Browsing through archival material for scholarship has its many drags: there’s the difficulty of obtaining the material, the problem of finding useful information and juicy quotations, and the inevitable microfilm vertigo. But it can have its rewards. Evidently, The Billboard magazine was once a general entertainment industy trade publication (before it dropped its title’s definite article and specialized on the music business. There are still the same sort of quick-hit blurbs about whether so-and-so and his/her new record or tour or sheet music will be a smash hit and the same praise for sales above artistry or other aesthetic criteria. In the 1920s, there were also a lot of amusingly quaint sections of the magazine that have now become extinct: a fashion column called “Feminine Frills” (with its brother page, “MANSTYLES”), a Vaudeville section, a Burlesque page, a section devoted to boat shows and ‘Tom’ shows and medicine shows, a page devoted to the latest happenings in minstrelsy (!), and “J.A. Jackson’s Page in the Interest of the Colored Actor, Showman and Musician of America,” which I think is the era’s equivalent of “Ask a Black Dude.” The minstrelsy column is plenty disturbing, especially with the cartoonish drawings of blackface performers at the page heading. There’s also some casual exoticism in other song titles (not just of the “coon” or “mammy” variety) which would also be judged racist by today’s standards but back then was a recipe for success: novelty hits like “Seminola” and “Egyptian Echoes” are borderline discomfiting, but “Hot Eskimo” and “Chink” (described as a “Mongolian fox-trot”) sound appalling for their titles alone. One can only imagine what kind of stereotypes adorned the sheet music.