Timeline of music in the United States (1920–1949)

This is a timeline of music in the United States from 1920 to 1949.

1920 Vaudevillean Mamie Smith records "Crazy Blues" for Okeh Records, the first blues song commercially recorded by an African-American singer,Crawford, p. 562.Jones, p. 99. the first blues song recorded at all by an African-American woman,Bird, p. 323. and the first vocal blues recording of any kind,Malone and Stricklin, p. 45. a few months after making the first documented recording by an African-American female singer,Southern, p. 369. "You Can't Keep a Good Man Down" and "That Thing Called Love", which were successful enough for Okeh to commission "Crazy Blues". Stylistically, it resembles other vaudeville music of the era, but it borrows a poetic and melodic form from African-American folk music, as well as elements of unrelated "field-holler" vocal practices. More than its traditional predecessors, this mixture would come to define and epitomize the blues for later generations. The songDavis, p. 29. becomes a surprising commercial success that would open up the market for African-American music by selling more than 8,000 copies a week for several months. It is followed by a string of hits by African-American women singers.Chase, p. 496. A paper shortage contributes to a cost increase and a downturn in the sheet music publishing industry.Crawford, p. 675. Joseph Patek forms a family band that will become one of the longest-lasting and most influential Czech-Texan groups. KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania claims to be the first radio station with regularly scheduled programs.Santelli, p. 8.Southern, p. 361. Michigan and Wisconsin organize their first state-sponsored band contests.Hansen, p. 251. Carl Fischer Music publishes the first full band music scores in the United States.

Early 1920s music trendsIn jazz bands, the cornetist becomes more and more frequently assigned to the melody of a piece, rather than shifting that responsibility among various instrumentalists.Crawford, p. 566. American audiences begin to turn away from predominantly German classical music towards works by the like of Frenchman Erik Satie and the Russian Alexander Scriabin.Crawford, p. 569. An organized country music industry begins to evolve, through commercial recording and radio broadcasting.Crawford, p. 607. Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg begins advocating serialism, a composition technique that will come to dominate American classical music later in the 20th century.Crawford, pp. 696–697. The creative peak of jazz in Chicago.Crawford, p. 759. A printers strike and paper shortage decimates the music publishing industry by raising costs, as customers are beginning to focus more on recordings than sheet music. The golden age of the "black female blues singer" begins and ends.Southern, p. 371. American public schools begin offering music instruction for band and orchestra. The Flanagan Brothers begin recording prolifically with great success. Mike Flanagan is the most popular Irish banjoist of the era.Vallely, p. 23.

1921 The Army Music School at Fort Jay is moved to the Army War College in Washington, D.C.U.S. Army Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle's Shuffle Along is an influential work in the history of African American theater, re-establishing the black musical theater tradition.Chase, p. 376.Southern, p. 326. It is the first black musical to achieve major success.Clarke, p. 100. The Norfolk Jazz Quartet begins recording for OKeh, becoming "one of the earliest and most popular group to emerge" from the Tidewater area of Virginia, a fertile region for African-American singing quartets.Darden, p. 154. The National Baptist Convention's Gospel Pearls, a compilation of hymns, collected by Lucie Campbell, is released in its second edition, becoming so popular it remains in print, without a new edition, into the 1990s.Darden, p. 164. It is an influential landmark in African-American church music,Southern, p. 458. and is the first use of the term gospel in a collection of songs by a black church to describe the music later known as gospel music.DoveSong: Black Gospel Music: A Tradition of Excellence Vincent Lopez's dance band makes first live broadcast of a performance on the radio.Clarke, p. 126. Thomas A. Dorsey moves to Chicago for the second time in his life, this time hoping to make his way in the burgeoning blues and jazz scenes; he is electrified by the singing of W. M. Nix, thus beginning his career as a pioneering gospel singer.Darden, pp. 164–166. He also composes his first song, "If I Don't Get There".Southern, p. 460. The Penn Hotel becomes the first African-American-owned hotel in Baltimore; it is on Pennsylvania Avenue, then a major center for black culture and business, and where the Douglass Theater, later more famously known as the Royal Theatre, is opened as one of the finest African-American theaters in the country. The Royal Theatre will become one of the major stops on the black entertainment circuit.Bird, p. 211. Canadian-born black composer Robert Nathaniel Dett is the first to arrange a spiritual in a motet, with "Don't Be Weary Traveler", which won the Francis Boott prize, given out by Harvard University. W. C. Handy and Harry Pace start Black Swan, the first black-owned record label.Moore, p. xii. Paul Gosz forms the Empire Band, which will become one of the major Czech American bands of the Midwest. Black Swan Records, founded and led by Harry Pace, becomes the first African-American-owned record label, specializing in what was then known as "race music".Gates and Appiah, p. 262. Ethel Waters records the label's first hits, "Down Home Blues" and "Oh, Daddy", and will be the label's biggest star.Jones, p. 129. Ford Dabney's orchestra ends their eight-year run on Broadway, in the Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic Show at the New Amsterdam Theatre. They are the first "black orchestra to fill such a long engagement".Southern, p. 347–348. OKeh Records becomes the first major record company to realize the commercial potential of the African American market, creating a line, called the Original Race Records with Clarence Williams as director, to produce what was then called race music.Southern, p. 370. Thomas A. Edison, Inc. sends out a survey to more than 20,000 phonograph owners, one of the very few primary sources from this era on the characteristics of people who actually listened to recorded music.Kenney, p. 5. Kid Ory's Sunshine Orchestra becomes the first African-American jazz ensemble to record.Jones, p. 146. In Chicago, a group of young white students listen to recordings of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings on a jukebox. They decide to play music in that style, and became known as the Austin High School Gang, consisting of Jimmy McPartland and others.Bird, p. 240. Bennie Moten's orchestra becomes the earliest major jazz band in Kansas City.Bird, p. 269.

1922 Eck Robertson and Henry Gilld show up at Victor Records offices, dressed in Confederate Army uniforms, and demand to record their music. The first recording to be released from the subsequent sessions will be Robertson's "Sallie Gooden", which is the first recording of what is now called country music.Erbsen, p. 149.Wolfe, Charles K. and Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje, "Snapshot: Two Views of Music, Race, Ethnicity, and Nationhood", pp. 76–86, in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music.Tribe, p. 2. The Four Harmony Kings, a jubilee group, are invited to join the Broadway production of Shuffle Along; they include a version of a spiritual entitled "Ain't It a Shame to Steal on a Sunday".Darden, p. 149. Francis La Flesche begins producing an important musicological study of the Osage tribe, entitled The Osage Tribe.Blum, Stephen. "Sources, Scholarship and Historiography" in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, pp. 21–37. The Grand Street Follies in Greenwich Village is the first revue "to be controlled largely by women", specifically director Agnes Morgan and composer Lily Hyland. This is the beginning of 'intimate revue', a type of show that is "literate, sophisticated, witty, amusing, satirical, and topical".Chase, p. 526. General Pershing creates the United States Army Band, which soon becomes a prominent performing group.U.S. Army Bands. James D. Vaughan forms a record label to expand the audience for the gospel quartets he manages, an influential point in the early history of the gospel industry.Erbsen, p. 23. The New Orleans Rhythm Kings, the "most significant and influential of the early white jazz bands", record for Gennett, producing records that "had a direct impact on the young white musicians who developed what became known as the 'Chicago Style'."Chase, p. 516. OKeh Records begins using the term race music, which soon becomes the standard referent for African-American popular music.Malone and Stricklin, p. 47. Trixie Smith, a popular blues singer, recorded "My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll)", one of the earliest uses of the terms rock and roll together in secular music.Miller, p. 84. The first Southern radio station to broadcast rural white music is WSB in Atlanta. Rural folk performers begin to perform for local radio stations in Atlanta and Fort Worth. Kid Ory and his Sunshine Orchestra record "Ory's Creole Trombone" and "Society Blues". These are the first instrumental jazz recording of an African-American group,Barlow, p. 327. and marks the beginning of the record industry focusing on "the instrumental ensemble as a source of entertainment in its own right rather than as accompaniment for singers".Southern, p. 378. Clarence Jones & His Sunshine Orchestra becomes the first local jazz dance band to broadcast in Chicago.Barlow, p. 328. A legend states that comedian Ed Wynn is responsible for creating the first studio audience when he refuses to perform without an audience watching.

1923 Spanish folk songs recorded by Charles Fletcher Lummis and transcribed by Arthur Farwell in the mid-1900s are finally published in an anthology called Spanish Songs of Old California.Crawford, p. 438. Arnold Schoenberg, an innovative experimental composer of the period, begins to be performed more frequently in New York City after this year's production of Pierrot Lunaire.Crawford, p. 568. Clay Custer's "The Rocks" is the first known recording of a boogie piano bass line. Ralph Peer of OKeh records fiddling and singing from Fiddlin' John Carson in Atlanta; he is convinced to release the singing records by a local distributor, and Carson's songs become a surprise hit. This is an important part of the early evolution of country music.Chase, p. 619. Peer thus becomes the first professional talent scout. Jelly Roll Morton makes his first recordings, as a jazz band member and as a solo pianist, and begins publishing songs through the Melrose Brothers Music Company.Crawford, pp. 624, 628. Morton is the "first to perceive and define the distinction between ragtime and jazz, insisting that the latter, whatever its sources or borrowings, was a new type of music that transformed what it absorbed".Chase, p. 509. He is working with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, the first white Chicago jazz band to record, using a black group (King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band) as a model. Morton's recording with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings constitutes the first "interracial recording sessions".Crawford, p. 628.Southern, p. 402.Clarke, p. 76. King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, performing at the Lincoln Gardens in Chicago, records with Gennett Studios, resulting in a set of recordings that are "landmark(s) in the history of jazz... the first major set of recordings by black jazz musicians". After this point, the music of "black jazz performers as well as white was preserved and circulated on record."Crawford, p. 629. The National Association of Broadcasters is formed to be an "intermediary" between ASCAP and the radio broadcasting industry.