The story of Ralph Peer is the story of music publishing and how it defined the American soundscape from the days of piano rolls and sheet music to the dawn of rock and roll. Peer is most often associated with his role in organizing the 1927 Bristol Sessions. An on-site recording venture that, having launched the careers of both the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, has come to be called the “Big Bang” of country music.
But by that time Peer had already been around the music industry for 20 years and had decades ahead of him during which his Southern Music Company would transform the way songs were brought to market and songwriters received compensation both in the US and around the world. It is that “rest of the story” that Barry Mazor engagingly brings us. Lovers of music history, and record collectors especially, will devour this book like a suspense novel and return to it repeatedly for the fresh material it adds to the public record.
Peer, who was born in 1892 and died in 1960, made a career out of seeing the changes around the corner—the changes in public tastes, changes in the industry, and new opportunities to profit from both. His father sold Columbia phonographs as part of a sewing machine dealership in Independence, Missouri. By age 11 Ralph was taking the light rail into Kansas City to pick up records and replacement parts from Columbia’s regional offices
