Stage to studio

by James P. Kraft

Thomas Edison's inventions, so successful commercially, altered the lives of all Americans in the twentieth century. Among those persons most directly affected were artists in the entertainment industry. In this groundbreaking study of musicians and the businesses of recording, broadcasting, and film, James P. Kraft shows how musicians adapted - or tried to adapt - to momentous change and the emerging nexus of corporate power, labor-union muscle, and government regulation that came to define the field. Kraft begins in the late nineteenth century, before high-fidelity records, network radio, and sound motion pictures ended a "golden age," in which demand for skilled instrumentalists often exceeded supply. He examines conflicts that occurred across America - in New York recording studios, on Hollywood sound stages, and in nightclubs and movie theaters - as new invention and entrepreneurship intersected with the interests of artists. He describes how instrumentalists suddenly discovered -