“Adding 'the' is like taking responsibility and saying, 'This is us,'” says Howlin' Pelle Almqvist of The Hives. “When bands call themselves something like Tortoise In The Snow, it seems like an attempt to make what you do less important than it is to you—almost shunning responsibility or defending yourself before the critique has even arrived.”

Mark Tester of Burnt Ones noted that “having a ‘the’ before the name of a band signifies singularity and property. In a lot of ways it's really perfect and very cool, almost gang-like: 'We are The Stooges or The Kinks or The Sisters of Mercy.' The mind-set is, ‘There is only one of us and we are it and we are gonna do it our way, no mercy.'”

The choice to add “the” did not seem to occur to musical groups of any kind until about 1920, when changes in patronage and technology made slighter distinctions between artists necessary. Through the late 1800s and the early 1900s, the main performers and composers of music either took their own names or grouped themselves underneath mass nouns—Scott Joplin, Irving Berlin, Venetian Trio. Most notably, the “Big Five” orchestras (New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, etc.) have always lacked the definitive article. People certainly did tack a "the" to those mass nouns for convenience, but even groups like Victor Military Band published without the definitive.

Original Dixieland Jazz Band was popular in the late 1890s and recorded early in the 20th century; on those recordings, they were billed without the definitive. But on fliers and handbills that date as far back as 1918—and, notably, in paragraphs where it became convenient to make definite the mass noun of Band—a "the" is added. An offshoot, The Original Memphis Five, appeared on record around 1924; that same year, The Seven Musical Magpies published a few recordings. Another early instance of "the" in a group name was a 1920 band called Johnny Hamp’s Kentucky Serenaders. The Serenaders, as they were originally called, were from Pennsylvania. They changed their name to The Kentucky Serenaders in a branding decision related to their hit “My Old Kentucky Home.”

It wasn’t until bandleaders like Hamp fronted orchestras or groups that orchestras received "the" names. “Bandleader and The Orchestra” became a common construction in the next decade. This is also the first instance of "the" that hit the charts. Before 1927, "the" was omitted because the possessive case was apparent. Tyler Schnoebelen, a recent Stanford Ph.D studying sociolinguistics, examined the presence and absence of "the" on Billboard charts ranging from 1890 to the end of 2012. He analyzed 39,046 songs by 8,758 artists; in that data set, 3,913 artists' names started with "the."

“The earliest [instances of 'the'] occur behind a band leader,” Schnoebelen wrote to me, “like ‘Nat Shillkret & The Victor Orchestra’ that had a bunch of hits in 1927. (My own favorite name in these early years is ‘Adrian Rollini & The Gang’—though maybe that’s because ‘Rollini’ is such an awesome last name.)” Even the Beatles, when they tried out for the Carroll Levis-hosted T.V. show Discoveries, went by Johnny and the Moondogs in 1959. But early R&B groups that didn’t chart also used the "the" schematic.