Ralph Peer (May 22, 1892 – January 19, 1960) was born Ralph Sylvester Peer in Independence, Missouri. He died in Hollywood, California. Peer was a talent scout, recording engineer and record producer in the field of music in the 1920s and 1930s.

Peer spent some years working for Columbia Records, in Kansas City, Missouri until 1920 when he was hired as recording director of General Phonograph's OKeh Records label in New York. In the same year he supervised the recording of Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues", reputed to be the first blues recording specifically aimed at the African-American market. In 1924 he supervised the first commercial recording session in New Orleans, Louisiana, recording jazz, blues, and gospel music groups there.
He is also credited with what is often called the first country music recording, Fiddlin' John Carson's "Little Old Log Cabin In The Lane"/"That Old Hen Cackled and The Rooster's Goin' To Crow". In August 1927, while talent hunting in the southern states with Victor Records he recorded both Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family in the same session at a makeshift studio in Bristol, Tennessee, known as the Bristol Barn Session. This momentous event could be described as the genesis of country music as we know it today. Rodgers, who later became known as the Father Of Country Music, cut "The Soldier's Sweetheart" and "Sleep, Baby, Sleep", while the Carters' first sides included "Single Girl, Married Girl".

By year's end OKeh had released performances by Whittier and by Atlanta-based "Fiddlin' John" Carson, among others, and launched yet another specialty record series, designated "hillbilly" by Peer and bearing its own catalogue numbers. Together with the company's already thriving business in ethnic and nationality-oriented records, the new lines propelled Okeh - and Ralph Peer - into the most important phase of his early career. Country music had arrived.

Most available evidence indicates that the practice of "field" or location recording - travelling to sometimes remote locales to capture the work of regional artists on portable equipment - had gone on since the industry's first days. But there is no doubting that it began in earnest in the early 1920s, and that its most vigorous practitioner was Ralph S. Peer. By the end of 1923, he had taken equipment designed by OKeh technical director Charles Hibbard to Atlanta, Chicago, and St. Louis, recording artists for the label's "race," "hillbilly," and mainstream catalogues.

Among attractions recorded this way, often under Peer's close supervision, were King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, Erskine Tate's Vendome Orchestra of Chicago, the Clarence Williams Blue Five, Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orchestra, Louis Armstrong's Hot Five, the Jenkins Family, Kelly Harrell, blues singer "Sippie" Wallace, and the family of Ernest V. "Pop" Stoneman, whose 1925 hit, The Titanic, numbers among the earliest "event songs" - those celebrating and romanticizing actual occurrences - recorded in the country field.