Short Loop and the Long Loop

After 1945 the paralleled growth of independent record labels and growth black-oriented radio stations were crucial to the development of rhythm and blues. Race record field was wide open, with relatively small capital requirements. Hundreds of labels were created with only the $1000 needed to record and press five-hundred records. Four to five hundred labels were created to record rhythm and blues. About seventy-five to one hundred had enough activity and stability to be listed in Cash Box and Billboard's regular coverage of rhythm and blues.

The number soon thinned with less than ten dominating the field by 1949. Of Billboard's best selling rhythm and blues records between 1949 and 1953, only eight percent were from major labels. Almost two-thirds of the best selling rhythm and blues records were issued by independents, Aladdin, Atlantic, Chess, King, Modern, Savoy and Specialty.

Perhaps the most important accomplishment of these companies was the re-defining of black music postwar boundaries, both musical and geographical. This structure consisted of the short loops loosely tied together to form a national long loop. The short loop was as a localized form of a flourishing artistic system, a market efficient to support it and a social movement celebrating  the identity of its members.All these were constructed in those major cities that had larger black populations.. The key to these markets were the linkage between home performance sites, the jukebox, the emerging black radio and the new record companies with their distribution and retail sites The short lop traced the path from audience demand through exposure points to retail sales; from the discovery of new talent and songs to their incorporation into marketed phonograph records.

The workings of the rhythm and blues short loop began with and depended on the single record. From 1920 on, the single had been the basic unit, imitating as closely as possible, the experience of a live, spontaneous performance and taking it to the black home.

The long loop is the extension of the separate parts of the short loop into adjacent and distance cities, bringing all the short loops together nationally. It was more or less completed by the early fifties and included most of the larger cities. A few of them were New Orleans, Houston, Memphis, Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, Los Angles and San Francisco Bay area. They all had the components in place and produced more than their share of the emerging black musical culture that was national in scope. In some cities, there was only a small network of small clubs, playing to separate white and black audiences. In others, the scene consisted of scattered jukeboxes, social clubs and other small places supporting live performances.

In still other cities large theaters provided entertainment to the black community. The six great black theaters of the nineteen-forties and nineteen-fifties were the Apollo in Harlem, the Lincoln in Los Angeles, the Regal in Chicago, the Paradise in Detroit, the Howard in Washington D.C. and the Royal in Baltimore They were important factors in the whole system. It was there that many young performers were discovered. Each had its own audiences and tastes, producing a mix of styles Beneath these prime theaters were another set of clubs ranging from uptown elegance to downtown dives. The entire long loop gave black music a market and size.

The connections among the separate short loops in each major cities gave to long loop sources to refresh each of its parts. The exchange of local hits and performers injected new material into the stream.

Source, SPONSOR, September 20, 1954