Starr Piano Company

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Starr Piano Company
legal form Recording company
founding 1872
resolution 195?
Seat Richmond , Indiana
Branch entertainment

The Starr Piano Company was an American company from Richmond , Indiana , which focused on the production of pianos in the first decades of its existence and entered the record business from 1915. The Starr Piano Company was able to assert itself on the market, especially with the record label Gennett Records .

history

Starr was founded in 1872 by James Starr, George Trayser and Richard Jackson as the Trayser Piano Company and six years later, in 1878, it was renamed the Chase Piano Company . At this point, James Starr's brother Benjamin Starr joined the company and together they bought 23 acres of land in the Whitewater Valley in Richmond, Indiana , on which they built a large factory complex powered by hydropower from the nearby Whitewater River. In 1893 the company got its final name, Starr Piano Company , and became Richmond's largest employer during those years. The pianos were marketed under the brand names Cumberland, Duchess, Gennett, Krell, Minum, Tayser, Royal, Pullman, Remington, Richmond, Coronado, Schmoller & Mueller and Starr .

The Starr Piano Company rose to a nationally known company and in 1893 Benjamin Starr became president, while the entrepreneur Henry Gennett helped Starr to further success in a leading position. In 1906 they employed 600 people. In 1916, another factory for the production of records and phonographs was set up on the site and a year later the record label Gennett Records was founded to bring their own recordings onto the market. As early as 1915, the company had dared to try the record business with Starr Records , but the sales figures were below expectations.

In 1922, Starr won a lawsuit against the Victor Talking Machine Company , which together with the American Graphophone Company held a monopoly position, so that Victor's patent for vertical recording technology was revoked. There was now a lively exchange of master recordings with many of the smaller recording companies who had joined Starr in the process . In the mid-1920s, Starr had grown into a strong economic power with the Gennett label. At that time around three million records, 15,000 pianos and 35,000 phonographs were produced annually. In 1928 the number of master recordings was 1,250.

The global economic crisis and the subsequent Depression put Starr, as well as many other companies hard to. The company's record labels were largely discontinued, but pianos continued to be produced in smaller numbers and records were pressed for other companies. In 1935 Gennett Records and its sub-label Champion Records were sold to Decca Records . The last piano left the factory in the early 1950s. Around ten years later, Starr was already closed and the former factory buildings on the Whitewater River fell into disrepair.

To honor Starr's achievements in the music industry, the Starr-Gennett Foundation was established in Richmond , which hosts a music festival in Richmond every year and honors important artists on the Gennett Walk of Fame in Richmond.

Labels

Label Years genre Artist
champion 1925-1934 Old-time music Vernon Dalhart , Frank Luther & Carson Robison , Gene Autry , Cliff Carlisle , Ernest Stoneman , Byrd Moore
Gennett 1919-1935 Jazz , Novelty , Pop , Old-Time Music , Blues Jelly Roll Morton , Louis Armstrong , Bix Beiderbecke , Vernon Dalhart , Ernest Stoneman , Carson Robison , Cliff Carlisle
Rigid ( Canada ) 1919-1925 Jazz , Novelty , Pop , Al Bernard , Frank Ferera , Billy Murray , Arthur Fields
Superior 1930-1932 Old-time music Byrd Moore , Cliff Carlisle , Bradley Kincaid
Van Speaking

Web links

Commons : Starr Piano Company  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files