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The first full decade of radio broadcasting in the United States coincided with the fabled "Jazz Age" or "Roaring Twenties," a period of significant cultural upheaval on both sides of the color line. In white America, middle-class "flappers" and "flaming youth" were in open revolt against the old-fashioned Victorian moral codes that were the foundation of their parents' puritanical culture. In their efforts to break with the past, these young rebels turned to African American culture--particularly music, dance, language, and humor. Ragtime, blues, jazz, the Charleston, the black bottom, the slow drag, black slang, and jokes all became fashionable within this subgroup of "white Negroes," and symbolic of their generational revolt against the established social order. This sort of selective expropriation of African American culture by certain sectors of white society was nothing new--it had been going on since slavery; and, more often than not, the outcome was contradictory. On the one hand, American popular culture was periodically infused with the latest black innovations in music, dance, and comedy, and these infusions both enriched the cultural mix and encouraged the cultural rebellion of disaffected segments of the white population--most noticeably bohemian fringe elements in the 19th century and middle-class young adults after 1920. Yet the end result of this cultural transaction was often a misguided and condescending dilution of the original art forms. Once they entered the mainstream, African American song, dance, and humor were vulnerable to commercial exploitation; white entrepreneurs, entertainers, and tunesmiths routinely appropriated black cultural innovations, en tailored them to appeal to a white audience. Moreover, the African Americans who created these art forms and styles in the first place were not only victimized by the theft of their material, but were often forced to compromise their art, and even their integrity, in order to gain entrance into the entertainment industry, which was white-controlled and racially segregated. These cultural contradictions reached an important watershed in the 1920s, during which time they played a decisive role in determining the form and the context of black participation in the entertainment industry--which now included a new medium called radio broadcasting.
A major source of radio programming during the Jazz Age was live and recorded music. Initially, the use of phonograph records was widespread among broadcasters...