Do Not Sell At Any Price

by Amanda Petrusich

  Paramount was launched by the NYRL on June 27, 1917 (it bore no relation to the American movie studio, which was founded in 1912), and after four floundering years as a flailing pop enterprise, Paramount executives, led by the sales manager M. A. Supper, decided to cash in on a sudden boom in black vaudeville, jazz, and blues. Paramount, it was decided, would make a fine test dummy for the company’s speculative “race records” series, and the project began in 1922 with the release of Paramount 12001—Alberta Hunter’s “Daddy Blues” / “Don’t Pan Me.” The series was a savvy move: besides serving a relatively untapped market, race artists didn’t command high prices, meaning Paramount could keep its costs low. Getting Al Jolson behind your microphone might cost $10,000, but a blues singer required a payout of only twenty-five to seventy-five dollars per side, and sometimes as little as six dollars.

  Paramount was born from a mercenary impulse: at no point in the company’s history were its founders intent on performing any grand cultural service or nobly distributing overlooked music to an underserved community. Like any functional capitalist enterprise, the WCC was only trying to make as much cash as possible. When early record executives thought about music as an edifying force, it was about exposing indigent populations to “sophisticated” white art, and never the other way around. Race records became popular only after African-Americans became record buyers, which happened mostly in the early 1920s, after portable phonographs, a novelty intended for World War I soldiers, suddenly allowed folks who couldn’t necessarily afford an ornate Victrola to dip into the home-audio scene.

  The notion of black performers recording music for black audiences was still rogue and untested in 1922, although a few enterprising labels had been experimenting with similar projects. A few months earlier, in 1921, the New York City–based Okeh Records had initiated its first race series, with serial numbers starting in the 8000s. A year prior, Okeh (then the General Phonograph Corporation) had taken a chance on a thirty-seven-year-old black singer and actress named Mamie Smith, releasing Smith’s “Crazy Blues” / “It’s Right Here for You (If You Don’t Get It . . . ’Taint No Fault of Mine),” possibly the first recording of a vocal blues by a black artist. It sold a whopping 75,000 copies in its first month of release. By 1923, Columbia had its own race series, and by 1926, the entire industry had caught on.

  A year after its launch, a twenty-eight-year-old talent scout and part-time sportswriter named J. Mayo Williams was selected to oversee Paramount’s race series from Chicago. A Brown University graduate and former track and football star, the charismatic Williams was Paramount’s only black “executive” (he didn’t receive a salary, only royalty payments) and had effectively volunteered himself for the job, traveling to Port Washington and bluffing his way through a meeting (“I just jived my way into the whole situation,” he later told Calt). Williams is credited as a composer on many of Paramount’s race releases, sometimes under the pseudonym Everett Murphy, and has since become a contentious figure for blues enthusiasts. He purportedly plied rural performers with liquor and often assumed false ownership of their songs, crediting himself as a co-composer (it was, after all, his only way to make cash). Williams’s scheming was hardly aberrant—according to van der Tuuk, Williams’s secretary, Aletha Dickerson, also snuck her name onto forty-three titles listed for copyright—and besides, most artists readily agreed to a flat recording fee and waived all rights to future royalties. Whether they fully understood the financial repercussions of the contract should they have landed a hit is unclear; in the money-now vs. money-later debate, most chose money now. Interestingly, Calt credits Williams’s “aloofness”—he wasn’t much for banter, particularly if his conversational partner was uneducated—for his sour reputation among artists of the era.

  Still, Williams was something of a gatekeeper for black musicians, who, in the early 1920s, didn’t have many options for recording their work. As Sarah Filzen notes in the Wisconsin Magazine of History, “Because Williams was one of the very few black music representatives in the recording business, he had the luxury of having many black artists come to him to be ‘discovered.’ ” He frequented local theaters, held auditions, and entertained suggestions from Paramount talent scouts scattered throughout the South. Men like R. T. Ashford, who owned a combination shoe-shine parlor and record shop on Central Avenue in Dallas, often sent local artists north to Chicago to record for Paramount. In 1925, Ashford referred the blues great Blind Lemon Jefferson, whom he purportedly discovered playing on a street corner; Jefferson eventually became Paramount’s most-frequently-recorded race artist, laying down a total of ninety-two sides in a period of three and a half years.

  A good chunk of Paramount’s race releases were captured by a producer named Orlando Marsh, who worked out of a studio on the sixth floor of the Lyon and Healy building in downtown Chicago. According to The Country Blues author Samuel Charters, Marsh was “a conscientious, imaginative recording engineer, but everything about the Paramount business operation was cheap, and the quality of the recordings was very poor.” Marsh’s original studio was close to the city’s elevated train tracks, and recording had to stop every time a train rattled by. Even after the business moved to a building farther down the block, Marsh could be a sloppy manager (supposedly he once left a box of wax masters in a hot room filled with mice—they scrambled through and scratched the inscriptions, leaving the masters unusable). Recording sessions usually lasted three to four hours and yielded three or four songs. Artists, who were cued to start and stop by a series of lights, often under- or overshot, ignoring the warning to wrap up altogether or abruptly cutting themselves off midverse. The technology was still new, and it could be confounding. If artists couldn’t get it done in fewer than four takes, they were usually dismissed.

  When Marsh was finished, the wax masters were shipped to a pressing plant in Grafton, Wisconsin, a small, predominantly white town on the Milwaukee River, about a hundred miles north of Chicago and just south of the Wisconsin Chair Company’s corporate hub in Port Washington. The Grafton plant had previously cranked out chairs, but in 1917 it was remodeled for the manufacture of 78 rpm records. The wax masters of Paramount’s recording sessions were sent to intermediaries on the East Coast (first a company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and later one in New York), where they were converted into metal stampers that could be used to mass-produce 78s. When the Grafton plant finally became capable of making its own stampers, the wax masters were packed in dry ice and delivered there by train. Employees in the plating department used a camel’s hair brush to carefully apply graphite to the grooved surface of the wax; it was then hung in a tank of copper sulfate, where the graphite attracted iron oxide, resulting in copper plating. This so-called negative master was then stripped from the wax, which was discarded, and used to make a positive master. Known as a “mother” or “matrix,” the positive master had ridges instead of grooves and was coated with nickel or silver. Eventually, a negative stamper was made from the mother master and fitted to a press, where it could be used to fashion brand-new 78s. As Filzen wrote, a fresh record would then pop off the press like “a very thin, delicate waffle.”

  Workers sanded and cleaned the new records, then slid them into brown paper sleeves. Old stampers and masters were often melted down and reused for the creation of new records. The whole process took about four days. Test pressings of each record were dispersed to the company executives, who decided—based on, one assumes, a somewhat arbitrary set of rules—whether or not a given record was suitable for release.

  Early on Paramount had about ten presses, but by the mid-1920s—the company’s commercial peak—there were fifty-two presses squishing wads of shellac, ground stone, and local clay into flat, grooved 78s. Each press could theoretically produce around seven hundred records per day, but because Paramount’s pressing plant was run with a rope drive from a water wheel in the river rather than an electric motor, it only operated at partial power. Most things about the Grafton plant were slipshod
or half-cooked, and while it was functional, it was hardly producing lauded product. Even Paramount’s earliest customers griped about the quality of the pressings, which seemed to contain an odd and aggravating amount of surface noise. Most historians chalk it up to the plant’s cheap shellac mixture, which was heavy on filler—Wisconsin stone is good for lots of things, but not for being ground up and crushed into blues records.

  An initial pressing typically demanded a run of 1,200 78s, which were packed into wooden crates (twenty-five per box) and priced at seventy-five cents apiece. Paramount releases were often reissued by the company’s subsidiaries, so a recording made in Chicago for Paramount might also appear, later, on a WCC-owned sublabel like Puritan, Famous, or Broadway. These were made of an even crappier shellac compound and typically went for fifty cents each, or sometimes three for a dollar.

  Once they were pressed, packed, and stacked, Paramount’s race records sold mostly via mail order (for a while, Broadway pressings were even on offer in the Montgomery Ward catalog). In 1999, Dorothy Larson Bostwick told Alex van der Tuuk that she remembered processing orders for Paramount as a high school student: “We assembled several pieces of printed advertising, which were mailed to customers or prospective customers in the Southern states. In order to secure the records, the customer would be required to pay in advance, with a post office money order,” she said. Potential buyers filled out a short form with their name and address, checked off the records they were interested in, and handed it all to their mailman, along with payment. Paramount covered the shipping on orders of two or more records. If you ordered only one, you were expected to pay “a small COD fee” when the record was delivered.

  Aside from its direct-marketing campaigns, Paramount placed advertisements in the Chicago Defender, an African-American-run newspaper founded in 1905, with a considerable black readership and an impressive masthead (both Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks wrote for the Defender in the early 1920s). In addition, stock was sent out with traveling salesmen who plonked down $4.50 for the honor of peddling Paramount 78s (that bought you ten records, which you could then pitch to buyers for seventy-five cents each, clearing three dollars’ profit), and, on occasion, with Chicago-based Pullman porters, who tended to sleeper-car passengers and sold records to buyers living along the railroad routes.

  Paramount also shipped its wares directly to a handful of record distributors, but most traditional music stores were uninterested in the label’s marginal-seeming goods. As such, Paramount got crafty with its promotions. In 1924, the label pressed a slow, moody blues record by the popular Georgia-born blues singer Ma Rainey and dubbed it “Ma Rainey’s Mystery Record.” The company claimed it was so spectacular that no one could conceive of a title, then launched a contest to find one (a woman named Ella McGill, from Jefferson, Indiana, won with “Lawd I’m Down Wid De Blues”—although what McGill heard as “down” in Rainey’s lyrics, I’ve always heard as the comparably grim “dyin’ ”). According to Filzen, a dealer named Harry Charles once conjured a scheme that involved “hiring a group of African-Americans to follow him into a record store and having them show great enthusiasm for the records he was trying to promote.”

  In the 1920s, race records typically sold around five thousand copies each; a hit record would move twenty thousand to fifty thousand units. For singers to earn a follow-up session with Paramount, they would have to sell ten thousand copies, proving their financial worth to a company that didn’t much believe in artistic worth as an end in itself.

  Paramount didn’t exclusively release blues music—in 1924, it started issuing country and old-time songs by artists like Earl Johnson, the Dixie String Band, and the Kentucky Thorobreds, and it had been releasing dance, jazz, and jazz-influenced records since its inception. But by the end of the 1920s, no Paramount releases were selling very well. As musicologist Dick Spottswood explains in the notes for Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues, rival firms were scouring the South and producing better, locally made versions of the blues records Paramount had built its tenuous reputation on, and profit losses had led to decreasing promotional and distribution budgets. “By 1930–31, Paramount records were either selling by word of mouth or not at all,” he wrote. When Charley Patton arrived in Grafton in 1929, Paramount was nearly lifeless.

  Patton, who died in 1934 on the Heathman-Dedham plantation in Mississippi, has long been considered an originator of the Delta blues (or at least its finest practitioner), and he’s as elusive a figure as he is esteemed. In his book Deep Blues, the scholar Robert Palmer claimed Patton “personally inspired just about every Delta bluesman of consequence . . . he is among the most important musicians 20th century America has produced. Yet we know very little about his formative years, and practically nothing about how he learned his art.”

  We know this much: in the summer of 1929, Patton—who was itinerant in the manner of all classic blues singers—was living in Jackson, Mississippi. He was an acquaintance of Henry C. Speir, a white music store owner who, like R. T. Ashford, acted as a makeshift talent scout for a few record companies. Speir arranged for Patton to travel to Richmond, Indiana, to record in a studio owned by Gennett Records, for sessions underwritten by Paramount. Palmer described the space as a “barnlike frame building just a few feet from a railroad track,” and noted that it also housed a pressing plant, meaning “the freshly pressed records could be conveniently dispatched by rail, but recording had to stop whenever a train approached.”

  On Friday, June 14, Patton, then thirty-eight years old, recorded fourteen tracks at Gennett studios. There’s a decent chance Patton was drunk—“most companies gave ‘race’ and ‘hillbilly’ artists liquor to loosen them up,” Palmer wrote—but Patton’s performance is still riveting. In July 1929, the label issued Patton’s first release, “Pony Blues” / “Banty Rooster Blues,” and the record sold well enough that the label devised an elaborate promotional plan for Patton’s next record, “Mississippi Boweavil Blues,” an old folk ballad about a little black beetle that bores into cotton buds and prevents them from blossoming. (“Suck all the blossoms and he leave you an empty square, Lordy,” Patton sang in his heavy, garbled voice.) The record, Paramount 12805, was credited only to the “Paramount Masked Marvel,” and handbills featuring a caricature of a figure that looked sort of like Patton—or a superhero version of him, wearing an extra-large suit and a black wraparound eye mask—were shipped to Paramount dealers. Customers were asked to discern his identity, and anyone who guessed correctly received a free record of their choosing. (Patton being something of a singular singer, the answer would have been blindingly obvious to anyone who had heard ten or more seconds of “Pony Blues.”)

  The contest was advertised in the Chicago Defender on September 7 and 14, and ended on October 15. Ten thousand contest entry forms were printed, and researchers guess that around the same number of records were pressed. Copies have since shown up featuring Patton’s proper name on the label rather than the Masked Marvel, meaning Paramount likely re-pressed the song after the original run sold out. Spottswood points out that Patton was “Paramount’s most prolific recording artist for 1929, an indication of the confidence that the company had in his sales potential.”

  Soon after, Patton was invited to record at Paramount’s brand-new studio in Grafton. Built in 1928 or early 1929—mostly as a way to save cash, allowing the company to circumvent studio fees—it was located on the second floor of a building directly across the street from the pressing plant, at Twelfth Street and Falls Road. No photographs of the interior have surfaced, but it reportedly housed a piano, a guitar, a few wooden chairs, and a wall of rudimentary recording equipment, some of which may have been handmade. The space is often described with limp euphemisms like “rustic.” There were two rooms—a control room and a studio room, where the performers worked—and the walls of each were lined with stretches of burlap, towels, and blankets to reduce echo. As the dance-band leader Sig Heller, who recorded in Grafton in 1931, told van
der Tuuk, “Even the door was padded. There was no big room resonance, echo, or acoustics. It was rather difficult to play when a note was gone as soon as [it was] played.” The studio was hot and clammy or damp and cold, depending on the season. It was not a luxurious place.

  In October 1929, Patton recorded “High Water Everywhere Part 1” and its sequel, “High Water Everywhere Part 2”—a harrowing account of the 1927 Mississippi River flood—in Grafton, along with twenty-four other songs. “High Water Everywhere” was released in April 1930. Three years earlier, in April 1927, the Mississippi River had busted through a levee in Mound Landing, Mississippi, about twenty miles north of Patton’s hometown of Greenville. That same spring, the Delta had been pummeled by a series of spectacular weather events (tornadoes, earthquakes, merciless rains) and the levees were taxed, trembling under the weight of a thrusting, overfed river. When they finally acquiesced, a massive wall of muddy water—some reports claim it was well over twenty feet tall—ate up much of northwest Mississippi, blanketing 27,000 square miles of land. According to Rising Tide author John M. Barry, the now-unleashed river carried in excess of three million cubic feet of water each second. Even attempting to harness a river as brawny and robust as the Mississippi demanded a certain amount of hubris; in this case, it backfired. The flooding didn’t let up until August. By then, at least 250 people were dead, maybe more.

  “The whole round country, Lord, river has overflowed,” Patton moans in “Part 1,” his voice loose and rich over a three-note, open-G guitar melody. There’s a vague bit of percussion—Patton smacking his guitar or thwapping his foot on the ground—in the background; his delivery is knotty and almost unintelligible. Patton may have been recording in the world’s shittiest studio, seven hundred miles from his hot Delta home, but the performance is tough, aggressive, certain. “The whole round country, man, is overflowed,” he snarls. Patton sounds angry and indignant, the way we sing when we are singing about things that are out of our control, things that feel too large and too devastating to also be true.