Below is a list of the record companies who issued Race Records between 1920 and 1922. Not all companies used the term Race Records, not all companies created a separate Race series, but these companies all issued discs of performances by Black artists that were aimed at the Black record-buying public.
The date in brackets after the name is the probable year of the first Race Music release.
OKeh Records (1920)
OKeh Records was founded by Otto K. E. Heinemann, a German American, who set up a recording studio and pressing plant in New York City and started the label in 1918.
OKeh released mainly music by Dance and Jazz bands, until a Vaudeville singer, Mamie Smith, became the first African American woman to make a Blues recording in 1920. Mamie’s song “Crazy Blues” was one of the best-selling records that year and alerted the music industry to a new market, the American Black community. So-called “Race Records” were issued by the label to meet this hitherto untapped source of income, produced by a New York team led by Clarence Williams and a team in Chicago led by Richard M. Jones.
The OKeh race series was produced from 1921 to 1932, including music by Clarence Williams, Lonnie Johnson, King Oliver and Louis Armstrong. The success of the Race Records series persuaded the company to begin remote recording. Starting in 1923, OKeh sent a team with mobile recording equipment to cities where new Black artists could be found, including New Orleans, Atlanta, San Antonio, St. Louis, Kansas City and Detroit. The OKeh studio in Atlanta also discovered “Hillbilly” artists such as “Fiddlin’ John Carson, who first recorded Country music in 1923.
In 1926, OKeh was sold to Columbia Records. Ownership then moved to the American Record Corporation (ARC) in 1934, and the Race Records series from the 1920s ended. CBS bought the company in 1938.
Arto Records (1920)
Arto Recording Company operated from 1920 t0 1923. It was owned by the Standard Music Roll Company of Orange, New Jersey, and had a recording studio in New York City. Although Arto never created a Race Records series, it was the first company to respond to the surprise success of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues, with the 1920 release of Lucille Hegamin’s “The Jazz Me Blues”, backed by “Everybody’s Blues”, which made Hegamin the second Black female singer to record a Classic Blues song.
Lucille Nelson (her maiden name) was born in Macon, Georgia, in 1894. At the age of fifteen she joined a travelling show, singing popular songs for the next twenty years. In 1914, she decided to settle in Chicago, where she met and married pianist Bill Hegamin, who became the leader of her backing group, the Blue Flame Syncopators. After five years making a living singing in the clubs in Chicago, she and her husband moved to New York in 1919.
It was there that she came to the attention of Arto. Her first single sold pretty well; her second “Arkansas Blues” did even better, establishing her as one of the leading Classic Blues singers. She later moved to Cameo Records. Atco also signed Alice Lester Carter, another Black Blues singer.
Both Hegamin and Carter also had Arto recordings released on Arto’s sister company, Bell Records, which continued operating until 1928, leasing masters from Independent Recording Laboratories, Scranton, Emerson, and Starr.
(Source: Infrogmation, Wikimedia Commons)
Pathé Records was set up in France by Paris café-owners Charles and Emile Pathé. They began by selling phonographs and cylinders made by Edison and Columbia in the mid-1890s, but they soon switched to manufacturing their own players and cylinders. The business was successfully expanded across Europe, with recording studios and offices in London, Milan and St. Petersburg, before an American branch was created in 1914.
In 1920, a new Pathé Actuelle label was set up to record material for the American market and a Race series was included in the output. A low-budget label Perfect was created in 1922, which also proved successful.
(Source: Infrogmation, Wikimedia Commons)
The Actuelle label was merged with Cameo Records in 1927 and then ARC bought out Cameo in 1929. By March 1930, the Pathé Actuelle label was discontinued, but Perfect continued to be used until 1938, when ARC stopped issuing low-priced discs.
The Black Swan Phonographic Company (1921)
The Pace Phonograph Corporation was founded in 1921 in Harlem, New York, by Black songwriter Harry Pace, to give African American artists more creative opportunities; it was renamed the Black Swan Phonograph Company in the autumn of 1922. It was the second Black-owned record company, after George Broome’s Broome Special Phonographic Records.
Pace left school aged twelve but, seven years later, graduated from Atlanta University. In 1912, he met W.C. Handy, with whom he wrote songs and set up a music publishing company. He left to set up a new recording company in 1921, making his aims clear: “There are twelve million colored people in [the] US, and in that number there is hid a wonderful amount of musical ability. We propose to spare no expense in the search for and developing of the best singers and musicians among the twelve million.”
Pace launched his new label using the slogan “The only records using exclusively Negro voices and musicians”. Black newspapers across the USA carried adverts for the new company’s label Black Swan Records. He signed around eighteen artists to the label, including Ethel Waters, known by the nickname Sweet Mama Stringbean, who had a hit with “Down Home Blues” in 1921. She was the fifth Black woman to make a commercial recording, and she went on to have a scintillating career as a recording artist, a film star, and on the stage. Between 1921 and 1938, she released twenty-five hit singles and won three Grammy Awards.
Harry Pace
The Crisis (October 1911), p. 236 (Wikimedia Commons)
Despite Waters’ success, the company struggled to make a profit. Pace declared the company bankrupt in December 1923 and sold it to Paramount Records in 1924. Despite its short life, the company had made its mark. Other small Black-owned record companies were set up in Los Angeles (Sunshine Records) and Chicago (Black Patti Records).
See Bee Records (1921)
See Bee Records was possibly set up to be a competitor for Black Patti Records.
The label belonged to the C. H. Bourne Recording Company, but no record of its incorporation has been found. The first adverts for the label appear in New York in 1921.
It is thought that Bourne may have acquired masters from the Jones Central Recording Laboratories, as they used a similar set of matrix numbers when supplying masters for Arto Records and Lyric Records. Around a dozen Bourne releases are known, mainly of Jazz and Blues performances, although the most significant Bourne issue is probably a recording of a speech by Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League. It is the only recording known of him speaking.
Estimates of the label’s closure vary between 1922 and 1929, but the absence of later advertising suggests that 1922 or 1923 is the most likely.
Cameo Records (1921)
Cameo was a record label owned by the Cameo Record Corporation of New York City, which also set up Lincoln Records (1924) and Romeo Records (1926). The label’s roster included the Original Memphis Five and the Varsity Eight, but their star was Lucille Hegamin, who released around thirty singles on the label between 1921 and 1926.
In 1928, Cameo merged with Pathé Records and Plaza’s record labels to form the American Record Corporation (ARC), and the Cameo name was phased out in the early 1930s. Lucille Hegamin then released two recordings on the OKeh label.
Edison Records (1921)
Thomas A. Edison was the inventor of the phonograph, a machine that played cylinder recordings, in 1877. His invention used tin foil wrapped around a grooved cylinder to record sounds acoustically. Each cylinder could only be played a few times. Other inventors, including Alexander Graham Bell, developed a cylinder that had a hard wax coating which proved more durable. Edison set up the Edison Phonographic Company in 1888 to manufacture the wax-coated discs, but it was soon clear that a rival design was superior. Emile Berliner had designed a system that used flat discs instead of cylinders and in 1912, Edison’s company started making them too. Strangely, until 1910, the cylinders did not carry the name of the artist who had made the recording!.
Despite being the first in the field, Edison was soon overtaken by Victor and Columbia in terms of popularity and quality. One significant feature was that Edison continued using acoustic recording technology for two years after the invention of the microphone around 1925. Other companies such as Columbia, Vicor and Brunswick switched to the new electric microphones and moved even further ahead.
Nevertheless, Edison carried on until 1929, when production was finally shut down.
Thomas A. Edison (Wikimedia Commons)
Edison didn’t create a Race Records series, possibly because Thomas A. Edison didn’t like Jazz, but the company did record some Black artists. The earliest recording of a Black singing group that has survived is Edison 694, a cylinder recording of the Unique Quartet performing “Mamma’s Black Baby Boy” from 1893.
Later, Noble Sissle recorded a cover of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” in 1921,
And, like many other companies, Edison responded to the success of Mamie Smith’s original version of the song by recording a number of Black female Classic Blues singers. Genevieve Jordan (or Gordon, or Jordon, depending on the source!) recorded “Baby’s Got The Blues” in 1923, Ethel Finney recorded “You’re Gonna Wake Up One Morning” in 1924, and Josie Miles added “”Temperamental Papa” in 1924. Helen Gross (“Undertaker’s Blues”, 1924), Viola McCoy (“Memphis Bound”, 1924), Rosa Henderson (“Don’t Advertise Your Man”), Elsie Clark (“Loud Speakin’ Papa”), and Clarence Williams and his wife Eva Taylor (“Come On Home”) all followed suit. The best of the Classic or Vaudeville Blues singers at Edison is probably Marjorie Royer with her wonderful rendition of “Hard Hearted Hannah”. It is an impressive list, but, sadly, Edison did not issue all of these recordings at the time. Several sat in the vaults for many years before seeing the light of day.
Chappelle and Stinnette Records (1921/22)j
The C. & S. Phongraphic Company was set up by Thomas E. Chappelle and Juanita Stinnette Chappelle in New York City, probably in 1921. They were a well-known Black married couple, established in the entertainment industry as singers and dancing partners. The discs carry a C. & S. Record logo (“Record” was often used in the early days of recording rather than “Records”). It is believed that Arto pressed the first releases.
Only nine issues are extant, probably all from 1922, with most in Classsic Blues style. One or both of the Chappelles feature on eight of them , with Clarence Williams joining them on one. Bobby Lee & His Music Landers recorded the ninth (see image). The serial numbers run from 5003 to 5016, which might suggest that around half of the releases have not survived. It was the third Black-owned record company.
Nordskog Records (1922)
Nordskog Records was founded by Andrae Nordskog in Santa Monica, California, in 1921. The company had a recording studio but signed a deal with Arto Records to press discs from its wax masters. The machine used to record the artists was hand-built by Andrae Nordskog’s father-in-law, Frank Lockwood. It incorporated some novel design ideas and produced good-quality masters. Nordskog was in operation for just two years, during which it released twenty-seven double-sided discs.
Artists on the label included Roberta Dudley, Ruth Lee, Eva Tanquay, Arthur Fields, and Kid Ory’s Jazz Band. The Kid Ory recordings were the first ever made of a Black Jazz band from New Orleans. The image above is of a recording by Vaudeville Blues singer Roberta Dudley of “Krooked Blues”, backed by “When You’re Alone Blues”, which was co-written by the Spikes brothers (see Sunshine Records) with a third writer credited as Johnson. This was probably Ollie “Dink” Johnson, who played clarinet in Kid Ory’s Sunshine Orchestra, who were the studio band for the recording.
As several other small recording companies found, it was hard for Nordskog to generate enough sales when the level of investment was relatively low. The company was declared bankrupt in 1923.
One of the 1920s recordings by Kid Ory’s band was re-issued in 1951. The six-piece band consisted of Kid Ory (trombone), Freddie Washington (piano), Ben Borders (Drums), Mutt Carey (Cornet), Ollie “Dink” Johnson (clarinet), and Ed Garland (bass). The links between Nordskog and Sunshine were clearly strong, as the original version of the Kid Ory tracks appeared on both labels.
Paramount Records (1922)
Paramount Records was set up in 1917 by the Wisconsin Chair Company, in Grafton, Wisconsin. It was an understandable move, as they had been manufacturing cabinets for Edison phonographs. A recording studio was established in New York (the New York Recording Laboratories Inc.), from where the masters were sent back to Wisconsin for disc production. The company registered two labels, Paramount and then Puritan. In 1920, Paramount began a marketing drive to Black customers, issuing the first Race Music discs in 1922. Two of the early artists on their roster were Alberta Hunter and Lucille Hegamin, who sang Classic Blues, later to be called Vaudeville Blues.
As part of the development of Paramount, the company had signed an agreement with Black Swan Records to press discs for Harry Pace’s company. When Pace declared Black Swan bankrupt, Paramount bought the label in 1924 and began concentrating on recording Race Music. The roster was expanded with the addition of Ethel Waters, Rosa Henderson, Noble Sissle and Eubie Bank, Jelly Roll Morton, Ma Rainey, King Oliver, Fletcher Henderson, Ida Cox, Blind Blake, Ma Rainey, Skip James, Son House, Blind Lemon Jefferson and others. J. Mayo Williams, a Black independent talent scout and arranger, was responsible for arranging nearly all the recording sessions for these artists up to 1927.
Thanks to this expansion, the company was able to build a large and profitable mail-order business, despite the average quality of many of the releases.
The Broadway label was acquired in 1926 and used to issue Popular recordings, while the Paramount label added Country music to its output, alongside Race music.
The recording studio was moved from New York to Chicago in 1927 and, in a possibly related move, it was also in 1927 that J. Mayo Williams decided to take his services to OKeh records. Blind Lemon Jefferson, one of Paramount’s star performers, went too!
The studio was then relocated to Grafton, Wisconsin, in 1929. During its construction, Paramount wanted to record Delta Blues singer Charley Patton, so they sent him to Gennett Records to record fourteen songs that have become part of Blues legend.
With the onset of the Great Depression, Paramount struggled to stay profitable. The final recording was made in Grafton in 1932 and the business was sold to Gennett Records in 1935.
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It is significant that the majority of the companies who issued Race Records during the two years after “Crazy Blues” were small and short-lived. Despite the obvious success of Mamie Smith’s song, many people in the industry were still unsure whether there was a genuine market for music of Black origin amongst America’s Black communities. One such hit could be a novelty, a one-off. The big companies apart from OKeh seemed to be waiting to see more evidence of this new potential phenomenon.
Bill Spicer All Rights Reserved
Parts 3,4, 5 and 6 will follow.
