According to Artophone Vice President Herb Schiele, the company made its decision on the basis or the greater appeal of the radio: "'The decline started when radio come on in...about '28. You see, it (the decline of "race" sales) didn't go that fast because most of our customers of the blues were black, and didn't have money to buy radios in those days, and so it took a year or two for the record business to sort of decline." Apparently, the company gradually phased out of record distribution: by the end of 1929, it had closed its Dallas branch, and by 1930, had forsaken records altogether for Philco radios, then a little-known brand. Around the same time, Paramount's previous leading distributor, the E.E. Forbes Piano Company of Birmingham, began handling Majestic radios. J. L. Ausban, who replaced Harry Charles as its head salesman, would claim: "Radio killed Paramount and the other companies too."

The actual impact of radio on "race" record sales is problematic. Most blacks did not own radios: of nearly a thousand rural black Southern households canvassed in the mid 1930s, only 17.4% owned radios, as opposed to 27.6% with victrolas. As radio stations rarely played black music, and featured no programming aimed at black audiences, it is unlikely that radios even competed with "race" records as a black consumer item. Rather, "race" record industry figures apparently made the radio a scapegoat for declining record sales, just as the pop branch of the industry had done in the early 1920s. At the same time, the national market for radios was rapidly expanding in the late 1920s: radio sales of 1928 amounted io $650 million , far surpassing the sa1e of records or phonographs. Record executives, who had originally insisted in the early 1920s that radio could never become a substitute for recorded music, were increasingly whoring after the thriving medium. By 1929 both Brunswick and Columbia had begun manufacturing radios in addition to victrolas; in January of that year Victor merged with the Radio Corporation of America, while in November, the Edison label discontinued records altogether for radio production.

Unable to diversify with radio production, Paramount was left to operate a crippled record business once it lost Artophone. The company eventually salvaged some of Artophone's business by buying its list of mail order record customers.1 Most of the dealers Artophone had serviced, however, were all but lost to the record company: it became necessary for them to contact the company in order to purchase records.

In an apparent attempt to keep Artophone interested in Paramount's product, Laibly made a local Artophone client named Jesse Johnson (1873-1946) the label's leading source of "race" talent. Between August of 1929 and July, 1930 Johnson brought Paramount over a dozen blues discoveries, more than any other record dealer had previously sent the company.2 "He was a real entrepreneur in his day," Herb Schiele said of Johnson, the leading black "race" retailer of the period. Johnson had originally come to St. Louis by way of his native Clarksdale, Tennessee to see the World's Fair of 1904, and remained in the city to work as a ballroom dancer, shipping clerk, and train caller. His Deluxe Music Shop, founded in 1913, stood next to the Booker T. Washington Theater at 23rd and Market, for which he worked as a booker.3 Johnson was also noted for his promotional ventures, which included Monday excursion cruises on the St.Paul, featuring assorted jazz musicians. The artists he dispatched to Paramount included his blues-singing wife Edith (who worked as his business assistant after marrying him in 1926), his piano-playing brother James ("Stump") Johnson, who had learned his instrument in a pool hall, and himself; backed by a chorus, he recorded a two-part spiritual for the company in September of 1929.

"...They wasn't puttin' out good records...just wouldn't track right."

Perhaps because Paramount was steadily losing retail clients, Laibly was unable to find a wholesaler to replace Artophone. "Dealers cut 'em off," H.C. Speir recalled. "Quit handling their products." The reason, he said, was the label's poor sound quality: "...They wasn't puttn' out good records...(the records) just wouldn't track right. It just wasn't a quality record," he said. 'The advent of electrical recording, which increased volume and range, had accentuated the acoustical deficiency of the Paramount product.

Instead of upgrading its pressing process to produce a clearer sound, Paramount was preoccupied with obtaining its own recording facilities, and thereby eliminating the expense of hiring out other studios. "We could not build and develop an electrical recording studio for the reason we did not have the know-how," Moeser recalled. Until 1923 it continued to rely on Marsh Laboratories, which had taken up electrical recording in the fall of 1926 (when the process became standard) and was now situated in the seventh floor of the Lyon & Healy building at 64 East Jackson Avenue.4 The premium Paramount placed on electrical recording was reflected in its Defender ads of the late 1920s, which boasted:

Marsh's tendency to under-record artists gave some of Paramount's vaunted electrical recordings (such as George Carter's Ghost Woman Blues of 1929) the anemic presence of the acoustic production. It was probably as a result of dissatisfaction with Marsh's sound that Laibly began using the studio facilities of Gennett Records in June, 1929.6 Between June and October of that year, Laibly conducted some 15 sessions at its main recording studios on the west side of Richmond, Indiana (where the Gennett front offices and factories were located). Other sessions involving East Coast talent were held ar Gennett's New York studio at 9 East 37th Street.7 One of the advantages of collaboration with Gennett, which charged $80 per wax master, was that its recording director Fred Wiggins had no designs on Paramount talent: "They weren't in the 'race' field to any extent," Laibly said of Gennett.

In the latter part of 1923, Walter Klopp, who was to become Paramount's recording engineer, succeeded in constructing an electrical recording machine. Laibly then engaged an acoustic research firm located in Madison, Wisconsin to build a studio in Grafton. Because the project was conceived as part of an acoustical experiment, Paramount was charged only the cost of materials. The work was done by an Englishman named Fertington: "He was just a fella in sound recording and making equipment," Laibly said. "What he did originally was wind transformer coils." Fertington equipped the studio with a five-foot high two-panel amplifier, recording heads, and a parabolic microphone. His equipment did not function properly, causing Laibly to temporarily revert to Marsh and a freelance engineer in Milwaukee.8 All told, the project took a couple of months to complete before it was ready for business sometime between November, 1929 and April, 1930.

The Paramount studio at the southern edge of Grafton was probably the most secluded recording studio in the country. No sign or logo on the premises announced the presence of a recording studio or record company, and its construction had been given no play in the local newspapers, which preferred to print items like: "The snapping of a parlor match at the residence of Mrs. Louise Bostwick last Tuesday destroyed a pair of lace curtains and created a big scare in the household for a few moments..."

The studio stood on a private driveway, a block or two long, that veered off Falls Road and led to a dam. The main road was unpaved and rarely traveled; the only people who regularly used it besides Paramount employees were members of the Grafton fire department, which operated a pumping station near the dam. The studio itself was housed within a four-story wooden structure, painted reddish brown, that dated to the 1890s, when Grafton had been officially known as "Hamburg." Originally it had been used by the Sheboygan Knitting Company. Across the street from the studio stood the Paramount pressing plant, to which it was connected by a viaduct. The only other buildings in the vicinity were an open woodshed measuring 100 x 300 feet (used by the Wisconsin Chair Company to dry lumber), and a stone house that had been built for a chair company executive named Wilkie and was then occupied by Alfred Schultz, the pressing plant foreman.

The studio occupied the second floor of the building, the only one then in use. Once operational, it proved, in Laibly's word, "cumbersome." According to Schultz its weak wooden floor required frequent reinforcement, while unsatisfactory room acoustics led Laibly and Klopp to drape its walls with burlap in order to reduce reverberation.9 "Their studios wasn't any too good," H. C. Speir observed. "Their studios wasn't up to par at all." He felt that its recording premises were too large, "consisting of big rooms, all square and everything...You had dampness there all the time: you can't have dampness when you're recording...that dampness, even if it wasn't but just a small degree, it'd throw the sound off a little, you see." Actually, there was nothing perceptibly wrong with Paramount's recording process, as it existed at Grafton: it was rather the grating surface noise generated by its cheap pressing materials that doomed Paramount's product to inferiority. Thus, the introduction of the studio had the net effect of decreasing Paramount's overhead, while not enhancing the appeal of the label to the company's dwindling army of dealers.

The Grafton sessions were conducted primarily in the daytime by Laibly and Walter Klopp, who served as its studio engineer. In addition to a piano, the studio boasted of at least one company guitar."10 Partly as a result of Laibly's whimsical approach to recording, the Grafton studio proved much busier than Marsh's free-lance "laboratory" had been. In its first two years of operation it recorded as many masters (about 1100) as Marsh Laboratories had recorded in its last three years of acoustic recording.

The Grafton sessions seem to have followed the informal format of the Marsh sessions conducted by Harry Charles, who recalled: "We'd just make all we could." This approach was in contrast to the sessions run by OKeh, of which Polk Brockman said: "We had a program all laid out ahead a time; we knew exactly what we'se gonna do...It wasn't any hit or miss to it at all." The Grafton session, by contrast, was entirely hit or miss, running until Laibly decidcd to end it. The experience of Son House, who recorded in the spring of 1930, was probably typical of the Grafton artist. Sitting before the mike, he auditioned each song before recording it, prefacing his playing by announcing the title of his song. Then Laibly would listen to a single verse and decide whether or not he wished to record it.

Following the practice of Mayo Williams, who recorded two or three takes of each title at Marsh Laboratories and afterwards selected the best one for release, Laibly recorded three takes of each song. (OKeh, by contrast, customarily recorded two.) Once converted to testpressings (a process that took about four days), the takes were divided up between Laibly, Klopp, and another executive (probably Henry Stephany) and taken home. At a conference the following morning each executive would give his impressions of the take. After a take was selected for issue, the wax disks representing the rejected takes were re-used for more recording.

Once Paramount acquired its own studio, it was possible for Laibly to solicit material without fear of incurring extra overhead. Skip James was surprised at the extent of his session, which, he recalled, ran to 26 songs over two or three days. "I did have a little collection (of songs) mapped out...before I left to record. I figured I could afford satisfaction to a few records, but I didn't have no idea of makin' that many...There were certain songs that I composed there and didn't have but three minutes to make that song up, and put the music to it." One of his impromptu pieces was 22-20:

"Mr. Laibly, the manager of that recordin'...ask me,'Skip, the 44 Blues is out...havin' a fast sale. Do you think you could compose us a blues about a gun that would kinda come up to that requirement? Make a pretty fast sale?
"I said:'I don't know, how about .38 Special ?'
"'No, I got that.'
"I say: 'Well, how 'bout 44 .40?'
"'I got that already...'
"He say: 'How about 22-20?"'
Thus was James prompted to record a tune about a nonexistent firearm.

Continue....

1. 'We went up to Chicago to make the final deal," Schiele said. "We were supposed to have a day meeting with Chicago in a hotel room to carry out the negotiations and stuff. But then someone wanted to go up to Milwaukee to carry on the negotiations so his attorney could be in on the act."Return to text

2 Another dealer who furnished Paramount with talent in thls period was W. R. Calaway of Charleston, West Virginia. He brought musicians from both Charleston and Frys Alley, Virginia to the company.Return to text

3. Records bearing the imprint of the Deluxe Music Sbop have been discovered in rural Misissippi indicating that Johnson had a mail-order sideline.Return to text

4. In January of 1927, Marsh Laboratories had been sold to a syndicate of businessmen.Return to text

5. Electrical recording made Paramount's New York studio obsolete. After being discontinued in 1928, the studio was converted to a shipping department for records and Chair Company products. Later that year, it was vacated, and the Shipping department was transferred to an office off Whitehall Street that had previously been the business headquarters of Black Swan.Return to text

6. Gennett had developed its electriccal recording process by working with the Radio Corporation of America and the General Electric Company.Return to text

7. These included an August, 1929 session by the Biddleville Quintette, who were originally placed with Paramount by Harry Charles, and an October, 1929 session by Edward Thompson, a find of W. R. Calaway's.Return to text

8. Two sides Papa Charlie Jackson recorded in late 1923 that were allotted unique control numbers (A-1-2 and A-2-2) were likely recorded at this unknown Milwaukee studio. Later Grafton recordings bore the prefix "L." Although Laibly denied that the initial stood for his surname, Alfred Schultz thought it did so.Return to text

9. Maurice Supper's son Frederik recalled that it had "...red, plush cloth hangings, to diffuse the sound."Return to text

10. Marsh Laboratories had no studio guitar.'Some of them, you know, they had about a $10 guitar," Charles said of his discoveries.Return to text