One of the original blues brothers
Chess Records published songs by black music titans
Phil Chess and his brother founded Chess Records, a storied Chicago label that captured great blues musicians, such as Muddy Waters, in their prime and helped power the musical fusillade of rock ‘n’ roll with vibrant recordings by the likes of Chuck Berry.
He died this week at his home in Tucson, Ariz. He was 95.
Chess Records was one of the most prominent of the independent labels — Atlantic in New York and Sun in Memphis were among the others — that became successful in the 1950s by finding little-known performers, recording them and persuading radio stations (not infrequently with the help of cash payments) to play their records.
Their goal was profit, but their lasting influence was suggested by the first ballot of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which consisted almost entirely of artists who had recorded for independent labels.
Chess Records was best known for recruiting black musicians who had taken their heartbreak, hopes and not a few harmonicas from the South to Chicago and who, with electric guitars and a big backbeat, gave birth to what came to be known as Chicago blues. In addition to Muddy Waters, its roster included, at various times, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson and other stars.
“Chess not only became the true repository of American blues music, but it also presented black music for the edification of white audiences throughout the world,” the Hall of Fame said in 1987 when it inducted Phil’s brother and partner, Leonard Chess.
Curiously, Phil Chess was neither inducted nor mentioned in the citation. Nor was he depicted in a 2008 movie about the company, Cadillac Records. (In another movie about the label, Who Do You Love, from 2010, Phil, played by Jon Abrahams, and Leonard, played by Alessandro Nivola, were portrayed as equals.)
Marshall Chess, Leonard’s son, who worked with both men at Chess and went on to run the Rolling Stones’ record company, said both brothers did a lot of everything, including supervising recording sessions and hawking records to disc jockeys. “It was a fully symbiotic, synergistic relationship,” he said in a 2008 interview with the Chicago Tribune.
Leonard’s greater visibility reflected the more public role he played. In addition, he worked primarily with the blues performers, for which the label was best known. Phil mostly shepherded the company’s jazz and doo-wop recordings.
Both brothers, however, were honoured in 2013 by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences with a Trustees Award for lifetime achievement.
The legacy of the tough-talking, cigarchomping brothers can be seen not just in the records they made, but also in the many songs recorded first by Chess artists and later by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and others.
The influence of Chess Records was evident in how Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, who had been playmates as children, got together musically as teenagers in the spring of 1961. On a train from Dartford, the London suburb where they both grew up, Richards noticed that Jagger was carrying two Chess albums then unavailable in England, one by Muddy Waters and the other by Chuck Berry. The name of the group they soon formed, the Rolling Stones, came from a Waters song. When the Stones first visited the United States in 1964, they made a trip to Chess’ studio in Chicago and recorded several tracks there, including an instrumental titled “2120 South Michigan Avenue” — the company’s address.
The Chess brothers may have been motivated more by financial considerations than by artistic ones. But virtually no one disputes that they helped document some of America’s most important vernacular music.
“The brothers were not musical visionaries; they were small-time ‘indie’ record men making a quick buck from the poorest, least respected people in America,” the British newspaper the Guardian wrote in 2010. “But their recorded breadand-butter discs of local street musicians and bar bands still sound as fresh today as they did 60 years ago.”