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The American Photoplayer Company introduces the "Fotoplayer Style", an instrument that can play orchestral music as well as sound effects
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The incidental music to Richard Walton Tully's play Bird of Paradise popularizes the ukulele and the steel guitar
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Jerome Kern invents the "musical" by integrating music, drama and ballet and setting it into the present
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Henry Cowell composes quartets using combinations of rhythms and overtones that are impossible to play by humans
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James Europe's Hellfighters export jazz to France
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Mamie Smith's Crazy Blues is the first blues by a black singer to become a nation-wide hit
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Texan fiddler Eck Robertson cuts the first record of "old-time music"
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The Music Corporation of America (MCA) is founded in Chicago as a talent agency
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Bing Crosby cuts his first record and invents the "crooning" style of singing thanks to a new kind of microphone
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Clarence "Pinetop" Smith cuts Pinetop's Boogie Woogie
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Leon Termen invents the first rhythm machine, the "Rhythmicon"
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Milton Brown and Bob Wills invent "western swing"
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Laurens Hammond invents the Hammond organ
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Pete Seeger forms the Almanac Singers to sing protest songs with communist overtones
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Savoy is founded in Newark (NJ) by Herman Lubinsky to promote black music
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The USA army introduces V-Discs that play six minutes of music per side
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The first rock and roll record, Ike Turner's Rocket 88, is released
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Boom of doo-wop
