Paramount and the race records

In August 1920, a Black singer from Cincinnati, Mamie Smith, records Crazy Blues for OKeh. Within months it sells hundreds of thousands of copies, mostly to Black buyers. The record companies discover a market and give it a name: race records.

One of the labels that bets on it most heavily is Paramount, owned by a furniture company in Wisconsin. The company makes phonographs and needs records to sell with them. To find artists, it hires J. Mayo Williams, one of the first Black producers in the industry, who scouts talent in the South and in Chicago's Black neighborhoods.

In 1926 Paramount records Blind Lemon Jefferson in Chicago, a blind singer from Texas who until then had played on the streets of Deep Ellum. He is an instant success. Paramount advertises him in the Chicago Defender, and his records sell by mail order across the country. The only known photograph of Jefferson is a promotional portrait made by the label.

Paramount records had a reputation for sounding bad: cheap materials, noisy recordings. But that catalog, made on a shoestring, became one of the great archives of Black music of the 1920s and early 1930s: Ma Rainey, Charley Patton, Son House, Skip James.

The Great Depression sinks everything. In 1932 Paramount stops recording. According to a story still told in Grafton, where the factory was, the workers threw the records left in the warehouse into the river. True or not, some of those records are now among the most sought-after objects for collectors around the world.