Below is a list of the record companies who issued Race Records between 1924 and 1927. 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.
Herwin Records (1924)
Herwin Records was set up in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1924 by two brothers, Herbert and Edwin Schiele. They formed the company’s name by taking a part of each brother’s first name. The majority of the discs issued by Herwin came from master recordings leased from Paramount and Gennett Records, who also pressed the Herwin discs. The company traded for six years and was then sold to the Wisconsin Chair Company, the owners of Paramount records.
The Herwin brothers sold the discs via adverts in magazines and sent them by mail to their customers at a price that corresponded to the major’s budget labels. The output concentrated on Jazz, Blues and Hillbilly music, featuring Delta Blues singer Charley Patton, Blues singer Booker T. White, Ernest Stoneman, who played several instruments and sang old-time songs from the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, and Chubby Parker, who sang old-time vaudeville and minstrel songs and played banjo.
Charley Patton circa 1929 (Wikimedia Commons)
Plaza (1924)
The Plaza Music Company was founded in New York City in 1922, issuing records on a variety of labels such as Regal, Oriole, Jewel and Domino. Their main label was, however, Banner, which released largely dance band tunes and semi-Classical songs, alongside a small number of Jazz and Blues recordings. They specialised in budget-priced discs. Plaza was not a manufacturer of discs, but acted as a sales and marketing agency for recordings made at the Independent Recording Company, which were then mastered by the Regal Record Company (owned by Scruton Button Co.) and pressed by the Scruton Button Company. When Plaza went bankrupt in 1921, it was affiliated to Regal until 1929, finally ceasing operations in 1933.
Regal was a budget label created by Emerson Records and taken over by Plaza when it ran into financial difficulties
Famous names that appeared on the Plaza labels included W. C. Handy and Fletcher Henderson, both songwriters, arrangers and bandleaders. Following in the footsteps of Mamie Smith at OKeh came a number of Black female Blues singers: Miss Frankie, Lucille Hegamin, Rosa Henderson, Hazel Meyers and Josie Miles. The Plaza labels Pathé and Cameo merged to create ARC in 1929.
Emerson Records (1924)
Emerson Records was set up in 1916 by Victor Emerson in New York City. Emerson had previously worked at Columbia Records as chief recording engineer, before he decided to create his own company. He began by producing a series of small discs, (five and seven inches), of popular dance tunes and marches played by the Emerson Orchestra. In 1918, he introduced nine-inch discs, followed by ten -inch discs in 1919, with some twelve-inch records of Classical music.
One of Emerson’s 7-inch discs (Source Infrogmation, Wikimedia Commons)
In 1920, Emerson decided to expand his business to California. He commissioned a second studio, operating in Los Angeles, but soon ran into financial difficulties which forced him to sell the business to Benjamin Abrams and Rudolph Kararek in 1922. The new owners invested around a quarter of a million dollars in the company, built it back up and then sold it to the Scranton Button Company in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1924.
The advert below for Race Records on the Emerson label appeared in the Chicago Defender on May 10th 1924.
The roster included Lizzie Miles, Fletcher and Rosa Henderson, Noble Sissle, Lena Wilson, Ethel Finney, Hazel Meyers, the Peerless Quartet, and Homer Rodeheaver, offering Jazz, Vaudeville and Gospel.
Production of Emerson discs continued for another four years, but the number of artists on the roster was diminishing. A few Race Records were issued around this time, including Lizzie Miles’ “Four O’Clock Blues” from 1923 and Ethel Finnie’s Classic Blues “He Wasn’t Born in Araby, But He’s a Sheikin’ Fool”.
Blu-Disc (1924)
Blu-Disc was a New York label that fist appeared in December 1924. Nine releases were all issued during that month, and then there were no more. The label’s name is derived from the dark-blue shellac used to manufacture the discs. Nothing is currently known about the company or its manufacturing arrangements. Its one claim to fame is the disc illustrated below. The Washingtonians were a Jazz sextet, featuring Otto Hardwick on alto sax, George Francis on banjo, Sonny Greer on drums, Charlie Irvis on trombone, Bubber Miley on trumpet, and Duke Ellington on piano. The tracks issued by Blu-Disc were Ellington’s first-known recordings.
Meritt Records (1925)
Meritt Records was established in Kansas City in 1925 by Winston Holmes. Holmes owned a music store with a recording studio where he recorded local Jazz and Blues artists between 1925 and 1929. He also made acoustic recordings of some Gospel performers and local preachers.
He called his label Meritt. All the discs he made were for sale in his record store. Altogether, around twenty discs were issued during the five years of Merritt’s existence.
A Meritt disc from 1925
Source: Nauck’s Vintage Records (Wikimedia Commons)
Champion Records (1925)
Champion was set up in 1925 in Richmond, Indiana, by the Starr Piano Company, as a division of Starr’s Gennett Records. It sold a cheaper range than Gennett, with Race Records included. In 1926, you could buy a disc for thirty-five cents or three for a dollar! When Champion was closed down in 1934, Decca acquired the label for a short-lived series.
Vocalion (1926)
Vocalion was originally created by the Aeolian Piano Company of New York City in 1916. They named the label Aeolian-Vocalion, combining the names of the piano company with the name of their organ-manufacturing subsidiary. Aeolian also launched a Vocalion phonograph player at the same time, which played the company’s single-sided discs.
They soon switched to manufacturing double sided lateral-cut discs, which were, like the earlier discs, made from shellac that had been coloured a reddish brown shade. It certainly made their records stand out!
Aeolian was dropped from the label’s name in 1920 and black shellac started to replace the red in 1921. The company also opened a production plant in the UK in 1920.
In 1925, the Vocalion Records operation was bought by Brunswick, who used the label as a subsidiary producing Race (1000) and Country (5000) series. One of the most successful releases was Jim Jackson’s version of “Kansas City Blues”, issued in 1927.
The 1926 trade advert below is interesting from a number of angles. First, the ad highlights Brunswick’s intention to produce “Better and Cleaner Race Records”. Better quality, certainly, but cleaner is a reference to the subject matter and not the disc! Brunswick wanted nothing to do with “Dirty Blues”. The ad also gives an indication of the genres covered by the term “race”. King Oliver and his Syncopators bring Jazz, Ada Brown brings the Blues, and the Cotton Plantation Quartet adds Gospel. The final key insight is the reference to Jack Kapp, the Head of the Race Records series, scouring the country for Black artists whom he can record. The pattern set by OKeh in 1920/21 is still very much in operation.
The later 15000 series featured a number of wonderful Jazz recordings that are now real collectors’ items. For Blues fans, the recordings of Robert Johnson that appeared on Vocalion are some of the most important records issued in the inter-war years.
In 1932, ARC set up a leasing deal to acquire the Brunswick labels; they built Vocalion into a very successful brand over the next six years, selling the Brunswick releases at a premium seventy-five cents and the Vocalion at a budget thirty-five cents. The change to a new black and gold label design seemed to give Vocalion another boost, as did the re-issue of some of OKeh’s older material by Vocalion.
Vocalion’s success may have been a factor when ARC itself was taken over by the Columbia Broadcasting System in 1938. Strangely, the Vocalion label was phased out over the following two years, in favour of a revived OKeh imprint, while many of Vocalion’s most successful recordings were re-issued on the Columbia label.
In 1943, Decca acquired rights to the Brunswick and Vocalion labels. The latter was revived for a short time in 1949 and used again for a series of low-budget albums from the late fifties.
The latest revival of Vocalion took place in the UK in 1997, when Michael Dutton acquired the label to produce a series of re-mastered compact discs of Vocalion recordings at his Dutton Laboratories in Watford, Hertfordshire.
The importance of Vocalion to the development of music of Black origin is easy to see. The label had the best of the artists that emerged in all the Race Music genres.
In the field of Jazz, Vocalion attracted Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, King Oliver and a host of talented Black musicians, alongside Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. Many fans, from all communities, made Orchestral Jazz the most popular genre of all.
In the Blues arena, the roster included Scrapper Blackwell, Big Bill Broonzy, Leroy Carr, Daddy Stovepipe and Mississippi Sarah, Blind Boy Fuller, Jim Jackson, Robert Johnson, Furry Lewis, Arthur “Montana” Taylor, Henry Thomas, Big Joe Turner, Washboard Sam, Peetie Wheatstraw, Bukka White, Big Joe Williams, and harmonica player Walter Horton. The female Blues singers on the Vocalion label are equally impressive: Viola McCoy, Memphis Minnie, Victoria Spivey, Ethel Waters, and Billie Holiday.
Boogie-Woogie pianists were well represented too: Albert Ammons, Cow Cow Davenport, Clarence “Pinetop” Smith, and Jimmie Yancey attracted many fans from both Black and White communities.
There wasn’t much Gospel music on Vocalion, but they did have the Rev. A. W. Nix, the brother of William Nix, who had a profound impact on Thomas A. Dorsey. The Rev. A. W. Nix recorded Gospel songs and over fifty sermons during the late 1920s and the early 1930s.
The impact of these Vocalion recordings was not always immediate, but it has endured for many years, inspiring both White and Black performers who have acknowledged their debt.
Brunswick Records (1927)
Brunswick Records was founded in 1916 by the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company in Dubuque, Iowa, which was a manufacturing company that made a range of goods including sports equipment and pianos. The record company had an office and recording studio in New York and its head office in Chicago. In 1924, Brunswick acquired Vocalion Records.
Towards the end of 1925, Brunswick began using electric recording equipment, improving the quality of their discs, which they called “Light Ray Electronic Recordings” for a while. The company also launched an electric record-player, the Panatrope, the first of its kind on the market.
In 1926 a Race Records series (the 1000 series) was launched by Vocalion, and the main Brunswick label followed suit in 1927. A Race Records series (the 7000 series) was established to issue Jazz, Blues, Gospel and Hillbilly discs, including a small number of Gospel songs by the Pace Jubilee Singers.
In 1930, Brunswick Records was sold to Warner Bros. and moved to New York. A new budget-priced label was established, Melotone Records, to try to stimulate sales, which issued a range of recordings that covered Jazz and Blues. Artists on the label included Lead Belly, Blind Boy Fuller, Big Bill Broonzy and Josh White.
In the early 1930s, Decca Records in the UK bought a majority shareholding in Brunswick. From 1932 until 1939, the output on the Brunswick labels was leased to ARC, becoming that organisation’s leading brand, selling for seventy-five cents a disc against the thirty-five cents of their budget labels. Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway were added to the roster. In 1939, the Melotone label was discontinued, and in 1940, the Brunswick label suffered the same fate.
In 1942, Decca UK acquired the remainder of Brunswick’s shares and floated on the US Stock Market as a new Decca US company, independent of its British antecedent.
Bill Spicer April 2025 All Rights Reserved
