Paramount Records
Paramount Records was an American record label that existed from 1918 to 1932 and was particularly known for its recordings in the field of jazz and blues . The company is not to be confused with the film production company Paramount Pictures , with which it had no relationship during its existence.
history
founding
Paramount Records was founded as a subsidiary of a furniture company, the Wisconsin Chair Company of Grafton . They had made some gramophone cabinets for Edison Records and then launched their own gramophone brand called Vista as the United Phonograph Corporation . To complement this, Paramount was founded in 1918. A separate subsidiary of the Wisconsin Chair Company , New York Recording Laboratories, Incorporated , which regardless of its name, was also located in the parent company's factory complex in Wisconsin, served as the recording studio and press shop . The misleading name should probably suggest proximity to the music metropolis New York and thus bring market advantages, in advertisements you can find the sentence: "Paramounts are recorded in our own New York laboratory", in German roughly "Paramount (records) are made in our own New York (-er) laboratory added. "
The company wasn't particularly successful during its early years. There was a lack of outstanding interpreters, the quality of the recording and the press was so below average that when the company had a hit with Blind Lemon Jefferson's Got the Blues / Long Lonesome Blues in 1926, Jefferson had to re-record the pieces in a better studio and replaced the new version the old one without comment.
Ascent
Even in the early 1920s, the company remained in deficit, and the press shop was then rented to competitor Black Swan Records . After their bankruptcy, the company then began producing " Race Music ", ie recordings of African American musicians, which were specifically aimed at an African American audience. With this decision, the most economically and artistically successful phase of the company began. Since the market itself was foreign to the company, talent scouts such as J. Mayo Williams and HC Speir Paramount introduced promising artists, including some of the most famous names in the blues such as Ma Rainey , Charley Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson . Around a quarter of all known blues records of the time were released by Paramount.
The End
Paramount's blooming phase lasted only a short time, however, with the Great Depression from 1929 onwards, the lower class in particular, to which the African-American target group almost entirely belonged, became extremely impoverished, making luxury goods such as records almost unsaleable. Paramount tried to counter this failure by lowering prices. B. used for pressing the plates very bad material. Despite these and other measures, Paramount did not manage to survive in the long term, and in the summer of 1932 the entire company was closed.
In 1942 John Steiner acquired the company, he published the old recordings again, but also added new recordings to the catalog. In 1970, George H. Buck acquired the company, sold the naming rights to Paramount Pictures and integrated the Paramount catalog into his label Jazzology Records .
Allegedly the masters were thrown into the Milwaukee River for disposal together with numerous (as new) records in 1932 , in fact most of the masters have not survived. For re-releases of Paramount records, one has to fall back on the published records today, which leads to high quality losses due to the poor pressing material mentioned and the decades of use of the sound carriers.
