Little Labels -- Big Sound celebrates 10 legendary record labels,
their founders and the artists they developed, people who created
original and enduring music on the tide of social change. From the
1920s through the 1960s, scores of small, independent record
companies nurtured distinctly American music: jazz, blues, gospel,
country, rhythm and blues, and rock 'n' roll. These companies, run
on shoestring budgets, were on the fringe of mainstream culture.
Louis Armstrong, Hank Williams, James Brown, Roy Orbison, and other
musicians brought regional American styles to a world audience and
won enduring fame for themselves. But often forgotten are the
colorful owners of small record labels who first recorded these
musicians and helped to popularize their sound before the dominant,
more bureaucratic competitors knew what had happened.
Rick Kennedy and Randy McNutt bring alive the glory days of the
independent labels and their colorful founders, many of whom were
interviewed for this book. Sometimes these men were visionaries.
Ross Russell, a record-store owner in Los Angeles in the mid-1940s,
risked his last dollar to create Dial Records because he was
convinced that an obscure jazz saxophonist named Charlie Parker was
creating a music revolution with his bebop jazz. Sam Phillips in
Memphis had recorded white country and black R&B singers in the
early 1950s, so he knew exactly what he was looking for when a shy,
teenaged Elvis Presley walked into his storefront studio in 1954
and asked to make a record.
Other owners had little appreciation for the music but were
street-smart entrepreneurs. The white-owned "race" labels of the
1920s, for example, recognized a black consumer market thatthe
recording business had previously ignored. Operating out of such
cities as Houston, Memphis, Cincinnati, and New Orleans, these
savvy business people promoted regional sounds that were to
reverberate around the world.
But influencing the development of music wasn't what these
record-label owners had in mind; they were just trying to earn a
living. Today, when most of the independent record labels have gone
under or have been gobbled up by big conglomerates, the music they
produced on primitive equipment remains fresh -- and bigger than
life.
Little Labels -- Big Sound tells with verve and affection the
story of the people and the small homegrown companies who gave
America its beat.
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