“The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records – A Great Migration Story” by Scott Blackwood, 2023
Jack White, a fan of the blues, once put out the whole
Paramount catalog in a fancy wooden box containing 6 reddish LPs and a memory
stick. The company's metal eagle and globe symbol was on the outside. The box was to pay homage to the best early blues
label in the U.S., run by a stumbling Wisconsin furniture company as a ploy to
sell console record players. That box is
also a story of the migration of black musicians from the South, New Orleans
and the Mississippi Delta to Chicago and later, Grafton, Wisconsin, a small
town north of Milwaukee.
Blackwood paints a picture of a furniture company run by
white owners who had no understanding of the blues, quality recording-making or
the African-American artists that they got to record for them. They were canny engineers and businessmen who
seized the moment when the style went national in 1920 with the success of “Crazy Blues" by Mamie Smith on Okeh
Records. They had ties to a network of music
store owners who also sold 78s. They ran ads in publications like the Chicago Defender and New York’s Amsterdam News for blues songs pitched
to black audiences. They were the first to develop a mail-order business. Lots
of firsts.
Paramount used a recording studio in Chicago for the most
part. They manufactured 78s in Grafton
at an old chair factory using the worst materials – “crushed limestone, pipe clay, silica, lamp black, shellac and cotton
flock,” yielding a lack of durability and poor sound quality. The company thought the whole ‘blues’ thing
was a fad you see. Yet as Blackwood says
about the management of Paramount: “…the foolish, profane and ephemeral might
only be masks worn by the transcendent.”
It was women blues singers, fresh off the minstrel and
vaudeville show trail who led the way in ‘race music.’ Blackwood profiles the ones who recorded for
Paramount and its many sub-labels:
Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter and Ma Rainey. Rainey, a rootsy blues shouter, outsold every
Paramount musician but Blind Lemon Jefferson. This all came out of the ferment in the music
scene in Chicago’s “Black Metropolis.”
It had places like Dreamland where N’Orlins’ own King Oliver, a young
Bix Beiderbecke and the famous Al Jolson waited for Alberta to come on stage.
Blackwood profiles Mayo Williams, a black middle-class recording
executive who found artists for Paramount starting in 1923, even though he
appreciated opera more. He recruited people like Ida Cox, Jelly Roll
Morton, Ma Rainey, Blind Blake, Big Bill Broonzy and King Oliver. He used a network of Pullman porters and
talent scouts spread across the South, as well as his connections in Chi Town. He earned a portion of the publishing and
recording sales, so he was never an ‘employee’ but more like a contractor. Williams set up an office at 3126 South State
Street, hired Tommy Dorsey as Paramount’s music arranger, and built a quality session
band led by a woman, Lovie Austin, called the Blues Serenaders. Arrangers
were needed as many musicians couldn’t read music, so they had to write the
notes down for accompanists and for royalties.
Many artists didn’t understand royalties, so they’d sign
away ownership of their song for a small payment just for recording it. Later
this was called both theft and ‘intellectual property.’ Williams later admitted he claimed royalties
for other’s songs and said he was “better
than 50% honest” – a figure ahead of the industry. For one, Alberta Hunter never made real money
off of her Paramount hit “Down Hearted
Blues.” Some studios never paid promised royalties to artists at all. Some artists signed with several labels and
the labels had to sue each other or recover the money from the musicians. Williams left Paramount in 1927 for Vocalion
Records after turning Chicago into a rival to New York’s recording industry.
H.C. Spier took his place.
He was a blues fan from the Mississippi hill country and toured the South
and Mississippi Delta for talent. Spier finally
found Charlie Patton with help from Paramount exec Art Laibly. He also signed, while working for other
labels besides Paramount: Willie Brown, Son House, Skip James, Tommy Johnson, Ishmon
Bracey, Jimmy Rogers and … though not for Paramount, Robert Johnson.
If you don’t know who all these people are, well it’s significant.
Blackwood touches on the invention of the horizontal record
and player; the seminal role of minstrel shows and vaudeville and the lesbian proclivities of female blues singers. He
sprinkles in quotes from Faulkner, Toni Morrison and Flannery O’Connor just to
let you know he’s literate and ‘southern.’ He goes through the haunting lyrics of various
songs. He sketches employees of
Paramount, and those whose influence extended to other labels. Blackwood tracks
their efforts to branch into ‘hillbilly,’ ‘old time’ and gospel music too, as
they had an almost open door. This included the monster song “Casey Jones.”
Blackwood touches on the poor quality of Chicago’s Marsh Laboratories,
where Paramount first recorded. The
sessions at Marsh were pre-electric and sited next to a screeching El train
track which disrupted sessions. These problems made Paramount go electric in
1929 and build their own studio in Grafton.
Blackwood describes a visit by Patton, Eddie ‘Son’ House and Willie
Brown to that studio the following year. Blind Lemon Jefferson’s last visit to
Paramount’s headquarters, as a famous and rich black man, still disturbed the
white office workers.
Blackwood profiles the true genius of New Orleans jazz
musician Jelly Roll Morton, who was insulted by a shabby bio written by Alan
Lomax. He tells the story of New Orleans
cornet improviser Joe “King” Oliver, an inspiration to Louis Armstrong who joined
Oliver in Chicago. He describes the quiet band leader Fletcher Henderson, who
developed swing. Switching gears,
Paramount recorded a Texas bottleneck guitarist, Blind Lemon Jefferson,
bringing the guitar into focus for the first time. Country blues guitarist Josh
White also knew Jefferson and became part of the Paramount session band. Blackwood considers Jefferson to be the
key early blues guitar player over all others.
Another Paramount guitarist, Blind Blake, recorded and made his gi-tar
sound like 7 other instruments, then hit the boogie-woogie. There was the seminal, poly-rhythmic Delta
blues of the shape-shifting Charlie Patton, the raging preach from Son House
and the high country lonesome of Skip James.
James was one of the first to record a short guitar solo / break in a
blues song.
Blackwood mentions less well known players for Paramount
like Jimmy O’Bryant, Johnnie Dodds, Papa Charlie Jackson, Blind Roosevelt
Graves, Geeshie Wiley, Elvie Thomas, Ishmon Bracey, Blind Joe Taggert, Blind
Willie Davis, Clarence Williams and more - ghosts from the past. Some of these musicians, like Morton and
Oliver, died, as the cliché goes, penniless, or they disappeared whole. Because clichés are sometimes true, just like
R. Crumb sketches.
By 1923 Paramount was at the top; by 1933 during the
Depression, Paramount declared bankruptcy.
The last workers congregated on the roof of the Grafton plant, drank
what they had until dark and spun records and metal masters into the Milwaukee River. They were the victims of a chaotic capitalist
economy and sadly, musical ignorance. This
book is not just a story of Paramount Records, but of a group of musicians that
broke true ground. We will not see their like again. If you are a blues, jazz or music fan, it’s
great stuff.
Prior blogspot reviews on this issue, use blog search box,
upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: “Ma Rainey,” “jazz,” “blues.”
May Day has several shelves of blues, rock, folk, punk and
more music books. But I got this at the
Library!
Red Frog / March 27, 2025
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