The Vanishing of Harry Pace: An esoteric journey through early 20th-century music and culture
Earlier successes allowed Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad and Shima Oliaee to take calculated risks in their latest series.
In the hands of another show, Harry Pace’s story might have been told in just one episode, but for the team at Radiolab there’s always more to the story than first meets the ear. In “The Vanishing of Harry Pace,” the latest miniseries from Radiolab, co-creators Jad Abumrad and Shima Oliaee bring listeners along on an esoteric journey through early 20th-century music and culture.
Who Was Harry Pace?
Abumrad and Oliaee first learned about Harry Pace when researching their series Dolly Parton’s America. Paul Slade, author of Black Swan Blues: The hard rise and brutal fall of America’s first black-owned record label, appeared in an episode of the series, and a follow-up conversation about his work would lead the producers to this new story.
Slade’s Black Swan Blues chronicled the life of Harry Pace, a Black music pioneer who would later all but disappear from history. Pace founded the country’s first Black-owned record label, Black Swan Records. The label was named after 19th century opera singer Elizbeth Greenfield, who was known as the Black Swan. The label originally sought to publish classical music to demonstrate that Black people belonged in a style of music that was almost exclusively white, something pace picked up from his time studying with W.E.B. DuBois at Atlanta University.
Pace was also a lawyer who worked to desegregate Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood in the 1930s, and his testimony in the Hansberry v. Lee court case would be the first step to ending redlining in Chicago and other cities (it would also inspire Lorraine Hansberry to write A Raisin in the Sun).
After the trial, however, Pace appears to have spent the remaining years of his life trying to erase his former identity and re-establish himself as a white man, going so far as to list his race as white in the 1940 U.S. Census. Pace would so fully pass as white, that his own grandchildren would later have no knowledge of his role as an influential figure in Black history.
Creating a New Audio Playbook
Though Pace was the founder of a recording company, no audio of him remains — a unique challenge for Abumrad and Oliaee.
In some ways, Vanishing throws the traditional podcast editing playbook out the window. Without archival tape to guide them, Abumrad and Oliaee would introduce a slate of modern voices to help tell his story, including Pace biographer Slade and Pace’s own extended family. The series producers also relied on a team of advisers to contextualize Pace’s story within the Black experience (Abumrad and Oliaee both identify as Middle Eastern). It’s worth noting that the series advisers, which included writer Cord Jefferson, author Kiese Laymon, musician Terrance McKnight, scholar Imani Perry, and linguist John McWhorter are credited as contributors to the series — not guests.
The introduction of these myriad voices — along with Radiolab’s traditional style of quick edits and sharp story turns — make the series feel almost breathless at times. And while Pace’s story is the focus of the first three episodes, the remaining three episodes in the series push past Pace to introduce us to his contemporaries, and detail a broader history of Black music in the early 20th century. The series’ advisers offer insights into Pace’s struggles with racial identity, the cultural conditions of Black artists in the early 20th century, and how those dynamics persist today.
For example, in the fourth episode, Rhiannon Giddens discusses the history of minstrel shows. We uncover the series’ best archival tape in this episode when we hear from Ethel Waters, one of Black Swan’s artists, describe how her song “Underneath the Harlem Moon’’ helped recast impressions of Black New Yorkers. The series’ greatest irony, however, is found in the final episode when we learn that “Lift Every Voice and Sing,’’ a song commonly known as the Black national anthem, was first released by Pace, a man desperate to hide his own Black identity.
“The Vanishing of Harry Pace” explores the question of race and identity with nuance and curiosity. It plucks a forgotten story from history at the right time for it to be relevant in the current moment. Whether you come for the history and stay for the music or vice versa, there are plenty of entry points that make the series a worthwhile listen.
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