbecke had a piano player's sensibility, and then he had a kind of pathos and poetic lyricism that came through in his playing and a characteristic in his sound.

[SOUND OF ARTILLERY] NARRATOR: During the First World War, Bix's older brother, Brunie, acquired a phonograph player, which he sent home to his baby brother, along with some early jazz records.

Young Bix was instantly smitten with these new hot rhythms.

He purchased a beat-up, second-hand cornet from a local pawn shop and abandoned classical music for jazz, much to his parents' dismay.

GIDDINS: Bix Beiderbecke, musicians of his age, will listen to the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, which recorded for Gennett in 1922, and they love that music and they learn how to play it.

Beiderbecke would slow down his recording apparatus so that he could catch every note.

NARRATOR: At about the same time that young Beiderbecke was outperforming his teachers, another prodigy was establishing his musical roots in the college town of Bloomington, Indiana.

Hoagland "Hoagy" Carmichael was born in 1899.

His mother, Lida, played piano for the silent picture shows in town.

Like Beiderbecke, Carmichael could listen to sounds and play practically by ear.

One story from his early childhood recalls his ability to listen to the chimes at the clock tower at Indiana University, and then immediately sit down at the piano in his living room and play the song note for note with no training or practice.

CARMICHAEL JR.: My father was smitten with hot jazz, there's no doubt about that.

He was a young kid burning with the residue of hot jazz, and he wanted to be one of those guys who played hot music.

NARRATOR: In the summer of 1923, Hoagy and Bix met for the first time at the clubs on the south side of Chicago.

One night at Lincoln Gardens, they heard King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, with Louis Armstrong on second trumpet.

TOM WALSH: This is really an extraordinary picture to imagine.

These innovators all in the same room at the same time and the influence they would have on each other, the inspiration that they gave each other and all the things they would go on to accomplish.

GIDDINS: These guys heard the black musicians and said, "That's where I want to devote my energies.

That's where I'm taking my art."

That's a remarkable thing.

It's not just progressive.

It's rebellious.

It's really taking a stand against the way the whole culture, the whole class system and race system is devised.

None of these guys have any problem seeing black musicians as tutors at a time when this would be unheard of.

You couldn't even imagine a black intellectual teaching white kids at Yale or Harvard.

That just wasn't happening.

But these musicians, they knew where to go.

NARRATOR: By 1924, Bix and his band, The Wolverines, were touring the greater Midwestern college circuit.

At Indiana University, where Hoagy was studying law, he led a band called Carmichael's Collegians.

As well, he booked several groups for dances at area colleges, including Bix's band, which was an instant hit.

CARMICHAEL JR.: When he first heard Bix live, it knocked him over.

And it was a clarion call to my father, who thought, "That is really special and that guy is doing stuff that I've never heard before."

[JAZZ MUSIC] NARRATOR: Bix and the Wolverines earned their first shot at recording at the Gennett Studios in May 1924.

Beiderbecke turned to Carmichael and asked him to write a number for the session, "Riverboat Shuffle," a major hit of the Jazz Age, and the first popular recording for both Bix, the performer, and Hoagy, the composer.

[JAZZ MUSIC] [JAZZ MUSIC] GIDDINS: If you listen to the solo he played on "Riverboat Shuffle," where he really is completely mastering those slurs, they just warm your soul.

You feel like you're hearing something that you've never heard before.

And you just wish he would go on and on and on.

[JAZZ MUSIC] [JAZZ MUSIC] TOM WALSH: He's taking chances.

He's really going after something, and I think that really summarizes the spirit of what was going on with these musicians and I think probably why Bix Beiderbecke and Hoagy Carmichael were soulmates in that way.

[JAZZ MUSIC] MARSALIS: There was like a movement of younger people saying, "Man, we could do something, bringing these things together, bringing the American popular song together with jazz.

Let's meld these things."

And he was on the cutting edge of all the new things that were being played.

CARMICHAEL JR.: Going to Gennett was, for my father, a landmark moment.

I can't imagine anything at that stage of my father's musical life, anything more important.

[JAZZ MUSIC] NARRATOR: Carmichael would get his own opportunity to perform at Gennett, playing some of his written works with an Indiana band, Hitch's Happy Harmonists.

[JAZZ MUSIC] In early 1925, after playing a late-night session at a club in Indianapolis, Bix asked Hoagy to drive him to Richmond.

He had a new group that was set to record at Gennett in the morning.

Together, the two young musicians took off in Hoagy's new Ford Model T Roadster, fueled by ambition, audacity, and about two quarts of illegal, Prohibition-era liquor.

CARMICHAEL (actor): We were halfway to Richmond, driving out in the middle of nowhere, when Bix asked me to stop the car.

Bix took out his horn, cut loose with a blast, as if to warn the farmers in the middle of the night and start the dogs to howling.

He played as I had never heard him play before.

Bix was laying it out in the cold, quiet night for the tillers of the soil.

Wonderful banners of melody that filled the air, carving their way across the countryside."

-- Hoagy Carmichael.

TOM WALSH: What a strange sight that must have been, but Hoagy finds nothing but pure inspiration in this moment.

NARRATOR: Eventually both Midwestern musical prodigies went their separate ways.

Carmichael graduated with a law degree and was working at a firm in Florida, when he happened to pass by a shop and overheard one of his own compositions playing on the store's Victrola.

CARMICHAEL JR.: He went into a record shop one day and there playing in the shop was Red Nichols and his Five Pennies playing "Washboard Blues."

"What -- this thing is out there?

And not only out there, but they're selling it, and it's my song and I'm stuck in this law firm working on real estate contracts?"

No, no, no.

And he quit, and thank God he did.

[MUSIC] NARRATOR: Alcohol had been a part of the Jazz Age as much as the music, flappers, and gangsters who ran the clubs and streets of major American cities.

For Beiderbecke, alcohol binges were growing increasingly common and problematic.

GIDDINS: They were all drinking.

They were drinking to prove that they could.

They were drinking to keep up with each other.

You can't overemphasize the fact that these people were very, very young.

They were kids.

[MUSIC] NARRATOR: At the time, Bix was performing with many of the greatest acts in all of American music, including the Jean Goldkette band and the Paul Whiteman Orchestra.

Despite his enormous success, however, he could not wrestle control over his inner demons.

Often Bix wrote letters home, trying to reconcile his freewheeling lifestyle with his conservative upbringing.

In much of this correspondence, he attempted to explain to his parents how successful he was doing on the road, while at the same time attempting to convince them -- and perhaps himself -- that he had overcome his addictions.

But by now, Bix's drinking had begun to have bad repercussions.

He was missing sessions, making mistakes during solos, and falling asleep during concerts.

A trumpet player in the Whiteman Orchestra who sat next to Bix had made specific notes in one of his concert arrangements to lean over just before his cue and "Wake Up Bix."

CARMICHAEL (actor): "The worst news was about Bix.

He was fumbling at rehearsals.

He was often still great, sometimes as good as ever.

But he was slipping and it hurt me to realize that so young a man was doomed."

-- Hoagy Carmichael.

GIDDINS: I think Carmichael, I think all the guys who knew Beiderbecke were haunted by him and they were trying to keep him alive in a personal way.

NARRATOR: Band leader Paul Whiteman encouraged Beiderbecke to get some medical help and sent him home to Davenport to recuperate.

But before he could check himself into an Iowa hospital, he left again -- a move that worried Carmichael, his former Gennett collaborator, who rushed to visit him in a small apartment in Queens.

CARMICHAEL JR.: Bix was having difficulty, no question about it, and I remember Dad telling me that he went out there to see Bix one day.

They talked, and I think it's fair to say that Dad felt that it was probably the last time he was going to see Bix.

And Bix did a pretty extraordinary thing.

He said, "Hoag, bring me my cornet."

And he did.

He gave it to Bix and Bix held it for a minute, and then he took the mouthpiece out and he gave that mouthpiece to my father, which was Bix's way of saying, "Hey Hoag, you take the music.

It's yours."

And that was an extraordinary moment for my father, because one, because he knew he was losing Bix.

Bix thought enough of where he was musically to give him his mouthpiece, as if to say, "You know, I'm not going to be playing any more.

But here is the symbol of this music.

And I want you to have it."

NARRATOR: On August 7, 1931, Bix Beiderbecke died of pneumonia, brought on by alcohol poisoning.

He died alone in his apartment.

He was 28 years old.

[MUSIC] CARMICHAEL (actor): "It struck me later that maybe I never really knew Bix at all.

None of us did.

He was my friend, yet intimately, deeply, I didn't really know him.

I respected him and loved him at his best.

I'll leave the enigma of the inner Bix Beiderbecke for others to figure out if they can."

-- Hoagy Carmichael.

[MUSIC] NARRATOR: Carmichael -- as well as many other early jazz pioneers -- did, in fact, carry on the legacy forged by Bix Beiderbecke.

In October 1927, Hoagy gathered several of his old college pals and went back to Richmond and signed a new contract with Gennett to record his most recent composition, a tune he imagined as a fun ragtime stomp.

["STARDUST" PLAYING] KENNEDY: He'd been working for a long time on a song that was deeply inspired by what he heard from Bix Beiderbecke, what he heard from Louis Armstrong.

The melody is very distinctive.

It almost sounds like a jazz-improvised melody.

He would call it "Stardust."

["STARDUST" PLAYING] GIDDINS: Carmichael, from all of his accounts, knew this was his masterpiece.

He felt that this was the greatest thing he had ever done -- might be the greatest thing he ever would do, a song that has a completely original melodic idea with really interesting chords.

It never goes where you think it's going to go.

And that's one of the things that makes it really rather historic.

["STARDUST" PLAYING] NARRATOR: By the early 1930s, Carmichael had hit his stride.

Many leading performers, such as Benny Goodman and the Dorsey brothers, were recording Carmichael compositions, such as "Georgia on My Mind," and "Lazy River."

In 1929, Hoagy teamed with lyricist Mitchell Parish to rework his original Gennett recording of "Stardust."

This new ballad version of "Stardust" became the second most-recorded song in popular American music history, behind only Irving Berlin's "White Christmas."

Through all his success, Carmichael never forgot the friendship and musical influence of Beiderbecke, who, through the Gennett Recording Studios, turned Carmichael's early compositions into hits.

He named his first son Hoagy Bix, and several of his songs paid tribute to the musical quality that Bix brought to the budding years of jazz through those early Gennett recordings.

CARMICHAEL JR.: Bix Beiderbecke, to my father, was the most important musician, not just in terms of mentoring, but in terms of what he heard and what -- it opened it up for my father.

He said, "Wow, that's possible."

[NATIVE AMERICAN FLUTE MUSIC] GILBERT: Long before any non-native individual ever set foot on the Americas, the Hopi people have, for many, many years, been practicing their religious customs and practices as a way of life.

NARRATOR: After the railroads connected the United States, tourists had been traveling to northern Arizona to explore the Grand Canyon and to watch with curiosity the traditions of the Hopi Nation.

Hoping to generate greater interest for the Hopi among these tourists, a British-born hotel and restaurant mogul, Fred Harvey, constructed a new, lavish resort hotel along the southern rim of the Grand Canyon and called it El Tovar.

Harvey wanted to take advantage of tourists' interest in the traditions of the Hopi.

He decided to produce and market sound recordings of the Walpi tribe of the Hopi Nation.

Like most non-native businessmen at the time, Harvey developed his plans without consulting the tribal leaders, a practice that fueled a longstanding history of complicated relations between the Hopi and the U.S. government.

GILBERT: There were some Hopi people who believed that these owners of the hotel and those who were in control of the tourist industry were exploiting them.

NARRATOR: In the summer of 1926, Harvey hired Gennett Records to bring their remote recording truck to Arizona and to capture on record the sacred songs of the Hopi.

Gennett worked closely with J. Walter Fewkes, Chief of the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution, who had for years studied the Hopi and their sacred rituals.

GILBERT: You had Hopi individuals who realized, politically, the importance of allowing these scholars, like Fewkes, to come into their communities and to record them.

These individuals are not coming out to Hopi telling the people to stop.

That was happening in other Indian reservations at that time.

The Hopis could have seen this opportunity as a political opportunity, as a way for them to survive as a people.

[HOPI SONG PLAYING] NARRATOR: What Gennett captured on their acoustic recording system in 1926 was a rare glimpse into the lives and spiritual traditions of the Hopi Nation.

The sales of records never took off, and the commercial venture was soon abandoned.

However, these rare Gennett recordings provided an important window to the past that today's academics and ethnic historians can continue to study as a critical link to the past.

GILBERT: It gives people a glimpse into a world unlike their own.

And I think that anybody who's listening to the Gennett recordings can get a sense of the beauty and the complexities of American Indian culture.

[MUSIC] NARRATOR: In the years immediately after the Civil War, many African-Americans expressed their new cultural and religious freedoms by establishing their own organized places of worship.

JONES: The church was a major gathering place of large numbers of blacks that could talk about the conditions in which they were in.

It's the foundation where most black people could come together and not only discuss this and learn their spirituality, but issues that concerned their lifestyle in this country.

[SPIRITUAL MUSIC] NARRATOR: One product of that rich, spiritual environment was Thomas A. Dorsey, the son of an itinerant preacher from a small town near Atlanta.

Throughout his childhood, young Dorsey would often play spirituals on the piano.

But as many young men did during the Jazz Age, he soon fell under the spell of jazz and blues rhythms.

EVANS: Blues and gospel were viewed as opposite worlds.

You were supposed to do one and not the other.

So that was a problem for a guy like that who just wanted to be a star and a success in music.

NARRATOR: Dorsey created a stage name, "Georgia Tom," during the 1920s and wrote and performed a type of Hokum Blues, which incorporated lyrics with many sexual innuendoes, along with a guitar-playing partner, Hudson Whittaker, known as "Tampa Red."

[BLUES MUSIC] EVANS: He became a pianist and a band leader for Ma Rainey.

And Dorsey wrote songs for Ma Rainey and helped to organize the band.

NARRATOR: On one of several trips to Gennett Studios, Dorsey recorded one blues number that sold more records than any other listing in Gennett's "Race Catalog" in 1930 -- "Maybe It's the Blues."

["MAYBE IT'S THE BLUES" PLAYING] NARRATOR: In 1927, Dorsey attempted to release several compositions of his own spiritual music.

At the time, however, the church refused to accept musical numbers from a noted blues musician.

WILLIAMS: When Thomas Dorsey made his switch to gospel music, he didn't change his sound at all.

He just brought what he was doing from playing blues with Ma Rainey into gospel music, which, of course, people found very offensive.

You're bringing the night club into church, and people had a problem with that.

And Thomas Dorsey said once he had been kicked out of some of the best churches in the United States.

[MUSIC] NARRATOR: Dorsey continued to push his own brand of gospel music to the masses without much success, until the inner conflict between his church upbringing and his blues career caused him to have a nervous breakdown on two separate occasions.

Each time, after he recovered, he earnestly tried to write only gospel music, but the church continued to turn him away, and he returned to playing the blues.

Then in October 1929, the Stock Market crashed, and many people lost their fortunes when the banks failed, including Dorsey.

His fortune lost, he despaired, feeling that his losses were God's way of punishing him for being a blues musician.

BURNIM: He's bringing together elements from both worlds, but he didn't see those worlds as musically divided.

In terms of religious values, yes, but musically, he did not compartmentalize sacred and secular music.

NARRATOR: By the summer of 1932, Dorsey was finally feeling "happy and carefree."

A handful of his gospel numbers, published by Gennett and other labels, were now selling.

As well, he had just learned that his wife Nettie was pregnant.

She was due to give birth in August at their home in Chicago when Dorsey was asked to perform several songs at a Baptist church in St. Louis.

He hesitated to go, but Nettie encouraged him to join the tour.

When he got to St. Louis, however, there was a telegram waiting from one of Nettie's sisters -- "Hurry home, your wife is very sick.

She is having the baby."

[MUSIC] NARRATOR: Dorsey raced back to Chicago, but it was too late.

Nettie had passed away during the evening.

She had given birth to a son, which Thomas held briefly, before spending the night at his wife's bedside mourning her loss.

By the next morning, Dorsey had learned that the child, too, had died due to complications in the delivery process.

The former bluesman was devastated.

He knew that somehow, God was punishing him again.

NARRATOR: After the funeral service, Dorsey went to the basement of the church and began to play the piano in the choir room.

There, in the midst of his greatest grief, Dorsey created the melody to a new gospel song that spoke to his deep desire for God's help.

He called it "Precious Lord, Take My Hand."

["PRECIOUS LORD" PLAYING] ["PRECIOUS LORD" PLAYING] ["PRECIOUS LORD" PLAYING] WILLIAMS: This came out of his pain, and this is his way of releasing his pain, his agony.

He's feeling real pain, but he puts it into the gospel.

BURNIM: "Precious Lord" went on to become a standard.

It's known in virtually every African-American church, regardless of denomination.

JONES: The presentation of a song like "Precious Lord, Take My Hand," I think people who have experienced situations, where they have asked for help from the supernatural, then they can appreciate that even more.

NARRATOR: Dorsey would eventually recover from his devastating loss.

He would go on to help establish a celebrated choir at Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago and founded the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses.

His songs, like "Precious Lord, Take My Hand" and "Peace in the Valley," became international hits.

And he helped to discover other gospel talents, such as Mahalia Jackson.

BURNIM: Thomas Dorsey was a pioneer.

Thomas Dorsey was at the advent.

He was at the forefront of the development of this music.

JONES: Thomas Dorsey's name still rang out among all of the others as the one who started this sound, and I think it's the particular sound that identified what gospel music is.

[GUITAR MUSIC] SKAGGS: People in the mountains were heartfelt, soul, true, real pure-hearted people.

Music to us was not a way of escape.

We weren't really trying to escape from anything.

It was just a time to relax.

Music was relaxing.

[GUITAR MUSIC] NARRATOR: In the mid-1920s, a representative from the Victor Talking Machine company recorded a fiddle player from the Appalachian Mountains by the name of John Carson.

At the time, practically everyone in the recording industry doubted that such rural, country rhythms would sell to a mainstream audience.

But when these first country records sold thousands of copies within the first few weeks of release, music executives changed their minds, determining that they needed to act quickly to take advantage of this new and surprisingly enthusiastic market demographic.

[GUITAR MUSIC] OLSON: Record companies suddenly realized that even rural-dwelling people were very interested in purchasing the music by means of commercial records, then they started to market certain types of music to those people.

NARRATOR: Gennett Records was no exception, and in 1925, they hired a talent scout named Dennis Taylor to scour the hills of the southeastern United States looking for exciting, fresh musical talent.

RUMBLE: Taylor was very entrepreneurial.

He'd provide transportation, even board them in his home until they worked up material.

And then once Taylor felt they were ready to perform, he'd haul them up to Richmond and see that they got recorded.

NARRATOR: Taylor combed a six-state region looking for talented banjo players, fiddlers, and other musicians from the region.

Ironically, it was his own neighbor that proved to be the most prolific of the group -- a fiddler by the name of Doc Roberts.

RUMBLE: He liked being a farmer, and he didn't particularly like the road.

He just wanted to make his records, play local dances, and enjoy himself.

NARRATOR: By most accounts, Doc Phillip Roberts grew the best tobacco crop in five counties from his farm along Curtis Pike, Kentucky.

He was also the most popular square dance caller in the region.

When his neighbor, Dennis Taylor, suggested Roberts travel to Richmond, Indiana, to make some recordings of his most popular music, the 28-year-old Roberts declined, telling Taylor that the hustle-and-bustle of "big cities and new-fangled automobiles" frightened him.

Only after Taylor offered to serve as his agent did Roberts finally relent.

Soon a new type of music would be rolling up the backroads heading to Richmond, bringing with it the spirit of the mountain folk.

[HILLBILLY MUSIC] SKAGGS: Man, they would just burn the house down with fiddling, and they had a banjo that they'd play a rhythm on.

And they were driving, just wild, and it was just party time.

It was just freedom and fun.

NARRATOR: The timing of these new "hillbilly" recordings coincided perfectly with a new contract Gennett had signed with Sears, Roebuck and Company to produce and distribute "Old Time Music" to rural audiences throughout the country.

RUMBLE: There was a caché to being a recording artist.

"Well, I record for the Gennett people," somebody would say.

A fan might go into a local Mom and Pop record store and say, "What's the latest Doc Roberts fiddle tune you have, because we're getting a square dance together."

NARRATOR: By the end of 1927, Roberts had grown to be a savvy businessman of the recording industry and worked with Gennett for several more years -- both as a musical artist, and as a talent scout himself for other Appalachian musicians, including the production of the first interracial recordings in country music history.

OLSON: This led to a kind of self-consciousness, perhaps, of, "Hey, other people are finding our musical traditions valuable and interesting."

That's new, perhaps, to have that kind of self-consciousness about the musical traditions.

[FIDDLE MUSIC] [MUSIC] OLSON: What was going on then in Appalachia and in other parts of the South was a kind of a race to find talent, and kind of responding to the sound of money.

And It's quite clear there's a lot of competition for recording the best and the brightest of Appalachian musicians.

NARRATOR: Back in Richmond, Gennett executives sent more talent scouts into the Heartland, hoping to find the next great act.

They struck gold in 1928, when they discovered a talented guitar picker and singer, Bradley Kincaid, who grew up in a log cabin near Paint Lick, Kentucky.

RUMBLE: Bradley Kincaid was in a way a rags to riches story.

He grew up going to a one-room schoolhouse.

He got through the fifth grade, and at that point, his mother died -- his father soon remarried and moved off.

That left Bradley with an older sister.

Bradley had to quit school after the fifth grade and work.

NARRATOR: One of the few treasured possessions Kincaid kept from his childhood was a small guitar his father had acquired in a trade with an African-American farmer in exchange for one of his prized foxhounds.

For years, Kincaid kept the instrument -- which he called his "Hound Dog Guitar" -- close to his hip, teaching himself to play various mountain melodies he heard growing up.

RUMBLE: He would make regular trips up into the hills of Kentucky and write down these words and memorize the melodies.

SKAGGS: And he'd walk or take a horse or whatever, and go and find those people and find that song.

He rounded up those songs.

["THE RED RIVER VALLEY" PLAYING] NARRATOR: On many return trips home, Kincaid carefully penned portions of tunes he heard on the front porches and dance halls near his old family farm in Kentucky.

On Gennett Records and on the stage, Kincaid was billed as "The Kentucky Mountain Boy."

But back in the hills near his hometown, he was known simply as the song catcher.

TURNER: Somebody like Bradley Kincaid is out there purposefully trying to find new music in different areas, in different communities.

And he's out there trying to find new songs to bring out in his music to bring to the record industry, a lot of songs that had never been recorded, but songs that had lived for generations in a community.

RUMBLE: In effect, what he was doing was going out into the field and preserving folk songs that were part of the mountain tradition.

This really gave country music a different image.

["BARBARA ALLEN" PLAYING] NARRATOR: Kincaid would eventually go on to record hundreds of folk and country singles -- almost all exclusively on the Gennett label.

Kincaid's published songbooks sold more than 400,000 copies, and he performed several times at the Grand Ole Opry over the next two decades.

OLSON: He was very good about taking traditional culture and packaging it to a general audience in a way that was appealing to people, and giving it a face and giving it a spirit and a presence that was meaningful and substantial.

He clearly was a friend to every song he sang.

[KINCAID SINGING] [BLUES MUSIC] NARRATOR: Down in the Mississippi Delta region in the 1890s, a land owner by the name of Will Dockery used the last $1,000 of his family's inheritance and bought several tracts of land near the Yazoo River near Cleveland, Mississippi, and turned it into a 28-acre cotton plantation.

There at Dockery Farms, he built a sawmill and a small general store to help support workers on his farm, most of whom were African-American tenant farmers and sharecroppers who had migrated to the region in search of work.

PEYTON: This is a tough time that's in a tough place.

These were people who were one generation from slavery, just one generation from slavery.

It was not easy -- it was not easy.

NARRATOR: Music was a strong part of life in the Delta, from the soulful spirituals sung by the workers in the fields, to the secular rhythms of guitar pickers, singers, and fiddle players who toured the region and performed each weekend.

COOPER: It is distinct and unique to their style, to the expectations of the community in which they were performing for, and it allowed for the mainstream, for the masses, now to get a glimpse of this community.

NARRATOR: One man who understood the power and profit-making possibilities of this rich and distinctly raw Delta music was Henry Columbus "H.C." Speir, a Jackson-area furniture store owner -- and a talent scout for Gennett Records.

DAHAN: He sold records.

He was very well-attuned to what the local African-American population purchased, what they were hearing on Friday nights at the various parties or the concerts or on the streets in town.

So he became a great talent scout for the various record companies.

NARRATOR: In the back of his store, Speir fashioned a small studio to record several of the region's most popular acts, crafting demo records that could help him market musicians to national record labels like Gennett, Paramount, and Victor.

One of his earliest and most influential finds was a guitar player with a slight build and a huge sound -- Charley Patton.

[GUITAR MUSIC] EVANS: Charley Patton was very charismatic.

He did a lot of tricks with the guitar -- play it behind his head, play it between his legs, so on -- slap on the guitar.

PEYTON: The American music that people know the world over -- blues, rock-and-roll, everything that's been influenced by that, from country on, has been influenced, one way or another, by Charley Patton.

NARRATOR: Speir received a letter that recommended he travel to the Dockery plantation to hear Patton, one of the most popular musicians to live and play there on the weekends.

In the spring of 1929, Speir hopped in his car and made his way more than 120 miles northwest to the Dockery Farm.

Dressed in his finest three-piece blue suit, Speir high-stepped it over rows of cotton along the backroads, looking for the famed bluesman.

Most of the farmers there had never seen a white man in a suit traipsing over cotton fields before, and thought Speir was a "revenue man" on the hunt for alcohol stills.

Instead, what Speir found that day at Dockery was even more intoxicating -- the raw sounds of a musician who was half African-American, half Choctaw Indian, who worked independently and made enough money playing music to avoid a life of hard labor in the fields.

[CHARLEY PATTON RECORDING PLAYING] PEYTON: Charley Patton would travel from plantation to plantation, and everyone would just toss coins, and through that, he's able to build up enough money to buy new, high-end guitars -- I mean, that's pretty amazing.

EVANS: Charley himself was upwardly mobile, too.

He just did it in a different way.

Charley Patton was able to do it on his own terms, in the Delta, in a very racist social structure.

NARRATOR: Speir booked Patton to record with Paramount Studios in the summer of 1929.

At the time, Paramount was in the process of moving its recording facilities from Chicago to its headquarters in Grafton, Wisconsin.

They wanted to get this new "Delta sound" recorded and distributed right away.

But without a working studio, the managers in Grafton chose to contact Fred Gennett and asked if Patton could record at their Richmond, Indiana studios.

KENNEDY: The Paramount folks strike a deal with Fred Gennett, "We will pay you $40 per side you master.

And then we'll take those masters and we'll distribute them on the Paramount label."

So in June of 1929, they got 14 songs from Charley Patton.

[CHARLEY PATTON RECORDING PLAYING] PEYTON: A lot of blues men that traveled around and played knew four or five songs -- they changed the words, that was it -- knew four or five songs.

Charley Patton knew dozens and dozens.

June 14, 1929, Charley Patton records 14 songs.

They go on to spread like wildfire and change the world.

NARRATOR: Most of Patton's songs recorded in Richmond that day dealt with the troubling times folks in the Delta often faced.

His song "Mississippi Boweavil Blues" told of an insect infestation that destroyed the Delta cotton crop in 1907.

His song "High Water Everywhere" spoke of the devastating flood that ravaged the region in 1927.

Whether it was a traditional Delta blues number or a soulful southern spiritual, such as "Prayer of Death," Charley Patton poured his heart and passion into each of those 14 legendary recordings at Gennett Studios on June 14, 1929 -- the day the Mississippi Delta musician came to Indiana and captured the world's imagination "Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues."

[CHARLEY PATTON RECORDING PLAYING] KENNEDY: You have almost a family tree that begins with the recordings in Richmond in 1929 with Charley Patton.

Those records influenced Robert Johnson, Robert Johnson influences Muddy Waters, Muddy Waters influences the likes of Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones.

And so you have this generational influence that begins with those really important records that Charley Patton made.

[CHARLEY PATTON RECORDING PLAYING] PEYTON: After those Richmond recordings, Charley Patton's music could be heard everywhere.

He was able to rise above that in a time when that's nearly impossible.

To me, it's just such an amazing American story.

[JAZZ MUSIC] NARRATOR: So many other extraordinary artists, performers, writers, singers and composers made their way to the Gennett Studios between 1920 and 1932.

The great Duke Ellington performed at Gennett's New York studios twice, once as a backup performer in 1924, and again with his Washingtonians Band in 1926.

Sidney Bechet, the legendary New Orleans clarinetist, played with Louis Armstrong at Gennett's New York studios in 1924.

[GENE AUTRY SINGING] The legendary singing cowboy, Gene Autry, got his recording start at Gennett's Richmond studio in 1930.

An employee of the railways at the time, Autry boarded a train with hopes of recording in New York.

When he was turned away, he stopped by the Gennett Studios in Richmond on the way home and signed a contract the next day.

He ultimately recorded more than 50 sides for the Gennett country label.

[GENE AUTRY SINGING] [JAZZ MUSIC] And when jazz moved into the swing era with more big band performances, Gennett signed contracts with other acts, including Lawrence Welk, Guy Lombardo, and Jimmy Durante.

KENNEDY: Everybody promoted themselves as Gennett Recording Artists, whether it was Lawrence Welk or the Wolverine Orchestra with Bix Beiderbecke.

It was just a nice thing to be able to announce, because not everybody was making records in those days.

The Midwest had no other recording studio other than the Gennett recording label, so that was a big deal.

HOOD: This was a big turning point in the way we appreciate music and the way we remember musicians.

And that these performances actually live on now in our culture.

RECORDING: "You shall not crucify mankind up on a cross of gold."

NARRATOR: One of the most significant presenters ever to record at Gennett -- at least in the mind of company manager Fred Gennett -- was the 1923 recording session in Richmond of civic leader and former U.S. Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan.

KENNEDY: One of their proud moments was having William Jennings Bryan come to the recording studio in Richmond, where he did a segment of his famous "Cross of Gold" speech that he had done in the 1896 Democratic convention.

NARRATOR: After the Stock Market crash of 1929, many American businesses suffered, including the recording industry.

Overall, annual sales of records dropped from a 1927 high of 104 million to a mere 6 million records sold in 1932.

Gennett struggled to keep its artists paid in full, and their advertising and distribution channels suddenly dried up.

At the start of the Second World War, company managers were forced to turn over many of the wax masters of their recording library, including many of the original sides by King Oliver, Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton, melting down the masters for the valuable copper that was contained within.

The Gennett mansion, which had stood proudly on Main Street on "Millionaire's Row," was sold in 1938 to cover company debts.

By 1949, the factory announced massive layoffs for the first time in history -- another necessary measure to help account for growing debt.

Three years later, the last records came off the assembly line in Richmond, and the doors to the Gennett Recording Laboratory closed in July 1952.

Most of the skeletal remains of the piano manufacturing company were torn down and sold for scrap by the mid '50s.

DAHAN: You have the collapse of the Stock Market, people are out of work, discretionary income is no longer available.

For the Starr Piano, Gennett Record company, the value overnight went down a million dollars.

Their stock goes down, People don't want to buy pianos, people don't want to buy phonographs, people don't want to buy records.

So they suddenly don't have a market anymore for any of their products.

[GUITAR MUSIC] NARRATOR: By the late 1990s, there were only a couple of large brick walls with a faded Gennett Records logo standing on the grounds of the old Starr Piano factory.

But before the final remnants could be torn down, a group of dedicated regional historians, musicians, and community leaders formed the Starr-Gennett Foundation to help preserve the history of the area.

Together, they saved what little remained of the Starr Piano factory and turned it into a park and an amphitheater, which hosts annual jazz concerts and other events.

A long sidewalk winds through the park that highlights a Gennett "Walk of Fame," with large replica record albums framing pictures of all the famous artists who once recorded for the Richmond label.

HARBISON: That was the most remarkable thing.

It wasn't ever intended to document the growth of America's roots popular music, and yet they did.

PIERCE: It was at the crossroads, literally, of Midwestern jazz, Appalachian music, rhythm and blues, all that.

They took this opportunity and they manufactured something that allowed this great musical experience that we appreciate to endure and to grow.

[GUITAR MUSIC] CLOSED CAPTION PRODUCTIONS ccproductions.com 844-335-0911 [JAZZ MUSIC] [JAZZ MUSIC] [JAZZ MUSIC] ANNCR: For a DVD or Blu-Ray disc of this program, or other WTIU-produced programs, go online at ShopWTIU.org.

ANNCR: This program is made possible in part by -- Visit Richmond, Wayne County, Indiana.

A getaway for eclectic shopping, interactive museums, and regionally inspired culinary trails.

With itineraries including the Wine and Ale Trail, the Chocolate Trail, and more.

Visit Richmond.org.

The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.

Mentoring and nurturing the next generation of music leaders.

music.indiana.edu.

Earlham College, offering the epic advantage of funded internship or research experience for every student.

Education grounded in the Quaker values of respect, integrity, peace, simplicity, and community.

Earlham.edu.

The Al Cobine Recognition Endowment.