Barry Mazor is a longtime music, media, and business journalist. He is a regular contributor to theWall Street Journal and to the online music magazine medium/cuepoint,, and is the author ofMeeting Jimmie Rodgers and Connie Smith: Just for What I Am. He is the former senior editor and columnist forNo Depression magazine and his work has appeared in numerous publications, includingAmerican Songwriter, the Nashville Scene, the Village Voice, and theWashington Post. He was awarded the Charlie Lamb Award for Excellence in Country Music Journalism in 2008.

Starting Out: Independence, 1892–1919

In the late 1920s, when Ralph Peer was finding, recording, and helping make global stars out of makers of country, blues, and jazz music, more than one down-home Southern performer or local music shop owner he encountered took him for a New York–raised, uppercrust, Ivy League–style sophisticate slumming in their homespun music, swooping down from somewhere far north and far above. They were wrong about the vital particulars, but the misperceptions were understandable. When they met Peer he was in his midthirties. He had already been in the music business for decades, and he was dapper, urbane, energetic, and, by his own admission, often downright cocky.

The truth was, this executive who would eventually head the world's largest independent global music publishing company had never been to college, let alone the Ivy League, and had begun life the son of a displaced farmer turned shopkeeper and a coal miner's daughter. He was not from the North at all, but from that particular place where America's Midwest, South, and West meet, Kansas City, and more specifically, from just east of that storied city, a most appropriately named town: Independence, Missouri.

Ralph Sylvester Peer was born in Independence on May 22, 1892, the first and only child of Abram Bell Peer, 28, and Ann Sylvester Peer, 20, who'd married in Detroit, Michigan, the year before, then relocated. Their goal in moving to that nexus of American regions was opportunity, as heading west was for so many from their notably working-class, rural Great Lakes area backgrounds — a chance to build a stable, more comfortable middle-class life. One sign that the newlyweds envisioned a life more modern and "up-to-date" (as Rodgers & Hammerstein described the rural view of the place in the song "Kansas City" in their show Oklahoma) was that until this move Abram had been known by his legal given name, Abraham, and Ann as Anna. The freshly tweaked names registered as more urban and more modern, and they stuck with them.

Abraham Peer was born and raised in the rural East Bloomfield–Canandaigua area of upstate New York, not far south of Rochester and Lake Ontario, a farmer's son, and a working farmhand himself into his twenties. His father, Benjamin Peer, Ralph's grandfather, was an Irish immigrant, originally from the far-southwestern shipping village of Crookhaven in County Cork, and Roman Catholic — although Peer men seemed to make a habit of marrying Episcopalian/Anglican women. (Peers had not been in Ireland very long; Benjamin's father Andrew, Ralph's great-grandfather, had moved to Crookhaven from southern England.) Young Abraham was one of eight siblings, just two of them boys. His older brother was the one destined to maintain the farm in the future, so Abraham had to explore other possibilities. The life of the new generation of "drummers," traveling salesmen, was his not-untypical choice.

There are neither lingering family legends nor concrete evidence describing how Peer's parents first met. It may well have been in Detroit; the Great Lakes area figures in both of their early stories. His mother was born Ann Sylvester, in Oil City, Pennsylvania (about two hundred miles from Canandaigua), north of Pittsburgh, east of Cleveland, Ohio, and not far from Lake Erie. The American oil boom had begun in that area just a generation before her birth. Her parents, William and Mary Sylvester, were recent British immigrants who soon settled in tiny Clinton, Pennsylvania (near today's Pittsburgh International Airport), where William worked in the bituminous coal mines. In the 1880 census, Ann's brother John, born in England, at age ten, and just two years older than she, was already listed as a working coal miner as well. That's certainly suggestive of the Sylvester family of eight's life conditions at the time.

One prerequisite for the explosion of pop culture that took place in the United States in the late 1890s — the coming of nickelodeons, dance halls, and machinery-heavy amusement parks, of records, and player pianos, and of the ragtime, jazz, blues, and country music that followed — was the ongoing migration of millions of rural Americans to towns and cities. The young Peers were examples of that mass movement themselves. In Kansas City the farmer's son and miner's daughter rented a series of apartments and modest bungalow-style houses, some in the central city, some out in the nearby town of Independence or on the Kansas City outskirts close to it. There were multiple reasons for the regular moves. It was common practice for landlords to offer a month's free rent to new tenants at the time, and for families to move every year to enjoy an annual rent-free month. Moreover, which neighborhoods in the formerly untamed, sometimes still-wide-open cowboy cattle town were actually compatible with a quiet, middle-class life was not yet fully determined. (Repeated outbreaks of Jesse James–style train robberies were still being reported in 1898.)

When baby Ralph Sylvester was born, Abram (or "A. B.," as he was often referred to in business) was listed in the area directories as a "confectioner" in "travelling sales." That was a substantial industry in the city at the time; the American Biscuit Company, maker of crackers and candies, for example, employed hundreds (they'd soon be known as Loose-Wiles, the manufacturer of Sunshine Biscuits and Hydrox cookies). By 1896, however, when Ralph was four, Abram was in a different sales field, one that would prove crucial in his son's life and future career, and for music history. He became a salesman of sewing machines, first as a traveling salesman for Singer, then as manager of a sewing machine dealership on downtown Kansas City's West Tenth Street, near the later site of the Central Library. The senior Peer had a penchant for things mechanical, as his son would; his farmhand background seems to have played a role in that. The 1900 US census describes his occupation as "machinist."

By 1902 Abram was working for Singer's key competitor, White Sewing Machines, at first from home at Fifteenth and Winchester near Kansas City's eastern limits, and then in his own retail storefronts, under the name the Peer Supply Company. In his store, which would soon be located on Lexington Avenue on the main square and shopping district of Independence, A. B. Peer added to the sewing machine line a second sort of mechanical device built on revolving wheels, cranks, and replaceable needles — talking machines, as record players were still called; specifically,...