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 blues singer, Mamie Smith, became the first African American woman to make a Blues recording in 1920. Mamie’s song “Crazy Blues” sold over a million copies 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.
OKeh Advertising 1921
Photo: Talking Machine World 1921 (Wikimedia Commons)
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.
In 1953, OKeh’s pop music acts were transferred to the newly formed Epic Records, making OKeh just a “rhythm and blues” label, as race music was now known. There is an interesting compilation album of the output from the period 1953 to 1962: “OKeh, the R&B Years”.
Surprisingly, the first ever album released by OKeh was a Gospel album, the Sons of Glory’s “God Glorifies” in 1962.
The Chicago Soul phase of OKeh Records also began in 1962, when producer Carl Davis was hired. Davis quickly recruited Curtis Mayfield, to write songs for his R&B artists. Together in Chicago they formed a very strong team that immediately put OKeh Records on the popular music map. Davis produced many hits for artists such as Major Lance, Walter Jackson, and Billy Butler.
Davis had been working as a salesman for Columbia Records, in 1961, when he heard a local group rehearsing a doo-wop song called “Duke of Earl”. He helped them secure a record deal with Vee-Jay records, who put the song out under the name of the lead singer Gene Chandler. The song went to number one on the national R&B chart and Davis saw a new career ahead of him. He joined OKeh a year later and began to search out talented singers and musicians, mainly from the Cabrini-Green housing projects on Chicago’s Near North Side.
One of the first singers he found was Major Lance, whose first release in 1962 was produced by Davis and written by Curtis Mayfield. Billy Butler joined OKeh Records in 1963, with his group The Enchanters (later The Chanters). Walter Jackson joined OKeh in 1964, from Columbia, and had success with another Curtis Mayfield song. Three vocal harmony groups joined OKeh Records during this period: the Opals, the Artistics and the Vibrations. It was a strong roster of artists. With the Davis/ Mayfield team behind them, it was no surprise to see the success of the label growing throughout the sixties.
The global rights to the OKeh back catalogue are now owned by Sony Music, who relaunched the OKeh imprint in 1993/4 as a new-age blues label, which it ran until 2000. Then in 2013 Sony launched the label again, this time as a jazz imprint under Sony Masterworks.
The OKeh Chicago Soul catalogue contains many songs that were minor hits or passed under the radar. They live on through the passion of collectors around the world. Many of the songs were written, arranged and produced by talented musicians such as Curtis Mayfield, Johnny Pate and Carl Davis. They have real quality, that should not be lost.
