[Dixielandjazz] The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records reviewed - LA Times

[Robert Ringwald]

Massive Paramount Records Trove Has an Ear for History
by Randall Roberts
Los Angeles Times, December 8, 2013
The ambitious new set "The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records 1917-1932, Volume 1"
comes packaged in a sturdy wooden suitcase dubbed "The Cabinet of Wonder," an apt
title considering the awe-inducing sounds and history it resurrects.
A label whose ragtag story stars two white Wisconsin business partners more concerned
with record player sales than music, an A&R man whose race and history as a Chicago
bootlegger (and ex-pro football player) allowed him access to the clubs where unrecorded
talent gigged and a roster of artists with equally fascinating biographies, the Paramount
and affiliated labels' output during its 15-year life comprises more than 1,600 songs.
They were released through a subsidiary of a Port Washington, Wis.-born furniture
company during the rise of the phonograph era.
Ultimately, and seemingly against all odds, Paramount tapped into a huge market hungry
for so-called race records, selling thousands if not millions of shellacs by some
of the most important African American voices of the first recorded music era. Artists
including Blind Lemon Jefferson, James P. Johnson, Louis Armstrong and Ma Rainey
appeared on now-historic sides for Paramount or one of its numerous subsidiary labels,
the most notable being a black music imprint, Black Swan.
It's an impressive object, the Cabinet, with the heft of a hellhound, but the true
revelations arrive in the narratives held in this first of two volumes, released
in November. The market is filled with so-called definitive box sets. Few, however,
bring the musical past to life in such a surprising and revealing way.
Two books illuminate Paramount's history, context and graphic marketing style. A
set of six vinyl-pressed albums curated by singer-guitarist and White Stripes co-founder
Jack White and compadres offers a representative slice of the voluminous music. Newsprint
circulars of sheet music and catalogs illustrate the notated and numbered specifics.
Most impressive, a flash drive playfully dubbed "the Jobber-Luxe" comes loaded with
800 MP3s released in Paramount's first decade, delivering a huge swath of sound from
the rise of the jazz and blues ages, in the process capturing the final years of
the vaudeville era.
Plug the drive, designed in the shape of an old phonograph needle, into a computer
and dig into the curated playlists, search by title, artist, catalog number, label
or year -- or drop a real needle on one of the 12 LP sides -- and the beat of a rich
and half-hidden American story starts thumping.
Which is to say, this volume, which extends through 1927, reveals the DNA of the
American sound. Some numbers reveal the sprouting of jazz jumping into the present.
Listen to the bawdy rhythm and blues, blackface minstrelsy, scat singing, hillbilly
music, popular song, gospel, white spirituals, pre-war blues and various baffling
one-offs and hear an echo of the big bang. In a few of the black "hokum" songs, most
notably on Lil and Will Brown's "Save My Jelly," are the seeds of rock 'n' roll and
hip-hop.
Voices eke out of the crackle, as if barely salvaged from the dustbin. The vocal
group that offers "God's Gonna Set This World on Fire," called the Herwin Ladies
Four, delivers a story of blazing portent that prompted a teary-eyed shudder the
first time I heard it. The trumpet and clarinet wobbling through "Peepin' Blues"
by Lovie Austin and Her Blues Serenaders seem to prevail though sheer force of will,
and the song erupts when a muted trumpet burps out a wild solo.
The box, a joint release from White's Third Man Records and the John Fahey co-founded
Revenant Records, based in Austin, Texas, is selling through Third Man's website,
thirdmanrecords.com, for $400, the cheapest price on the Web. It's worth every cent
because of the attention and care of Revenant's owner Dean Blackwood, the scholarship
and writing by pre-World War II blues expert Alex van der Tuuk and others, White's
purity of vision and the designers who crafted this thing.
Blackwood described during a recent conversation his desire to tell the Paramount
story after concluding that the company was "this inescapable force in the universe,
and every time you bump up against it you learn a little bit more about this curious
tale. These guys were white men operating near Lake Michigan in Wisconsin at a furniture
factory -- didn't seem to have any aptitude or interest in records." Rather, they
wanted to sell the more profitable phonograph cabinets, caring little about what
buyers heard when they got them home.
Their carelessness allowed unfiltered recordings to hit the marketplace, and after
hiring said bootlegger Mayo Williams, the company expanded into the "race record"
business, eventually absorbing the Harlem-based Black Swan imprint after it couldn't
pay its record-pressing bills. Alongside subsidiary labels Puritan, Famous and Broadway,
Paramount advertised in newspapers across the country, most notably in black sheets
such as the Chicago Defender, in the process starting one of the first music mail
order businesses.
Paramount at various times shared artists with other labels that had found success
selling to black audiences, most important among them Okeh and Gennett. But Paramount's
seeming colorblindness -- and aesthetic blindness -- made it unique, said Blackwood.
"It's a case where their very cheapness and interest in getting stuff out as quickly
as possible ended up unwittingly providing this platform with this incredible breadth
to it -- just in the diversity of sounds that were captured."
Nearly a century later the music feels safe again, even if some of the weathered
recordings, despite being remastered, sound as old as they are.
"The Day of Judgment" offers a retelling of Revelation by Rev. W.M. Clark and his
congregation, a peephole into a 1920s African American church. Ma Rainey does dirty
in "Down in the Basement." "The Santa Claus Crave" is a desperate piano blues by
Elzadie Robinson, a deep-throated singer who pleads with Santa Claus to bring her
baby home. Eliose Bennett's "Sting Me Mr. Strange Man" is as weird as its title.
Add in roughly 790 others and you've got yourself a holiday bounty.
Much of this stuff has been available in one form or another, but never before has
the full Paramount story been told. Van der Tuuk told me that he's been researching
the label and its affiliates for two decades and traveled to Wisconsin to interview
former workers, artists and witnesses. He tells the full story within -- including
an incredible scene near the end of Paramount's life when residents used thousands
of unsold records for some makeshift skeet-shooting.
Those in Hollywood looking for rich veins should expense this volume, limited to
5,000 copies. So vast are the mini narratives within the catalog of biographies in
the "Field Manual" that you can imagine HBO or the Coen brothers drooling as they
flip through it.
Mattie Dorsey, purveyor of "Love Me Daddy Blues," earned her keep in the mid-'20s
as a male impersonator. Harry Reser, who recorded as Jimmy Johnston, bragged of first
broadcasting from the Statue of Liberty in 1921. Scholars of gender and sexual politics
should dig into this volume to better examine the out-and-open lifestyles of blues
singers Ethel Waters and Alberta Hunter. The namesake artist of Horace George's Jubilee
Harmonizers stole whole hog a triple-clarinet trick (called in the book a "triple-licorice
stick trick") from a competing player, which prompted a feud that culminated in a
complaint to the National Vaudeville Assn.
With each turn of the page or album side too comes another prototype.
For example, Papa Charlie Jackson, according to Van der Tuuk, was "the first male
who was recorded by a record company accompanying himself on a guitar -- or a banjo
guitar, in this case." Sales were so good on this and other blues and jazz titles
that, said the scholar, "soon enough they figured, 'Well, we need to find more of
these people.'"
They did, in the form of early recordings from rising cornetist Louis Armstrong,
when he was a sideman in Joe "King" Oliver's band. "Riverside Blues," recorded 90
years ago, offers a glimpse of Armstrong as one among the many brilliant players
in the band. Blind Lemon Jefferson too owes Paramount for his early success (even
if it and other labels routinely stripped the artists of publishing and sales royalties)
as the first country blues artist to see commercial success. He did so on a roster
that also included Blind Blake and, later, Charley Patton.
The Depression wiped out Paramount and many other imprints -- but that's for the
second volume, due out in fall 2014 and offering 800 songs.
That's an overwhelming prospect, considering I've barely dented this volume. Amid
the bounty, though, it's a few lesser-known sides that have popped the loudest. One
is Sweet Papa Stovepipe's "Mama's Angel Child," a song that Blackwood too favored.
The first time he heard it he was awe-struck, he said. "It's like indie rock. What
is this? How did it get recorded and who green-lighted it for release? That's one
that both Jack and I went, 'Can you believe this?' How great is this? It sounds like
he's gonna cry, and he's talking about how whatever happens to him, he's his mama's
baby child."
It's true. Sweet Papa's forlorn moan seems to puncture the present. That something
so old can retain so much heat is a wonder to behold. That it sits alongside so many
other objects of equal density is remarkably and often fantastically overwhelming.
___________________________________
The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Volume 1, 1917-1927 (Third Man, 6 LPs, 800
MP3s, $400)
by Dan DeLuca
Philadelphia Inquirer, December 8, 2013
The prize musical-fetish object of the season is this lavish, 20-plus-pound oak box
designed to look like one of the vintage phonographs manufactured by the Wisconsin
Chair Co., which went into the music business to supply 78 r.p.m. discs to be played
on their machines. The "Cabinet of Wonder," jointly released by Jack White's Third
Man label, and Revenant, founded by John Fahey, lovingly documents "race music" blues,
jazz, and gospel artists such as Blind Blake, Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Ma Rainey,
and Chester's own Ethel Waters. It includes six marbleized brown LPs, a clothbound
250-page book reproducing ads in African American newspapers like the Chicago Defender,
bio information on 172 artists, and a USB drive that holds 800 songs and unlocks
Web extras. Worth it.
-30
Bob Ringwald K6YBV
www.ringwald.com
916/ 806-9551

To the optimist, the glass is half-full. To the pessimist, the glass is half-empty.
To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.