Menagerie of early Paramount music lives on
Jack White helped assemble box set that features Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver
In the annals of American music in the 20th century, no record label had a more unlikely origin or trajectory than Paramount Records. Founded in 1917 as a subsidiary of the Wisconsin Chair Co., which was eager to supply content for the phonographs it had begun to manufacture, Paramount took a scattershot approach to its business, recording more than 10,000 tracks of blues, gospel, hot jazz, treacly pop and hillbilly and ethnic music before going bust during the Depression.
So it seems appropriate that a new Paramount boxed set, is literally that: an oak box, stamped with the Wisconsin Chair Co.’s logo, that mimics one of the “talking machines” Paramount’s parent produced. The cabinet of curiosities even comes with what initially seems to be a key for a vintage phonograph — but which, in a distinctly 21stcentury touch, turns out to be a flash drive stocked with, among other things, 800 tracks of music in MP3 format.
“We wanted to highlight a whole menagerie of things,” said Jack White, formerly of the White Stripes and now the leader of Dead Weather, who played a role in both the design of the set and the selection of the tracks. “This Paramount music, I wanted to make it as appealing as possible to somebody in a physical, tactile way, all of that, the smell, everything, so as to lead you into the incredible stories that are contained in the music.”
The set, The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, is a joint project of White’s Third Man label and Revenant Records, founded by guitarist John Fahey and run since his death in 2001 by Dean Blackwood. It draws from Paramount’s first decade and includes recordings by major figures like Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Fletcher Henderson, Alberta Hunter, Ma Rainey and Blind Lemon Jefferson, as well as oddities from first-time performers who faded into history.
Spectacular though it may be, The Rise and Fall of Paramount is only the latest example of a trend that has been gaining ground in American music over the past decade. As pop drifts further and further from its roots in blues and country, some contrarian listeners are moving in the opposite direction, seeking out artists from the earliest years of the recording era.
One result has been a conspicuous increase in reissue projects on labels that exist specifically for that purpose or, like Smithsonian Folkways, have partially embraced it. Some of those labels, like Yazooand Origin Jazz Library, as well as Ace and Document in Britain, have been around since the vinyl era, but others, most notably the Atlanta, Ga.based Dust to Digital label, are purely products of the CD era.
“What we are always trying to do is fill in gaps,” said Lance Ledbetter of Dust to Digital, whose first project, a six-CD compilation of early 20th-century religious music called Goodbye Babylon, was released 10 years ago Sunday.
“The younger generation wants to be transported. It’s easy for them to be jaded because everything is one search away. But they go into a shop and see one of our sets of never-before-reissued music, and they say, ‘This isn’t like something I downloaded or saw on YouTube.’ It’s opening up their world to a whole new music.”
The Paramount set is limited to 5,000 copies and carries a list price of $400. In addition to the 800 digital tracks, the package includes a sixLP vinyl sampler, encased in a wood album with laseretched titling.
The set also comes with two books. One, in large paperback format and called a “field manual,” is a kind of encyclopedia, offering 360 pages of biographies of Paramount artists as well as a list of all the tracks they recorded for the label, along with the date and place of recording and the names, when known, of the musicians who played on the track.
The other book, a hardcover, contains 100 pages of essays about individual artists and the history of the company, the phonograph, minstrelsy and the migration of blacks from the rural South northward. Perhaps even more interesting to collectors are an additional 150 pages of illustrations: copies of original Paramount advertisements from the 1920s, which were done in a hand-drawn style that cartoonist Robert Crumb has acknowledged as an influence, and labels and sleeves of 78-rpm recordings.
Since their introduction at the beginning of the CD era, boxed sets have come to adopt a standardized format: multiple discs in a cardboard box, accompanied by an explanatory essay with photographs. The Rise and Fall of Paramount aims to break with that practice by providing what Blackwood describes as “a deluxe integrated package not to be taken piecemeal.”
“This can represent a definitive take on the Paramount story, which has a narrative that has not been written about a lot,” he said.
“It’s not an attempt at completism, but a fairly disciplined culling, something representative of the character and variety of this label.”
A second, equally imposing box is to be released next year. It will cover the label’s final years and focus on blues artists, like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, Son House and Skip James, whose music was crucial to the 1960s blues-rock revival and lives on today in recordings by artists as diverse as Bob Dylan and Gov’t Mule.
The Paramount set is an outgrowth of an earlier Revenant seven-CD set, Charley Patton: Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues, which won three Grammy Awards in 2003. White was one of the fans of that package, which contained songs he had been searching for since he was a teenage crate-digger prowling the record shops of Detroit. He said he hoped that the new box would encourage a younger generation of curious listeners to “go deeper and see where it all came from.”
“Hearing that music changed my life. It was a whole new direction for me,” he said. “I’m committed to making sure these records are available in one form or another, so that we can make people’s imagination blow up and try to get them involved in the beauty of it all. It’s not about trying to make money off the music. It’s witchcraft to lure you down the path to get you to the story.”