The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records
Excerpted Nonfiction by Scott Blackwood
Volume One: 1917–1927
What’s signed, is signed; and what’s to be, will be;
and then again, perhaps it won’t be, after all.
— Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Introduction: Out of the Anonymous Dark
December 1933. Evening. A knot of bundled up white people — factory workers, clerks, even a few secretaries — are standing on the roof of the Grafton record factory, along the banks of the Milwaukee River. They’re angry. They’ve just been fired during the company’s Christmas party (1). It’s the middle of the Depression. Many had worked for Paramount Records, a subsidiary of the chair company, their whole adult lives and lived in the small town of Grafton, Wisconsin for several generations. Most likely, the people up there would have been drinking at the party, given that Prohibition just ended. A few of the boldest and drunkest might have cursed the factory owner’s name. Old Man Moeser. Maybe even spoken ill of Moeser’s wife, who a few years back had invited Ma Rainey and Lemon Jefferson to her house when they were big sellers, even though she didn’t approve of the Race Records the company manufactured or the musicians who made them. Blacks, it was said, made her nervous (2).
The group of workers can hear the river rushing down below, where a dam, sluice, and waterwheel have long powered the record pressing plant, an archaic system that has slowed record production for years (3). After the crash, record sales dropped dramatically. Everyone knew it. Still, they kept recording and pressing records, thinking it all might turn around. That they might find another money maker, another Blind Lemon Jefferson. But now here they are, up on the roof. Stacked at their feet, hundreds of records the factory had pressed during the last fifteen years, records made from used tire rubber, shellac, ground china clay, and other industrial odds and ends. They’d stopped by the stock room on their way up, gathered these records and the metal recording masters in their arms. Let’s have ourselves a little fun, someone must have said. One or two had likely brought a lighted kerosene lamp. The workers’ bodies throw long shadows over the roof. A few hold up the records to the light. Call out names from the labels, just below the iconic Paramount eagle and globe. Son House. Blind Blake. Jelly Roll Morton. Ethel Waters. Papa Charlie Jackson. Alberta Hunter. Skip James, Charley Patton. Jimmy O’Bryant’s Famous Original Washboard Band. Names vaguely familiar from invoices but that sound strange on their tongues. Still, these records have been their livelihood, peculiar songs made for peculiar people they’ll never meet. It must have given a few of them pause — considering the cataclysmic changes the Depression had brought — to think how quickly things come into being and go out again, almost like they never were.
In any case, it’s a cold night in December, so they get on with things. They sling the records into the dark, toward the river. They can hear some of them smash on the rocks along the riverbank. Others make it to the water, drift downstream, they imagine, or settle to the clay bottom. The metal recording masters would’ve glinted, making a sharper sound when they hit, their last note.
Over the next decade, a generation of young Grafton boys will visit this same factory after it’s abandoned and they too will grab armfuls of left-behind records, fling them, explode them against the factory walls. Not out of anger but boredom, a young person’s need to break everything and begin again (4).
It’s remarkable that the Paramount recordings — arguably one of the greatest single archives of America’s rich musical heritage — exist at all. Music that will influence all of the popular music and culture to come. Prophetic music. Paramount’s erratic business practices, inattention to detail, inordinate cheapness, chicanery, and, at times, outright ignorance of what they were recording and for whom, should have doomed it to irrelevance. But like a record company Jonah, the more they tried to run from the voices, the more readily the voices seemed to find them. Paramount’s story is really part of the larger American story, which, like all great and lasting ones, is full of paradox, self-deception, illusion, and chance. There’s an intimation in Paramount’s story, like our own, that all is not as it seems. That the foolish, profane, and ephemeral might only be masks worn by the transcendent.
Back on the factory roof, the group of workers must have stood around afterwards, smoking, talking, feeling oddly exhilarated, not wanting to leave but knowing it’s time. This is how the story ends, they’re thinking. But the voices out there in the anonymous dark, drifting downriver, still have something to say.
The Great Migration
I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave until now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy. … Some men ride on such space, others have to fasten themselves like a tent stake to survive.
— Charles Olsen, Call Me Ishmael
1917. A young black man on a train moving up the Illinois Central Line to Chicago. Outside the window, a great emptiness crosshatched with railroads, threaded by a river. A few no account towns. A sea of prairie.
He’d left New Orleans early morning. Left everyone and everything he knew. His mother and her boyfriends. (Two who liked him, one that beat on him.) Left his friends. Never been anywhere else. New Orleans fills his head, water brimming a levee. So out in that emptiness he’s passing through, he builds the Eagle Saloon at the corner of Rampart and Perdido. Hears Buddy Bolden making some music, though he doubts he ever really heard him, probably was only told. The young man worked for a Jewish family for a while. Name of Cohen. Small jobs. Yard work, leaf raking. He likes the smell of burning leaves. The Cohens gave him afternoons off to play trombone for funerals and dances. A substitute for a substitute in the Olympia Band. He even had a girl. Or something like one. Gladys. Light skinned. Skinny. She worked for a family two doors down from the Cohens. The young man stutters some when he’s nervous, the space between what he wants to say and can get out, so wide. She asks him, why you so peculiar? She presses her palm to his chest when she says it. You kiss funny. He cups her breasts in his hands. What’s an embouchure? He thumbs her nipple. Tries to remember to kiss her when he does this. Love or something like it. Trying to play notes that aren’t in the song. Blue notes. Then Mr. Cohen died and the family had to let him go and all the substitute band work dried up. And Gladys took up with somebody older who knew what was what. Razor scar over his lip.
Now, headed to Chicago, he worries about appearing the fool. Wonders what the girls are like there. Concentrates on the swaying of the cars, the steady clocking of the train. He nods off a few times, seeing Rampart and Perdido, hearing Buddy Bolden blow his cornet. King Oliver who beat Freddy Keppard in a cutting contest.
He wakes to see a Pullman Porter walking through the train car. The Pullman Porters tell you how to feel about it, he thinks. Watch their faces. Chicago right there. Emissaries from that other world, pressed uniforms and rounded hats. Some high yellow, some dark skinned. Confident stride. Humming a tune he can’t catch.
He worries he’ll be invisible in Chicago, his nobody-ness lost in its big spaces. He knows he’s no Keppard or Oliver or Kid Ory. He worries it’ll all be a mistake. In his head he plays the funeral march standard, “Didn’t He Ramble,” tamps it all down.
Someone will pick him up in Chicago at the 12th Street station, take him to his mother’s cousin’s place off Calumet Avenue. They’ll say Goddamn, Son. You a sight. Give him a job in the kitchen peeling potatoes for somebody’s somebody. So cold in Chicago he has to wear his long drawers underneath his trousers and they poke out round his ankles, making him look the fool. He can feel the peeled potato rounded and cold in his hand. Hear the naked thud it makes in the basket.
The prairie outside the train window stretches on and on.
He opens his trombone case across his knees. The brass glints. He feels the promise of the slide between his fingers. All that space out there concentrated into this.
The Black Metropolis
The Black Metropolis on the South Side of Chicago, around 35th and State, lives and breathes. It’s 1917 and there aren’t any streetlights yet, but the Stroll, as it’s called, doesn’t need them. Lit like an arc light. Midnight like noon. Hot music plays everywhere, spilling out of cafés, cabarets, theatres, into the street, mixing with the sounds of car horns, barkers, shouts from upper windows, police sirens, punctuated here and there by gunshots (5). “The Black Athens,” the Chicago Defender newspaper calls it. High black style. Liberating. Dangerous, too. Con men, gangsters. Everything permitted but nothing free. A siren’s song for the tens of thousands of African-Americans arriving from the rural south during the great migration, away for the first time from the pull of extended family, churches, the crushing weight of old hatreds (6).
Porters, clerks, and postal workers leave work, sleep until 2 a.m. and are out on the Stroll in their finest to soak it all in (7). It’s too much, too overwhelming, but then it’s just right and irresistible. The Creole piano master, Jelly Roll Morton, who’s recently published his arrangement of “Jelly Roll Blues,” holds sway along the Stroll with his rhythmic miracles and showmanship — a Creole, reinventing himself, who’s seen wearing a Stetson bowler, a red bandana draping his neck, diamonds glinting in his teeth. But now Bill Johnson’s Original Creole Band’s ragged, assertive style had changed everything. In 1916, Freddie Keppard, the band’s brilliant cornet player, had a chance to be the first recorded jazz star for Victor Talking Machine Company but apparently turned it down for fear of others stealing his fingering style (word has it he wears a handkerchief over his fingering hand while he plays, his fingers too good for this world) (8). Or maybe it was the pay, $25 for the session, which Freddie Keppard said wouldn’t even cover his daily gin tab? Another story had it that a Victor executive had made a racially disparaging remark and Keppard — drunk, enraged — had refused to come back to the studio (9).
A rising tide of other New Orleans musicians are making their marks in the Black Metropolis, a city within a city that will swell to 100,000 people by 1920. Female blues singers come from other areas of the country, play the vaudeville theatres, like future Black Swan and Paramount stars Ethel Waters from Philadelphia, known then as “Sweet Mama Stringbean,” whom Bessie Smith once intimidated (fortuitously it will turn out) into singing popular songs instead of blues when they shared a bill in Atlanta (10), and who has developed a unique ability to bring blues feeling to popular song and stage. By 1917, Alberta Hunter, a blues singer from Tennessee who will later record for Paramount and enjoy at least three second acts in her singing career (the last when she’s in her eighties), is already a wildly successful mainstay in the South Side’s black vaudeville theatres and cabarets. The mother of the blues, Ma Rainey, originally from Georgia, already thirty-one, whose open sexuality twined with her powerful gutbucket blues performances have already deeply influenced Bessie Smith, and so many others.
But it’s still three years before Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” creates the huge demand for Race Records, for blues and hot music, so nobody knows yet what recording even means — nobody knows if these performances on records are anything but gimmicks. But performers know other musicians will play these records until the grooves wear down to steal their style, all the tricks they’ve spent years honing. Besides, recording pays next to nothing. The shows are where it’s at. It’s still nearly ten years before the talkies and radio arrive, so black vaudeville, with its blackface minstrel song and dance traditions and musical accompaniment to silent films, its spectacle, is still king.
But the wave of modernism, accelerated by the war in Europe, is already on its way. Already, in January of 1917, the all-white Original Dixieland Jass Band has issued the first recording of hot music, “Livery Stable Blues,” on the Victor label (ODJB had recorded with Columbia earlier but the record wasn’t released) and proclaimed themselves the inventors of jazz (11). But even with this self-serving fiction, they carved a space for everything to come. The rest of the notes have yet to be played but the tune is already in the ear. Already the Great Migration is changing everything, a whole race molding the urban spaces of the north into the shapes of its own sufferings and joys.
Excerpted from The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records: Volume One.
Scott Blackwood is the author of two novels, a story collection, and two narrative nonfiction books. His most recent novel SEE HOW SMALL won the 2016 PEN USA Award for Fiction, was named a “great reads” best book of 2015 by NPR and an “Editor’s Choice” pick by The New York Times. His previous novel WE AGREED TO MEET JUST HERE earned him a 2011 Whiting Writers’ Award, the AWP Prize for the Novel, the Texas Institute of Letters Award for best work of fiction, and was a finalist for the PEN USA Award in fiction.
Introduction: Out of the Anonymous Dark
1 Alex van der Tuuk Paramount’s Rise and Fall, second edition (Mainspring Press, 2012), 187.
2 Ibid.,101, 186.
3 Ibid.,39
4 Ibid.,4–5
The Black Metropolis
5 William Howland Kennedy, Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History. (Oxford University Press, 1993)
6 Ibid., 11.
7 Ibid., 12.
8 Laurence Bergreen, Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life (Broadway Books, 1997). 213
9 Pete Whelan, written response about Keppard’s reasons for not recording.
10Donald Bogle, Heat Wave: the Life and Times of Ethel Waters. (Harper Collins, 2011). 39
11 Alex van der Tuuk Paramount’s Rise and Fall, second edition (Mainspring Press, 2012), 52
