Los Angeles & West Coast

Wynona Carr began the second phase of her music career in 1955. Having moved away from Gospel, she faced the challenge of redirecting her energy into secular, popular...

The follow-up studio album, after the anthology album “Looking Back” (1977), was “Stevie Wonder's Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants", the first soundtrack album of his career, released in 1979. It was based on the book of...

Wynona Merceris Carr was born in 1923 in Cleveland, Ohio. At the age of eight, she started to take piano lessons, and five years later enrolled at Cleveland...

Eddie Kendricks started the year with a brilliant recording entitled “Girl You Need a Change of Mind”, which was the highest charting single of Eddie Kendricks’ solo career...

Following the highly successful year of 1972, The Temptations entered 1973 with considerable artistic and commercial momentum. “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” had become one of the defining...

The Jackson 5had swiftly risen to the top of the rankings at Motown in 1970, so 1971 raised a simple question. Could they sustain their meteoric level of...

Lummtone Records was established in Los Angeles in 1959 by Lummie Fowler, who came from the Crenshaw district in the South Central part of the city. He worked...

Music City Records was founded in 1954 by Ray Dobard in Berkeley, California, on the North side of Oakland on San Francisco Bay. The company’s address was first...

Dootone Records began operating in 1951, having been set up as Blue Records in 1949. Its founder was Dootsie Williams, who came to Los Angeles as a child...

Era Records was founded in Los Angeles in March 1955 by two cousins, Herbert Newman and Lew Bedell, with the support of their uncle Max Newman. Herbert Newman...