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Paramount's Rise and Fall: A History of the Wisconsin Chair Company and Its Recording Activities
How did a Midwestern chair company come to dominate the "race record" market of the 1920s? Their bold plunge into a then-untested market - records by black performers, for black buyers - unfolds in this new history. Alex van der Tuuk traces the story of their legendary Paramount label, which introduced such blues greats as "Ma" Rainey, Charley Patton, and Skip James to the world. More than 120 illustrations include rare ad artwork and many previously unpublished photos.
264 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2003
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February 18, 2020
February 2020 update:
“Chasin Dem Blues” runs at the Milwaukee Rep through March 22. A tuneful cabaret show with thirty songs that bring this story to life. Fun. I reread this book as good background before seeing the two hour show. Comments below still stand. https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2020/01/22...
April 2015 update
A revised and expanded second edition published in 2012, nine years after the first edition. This is a significant upgrade all the way around, including new chapters, corrections, higher quality photographs and better paper.
Among the fleshed-out stories:
In 1949, John Steiner, a chemistry professor born in Milwaukee, became the legal owner of Paramount when he bought the rights and remaining assets. He died in 2000 in his Bayview home, leaving his Paramount documents and ephemera to the University of Chicago. The university's library holds the 471box collection, which covers jazz and blues from 1860-2001, including musicians, clubs, artwork, recording.
John Steiner Collection, seven-hundred-page inventory, with bionote: http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/ead/rlg/I...
This second edition also described renewed interest in the Grafton Paramount experience since the first edition published in 2003. PBS History Detectives produced an episode called Lost Musical Treasure: http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetecti... . "Grafton City Blues," a cabaret show, played on the story: http://www.milwaukeerep.com/season/se...
March 2015, original comments
A hundred years ago, at the dawn of commercial music recording, the blues was known as folk blues and a studio was a laboratory.
This book serves as a witness to the marriage of blues and early recording technology. The story traces the music and musicians as well as audio techniques that began with the acoustic period of singing and playing into a two-foot horn which gave way to electronic recording by using microphones.
The Wisconsin Chair Company, thirty miles north of Milwaukee, started making phonograph cabinets in the early 1900s. To help create a market for phonographs and phonograph records, the company began to include free records with each unit. On June 29, 1917, the first record pressed in Grafton.
In the early 1920s, the boom began in blues, black jazz and vaudeville. Radio and talking pictures took off later in the decade. Paramount became a market leader by recording musicians before they became stars, including Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and Ma Rainey. Blind Lemon Jefferson, after ninety-two sides for Paramount, became the label's most recorded artist.
Before The Great Depression, Paramount Records recorded in Chicago, New York and Indiana. But during the depression, the label moved its recording to Grafton, from 1929-32. Many of the blues singers and players took trains to Milwaukee, spent nights in a men-only boarding house owned by the label, then took interurbans north for thirty miles to the studio in Grafton. So, this is a tuneful chapter of local history.
Record sales slumped during the depth of The Depression while recording technology improved in Chicago, which also was more convenient for the artists who lived there. After sixteen hundred recordings in three years, the studio closed in July 1932. Later, the closing of the chair company created bad feelings. Disgruntled workers sailed records and masters into the Milwaukee River where the plant operated.
Extensive citations and a five-page bibliography. This book includes many details and photographs not found in the new kits designed for collectors that released in the past couple of years.
I spent five hours at the library arts desk with The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, volumes one and two, which released in the past eighteen months. With a combined cost of eight hundred dollars, we can read these at the library, but the rare, oversize and deluxe kits do not circulate. Rare because this is a numbered piece of five thousand manufactured.
In addition to the four books, flash drives with the kits include sixteen hundred tunes recorded from 1917 to 1932.
http://thirdmanstore.com/the-rise-and...
http://thirdmanstore.com/the-rise-and...
Going to the arts desk was on my to-do list since NPR ran a story eighteen months ago about volume one: http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/20... ... NPR last month aired a story about volume two, which: http://www.npr.org/2015/02/24/3887961...
Historical plaques mark the location of the pressing plant in Grafton on the Milwaukee River, an area originally known as Milwaukee Falls. http://www.village.grafton.wi.us/inde... It makes a great half a daytrip to stand at the place where workers made these records. … I live in Milwaukee, on the Milwaukee River. Maybe a few bluesy notes of shellac washed down here and embedded in the banks and cry out in the night.
“Chasin Dem Blues” runs at the Milwaukee Rep through March 22. A tuneful cabaret show with thirty songs that bring this story to life. Fun. I reread this book as good background before seeing the two hour show. Comments below still stand. https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2020/01/22...
April 2015 update
A revised and expanded second edition published in 2012, nine years after the first edition. This is a significant upgrade all the way around, including new chapters, corrections, higher quality photographs and better paper.
Among the fleshed-out stories:
In 1949, John Steiner, a chemistry professor born in Milwaukee, became the legal owner of Paramount when he bought the rights and remaining assets. He died in 2000 in his Bayview home, leaving his Paramount documents and ephemera to the University of Chicago. The university's library holds the 471box collection, which covers jazz and blues from 1860-2001, including musicians, clubs, artwork, recording.
John Steiner Collection, seven-hundred-page inventory, with bionote: http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/ead/rlg/I...
This second edition also described renewed interest in the Grafton Paramount experience since the first edition published in 2003. PBS History Detectives produced an episode called Lost Musical Treasure: http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetecti... . "Grafton City Blues," a cabaret show, played on the story: http://www.milwaukeerep.com/season/se...
March 2015, original comments
A hundred years ago, at the dawn of commercial music recording, the blues was known as folk blues and a studio was a laboratory.
This book serves as a witness to the marriage of blues and early recording technology. The story traces the music and musicians as well as audio techniques that began with the acoustic period of singing and playing into a two-foot horn which gave way to electronic recording by using microphones.
The Wisconsin Chair Company, thirty miles north of Milwaukee, started making phonograph cabinets in the early 1900s. To help create a market for phonographs and phonograph records, the company began to include free records with each unit. On June 29, 1917, the first record pressed in Grafton.
In the early 1920s, the boom began in blues, black jazz and vaudeville. Radio and talking pictures took off later in the decade. Paramount became a market leader by recording musicians before they became stars, including Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and Ma Rainey. Blind Lemon Jefferson, after ninety-two sides for Paramount, became the label's most recorded artist.
Before The Great Depression, Paramount Records recorded in Chicago, New York and Indiana. But during the depression, the label moved its recording to Grafton, from 1929-32. Many of the blues singers and players took trains to Milwaukee, spent nights in a men-only boarding house owned by the label, then took interurbans north for thirty miles to the studio in Grafton. So, this is a tuneful chapter of local history.
Record sales slumped during the depth of The Depression while recording technology improved in Chicago, which also was more convenient for the artists who lived there. After sixteen hundred recordings in three years, the studio closed in July 1932. Later, the closing of the chair company created bad feelings. Disgruntled workers sailed records and masters into the Milwaukee River where the plant operated.
Extensive citations and a five-page bibliography. This book includes many details and photographs not found in the new kits designed for collectors that released in the past couple of years.
I spent five hours at the library arts desk with The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, volumes one and two, which released in the past eighteen months. With a combined cost of eight hundred dollars, we can read these at the library, but the rare, oversize and deluxe kits do not circulate. Rare because this is a numbered piece of five thousand manufactured.
In addition to the four books, flash drives with the kits include sixteen hundred tunes recorded from 1917 to 1932.
http://thirdmanstore.com/the-rise-and...
http://thirdmanstore.com/the-rise-and...
Going to the arts desk was on my to-do list since NPR ran a story eighteen months ago about volume one: http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/20... ... NPR last month aired a story about volume two, which: http://www.npr.org/2015/02/24/3887961...
Historical plaques mark the location of the pressing plant in Grafton on the Milwaukee River, an area originally known as Milwaukee Falls. http://www.village.grafton.wi.us/inde... It makes a great half a daytrip to stand at the place where workers made these records. … I live in Milwaukee, on the Milwaukee River. Maybe a few bluesy notes of shellac washed down here and embedded in the banks and cry out in the night.
January 27, 2019
“Voices lost to time, you’d think. But seemingly the more Paramount bungled things, the more willful their ignorance, the shadier their practices, the more they fled from their voices, the more readily the voices found them”
July 22, 2018
The subtitle of this book is more accurate than its title, as blues fans interested in the rise and fall of Paramount Records may learn more about chairs here than they care to know. If you just want to know about Paramount Records, though, it would be easy enough to skip the opening and closing chapters and read only the meat of this book, which is crammed with an impressive amount of detail.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews