RACE SELLS RECORDS: An observational study of jazz album art in the mid-1950s

The jazz section in a used record store. Haphazardly sorted bins. Thin cardboard smooth against your fingers as you shuffle the albums like playing cards. Smell of dust, faint crackling in the background. Bright color blocks whiz by, abstract shapes, sketchy lines and dynamic figures. One in mint green, one in bright vermillion, then one in black and orange with “Getz/Gilberto” emblazoned across the top. Eye-catching, unique, representative.

A common pattern of art.

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Since the mid-20th century, this art style, if it can even be condensed into a singular ‘style,’ has become the one most closely associated with jazz, flat illustrations and monochromatic color palettes given the heady task of summing up some of the most complex, groundbreaking music ever made in a single image. And oh, how well it succeeded! What started as a simple style of mid-century promotional art has become synonymous with the jazz genre, designs you could once find on something as innocuous as a soup can now found almost solely in the record cabinets of audiophiles. Take, for example, Barbara Carroll Trio (1953), a prime example of both mid-century modern color blocking and two-dimensional decorative illustration. One doesn’t need to know the artist before judging the record by its cover– a pair of pink and yellow hands clawing asymmetrically at grey rectangles arranged in keyboard fashion give the listener the impression of a somewhat tilted (or lilted!) set of piano pieces. 

Mid-century jazz album art was also partial to color blocking on top of black-and-white photographs, usually contrasting a vibrant monochromatic shade with the grainy nature of the photo, such as on Miles Davis’ ‘Round About Midnight (1957). Not only did this paint a picture of the artist themselves, it associated the jazz genre with “serious” stylistic photography, and thus, art– something to be taken in and digested beyond the vibrant colors, something that could reach the abstract. This mid-century art style has lingered on the covers of jazz albums for decades, such as the abstract block of swirling blues against a cream background on Joni Mitchell’s Mingus (1979), or the primary-colored rectangles that populate the cover of Bill Frisell’s Orchestras (2024).

The music contained within these covers was as fresh and innovative as the mid-century art technique on the outside, attracting a hip crowd of listeners eager for experimentation, and ‘new’ music. But what about the previous generation that had grown up on the (arguably sanitized) smooth sailing of white swing bands like Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey? Were they setting out to hear extended grooves, interval-leaping improvisation, represented in a printed burst of synesthesia? Regardless of the consumer’s decision, record labels certainly didn’t think so, and the orchestral compilation album was born, full of the sort of Muzak one expected to hear on The Lawrence Welk Show– and to their credit, the ‘easy listening’ business boomed. These albums were pumped out in droves to match consumer demand, but because they were made so quickly and cheaply, they seldom featured the artists themselves on the covers, decorated instead with stock photos (usually of thin, attractive, smiling white women), and given generic, candle-scent titles, like Les Baxter’s Caribbean Moonlight (1956) or Jackie Gleason’s Music, Martinis and Memories (1954). This music was barely jazz, if one could even deign to call it that, whitewashed and strictly metered, the soppiest of mid-century pop with little selling power beyond the eye-catching, pin-up covers. 

And yet, those covers sold, and with it, the easy-listening music inside. Noting this marketing success, record companies quickly began releasing more of these stock photo album covers across genres until they had fully infiltrated jazz. Well, maybe it made the music sell better, one might argue. Maybe these album covers helped decidedly un-soppy “true” jazz reach audiences it previously would not have. These points are not to be disregarded, but they are overshadowed by the most glaring problem with this marketing tactic: the stock models featured on these album covers were thin, white, conventionally attractive women and the jazz artists they represented were Black. This phenomenon can be seen as first occurring around the mid-1950s and in some cases, would continue into the early 1960s. It never became as widely standardized as the mid-century “jazz art style,” but these stock model covers occurred frequently enough for it not to be a question of chance. Thus, in this observational study, I will delve into a topic I have rarely seen discussed, examining how the whitewashed packaging of Black jazz was a subtle, but significant form of musical discrimination. 

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I. BILLIE HOLIDAY

The album that inspired me to conduct this observational study is also one of the best-known vocal jazz albums of all time: Billie Holiday’s Solitude (1956). The cover art is iconic and inescapable, painted in dusky roses and powder blues, lacy textures surrounding a beautiful white woman, hair perfectly curled as she leans her head woefully against a windowpane. This stock model is center-stage, with Holiday herself regulated to a small, black-and-white picture on the back of the sleeve, not at all eye-catching or even explanatory of the artist who made the music. In 1956, albums really were judged by their covers; though some record stores would occasionally have a listening booth for customers, the average customer usually did not listen before purchasing it, especially as these few listening booths became popular with young, teenage rock n’ rollers who couldn’t yet afford a full album. Record labels were distinctly aware of the fact that the packaging of records had an impact on their sales, and it is no coincidence that they packaged Holiday’s album into something a segregated America may have deemed more palatable. Solitude contains some of Billie Holiday’s most romantic recorded work, bleeding both hope and heartbreak as she touches every word with a serene sense of sorrow. And yet, Holiday’s artistry is not the focus of this album, purely from a visual standpoint. Her creative agency is stripped as she is “toned down,” or rather, “turned white.” Of course, the music inside the sleeve is not impacted, pure Holiday at its core, but the model on the cover makes her emotionality synonymous with a whiteness never once presented in her art.

As a one-off, this ‘swapping’ of Holiday’s image for a white stock model is upsetting, but it becomes doubly so– and clearly targeted– when it is discovered that other Billie Holiday albums in the mid-1950s were given a similar treatment. Take Velvet Mood (1956), a generic marketing title usually used to symbolize ‘exoticism.’ Again, Holiday is nowhere to be seen, but a white stock model in makeup, clearly mimicking an exaggerated blend of Arab and Asian features, takes center stage. To some extent, this ‘ethnically ambiguous but still distinctly white’ look was a beauty standard in the 1950s, one that Holiday clearly didn’t fit, and couldn’t sell. Alongside the fact that Holiday’s music becomes, to some extent, attributed to the bland white stock women grinning glossily from her covers, Velvet Mood’s style is also fairly orientalist, prompting one to wonder why certain racialized features were deemed as appropriate selling points while others were not. 

Post-1956, Holiday herself was featured prominently on her album covers, which also became better aligned with the aforementioned “jazz art style.” Albums such as Body and Soul (1957) featured monochrome, color-blocked photographs of her belting out a song, emotion etched into the lines on her face, while works like All Or Nothing At All (1958) expressed this emotionality through abstract illustration, Holiday clawing at her own face in apparent anguish. Anyone who was a fan of Holiday knew of her volatile personality, her raw emotionality, the pervading sense of melancholy in her recordings, making these dynamic expressions of passion perfect, symbolically, for the art contained within the sleeve. It is purely insulting that her passion was sterilized into frozen tears, her experience as a Black artist distilled into nothing but frigid, white sex appeal for the easily-swayed consumer. 

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II. A PRECEDENT IS SET

So Billie Holiday was replaced with a white stock model on a couple of her albums in the mid-1950s. It hasn’t tarnished her legacy. People know who she is. Why should it matter?

Despite the fact that I’ve heard very real testimonials from peers who, as 21st-century children, initially believed Billie Holiday was white because of the Solitude album cover, her album art is not enough to draw a solid conclusion as to what these stock photo covers meant for Black jazz artists, collectively. It certainly seems that record companies chose attractive white women as a means of selling sex– and racialized sex at that– in a segregated America. It certainly seems deliberate, focusing on whiteness as a selling point, rather than the musical art of Billie Holiday herself. But it would have to happen on a greater scale to draw any solid conclusions.

Which is exactly what happened. 

Ella Fitzgerald’s 1955 release, Miss Ella Fitzgerald & Mr. Gordon Jenkins Invite You to Listen and Relax has an album cover that features a lounging, listless, white teenage model so far departed from the music she is supposed to represent, it seems almost comical. After all, what 50s bobby-soxer in form-fitting capris was listening to “Black Coffee,” a torch song about a woman smoking her life away, waiting for love? Why pick this image if not for the underlying reason that the curled, sensual position of the female model would sell better? What does it have to do with Ella Fitzgerald, master of phrasing, famous for her improvisational scatting, rumored to hit a note so high it could shatter glass?

Next, we turn our attention to both of Dinah Washington’s 1956 releases, Music For A First Love and Music For Late Hours. These album covers, again, feature beautiful white women, with the added twist of attractive white men whom they are intimately embracing. Like Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington was known for the raw power and emotionality she interpreted jazz standards with, and album tracks like “What Can I Say After I Say I’m Sorry” and “I Want to Cry” speak more to wretched heartbreak than the soppy album titles and Norman Rockwell-esque covers suggest. 

However, this phenomenon does not exclusively apply to Black female jazz singers. Take, for example, jazz pianist Errol Garner’s Plays Misty (1955), another album characterized by a beautiful-yet-forlorn white woman staring out a window, raindrops sliding down the windowpane as if they were tears. Garner actually wrote “Misty,” a song that would go on to become one of the most famous jazz standards of all time thanks to popular renditions by Black vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald and Johnny Mathis. This album marks the birth of a piece of jazz history, but Garner, the composer, is not even represented, with the album art, 1954 sheet music, and even a 1971 film, Play Misty For Me, featuring beautiful, mournful white women as the song’s figurehead. 

Garner’s 1956 release, The Most Happy Piano, departs from these white female tears, for the (almost worse) alternative of a bare-shouldered white woman, red lips smiling, long lashes batting, perfectly curled hair flowing behind her. The Most Happy Piano is a collection of virtuosic jazz piano studies, and the cover that simply drips sex appeal is remarkably out of place when one hears the music itself. Appropriately representing Black art was never the focus of record companies– it was about what records made the most money in an advertising landscape that prioritized sex, and in a country polluted by segregation and wrought with racial tensions. 

This pattern of ‘race selling records’ is most apparent between 1954 and 1957, especially when held up against these artists’ white contemporaries. Jazz singer Julie London’s 1956 release Lonely Girl is, in content, not unlike the albums of Holiday and Washington, as she sings torchy jazz standards in a mature alto (though London always approached her work with a cool sort of distance Holiday and Washington did not). In all fairness, Lonely Girl’s album cover is also quite similar to these other albums, London front and center with a wide-eyed mournful pout, angled seductively to show off her bare neck. The glaring difference is that it is London posing for this cover, it is Peggy Lee in the intimate embrace on The Man I Love (1957), and they are represented by white stock models on the albums of Black artists. This comparison makes it apparent that white sex appeal sold records– and though in some cases, such as with Sarah Vaughan or Eartha Kitt, Black women were also posed in a seductive manner, they were often labeled as the ‘bad girls’ of jazz, whereas their white counterparts could simply be. That’s a topic for another article, though, and keeping within this one’s scope, whiteness sold sex, and sex sold records, with little space for Black artistry in between.

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III. A DRUM IS A (WHITE) WOMAN

The final aspect of this study regards Duke Ellington’s 1957 album A Drum Is A Woman. A Drum Is A Woman is a groundbreaking allegorical album, a feat of avant-garde jazz that personifies African rhythms as the character Madam Zaji, and drums as the character Caribee Joe. The album blends jazz with orchestral music and opera, the introductory track “A Drum Is A Woman” featuring Juilliard-trained opera singer Margaret Tynes jumping intervals and shifting keys at an almost unpredictable rate. The musical history of this album is astounding, telling the story of Zaji (the African rhythm) traveling the world and melding with cultural influences that will eventually give rise to jazz and bebop. Duke Ellington is a legendary figure in jazz composition, and this album is one of his finest conceptual and musical works– it is a true piece of musical art from start to finish. 

AND YET, from COVER-TO-COVER, A Drum Is A Woman is more akin to something found in the easy-listening discount bin, rather than an exploratory work of musical art. A peroxide-doused blonde throws her curls back in ecstasy, perfectly manicured red nails thrust in the air, curvaceous back to the camera, faint impressions of her glutes showing through her slinky red dress, as she perches on what appears to be a rope-tuned dundun, framed by a conga drum and ngoma. It’s as if the record executive who selected this cover heard “woman” and “drum” and alarm bells for sex appeal started ringing, drowning out any critical thinking. It certainly doesn’t seem anybody listened to the album, understood the allegory of the woman, or even had any grasp on Black musical history whatsoever– or perhaps they just didn’t care in anticipation of attraction-fueled profit. It’s angering to see how the pioneers of such remarkable musical forms are reduced to conventionality, Black art boiled down to sex appeal, and Black emotionality fronted by a white woman’s tears– or in A Drum Is A Woman’s case, her behind. Beyond angering, it’s frankly insulting, as though Black art couldn’t find the legs to stand on its own, and needed assistance from charitable, sexy white women in order to sell, or even enter the mind of the consumer.

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IV. CONCLUSION

Early on in this study, I raised the question: Why should this matter? I am prepared to answer that question in an open-ended manner, in hopes that fellow musicologists will expand upon this discovery.

In terms of observation, I can definitively conclude that the feature of white stock models on the covers of Black jazz albums was not coincidental, but instead indicative of a trend in American advertising where sex sold, whiteness sold, and white sex appeal sold greatest of all. The prominence of Black artists being replaced by white models on the covers of their own albums during the mid-1950s also coincides with the start of the Civil Rights Era and a call for desegregation, a time of heightened racial tension that undoubtedly led to both consumer and executive bias towards the attractive, generic white images these albums featured, as opposed to more inflammatory images of, say, Billie Holiday belting out a song in apparent emotionality. 

What cannot be definitively concluded at this point is if the decision to replace Black artists was made with specifically racist intentions. It is a decision that is misguided at best, and downright discriminatory at worst, but record companies were never known to prioritize their artists over their profits– and as I conclude above, attractive white women did sell records. Of course, none of the stock models were Black, speaking to the anti-Black bias omnisciently present in American consumer culture throughout the 1950s, and it certainly seems racist to this author– particularly in the case of A Drum Is A Woman, which clearly shows no effort made on the part of record executives to understand Ellington’s art or vision. However, this study remains purely observational, and I leave further understanding of intentionality for another, more data-centered study. It is not enough merely to infer.

That leads me to my closing point; where do we go from here? Why should it matter? Do we assimilate this into an open-ended circle of musical debates including, famously, Wagner’s anti-Semitism and Handel’s involvement in the slave trade, to be left in purgatory or discussion rooms for music students without any true conclusion as to how we go about addressing the issues of a bygone era? Should we reprint these albums with modern covers that feature the artist themselves, or does that raise questions pertaining to the erasure of history? Do we keep these album covers as-is for archival purposes, but never address their continued presence within streaming services, record stores, and libraries? Of course this topic matters– it is just one instance in a long history of Black artists’ work becoming famously conflated with whiteness, their creative output crumpled into a box of conformity, and it should certainly be addressed in musical retrospect. And yet, it is difficult to take these discoveries and decide, definitively, what should be done with them. For now, I hope to spark discussion and spotlight the subtle biases and hidden patterns present in jazz of bygone eras, as well as how they continue to have impact on both public perception and contemporary studies of the genre and its artists. 

 

Article by Gianna Caudillo

Design by Angelica Casas-Murillo

This article has been digitized from its original Spring 2024 print appearance.