JAD ABUMRAD: Before we start today's show, just want to let you know this episode contains a few moments of content and language that might be upsetting for sensitive listeners or young kids.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD: Hey. This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. Really excited to bring you a project I've been working on with ...

SHIMA OLIAEE: Shima Oliaee. It's me.

JAD: You.

SHIMA: Yeah.

JAD: Co-creator of "Dolly Parton's America" with me.

SHIMA: I jumped in too quick. I jumped in too quick.

JAD: Perfect timing. No. This project runs for about a month. And ...

SHIMA: Yes.

JAD: Really excited.

SHIMA: Let's do it.

JAD: Yeah. Start us off.

SHIMA: Okay. So every family has a secret, but some families' secrets are bigger than others.

JAD: We'll start with Eric Pace, the great-grandson.

ERIC PACE: My sister had gotten me a job at this YMCA camp.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [children singing] Eyes and ears and mouth and nose.]

SHIMA: This is 2006.

ERIC PACE: And we got a message from my dad saying we have a mandatory family meeting. You guys need to leave work to come and talk to us.

JAD: Did he tell you what was up?

ERIC PACE: He didn't give us any other information. He said, "No, you gotta come to the family meeting, and I'll tell you everything." We thought, like, "Okay, this has gotta be divorce." We told everybody at the job, and they're like—they're just like, "Good luck with the meeting, you know? This sounds really heavy, really serious."

SHIMA: [laughs]

SHIMA: So he and sister hop in the car.

ERIC PACE: Kind of just, like, trying to hurry up and get there so we can see what this is all about.

SHIMA: Three hours later, they walk into their childhood home in Redding, California. And the whole family is there. Like, eight of them.

ERIC PACE: My dad tells us to go sit in the living room. And we're not a very formal kind of family, and so that was strange. We're like, okay, this is getting weirder and weirder. And then he holds up a picture that had been on our wall our whole lives.

JAD: It was a really old picture.

ERIC PACE: It's kind of the sepia tone.

JAD: Guy in a pinstripe suit, really good-looking, but kind of a weary look on his face like he's being told to smile but he doesn't really want to smile.

ERIC PACE: And he says, "Do you all know who this man is?" And we said, "Yeah. That's your grandfather, Harry Pace."

JAD: What did you know about Harry Pace at that point?

SUSAN PACE: I mean, not much.

SHIMA: This is Susan Pace, granddaughter.

SUSAN PACE: Well, he was a lawyer.

PETER PACE: He was a lawyer. We knew that.

SHIMA: Peter Pace, grandson.

PETER PACE: We knew he lived in Chicago and he lived in New York.

SHIMA: He's the one who called the meeting.

ERIC PACE: And I was told he was, like, Italian.

PETER PACE: And somehow, the notion was presented that Pace was an anglicization of Pace.

ERIC PACE: Pace, Pace.

PETER PACE: An Italian name.

JAD: Wow.

ERIC PACE: They told me it means peace. And so I was like, ah, like, peace—cool.

SUSAN PACE: You know, we grew up thinking maybe we're Italian.

PETER PACE: You put together Italian and lawyer.

SUSAN PACE: So we thought, oh, well, maybe he's a lawyer for the mob. [laughs]

PETER PACE: We just kind of made this stuff up.

SHIMA: In any case, at the meeting, Peter sits everyone down.

PETER PACE: I think I told them—I said, "You know how we've never really known anything about Grandfather Harry Pace? Well, we've discovered some interesting information about it."

ERIC PACE: Then he handed us the packet. It's about 10 pages long. And so we started reading, and within, like, about 30 seconds, I was just like ...

SUSAN PACE: Oh my God!

PETER PACE: It was mind-blowing.

ERIC PACE: Oh my God. This is crazy.

SUSAN PACE: I can't believe this has been kept from us.

ERIC PACE: It was really ...

SUSAN PACE: You know, it was just so shocking.

ERIC PACE: Wow.

SUSAN PACE: How could it even been a consideration that I wouldn't need to know this?

JAD: What they discovered is that this man Harry Pace, whose picture had been hanging on their wall their whole lives ...

SHIMA: Well, first of all, he wasn't Italian.

PETER PACE: It turns out that he was African American.

ERIC PACE: He was Black.

SHIMA: That's how he identified. That's how he was seen.

JAD: And he was someone who literally changed America.

SHIMA: In, like, 19 different ways.

EMMETT PRICE: Music.

DAVID SUISMAN: Culture.

MARGO JEFFERSON: Theater.

IMANI PERRY: Housing.

JAMI FLOYD: Law.

[NEWS CLIP: He proceeded to fight the case all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States.]

[NEWS CLIP: The decision opened 500 new properties to Black residents.]

JAD: He desegregated whole neighborhoods, laid the groundwork for so much music.

IMANI PERRY: Like, without him ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert Johnson: [singing] Fell down on my knees.]

PAUL SLADE: We'd have no Robert Johnson.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rolling Stones: [singing] Please allow me to introduce myself.]

PAUL SLADE: No Rolling Stones and no Eric Clapton.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joan Jett: [singing] Singing, I love rock 'n' roll.]

JAD: He even had a hand in coining the term rock 'n' roll.

CHARLES MCKINNEY: I mean, this dude's—good God! Why don't we have, like, three movies about this dude, right? I mean, you know, hello, Ava DuVernay, right? Good God. I mean, this dude is, like—he is, like, the vocational MacGyver.

SHIMA: But then somehow, right at the peak of his power ...

CHARLES MCKINNEY: It's like, poof!

SHIMA: ... he vanishes.

JAD: So completely that none of us know his story—not even his own family.

ERIC PACE: Wow. So you're telling me we're related to this unsung hero, and you want me to just sit here and laugh about it? I gotta go understand this.

JAD: For the next three episodes, we're going to dig into some of these questions. Who was he? Why did he disappear?

SHIMA: And why did America let him? This is "The Vanishing of Harry Pace," a miniseries on Radiolab.

JAD: Now this was a tricky story to report and tell.

JOHN MCWHORTER: Where did you all get all this about him? He can be hard to research. Is there a book about him? There's ever a single book?

JAD: There's not a lot out there about Harry. He's a hard guy to know. We don't have his voice. We barely have his words.

SHIMA: So to try to help us make sense of all this, we assembled an amazing team of collaborators.

JAMI FLOYD: I'm Jami Floyd.

TERRANCE MCKNIGHT: I'm Terrance McKnight.

IMANI PERRY: Imani Perry.

KIESE LAYMON: Kiese Laymon.

CORD JEFFERSON: Cord Jefferson.

SHIMA: You'll hear all of them along the way.

JAD: And I'll just say, full disclosure, one of the things that drew us to Harry's story is that he's a guy who just didn't fit the categories that the world offered him.

SHIMA: He slips between the cracks.

JAD: Yeah. And in a very different way—I say this cautiously—I feel like, as Middle Eastern people, that experience, there's something about it that makes sense.

SHIMA: Sometimes it feels like people don't know how to see you.

JAD: I think a lot of people have this experience in all kinds of ways.

CORD JEFFERSON: My parents say ...

JAD: For example, Cord—filmmaker Cord Jefferson, one of our collaborators ...

CORD JEFFERSON: My parents tell this story about when I was about two, putting me in front of a mirror with them, and just sort of letting me take in the differences in all of us and the fact that I neither looked ...

SHIMA: Wow.

CORD JEFFERSON: ... entirely like my mother nor entirely like my father. Because they said that I asked, what am I? What am I?

JAMI FLOYD: I cannot remember a time when I was not aware of being different from everybody else I knew.

JAD: This is journalist Jami Floyd, another of our collaborators. She runs WNYC's Race and Justice Unit.

JAMI FLOYD: I mean, everybody I knew was either white or Black. There was nobody else who was kind of coffee-colored with an afro like me. [laughs] And I mean coffee with some milk in it.

SHIMA: [laughs]

JAMI FLOYD: To this day, I feel a lot Blacker than I really am. Like, in my mind, I am really Black.

SHIMA: [laughs]

JAMI FLOYD: That doesn't mean my Black friends and colleagues always see me as Black. And so it is complicated. And then when you step into the multi-racial ...

JAD: Okay, so we'll get back to Jami and Cord and the family soonish. But we've got a lot of ground to cover. So first ...

SHIMA: We're gonna take you on an audio roller coaster through what they discovered in those pages.

JAD: Chapter One: The Rise.

DAVID SUISMAN: Okay, let's go. He was born in 1884.

EMMETT PRICE: 1884 in Covington ...

DAVID SUISMAN: ... Georgia.

EMMETT PRICE: Georgia.

SHIMA: Scholars David Suisman and Emmett Price.

EMMETT PRICE: Which is about 32 miles east of Atlanta ...

DAVID SUISMAN: A very picturesque place that's been used for a lot of movies and TV shows. Like The Dukes Of Hazzard was shot there. And In The Heat Of The Night and other films and TV shows that needed a good antebellum background.

WILLIE RUFF: Now, remember ...

SHIMA: Scholar Willie Ruff.

WILLIE RUFF: ... Harry Pace was born just a few years after emancipation.

EMMETT PRICE: About 30 years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

WILLIE RUFF: His parents were slaves.

SHIMA: Grandparents, actually.

JAD: One of the things we know about Harry—or we think we know—is that his grandfather owned a plantation, raped one of his slaves. She had a child, and that child was Harry's grandfather.

PAUL SLADE: Which helps to tell us why Harry himself was so fair-skinned, which played quite a role throughout his life.

JAD: This is journalist Paul Slade. To our knowledge, he has written the only book that's out there about Harry.

SHIMA: What do we know about Harry's father and mother?

EMMETT PRICE: So we know that his father was named Charles. Charles was a blacksmith.

SHIMA: We know that his dad died when he was really young.

EMMETT PRICE: Five or six. Dad's gone. Mother is Nancy Francis Pace. And we think that Harry's mother was a laundress. So ...

SHIMA: If that is true ...

EMMETT PRICE: Then we do know that the type of folks whose laundry she would be doing would be of significant means.

JAD: She was a single mom, so no doubt she took Harry around town with her as she was picking up laundry and dropping it off.

EMMETT PRICE: And so he was able to see a huge swath of people that most average kids wouldn't have access to.

CORD JEFFERSON: It was probably pretty eye-opening for him at a young age.

SHIMA: Cord Jefferson again.

CORD JEFFERSON: I have no idea, but I just think that he probably saw people treat his mother pretty horribly as a servant, as somebody who you give your dirty underthings to. My grandmother and grandfather were domestic servants at a rich white man's estate in Ohio. If you see yourself as being part of the underclass, I think that there's some anger that develops with that.

JAD: One of the things we do know about Harry is that later in his life, he would write a brutal revenge story ...

PETER PACE: Through all these years, he had held this bitterness, this desire for revenge against those of his own blood who had cheated him out of the heritage and the life that properly belonged to him.

JAD: ... about a young mixed-race kid like him, who tracks down his white ancestors and kills them.

PETER PACE: He thought of himself as being a special avenger of God, an instrument to be used in bringing about punishment.

JAD: So yeah, there might have been some anger there.

SHIMA: In any case, by the time he's 10, 11 ...

EMMETT PRICE: Harry clearly excelled in Latin, in Greek.

SHIMA: He played music. He sang.

PAUL SLADE: I think even at that point it must have been pretty clear that Harry was a phenomenally bright kid.

SHIMA: And at the age of 12, he is sent to Atlanta University.

CORD JEFFERSON: Who paid for it, by the way?

SHIMA: From the brochures of the school that I went through from that time, they had donations.

CORD JEFFERSON: Got it.

SHIMA: So ...

CORD JEFFERSON: So he basically—so he got a scholarship.

SHIMA: Yes.

EMMETT PRICE: I mean, Atlanta University was the spot. It was the intellectual mecca for Black folks.

CHARLES MCKINNEY: I think the motto of Atlanta University is, "I'll find a way or make one." How boss is that? What? I'll find a way or make one. Watch me.

SHIMA: Professor Charles McKinney.

JAD: Okay, so take us back to Harry. Like, what do we know about his life on campus?

EMMETT PRICE: We know that when he gets to school, this cat was well-dressed. This dude ...

CORD JEFFERSON: He's a handsome man.

JAD: There's one picture you can find where he's about 17 ...

CORD JEFFERSON: ...Dark jacket, starched white collar ...

JAD: ...Closely cropped hair, wavy ...

CORD JEFFERSON: Slight smirk that seems, I would say, pleased with himself.

KIESE LAYMON: All of the Black—young Black women would have fell for this dude.

JAD: That's writer Kiese Laymon, by the way.

EMMETT PRICE: He couldn't be the country boy that he was from Covington.

SHIMA: His first few years, he sings a capella in the choir. Joins the debate team, writes for the school newspaper.

EMMETT PRICE: He works his way through school.

DAVID SUISMAN: Working as a printer. He was what was known as a printer's devil.

SHIMA: [laughs] Sorry.

DAVID SUISMAN: Which is some kind of print shop job.

JAD: A printer's devil.

DAVID SUISMAN: Yeah.

SHIMA: A young boy at or below the level of apprentice in a printing establishment.

JAD: Are you just getting that from the internet just now?

SHIMA: Just looked it up.

JAD: Oh, wow.

EMMETT PRICE: While he's at Atlanta University, he finds out that the white printer's devil is making more money than him. What does he do? He quit. He says "Enough of this. I refuse to be treated in this manner."

JAD: Okay, so he's printing, he's singing, he's learning to advocate for himself. All that's just a warmup because by far the most important thing that happens to him at Atlanta University ...

PAUL SLADE: Well, the most significant thing that happens to him there is that he meets W. E. B. Du Bois.

EMMETT PRICE: William Edward Burghardt Du Bois.

JAD: One of the greatest thinkers America has ever produced.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, W. E. B. Du Bois: In 1897, I went to Atlanta University and stayed there 13 years making a systematic study of the American Negro. It's fair to say that for the next 25 years, there wasn't a book published on the Negro problem that didn't have to depend upon what we were doing at Atlanta University.]

IMANI PERRY: Well, with Du Bois, I mean, you know, he's sort of who all of us Black studies academics are chasing because he's the ultimate, like, Renaissance intellectual.

SHIMA: This is scholar Imani Perry.

IMANI PERRY: You know, he's the father of American sociology. He's a novelist. He's, you know, one of the founders of the NAACP, also.

EMMETT PRICE: In 1903, he writes The Souls Of Black Folks.

CORD JEFFERSON: "It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness ..."

EMMETT PRICE: We get his phrase of double-consciousness.

CORD JEFFERSON: "The sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity."

EMMETT PRICE: Which is deep.

CORD JEFFERSON: "One feels his two-ness ..."

EMMETT PRICE: The—it's the most critical work for Black people still. Still.

IMANI PERRY: I mean, he's like ...

EMMETT PRICE: Published this in 1903.

IMANI PERRY: Many of us, even if we have very different politics, we're all chasing Du Bois.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, W. E. B. Du Bois: Negroes had to have some voice in their government and trained men to lead them.]

SHIMA: On that point of who would lead Black America, it's exactly when Harry steps foot on campus that Du Bois writes the following phrase.

EMMETT PRICE: "The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the talented tenth.

BILL DOGGETT: W. E. B. Du Bois coins and brings to life this idea of the talented tenth ...

SHIMA: Scholar Bill Doggett.

BILL DOGGETT: ...That African Americans, Negroes, only 35 years earlier slaves, could improve its lot in America by investing in the talented tenth—the brightest, the most intellectual of the race.

IMANI PERRY: Certainly, you know, Du Bois was an elitist.

JAD: But his idea was I want to find people who can accomplish things that are so great that even the most bigoted white person can't deny it.

PAUL SLADE: And Harry was almost a personification of that, I think.

EMMETT PRICE: In the talented tenth, Pace is number one.

SHIMA: Okay, if we were to imagine, then, Harry has just started there, like, what would have been the first interaction like?

EMMETT PRICE: Harry Pace would have heard about him. But then when he sees him, Du Bois is light-skinned. So you could only imagine Harry Pace following this guy around, trying to figure out what makes him tick.

JAD: Easy to imagine that one day after class, he's like, "Excuse me, Mr. Du Bois. I have a question."

EMMETT PRICE: And boom. I mean, you see this bond that's there. I mean, if we think about Star Wars, Harry Pace is the Padawan, you know, to the Jedi Master Du Bois.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, The Empire Strikes Back: [Yoda] Yes, a Jedi's strength flows from the Force.]

PAUL SLADE: W. E. B. Du Bois more or less adopts Harry. He recruits Harry to help him with some of his own research projects. He, I think, gives Harry the father figure that this fatherless kid has never had.

JAD: And he also gives Harry a whole outlook.

IMANI PERRY: For—to be a race man driven by a sense of service to Black people.

JAD: The talented tenth, that it's up to him to lift up the race. Double-consciousness—it's up to him to see himself through the hostile white gaze and manipulate that gaze for his own benefit.

SHIMA: In fact, later in his life, he would give speeches about how important it is to use public opinion to make equality happen.

JAD: Question was: how do you do that? How do you show white America what Black America is capable of?

SHIMA: That's after the break.

[LISTENER: This is Angela Babiars from San Jose, California. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

[JAD: Science reporting on Radiolab is supported by Science Sandox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science.]

SHIMA: Okay.

JAD: Okay. This is The Vanishing Of Harry Pace, a miniseries on Radiolab. Episode one.

SHIMA: That's Jad Abumrad.

JAD: I am Jad. You are ...

SHIMA: I'm Shima Oliaee.

JAD: And we are here.

SHIMA: Yeah, we're two people making a podcast.

JAD: Let's do this. So get us back to the story.

SHIMA: Okay. So Harry Pace—Talented Tenther, DuBoisian race man that wants to uplift as he climbs. The question is how? How are you gonna do it?

JAD: And the answer he comes up with, through a roundabout series of events, ends up creating this amazing thing that we're celebrating the 100th anniversary of pretty much right now. But it begins ...

SHIMA: At a bank.

PAUL SLADE: So 1907 ...

SHIMA: Harry is working at Solvent Bank on Beale Street in Memphis. He taught Latin and Greek for a while. He tried to start a magazine. And now he was working at a bank.

PAUL SLADE: Harry's there at Solvent Bank.

SHIMA: Sitting at his desk.

PAUL SLADE: And a man who turns out to be W.C. Handy walks in. Now Handy ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The father of the blues.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, W.C. Handy: When I didn't love you.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: W.C. Handy.]

PAUL SLADE: ... who we now know as the father of the blues, the man who really introduced blues music to America and to the world.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, W.C. Handy: It is my good fortune ...]

SHIMA: This is Handy from an oral history.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, W.C. Handy: ... to live for two years in the state of Mississippi and to hear the crude singing of the Negro down there.]

PAUL SLADE: Harry would have known who W.C. Handy was. Obviously, first of all, they have to talk about the mortgage business.

JAD: Mr. Handy, please sign this form and that form.

PAUL SLADE: As the meeting draws towards an end, all the mortgage business is completed. I imagine Harry hesitating for a moment and wondering, do I dare do this? He might not like it. What's he gonna say? Should I show him my lyrics?

SHIMA: [laughs]]

SHIMA: Turns out, Harry had been writing some song lyrics that he probably had in the top drawer of his desk.

PAUL SLADE: The way I imagine it, he gets up his nerve. He takes a deep breath. He does show Handy his lyrics. And lo and behold, Handy rather likes them.

SHIMA: Shortly after that meeting, they get together and start writing songs.

PAUL SLADE: The first song that he collaborated on Harry with was called "In The Cotton Fields Of Dixie."

SHIMA: I can do any of this.

JAD: Like that—Shima, are you a sight reader?

SHIMA: One of the most exciting moments in this series was I finally found the sheet music for the song after much hunting. And Jad, Jami Floyd and I ended up visiting John McWhorter at his home in Queens.

JOHN MCWHORTER: John McWhorter, and I teach linguistics and some other things at Columbia University. And in my off-time, such as it is, I am a great lover of music. Right now I'm in a room where I believe there are 850 Broadway cast albums. And I'm straight.

JAD: [laughs]

JOHN MCWHORTER: I don't know.

JAD: He agreed to sight read the song for us.

SHIMA: Can you sing it a little bit so we can hear it?

JOHN MCWHORTER: It's out of my range but [singing] In the cotton fields of Dixie is a dear old Southern home, where the mockingbirds and moonlight love to sing. Though it's just a lonely cabin, it is mine, though far I roam, in the land where cotton is king. I'm not a tenor. I'm a baritone.

JAD: [laughs]

JOHN MCWHORTER: That's where it's written. So it's not a good song, but that's what he did.

JAD: What? You know, it's better than I thought it was gonna be.

SHIMA: Yeah.

JOHN MCWHORTER: It grows on you, doesn't it, damn it? The chorus grows on you.

JAD: I think the chorus isn't bad. If you squint your ears and don't listen to the words ...

SHIMA: Yeah.

JOHN MCWHORTER: If you don't think about what it's about.

JAMI FLOYD: You know, we are struggling to understand, what are they trying to accomplish? Are they trying to advance a people?

JOHN MCWHORTER: Oh, they wanted to make some money.

JAD: The 'they' in this case was probably more Handy than Pace. Of the two of them, he was far more famous and far less political, and he knew that these plantation songs, they sold.

JOHN MCWHORTER: There wasn't a market for conscious sheet music back then.

JAMI FLOYD: But John, who were they writing this song for?

JOHN MCWHORTER: Good white people who want to hear about that wonderful period when everybody was so happy in the South—and you would bring, you know, Trixie and Rebecca and Uncle Bill around the piano, and everybody would sing along to it. And then they'd laugh and clap and then, you know, die of typhus or whatever. "Bill, I can play this. Will you sing along with me?" "Oh, sure, honey." And so, "In the cotton fields of Dixie is a dear old Southern home where the mockingbirds—oh, get that flossy—and moonlight love to sing. Okay, Wilbur, can you come do harmony with me?" "Well, I guess I could." Okay, so, "Just a lonely cabin—it is mine though far I roam, in the land where cotton is king." That's what this was for. And then Aunt Madge would bring some lemonade. "Here y'all go."

JAMI FLOYD: Because this is their form of entertainment.

JOHN MCWHORTER: That's all there was.

JAD: This particular song—they wrote it, paid a guy 50 bucks to publish it, and he ran off with their money, which is karmically something. I don't know. Then they make another song called "Beale Street Blues." It sells pretty well. And then suddenly, they move from Memphis to New York City.

DAVID SUISMAN: When they move to New York, their goal is to set up shop in and amongst all of the other Tin Pan Alley houses.

SHIMA: So all white.

DAVID SUISMAN: Which are all white-owned. We're gonna compete with everybody else, show them we have just as good if not better material.

SHIMA: Problem is, unsurprisingly ...

DAVID SUISMAN: They run into a lot of racism.

JAD: There are accounts of white music publishers literally accosting them in the street.

SHIMA: Now at this point, the way that things worked was the sheet music was sold in dime stores. And most of those stores were white-owned, so what Pace and Handy decided to do is they hired white piano players—song pluggers, as they were called—to go into those dime stores and demonstrate their music.

JAD: Oh, so would this be the thing where you'd walk into a place and you grab a sheet music and be like, "Huh, I wonder what this sounds like. Mr. Demonstrator, can you play this for me?"

ELLIOTT HURWITT: Right.

JAD: And then they'd key it out?

ELLIOTT HURWITT: Or Ms. Demonstrator. They were often women.

SHIMA: Oh, they were women?

ELLIOTT HURWITT: Yeah, some of them.

SHIMA: It's so interesting to think about the sheet music passing for Black or white just like—you know, like a person.

ELLIOTT HURWITT: Right.

JAD: This is historian Elliott Hurwitt. He says the strategy worked.

ELLIOTT HURWITT: You know, they're making all this money. I had mentioned 1918, 1920 ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bessie Smith: [singing] Cablegrams goes off in inquiry.]

ELLIOTT HURWITT: ..."Yellow Dog Blues." People love it. It sells huge numbers of those recordings.

SHIMA: And then ...

ELLIOTT HURWITT: [humming]

SHIMA: ... the big one.

PAUL SLADE: "St. Louis Blues."

ELLIOTT HURWITT: Maybe the most popular song of the 20th century. It's recorded over 2,000 times.

JAD: Wow. Wow!

ELLIOTT HURWITT: There are "St. Louis Blues" recordings by Stevie Wonder ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stevie Wonder: [singing]]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Nat King Cole: [singing] St. Louis woman.]

SHIMA: Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Louis Armstrong: [singing] Oh, I hate to see ...]

JAD: The Beatles.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Louis Armstrong: [singing] The evening sun ...]

ELLIOTT HURWITT: ...Herbie Hancock. People will be recording that for another hundred years. So the product that these guys produced was immensely important, and spread all over the world and really helped American folklore and American styles and ways of thinking. It's through these two men primarily, through Pace and Handy, that this pervades and permeates mainstream American society. So white people in Ohio have their sheet music on the piano, and they're playing it at parties. People are buying recordings of their records in Australia, in England, eventually in Korea and in Russia. This is how America really invades the world.

JAD: So Pace and Handy are killing it. Absolutely killing it.

SHIMA: But at the height of their success ...

DAVID SUISMAN: There is this sharp division.

ELLIOTT HURWITT: Handy is really stuck on sheet music.

PAUL SLADE: The old world of sheet music sales.

JAD: You know, he was 11 years older than Harry. He liked how things were going.

PAUL SLADE: But, Harry, that's not what he wanted.

ELLIOTT HURWITT: He believed that records are the big new thing.

JAD: Now records at this point were just a few decades in, but people were just starting to get into them. Pace was like, "Let's do it." Handy said no.

SHIMA: So right at the peak of their popularity, with barely any notice ...

EMMETT PRICE: He quit! He rolled out. He was like, "Enough. I'm done."

PAUL SLADE: Harry Pace bailed out of Pace and Handy. Harry also poached a good number of Pace and Handy's staff.

JAD: Oh!

PAUL SLADE: Right the way from the post room to the accounts department, mostly people in their 20s.

JAD: Do we have any idea how Handy—how this hit him?

ELLIOTT HURWITT: Oh, yeah.

JAD: What does he say?

ELLIOTT HURWITT: He says, all in, down and out. He talks about, I was broke in the bank and blind, you know ...

JAD: Blind?

ELLIOTT HURWITT: How could Pace do this to me kind of thing.

SHIMA: But for Harry, this was about more than just music.

EMMETT PRICE: Remember, Pace is a race man.

SHIMA: He's got a mission.

EMMETT PRICE: He's a race man the same way that Du Bois is a race man. And Harry Pace is all about Black people, of how do I uplift, right? While I climb?

SHIMA: And in the record industry, there was a lot more uplifting to do there than in sheet music.

JAD: Because basically, you had three main white record companies, and what they were releasing was almost entirely these really demeaning minstrel songs.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: All Coons Look Alike To Me.]

BILL DOGGETT: Like "All Coons Look Alike To Me" and "The Phrenologist Coon."

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The Phrenologist Coon.]

JAD: Bill Doggett again. He says it is impossible to overstate just how massive minstrelsy was at this point in time.

BILL DOGGETT: The minstrel show is the behemoth of American entertainment at the turn of the century. It is based on the demonization of Blackness.

JAD: You had white bands dressing up in blackface singing outrageously racist songs based on overblown stereotypes.

BILL DOGGETT: You know, the watermelon, the fried chicken, the big lips.

SHIMA: And he told us about a songwriter, Bob Cole—Black man—who Harry definitely would have known about.

JOHN WORTHAM: What makes it even worse is when a song like this is good.

JAD: John Wortham actually played us one of Bob Cole's songs.

JOHN WORTHAM: This is Robert Cole." And so [singing] If you like-a me like I like-a you, and you like me just the same, and then they're under the bamboo tree." And it's about a jungle person from Matabooloo, and it's in this dialect. And Jesus Christ, the song is very catchy.

BILL DOGGETT: Bob Cole had an issue with the coon song, all of the extremes. He had a lot of trouble with that. And so all of a sudden, one day—I believe it was 1910 or 1911—he made a decision. I don't know if he was drunk or what. He walked into a lake and drowned.

JAD: Wow!

BILL DOGGETT: Here is the most successful Black writer of his time period.

SHIMA: Wow!

BILL DOGGETT: I don't think it's an accidental drowning.

SHIMA: So the idea that Harry would want to move on from sheet music, this was the context, right?

JAD: The white companies were releasing these minstrel songs. That's all they were doing. They were putting out circular platters of white supremacy, and destroying lives in the process. And Harry wanted to change that.

SHIMA: And if Handy didn't want to be involved with that, their partnership was over.

RHIANNON GIDDENS: Harry Pace obviously saw the need. He—I can't—I mean ...

SHIMA: This is performer Rhiannon Giddens.

RHIANNON GIDDENS: Why are we neglecting all of this talent, you know? I mean that's the kind of rage, to be honest. Like, I mean, I can't speak for this man because I—you know, he's obviously dead. But I can only imagine that it would be rage-inducing, you know, to put it mildly. So I can only imagine, you know, that that all got funneled into, you know, let's do this ourselves.

DAVID SUISMAN: He understood that who makes records, under what conditions, and to what effects really matters. He understands that those are political issues.

SHIMA: To him ...

DAVID SUISMAN: This is not gonna be a regular business.

PAUL SLADE: No, no, no. Pace definitely saw it as a social movement as much as a purely commercial one.

TIM BROOKS: But Pace, being the businessman he was, went out and got funding for it. He got a board of directors with Du Bois and others on the board.

JAD: Media historian Tim Brooks.

SHIMA: Well, how old is he?

PAUL SLADE: Harry would have been 36 at the time.

SHIMA: The first question he had to consider ...

TIM BROOKS: What to call it? Well, he wanted to call it something that spoke of Black pride.

SHIMA: Do you know who named it?

PAUL SLADE: I do. For several months at the end of 1920, Harry was writing letters to W.E.B. Du Bois. The idea of calling the label Black Swan actually came from Du Bois.

SHIMA: He told Harry before you were born, there used to be this singer.

RHIANNON GIDDENS: She was a soprano.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield: [singing]]

RHIANNON GIDDENS: So Black Swan, the name itself, you know, was named after an opera singer.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield: [singing]]

RHIANNON GIDDENS: You know, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield. And that was her moniker. She was known as the Black Swan.

TIM BROOKS: The first concerts were 1851, 1852.

DWANDALYN REECE: When she made her debut in New York City ...

SHIMA: Curator Dwandalyn Reece.

DWANDALYN REECE: ... she was brought out on stage. And there was laughter. Audiences were jarred and laughed at her. They couldn't make sense out of what they were hearing out of that body.

TIM BROOKS: She had a magnificent voice. Looking back, it's this magical moment, even in slavery days, when a Black woman could command this kind of attention. So that was very much in the air.

SHIMA: So in May of 1921, almost exactly a hundred years ago, Harry Pace launches Black Swan.

DAVID SUISMAN: When he launches the company, it is hailed in the Black press.

RHIANNON GIDDENS: Chicago Defender, May 7, 1921. "News of the completion of the first list of Black Swan Records, which are now ready for delivery, will be received with great interest and enthusiasm by our people all over the United States. When the announcement was made that a company had been formed to manufacture phonograph records by our artists, a great uproar was caused among white phonograph record companies who resent the idea of having a race company enter what they felt was an exclusive field."

PAUL SLADE: They could see what a huge deal it was. I've got one of their first press ads here from May 1921.

PETER PACE: "Ask your dealer for Black Swan Records, the only phonograph company owned and controlled by colored people using exclusively Negro voices and musicians."

WILLIE RUFF: Yeah, it said "The only records using exclusively Negro voices and musicians." Yes. That was a slogan and a fact.

EMMETT PRICE: You remember FUBU?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, advertisement: FUBU runs the fashion world.]

EMMETT PRICE: FUBU. FUBU clothes. FUBU, right?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, advertisement: The look, the style, the vibe, the feel.]

EMMETT PRICE: "For Us By Us."

SHIMA: This was the 1920s version.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, advertisement: Did it. I'm just keeping it real.]

PETER PACE: All stockholders are colored. All artists are colored. All employees are colored.

JAD: And what did they release? What was their first record?

PAUL SLADE: It was "At Dawning" by Revella Hughes.

JAD: Okay.

PAUL SLADE: And "For All Eternity" ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Carroll Clark: [singing] Air is faint with magic power.]

PAUL SLADE: ... by Carroll Clark.

JAD: It's more opera-y than I expected.

DAVID SUISMAN: Well it's—this is classic talented tenth stuff: uplift the race by trying to encourage people to listen to better music, quality music.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Carroll Clark: [singing]]

JOHN MCWHORTER: A lot of the Black Swan material is boring as [bleep], to be honest, because it's just this hoity-toity, white, light classical crap. But I get why he recorded it because the idea is to show that Black people could do that too.

SHIMA: So "At Dawning" comes out. And Harry releases a couple other classical records. How did these do? Did anyone[00:35:00.24] buy them?

EMMETT PRICE: Yeah, I mean—ah.

PAUL SLADE: They sell only $674.64 worth of records.

SHIMA: [laughs]

JAD: Wow.

PAUL SLADE: So that sort of level, they're not gonna survive too long.

EMMETT PRICE: So now he has to figure out—what is he going to do?

JAD: This is one of the many moments we wish we could get in Harry's Pace head, but we can't. There are no journal entries. There's no letters to go to. But we can say that it probably hit him pretty hard. Like, we know he had a stubborn will, but we also know that when he met failure at other times in his life, it really rocked him. There's a short account from a writer named Mira Stewart, who apparently knew Pace personally. And he describes a moment after Atlanta University when Harry was working on Beale Street trying to start a magazine with W.E.B. Du Bois. It failed. And as he describes it, Harry looked out the window and quote, "There was the Mississippi River, swift and deep at the foot of Beale Street." And according to this writer, Pace very seriously considered throwing himself in and committing suicide. And maybe that's how he felt at this point, but then a very lucky break that would change him and American music forever.

SHIMA: Can you describe the moment where all of the fortune changes?

EMMETT PRICE: So Harry Pace, trying to figure out what they're doing. It's 1921, Harry walks into a bar called Edmond's Cellar in Harlem. It's the spot. This place is small. It seats maybe 150, 175 on a good day.

SHIMA: But on that night ...

EMMETT PRICE: These folks are jammed in elbow to elbow.

SHIMA: They'd all come to see this one hotshot 21-year-old.

EMMETT PRICE: And you imagine just a very tiny spotlight on her.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: [singing] Down in Georgia, got a dance that's new. Ain't nothing to it. It's easy to do, called shake that thing.]

RHIANNON GIDDENS: And she is amazing.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: [singing] Oh, shake that thing.

RHIANNON GIDDENS: So full of life.

EMMETT PRICE: Some artists, you listen to them, you can have light conversation, and they're the backdrop. But when Ethel Waters sings ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: [singing] Now the old folks are doing it.]

EMMETT PRICE: ... she is the oxygen in the room.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: [singing] But the old folks learn the young ones what to do about shaking that thing.]

SHIMA: Harry is spellbound.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: I come along. In that era, I was working in nightclubs. [laughs]] WILLIE RUFF: That laugh of hers, oh!

SHIMA: Willie Ruff got a chance to interview Ethel Waters about those early days.

WILLIE RUFF: I can't tell you what a thrill it is for me these 45 years later to hear her voice.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: They'd call me then Sweet Mama String Beans.]

WILLIE RUFF: Sweet Mama String Bean.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: That's because I was so thin.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Willie Ruff: And you got it before you started in show business?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: Yeah. But I was awfully thin. That was one of the things the Lord stopped me from grieving over because I was always a tall child.]

WILLIE RUFF: She was tall, elegant, pretty.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: [singing] I got rhythm.]

WILLIE RUFF: She could dance.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: [singing] I got music.]

IMANI PERRY: She was a good dancer.

EMMETT PRICE: Well, she did the shimmy.

MARGO JEFFERSON: The buzzard lope, the Charleston, of course.

EMMETT PRICE: You know that song, "Back That Thing Up?" She knew how to back that thing up.

DWANDALYN REECE: Ethel Waters is one of those entertainers I wish I would have been alive to see her on stage. She can get something across.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: I could sing, dance, talk and whistle. I'd make you laugh. And I'd make you cry.]

WILLIE RUFF: Make you laugh, and I'd make you cry.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: To me, baby, I got to tell the story. When I say a thing, I'm envisioning a picture. And I'm trying to paint that picture for you to see. I want you to see what I see.]

SHIMA: Now in terms of what did Harry see when he walked into Edmond's and saw her, it's interesting to imagine because on the one hand, Ethel Waters is as un-Paceian as you get.

RANDAL JELKS: She says, "Look, you know, I grew up by four. I know how to curse like a sailor. I knew junkies. I knew sex workers."

SHIMA: Author Randal Jelks.

RANDAL JELKS: She's a woman of the streets, so to speak.

SHIMA: But perhaps he also saw something in her that was in him.

CORD JEFFERSON: "It was a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others."

MARGO JEFFERSON: So she understood the use of masks ...

SHIMA: This is writer Margo Jefferson.

MARGO JEFFERSON: The love of and the absolute immersion, as if it was her birthright in masquerade and disguise.

SHIMA: Ethel was a chameleon.

MARGO JEFFERSON: She played with styles, doing what you might call vocal blackface and vocal whiteface.

JAD: Can you give us an example of that? What does that mean?

MARGO JEFFERSON: Well, you can hear that—good question—in the, for example ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: [singing] I can't give you anything but love, baby.]

MARGO JEFFERSON: ... in "I Can't Give You Anything But Love." The first verse she sings, you know, with what we might call "whiteface gusto."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: [singing] I can't give you anything but love, baby.]

MARGO JEFFERSON: I cahn't. [laughs] You know? And you can just hear having a wonderful, amused time with "I cahn't give you anything but love." Then ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: [singing] I can't give you anything but love, baby.]

MARGO JEFFERSON: ... the second verse ...

SHIMA: She drops her voice.

MARGO JEFFERSON: She finds Bessie Smith, you know, much lower. She does that. And then, the little grace notes start going into blue notes. The phrasing changes, so you can absolutely hear the two.

JAD: Oh my God, when Harry saw her at the bar, it must have been like, oh, you're the person I've been looking—you can do it all!

MARGO JEFFERSON: You know it. You got it all.

SHIMA: So in between sets ...

[applause]

SHIMA: ... Harry or maybe one of his associates elbows his way to the front of the room, where Ethel is lounging by the piano.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: I—he said, "Well, will you do me a favor?" This man, I can't think of his name. He was a very nice man and a very intelligent man, colored man. And he said, "There's a colored company." He said, "The Black Swan Records." He said, "Why, the Black Swan is starting out." And that was Pace and Handy.]

JAD: It was actually just Pace.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: And I knew both of them. I knew Mr. Pace from Memphis, Tennessee when he was in the insurance business. And I knew Handy when they—and they was in the music publishing business because you had to get permission from him to sing the "St. Louis Blues." But I knew them. And they had this little office on 139th Street down in the basement. So he said, "Just go out there and talk." So the—I go—I make an appointment to go with him down in this basement to where this office was. Very nice place and very dignified, because I was from the—other side of the tracks. But it was all colored. It was us. [laughs] But we still had lines of distinction, still do. So Mr. Pace was at the office at the time—very nice, friendly man. Anyhow, the result was they said would I be interested in making a test recording? So we went to a place in Jersey. That was when they were singing through horns.]

WILLIE RUFF: This was before the invention of the microphone. You and I are talking with good microphones. They had to do that in the recording studio with a megaphone.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: They'd have these horns drop down, tubas and bass horns and things like that, you know? And that dominated.]

SHIMA: As the story goes, Harry, Ethel and Harry's arranger, Fletcher Henderson, get into a discussion about what Ethel's gonna sing.

DWANDALYN REECE: Do we do more classical concert, you know, elevating, elite kind of music? Or do we go popular?

JAD: No doubt Harry was like, "Can you do some opera?" But it seems like what happened is Ethel said, "No, we're gonna do popular, and you're gonna pay me $100," which was three times what she was making at Edmond's.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: And so I went in this little hot studio. It was a little hot room. And I sang the "Down Home Blues."]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: [singing] Woke up this morning. The day was dawning. My loving daddy was not about. And he's got that loving that always makes me shout.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: So when they put it out, it was an instant sensation in New York.]

PAUL SLADE: An absolutely massive hit.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: [singing] Before it all gives out.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: It was a big hit, and it got Pace of the Black Swan Records off the hip.]

WILLIE RUFF: She says that recording got them off the hip, you know, put them on the map.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: [singing] ... or make me glad.]

PAUL SLADE: "Down Home Blues" just completely transformed showtunes. It was night and day.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: [singing] 'Cause I ain't been gotten, that don't mean I can't be had.]

WILLIE RUFF: The success of the "Down Home Blues" was so big.

PAUL SLADE: It kept on going back to the press again and again.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: [singing] Some men like me 'cause I'm happy, some because I'm snappy. Some call me honey. Quite a few think I've got money.]

PAUL SLADE: Harry always used to claim he sold 500,000 copies of "Down Home Blues" in six months.

SHIMA: Probably a bit of an exaggeration.

PAUL SLADE: Harry is hyping it up for all he's worth when he gives that figure.

SHIMA: But it's hard to appreciate. You know, music of the past can sometimes sound really far away. It's hard to appreciate what an atomic bomb Ethel was. You could argue that from this moment forward, she became the first crossover artist in American history.

EMMETT PRICE: She was Beyoncé before Beyoncé, right? I mean, she was on stage. She was in the movies. She was a recording star. So she's a superstar.

JAD: As soon as Ethel hit, Harry basically does a 180 from opera to blues. And he starts spitting out press releases full of lies just to stoke the hype.

WILLIE RUFF: So this was dated December 24, Christmas Eve, 1921, in my newspaper, The Chicago Defender. How I loved that paper. "Ethel must not marry, sign contracts for big salary providing she does not marry within a year." [laughs] That's the—this is the contract. "Ethel Waters has signed a unique contract with Harry H. Pace which stipulates that she is not to marry for at least a year, and that during this period she is to devote her time largely to singing for Black Swan Records. It was due to numerous offers of marriage, many of her suitors suggesting that she give up her professional life at once for domesticity, that Mr. Pace was prompted to make this step."

SHIMA: Side note: Ethel Waters was openly in a relationship with a woman. Harry would have known this. She was dating another woman named Ethel, a dancer. And they were famous in Harlem for getting into screaming matches in the streets.

CORD JEFFERSON: New York Age, on the must-not-marry contract.

JAD: But she played along.

CORD JEFFERSON: "Upon receipt of these documents, Ms. Waters is reported to have smiled and prominently attached her signature to the contract, which was returned to New York without delay."

WILLIE RUFF: "Mr. Waters' contract makes her now the highest-salaried colored star in the country."

CORD JEFFERSON: "There is no diminution in the number of perspectives swains—" I'm sorry. [laughs] 'Swains' is a word that we should bring back. "Information as to the effect that there is no diminution in the number of prospective swains, however, and that each city visited adds its quota to the list of victims."

JAD: [laughs] List of victims.

CORD JEFFERSON: This is an amazing sentence. I mean, what a beautiful—she must've felt amazing. This is in the newspaper?

SHIMA: Oh my God. Yeah.

CORD JEFFERSON: It's just like everybody's famously aroused by you.

JAD: [laughs]

SHIMA: In any case, only a few months after that big hit, after Ethel signs the contract ...

PAUL SLADE: Harry was getting the tour underway.

EMMETT PRICE: They start touring as Black Swan Records. I mean, we'll later see Motown Records do this, Stax Records do this, you know, Bad Boy Records do this. All of the record labels that come later in terms of Black-owned for Black folks, they take the same model.

PAUL SLADE: The tour actually kicked off in Washington, DC, November the 17, 1921.

JAD: Paul spent months scouring old newspapers to put together the only full account that we know of of this tour.

PAUL SLADE: Started in Washington, then Philadelphia. They played in New York. A little later it was Baltimore. Spent a long time touring around small towns in Ohio.

SHIMA: Paul says at first they played little nickelodeons in Black-run theaters.

PAUL SLADE: Cincinnati. They played Little Rock.

SHIMA: Ethel would always headline.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: [singing] Woke up this morning.]

PAUL SLADE: She was the big star. Lower down the bill, maybe a comedian. I mean, one case had some acrobats.

JAD: And all along the way, it's like one of those "Avenger" movies where superheroes just keep making cameos. Like, that just keeps happening. For example, in New Orleans ...

PAUL SLADE: That's where Fletcher Henderson met Louis Armstrong.

JAD: Was on this tour?

SHIMA: On this first tour? Dang!

PAUL SLADE: And it's—ultimately, that's the meeting that led to Louis Armstrong joining Fletcher Henderson's band and, you know, inventing swing music.

JAD: Oh, my God!

PAUL SLADE: Louis Armstrong was an unknown young trumpeter at the time.

SHIMA: So there was Louis. Also in a few of the early days, Jack Johnson.

[NEWS CLIP: One of the greatest fighting machines in the history of boxing.]

JAD: Jack Johnson was the first heavyweight boxing champion in America, maybe the most famous person in the country at that point. And he was the reason for that phrase, "Great white hope." White people hated that he was so good, kept throwing up challenger after challenger.

PAUL SLADE: He always beat them.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Johnson rushes in, lands an uppercut. Three left hooks, a tremendous barrage of punches.]

SHIMA: Apparently, on the tour he'd do little comedy skits.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jack Johnson: I have been requested to tell just how I knocked out so many of my opponents.]

SHIMA: And he would tell stories.

PAUL SLADE: He put the moves on Ethel at one point, but she brushed him off.

SHIMA: Speaking of Ethel ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Julie is proud to have with us tonight a talented lady, Ms. Ethel Waters.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: Thank you, Ernie, and hello men. It's a privilege to be here.]

SHIMA: Another thing that happens is that Ethel Waters appears on this new thing called the radio.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: [singing] Here I go again.]

SHIMA: Sings a few songs.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: [singing] Just hearing trumpets blow again.]

EMMETT PRICE: So that makes her the first Black woman to ever sing on US radio!

SHIMA: Wow!

JAD: Oh.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: I was the first—and I was the first colored person ...]

EMMETT PRICE: Having that voice transmitted across the airwaves was extremely significant.

PAUL SLADE: But anyway, let me get back on track. As the tour gathers force, Ethel was determined that they should play dates in the South because her argument was that all the records that have sold for Black Swan, all that music originates from the South. We have a responsibility to let the people there hear us play it.

SHIMA: As soon as she suggests this ...

PAUL SLADE: ...Four members of the band ...

EMMETT PRICE: They quit! They weren't going down South. You got lynching going on. You got a clear Jim and Jane Crow going on.

SHIMA: But Ethel said she wouldn't perform unless they did.

PAUL SLADE: They went South, January, February 1922. This was the second leg of the tour. Cincinnati, Memphis, Pine Bluff, Little Rock, Arkansas.

EMMETT PRICE: And so in many ways ...

PAUL SLADE: Nashville, Chattanooga ...

EMMETT PRICE: ... Ethel Waters and the folks who were on this tour ...

PAUL SLADE: ... Savannah, South Carolina ...

EMMETT PRICE: ... these artists felt that they were activists.

PAUL SLADE: ... Paris, Texas, Fort Worth, Texas, Waco, Texas, Dallas, Texas.

EMMETT PRICE: That Black people not only can excel in Texas, but we actually come in peace. We literally come in peace.

SHIMA: But that's not always what they found.

JAD: For example, Macon, Georgia. Moments before they show up to perform at the Douglass Theatre ...

PAUL SLADE: There's a white race riot, essentially, in Macon.

JAD: A young Black man had been accused of attacking a white police officer. A white mob then invaded the Black section of town, searched homes, trashed businesses. Eventually, they found the man, shot him hundreds of times, tied him to a tree and then lit a fire at his feet.

PAUL SLADE: They then take the body, they throw it into the back of a truck and they drive it into the center of Macon's Black neighborhood, which is ...

SHIMA: Oh my God!

PAUL SLADE: ... where this theater, the Douglass Theatre, is. And they—depending on which account you believe, they either throw the body actually into the lobby at the Macon, or they throw it up against its main entrance.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: I played Macon, Georgia.]

SHIMA: Here's Ethel remembering that moment many years later.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: And I got there just a few—oh, they had just removed, say about a half hour before I got there, the remains of a person that had been lynched, a man that had been lynched. And you'd never sense the pall that comes over it. It—oh, it was—it just—you could feel it. You didn't see nothing, but ...]

PAUL SLADE: Ten years later, when Irving Berlin writes the song "Supper Time" ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: [singing] Supper time ...]

PAUL SLADE: ... for Ethel, which is an anti-lynching song ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: [singing] ... I must set ...]

PAUL SLADE: ... that's the incident that Ethel thinks of to fuel her performance.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: When Mr. Berlin was telling me about how to project, I only had to remember ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: [singing] Somehow I ain't able 'cause that man of mine ain't coming home no more.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: ... the grief and the fear.]

SHIMA: In any case ...

JAD: I gotta say, the fact that this tour even happened is kind of a miracle. [laughs]

PAUL SLADE: Yeah, absolutely.

SHIMA: As the troubadours toured through the South, something surprising happened.

PAUL SLADE: Black Swan became quite a chic thing for people right at the top of white society.

JAD: He says nouveau-riche white people started giving each other Black Swan records as wedding gifts. And Harry started adding shows to the tour.

PAUL SLADE: What would often happen is that they'd organize what they called a midnight frolic after the main show on a Friday or a Saturday night. It would start about 11 o'clock at night and would run probably till about two or three in the morning. And this would be a whites-only show.

JAD: This is like the equivalent of Brooklyn hipsters coming in and slumming it.

PAUL SLADE: Yeah.

SHIMA: [laughs]

PAUL SLADE: I think that's probably right.

SHIMA: One of the strangest, most amazing details of this tour is that at a few of these midnight shows, for Ethel Waters' big entrance, the electrician would kill the lights.

PAUL SLADE: The stage would suddenly be plunged into complete darkness.

SHIMA: Ethel would then walk onto stage holding a giant Japanese fan that covered her entire body. And behind the fan was her dress made of 100 percent ...

PAUL SLADE: Radium.

JAD: What? You mean, radium like the element?

SHIMA: [laughs]

PAUL SLADE: Yeah. Absolutely.

JAD: Oh!

PAUL SLADE: So the whole building is pitch-black, and all you can see is Ethel on stage.

SHIMA: She then snaps shut her fan. And what the crowd suddenly sees is this woman ...

PAUL SLADE: Illuminated by the light of this radium dress. And, you know, you imagine the whole house just going crazy.

SHIMA: Wow!

JAD: Wow. That's so cool!

PAUL SLADE: This is 1922.

SHIMA: It's so good!

PAUL SLADE: No one would have seen anything like that.

JAD: That is so—that is crazy on so many levels.

SHIMA: It was Black Swan Records' most incandescent moment. But ultimately ...

JAD: That was the beginning of the end.

PAUL SLADE: Almost, yeah. I mean, it's like a wave cresting and breaking. Everything was brilliant. It looked as if, you know, the company's good luck would never end. And then suddenly the wave crashed. And ...

JAD: Wow!

PAUL SLADE: ...Everything just went to [bleep].

JAD: Chapter two, The Fall.

SHIMA: Now it went to [bleep] in stages. When Harry got back from tour, things were going great.

PAUL SLADE: I've got an extract here from one of his letters to Du Bois. "We were selling around 7,000 records a day, and had only ..."

JAD: Wow!

PAUL SLADE: "... three presses in the factory, which could make 6,000 records daily."

SHIMA: [laughs] Oh my God!

JAD: Oh, dang!

PAUL SLADE: He's—literally, he is selling records faster than he can make them.

SHIMA: Desperate to keep up, he buys an entire record-pressing plant in Long Island.

EMMETT PRICE: And then the white response, that backlash. The white record owners got pretty pissed.

PAUL SLADE: September the first, 1922, you've got workers at the plant. They're shoveling coal into the furnace which powers the plant. And one of them discovers a three-inch shell in the coal.

EMMETT PRICE: They discover a bomb!

CORD JEFFERSON: Chicago Defender, September 16, 1922.

EMMETT PRICE: At the Black Swan plant.

CORD JEFFERSON: "Just where the bomb came from could not be ascertained. The officials of the company were alarmed at first, lest they were the work of white competitors. The Daily News carried a picture of the bomb, which was of unusually large size."

PAUL SLADE: And if that shell had gone into the furnace ...

SHIMA: Oh my God!

PAUL SLADE: ... it would have blown the whole place up.

PETER PACE: Yeah. I have in my hand here a letter from Harry Pace to the board of directors of Black Swan Records. "During the past few months, we have been the target of attack from our competitors. The desire seems to be that we must be put out of business by any means, fair or foul."

SHIMA: The white labels had woken up. And they were coming after Harry.

EMMETT PRICE: The white backlash.

WILLIE RUFF: It was clear then that there was profit to be made producing and distributing music for Black people.

JAD: Harry's success had proven to the white companies, oh, there's a market here.

PETER PACE: "There are over 12 million colored people in the United States."

JAD: There are millions of people who have money and don't want to buy minstrel songs. So all of a sudden, in the space of just a few months ...

PAUL SLADE: Just about every record label, every white-owned record label launches its own specialist race records imprint.

PETER PACE: "My dear Dr. Du Bois, this summer has been very dull for us. The white companies have, every one of them, gone in for colored business teeth and toenail."

PAUL SLADE: Paramount comes along in August, 1922, launches its own race label. Columbia as early as February 1923. And the really big one was Victor.

SHIMA: August 1923.

PETER PACE: "It's caused a serious slump in our sales."

PAUL SLADE: Well, that's like suddenly discovering Google or Facebook have decided to operate against you.

PETER PACE: "Another phase of oppression from which we are suffering is the attempt that is going on to wean away our singers from us."

CHARLES MCKINNEY: And so the poaching begins. Trixie Smith gets pulled away.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Trixie Smith: [singing] My man rocks me with one steady roll.

JAD: Trixie Smith. We haven't talked about her yet. She was a Black Swan artist—coined the term ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Trixie Smith: [singing] He kept rocking with one steady roll.]

JAD: ... 'Rock 'n' roll' on this Black Swan release. She gets poached.

PAUL SLADE: They also ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Carroll Clark: [singing] Nobody knows the ...]

PAUL SLADE: ... poached Carroll Clark.

JAD: Who recorded spirituals for Black Swan.

PAUL SLADE: And of course, Harry hit the roof. There's a very good news report from the Chicago Defender. It says, "Mr. Pace is advised by his attorneys that another company has bribed certain dealers to damage their Black Swan records before selling them to consumers with a view of making the consumer feel that the race product was sent out in that condition and to cause him to cease buying them."

JAD: Oh, man! If I'm Harry, at this point, I'm hiring some thugs.

PAUL SLADE: [laughs] Yeah. I mean, this is ...

JAD: That is low.

PAUL SLADE: ... the sort of stuff that was going on.

SHIMA: Harry is a gentleman, Jad. He's a gentleman. He's not gonna do that.

JAD: They're scratching his records.

SHIMA: Making things even worse, in the middle of all this ...

EMMETT PRICE: You get Ethel Waters ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ethel Waters: [singing] Am I blue? Am I blue?]

EMMETT PRICE: ... who gets pulled away.

SHIMA: Ethel!

JAD: Ethel, no!

SHIMA: Ah.

PAUL SLADE: Ethel's Aeolian sides start appearing in 1923.

SHIMA: This feels like the end of, like, Scarface.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Scarface: You want to play rough?]

SHIMA: Like, Harry in a room alone with a bunch of cocaine ...

PAUL SLADE: [laughs]

SHIMA: ... and some, like, big guns.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Scarface: Say hello to my little friend!]

SHIMA: And it's just not gonna ...

PAUL SLADE: [laughs]

JAD: Harry Pace, like Tony Montana in Scarface, he goes down ugly. First thing he does is he starts running ads in newspapers saying ...

PETER PACE: "Don't be deceived."

CORD JEFFERSON: "Don't be deceived."

PAUL SLADE: "Don't be deceived."

PETER PACE: "Passing for colored has become popular since we established Black Swan Records, the only genuine colored records."

EMMETT PRICE: Harry would accuse white companies of passing for Black.

PETER PACE: "Every white phonograph company is now issuing a Jim Crow catalog of records."

SHIMA: [laughs]

PAUL SLADE: He says they're operating a Jim Crow annex.

JAD: Whoa!

PAUL SLADE: And I've saved the best 'til last.

SHIMA: Oh, no!

JAD: [laughs]

SHIMA: Oh, no. It gets worse?

EMMETT PRICE: This is desperate measures for desperate times.

SHIMA: Harry, at this point, is in a bind.

PAUL SLADE: What he desperately needs to do is to get some kind of Black Swan product out there on the market to fight back.

SHIMA: But the white companies had stolen all his stars.

EMMETT PRICE: What is he going to do?

PAUL SLADE: So he decides—what he does is ...

EMMETT PRICE: He does the exact opposite of what he's known for.

SHIMA: As he accuses the white labels of passing, he himself gets his hands on a bunch of unreleased music by white bands. He gets them through a white lawyer, by the way. And he changes the names—not the music, just the names.

EMMETT PRICE: He takes white artists' recordings, and he passes them off as Black.

PAUL SLADE: Mamie Jones, for example, she was really a white singer called Aileen Stanley. Henderson's Dance Orchestra, that would have been either the Merry Melody Men or Lanin's Roseland Orchestra. Rudy Wiedoeft's Californians—that's a German name, Wiedoeft—they became Haynes' Harlem Syncopators.

SHIMA: [laughs]

JAD: I have to say, I'm really on the fence about the morality of this move. Is this a badass move, or is this just, like, the opposite?

PAUL SLADE: [laughs]

SHIMA: What it is is a premonition of things to come.

JAD: Make a long story short, just a few months after Ethel Waters records "Down Home Blues" and literally lights up the night in a radium dress ...

SHIMA: Harry is basically broke.

PETER PACE: "We are cramped now, very seriously, for cash. We are cutting down to the bone in every way, although I have personally put in large amounts of money and have used my personal credit to borrow more."

PAUL SLADE: Harry was forced to cut the price of Black Swan's discs. They had started off at a dollar. He had to cut them first to 85 cents and then to 75 cents.

SHIMA: Eventually, he's selling whole bundles of discs.

PAUL SLADE: And he's throwing in a free 10-cent pack of needles. So ...

SHIMA: What?

PAUL SLADE: Phonograph needles. [laughs]

SHIMA: Okay.

PAUL SLADE: So, you know, at prices like that, there's just not much room for profit.

JAD: Harry holds out for as long as he can. But then ultimately ...

CORD JEFFERSON: Chicago Defender, April 19, 1924.

JAD: ... he sells Black Swan to Paramount Records, a white company.

CORD JEFFERSON: "White combinations of white businesses are frequent. It does not often occur where there is a combination of a white and a racial business. It is of more than local interest, therefore, to note the recent consolidation of the phonograph record business of the Paramount, a white organization, and the Black Swan."

SHIMA: Black Swan Records came and went in just two years. But if you think about it, if you think about what came before and what came after, it was a pretty gigantic domino to fall.

PAUL SLADE: Black Swan really hastened the process of the white labels giving Black artists a chance. And it only needs to be a couple of years for Robert Johnson to have died before he ever recorded a note. Had that process had been delayed by just a couple of years, we'd have no Robert Johnson. And with no Robert Johnson ...

SHIMA: Oh my God!

PAUL SLADE: ... you've got no Rolling Stones and no Eric Clapton.

SHIMA: Oh my God!

JAD: That's weird to imagine.

PAUL SLADE: Once you take that brick out, you know, the whole tower starts to look pretty shaky.

SHIMA: I mean, it's all historical speculation, really.

JAD: Here's what we'll say: everything that we just told you about Black Swan and Ethel and all the stuff, that's just the first part of Harry's story. This guy lived five lifetimes in one.

SHIMA: And the craziest part is yet to come.

ERIC PACE: There is a conspiracy. There is. Like, they threatened my family. They threatened Harry, Jr., your father. They threatened Josephine.

EMMETT PRICE: It's like, poof. That [bleep] is haunting.

JAD: In the next episode, Harry's record roulette starts to spin out of control.

CHARLES MCKINNEY: You know, so after—basically after 60 years of of battle, you know, how many more years did he owe you, right? How many more years did he owe?

JAD: That's on the next episode of "The Vanishing Of Harry Pace." "The Vanishing Of Harry Pace" was created by Jad Abumrad and Shima Oliaee, and is presented as a collaboration between OSM Audio, Radiolab and Radio Diaries. The series is based on the book "Black Swan Blues: The Hard Rise And Brutal Fall Of America's First Black-Owned Record Label," by Paul Slade. We had original music from musician Hania Rani, her song "Buka" off the album Esja.

SHIMA: Our editorial advisors are Kiese Laymon, Imani Perry, Cord Jefferson and Terrance McKnight. Jami Floyd is our consulting producer. Our fact checker is Natalie Meade. Series artwork was created by Katia Herrera. And special thanks to Nellie Giles, Ben Shapiro and Joe Richman.

JAD: Next episode is right on the heels of this one.

SHIMA: Thank you for listening.

[LISTENER: Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad, and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Suzie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Sarah Sandbach, Corinne Leung and Candice Wong. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly and Emily Krieger.]

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