Co-founder of music label Chess dies at 95
Phil Chess, who co-founded the Chicago-based music label Chess, which brought American blues, soul and early rock music to an international audience and influenced generations of musicians including the Rolling Stones, died Oct. 19 at his home in Tucson. He was 95.
Chess’ nephew Craig Glicken confirmed the death to the Chicago Sun-Times but did not provide a cause. Chess’ older brother, Leonard, who also started the label, supervised many of the blues recordings and was its public face, died in 1969.
In its 18 years as a family-owned business, Chess gave birth to such seminal records as Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” Etta James’ “At Last,” Muddy Waters’ “Hoochie Coochie Man,” Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love?” and The Dells’ “Stay In My Corner.”
British-born blues enthusiasts Mick Jagger and Keith Richards named the Rolling Stones after a 1951 Chess recording by Waters, “Rollin’ Stone.” The rock band coalesced in the early 1960s after Richards spotted Jagger, a childhood playmate, at a train stop; Jagger was carting two Chess albums.
The Rolling Stones, then well established, made a pilgrimage to record at the Chess studios in 1965. They named an instrumental after Chess’ address, 2120 South Michigan Ave.
“Phil and Leonard Chess were cuttin’ the type of music nobody else was paying attention to — Muddy, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Sonny Boy (Williamson), Jimmy Rogers, I could go on and on — and now you can take a walk down State Street today and see a portrait of Muddy that’s 10 stories tall,” blues guitarist Buddy Guy, a former Chess artist, told the Sun-Times. “They started Chess Records and made Chicago what it is today, the blues capital of the world.”
The brothers were children when they came to the United States as Jewish immigrants from a Polish village without running water or electricity. They began their music careers in 1946 as proprietors of the El Mocambo, an eatery on the predominantly black South Side that they converted into an after-hours jazz club. Although initially patronized by pimps and prostitutes, the bar developed a reputation as a hangout for Chicago’s bebop musicians.
The following year, they bought a stake in Aristocrat, an unsuccessful pop music label, initially to record jazz performers. But it was the amped-up delta blues sound of Waters’ “I Can’t Be Satisfied” (1948) that gave them an initial burst of success. The record reportedly sold out its first 3,000 copies in one day.
By 1950, the brothers had bought out their Aristocrat partners and renamed the label Chess. Spinoff labels Checker and Argo (later renamed Cadet) soon followed.