Below is a list of the record companies who issued Race Records between 1927 and 1942. 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.
Black Patti (1927)
Black Patti was founded in Chicago in 1927 by J. Mayo Williams, who was talent scout and arranger for Paramount in the early 1920s.The company was named after a famous Black opera singer, following the model set by Black Swan. Black Patti was the nickname of Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones. Although the use of her nickname added a touch of Classical class to the label, it didn’t really match the output, which was Jazz, Blues, Gospel, Sermons and Comedy. Like Black Swan, Black Patti also included a few White performers on the roster. The recordings were made at a number of different studios, but J. Mayo Williams arranged for all the discs to be pressed by Gennett Records in Richmond, Indiana.
Most of the artists that Williams was able to recruit were not well-known. Amanda Petrusich mentions four in her article for Oxford American (6th July, 2014): Steamboat Joe and his Laffen’ Clarinet, Tapp Ferman and his Banjo, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a pipe-organist, and the Down Home Boys (Long Cleeve Reed and Little Harvey Hull), whose “Original Stack O’Lee Blues” (Black Patti 8030) was unearthed by record-collector Joe Bussard in a shotgun shack in the Appalachians in 1966 (cf Amanda Petrusich’s article). The only well-known name on the list was Willie Hightower.
The lack of famous artists may help explain why Williams’ company struggled to make a profit. Only fifty-five discs were issued, with fewer than a hundred being pressed of each one. They were sold in Chicago and a few outlets dotted around the Southern States. That was not a strong set-up and it collapsed after just seven months.
ARC (1929)
The American Record Company (or Corporation) was formed by the merger of Cameo, Pathe Records, and the Plaza labels in 1929. All were acquired by Scranton Button Works, led by president Louis G. Sylvester, with ARC’s headquarters in Manhattan, New York City. It remained in operation until 1938, when it was bought by Columbia Broadcasting System for seven hundred thousand dollars.
(Source: Wikimedia Commons)
The companies that were acquired by ARC had created twelve record labels between them, to which were added Brunswick, OKeh and Vocalion via leasing agreements. Finally, Columbia was added in 1934, following its declaration of bankruptcy. For four years ARC and Decca were the biggest names in the industry, along with RCA Victor. Then, ARC was bought by the Columbia Broadcasting System in 1938 and renamed the Columbia Recording Corporation. In 1966, it became CBS Records.
Bluebird Records 1932)
Bluebird Records was founded by RCA Victor as a budget label in 1932. It quickly became known for the quality of its Blues output, thanks to the efforts of talent scout Lester Melrose, who was based in Chicago. A session band was established, including Big Bill Broonzy, Roosevelt Sykes, Sonny Boy Williamson and Washboard Sam, which was able to create a “Bluebird Sound”.
Bluebird also had a significant catalogue of Jazz (Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Artie Shaw and Jelly Roll Morton stand out) and Country music, which included the Monroe Brothers, the Carter Family and the Singing Brakeman Jimmy Rodgers.
The Bluebird label was given a limited launch in July 1932, to test the market. The earliest releases were a small number of 8-inch discs available only at selected Woolworth’s stores in New York, which were priced very cheaply, possibly as low as ten cents each. They were followed by a series of 10-inch discs, running until April 1933. In May 1933, Bluebird launched a thirty-five cent series numbered from B-5000, with a wider range of material on offer. The buff label featured the famous bluebird.
Not only Jazz, Blues, Popular and Country but Cajun music too was available.
In April 1940, the bluebird was gone! Instead, the discs are headed by Nipper the dog, still listening to his master’s voice.
Having worked with all genres mixed in one series from 1932, the company decided in November 1942 to change the coding system to enable each genre to have its own series. The category of each disc was indicated by a double digit number, 30 and later 31 for Popular, 33 for Country, and 34 and later 35 for Race Records. The category code was then followed by a four-digit serial number.
Over a period of around fifteen years, the Bluebird label released a large number of historically significant recordings. Fortunately, many have been re-issued in recent years.
In 1965, RCA Victor released a compilation of some of the best Country Blues tracks released on the Bluebird label, featuring songs by Blind Willie McTell and Kate McTell, Tampa Red, Poor Joe Williams, Sonny Boy Williamson, Tommy McClennan, Sleepy John Estes and Raymond Thomas, Arthur Crudup and Joe McCoy, Lonnie Johnson and Joshua Altheimer, Lil Hardin Armstrong and Andrew Harris. There are many more such compilations across the various genres.
The label was discontinued after the war but has been re-used from time to time, mainly for re-issues. Now, however, over five thousand Bluebird tracks have been digitised and made available free to stream, thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the co-operation of Sony Music Corporation and the work of the UC Santa Barbara Library. What a gift!
Montgomery Ward (1933)
Montgomery Ward was the name of a chain of retail stores which began selling own-brand budget label discs in 1933, thanks to a deal with RCA Victor that gave Montgomery Ward access to RCA masters. Prior to 1933, Montgomery Ward had been a major outlet for Broadway releases, but that arrangement had ended in 1932, when Broadway ceased trading. The new Montgomery Ward series, manufactured to a high standard by RCA Victor, began at M-4200, with the uncategorised issue of Popular, Race, Country and other genres. There was a separate Classical series that began at M-6000. Montgomery Ward also had deals with Decca and the United States Record Corporation, with access to some Gennett and Paramount masters, but these didn’t last long. A significant number of the releases were of tracks originally recorded for the Bluebird label, some of which had not been previously issued.
The price of each disc was twenty-one cents, or one dollar seventy-nine for ten. They could be bought in store or via Montgomery Ward’s mail-order catalogue. The Country releases were extremely popular in rural areas.
The production of the Montgomery Ward discs came to an end in 1941.
Decca (1935)
Decca started life in the UK as a retailer of portable gramophones manufactured by musical instrument makers Barnett Samuel & Sons (founded 1869). The Decca Dulcephone could be bought for just over two pounds in the early 1910s.
By 1920, the company had become the Decca Gramophone Company, but they were still not producing any discs to play on their machines. Edward Lewis, a London stockbroker who helped Decca join the London Stock Exchange in 1928, decided that he would buy the company and buy a record manufacturing company to go with it. He purchased Decca and Duophone, a disc manufacturer in South London, and launched the first discs in 1929. They were mainly recordings of well-known Classical works.
When the Great Depression hit the UK, Lewis moved quickly to give his company a chance of survival. The price of the discs was cut hard, rights were acquired to the recordings of the German company Polydor, and a majority shareholding was purchased in the Brunswick Record Company in America. In 1934, Lewis set up Decca Records US, and brought in Milton Rackmil, E. F. Stevens, and Jack Kapp, who had led the Race Records division at Vocalion. Kapp was able to set up a very strong Country & Western roster at Decca. In 1935, Decca US acquired the Champion label and some of Gennett’s recordings, which included some Paramount original masters. This brought Decca fully into the field of Race music.
Blues artists Kokomo Arnold, Amos Easton, Peetie Wheatstraw, Sleepy John Estes, and Roosevelt Sykes all made a significant contribution to the label, as did Gospel artists Mahalia Jackson, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, and the Harmonizing Four, plus the outstanding Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Below is a poster from 1937, featuring female Blues singers Rosetta Howard and Georgia White. White made her first recording in 1930 and went on to record over a hundred tracks for Decca between 1935 and 1941.
As recording activity was expanding, the company starting using studios in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. A deal was struck with the Compo Company in Canada to distribute Decca US discs. Slowly the economy started to pick up and Decca was able to grow, rivalling RCA Victor and Columbia. By 1942, Decca was strong enough to buy out the remaining shares in Brunswick that were still held by Warner Bros. and join the New York Stock Exchange as a separate company from Decca UK. After WW2, Decca followed Columbia’s lead in the United States and established in Europe the move to long-playing twelve-inch discs made from vinyl.
This was at the end of the period during which Race Records were issued as separate series, but now Black artists were well-established as part of the mainstream. Decca’s roster included the Ink Spots, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and Count Basie. From 1945, Decca organised a large number of recording sessions in Nashville, which had emerged as a world-class recording centre.
In 1969, Decca was bought out by MCA Communication Group, as a result of which the Decca label was replaced by MCA in 1969 in the UK and in 1973 in the United States.
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Race Records were issued from 1920 for just over twenty years. Around twenty-five companies decided to market music of Black origin, performed by Black artists, to specific Black markets or to both White and Black markets. Some of these companies were very small, selling in a particular locality. Others issued a small number of discs by mail order. Most of the small companies, several of which were Black-owned, lacked the financial fire-power to establish themselves in the industry and were duly declared bankrupt a short time after their launch.
Even the big names in the early music industry sometimes struggled too. Nevertheless, first Jazz, then Gospel and Blues all spread across America and beyond, underpinning the later development of Modern Jazz, Rhythm & Blues, Soul and Rock & Roll. The companies described in this series of articles can share the credit for that!
