Chess Records co-founder helped top blues artists soar
CHICAGO — Chess Records co-founder Phil Chess, who with brother Leonard helped launch the careers of Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and others and amassed a catalogue of rock and electric “Chicago” blues that profoundly influenced popular music in the 1950s and beyond, has died. He was 95.
Chess died Wednesday in Tucson, Arizona. Leonard, the older brother, died in 1969.
Started in Chicago by Leonard and Phil in 1950, Chess Records was home to many of the major blues artists of the following two decades and also took on such musical pioneers as Berry, Etta James and Ike Turner, whose “Rocket 88” is considered one of the earliest rock songs.
The rise of Chess helped mark the migration north of such southern-born blacks as Waters and Wolf and the transition of the blues from acoustic to electric, with hardhitting arrangements that the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and other white stars openly drew upon.
One of today’s greatest bluesmen, Buddy Guy, credited the label with raising Chicago’s status to the capital of blues.
“Phil and Leonard Chess were cuttin’ the type of music nobody else was paying attention to ... and now you can take a walk down (Chicago’s) State Street today and see a portrait of Muddy that’s 10 storeys tall,” said Guy, who recorded at Chess. “The Chess brothers had a lot to do with that . ... I’ll always be grateful for that.”
Like other businessmen of blues and early rock, the brothers were Jewish kids with an affinity for black music. Phil Chess was born Fiszel Czyz in Motol, Poland, and changed his name to Phil Chess after the family immigrated to the U.S. After Phil served in the army during the Second World War, the brothers started out with a liquor store, then ran the Macomba Lounge nightclub and music venue, before getting into the music recording business.
“Neither had even a bent for music,” author Nadine Cohodas wrote of the Chess brothers in her 2000 book “Spinning Blues into Gold: The Chess Brothers and the Legendary Chess Records.”
“But they were entrepreneurs, and through the indigenous sounds of America — blues and its progeny, jazz, rock and roll, and soul — they found their fortune.”
Chess Records’ first release was a Gene Ammons’ version of “My Foolish Heart.” Then came Waters’ “Rollin’ Stone” — a song so influential it became the name of the English rock band and the groundbreaking rock magazine.
For the next 19 years, they recorded a staggering lineup of America’s greatest blues, R&B and rock ’n’ roll musicians out of a two-story building at 2120 S. Michigan Ave., which still stands. They recorded everything from minimalist blues and harmony groups to Berry and fellow rocker Bo Diddley. Others who worked at Chess included Willie Dixon, Little Walter and a young session drummer named Maurice White, who founded Earth, Wind & Fire.
Chess Records was sold in 1989 and Phil moved to Arizona, where he worked in radio.
Leonard Chess was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, and both brothers are in the Blues Hall of Fame.