Little Labels - Big Sound

From the 1920s to the 1960s, many small, independent American record companies nurtured jazz, blues, gospel, country, rhythm `n’ blues and rock `n’ roll. This is a celebration of 10 popular record labels – the music, the people, and the small homegrown companies who produced the music on primitive equipment. 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 colourful owners of small record labels who first recorded these musicians and helped to popularize their sound before more dominant, bureaucratic competitors. This survey aims to bring alive this period, and these entrepreneurs, many of whom are interviewed in the book. Ross Russell, for example, a record-store owner in Los Angeles in the mid-1940s, risked his last dollar to create Dial Records, becasuse 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 R&B singers in the early 1950s, so he was prepared when a shy, teenaged Elvis Presley walked into his storefront studio in 1954 and asked to make a record. The book tells with verve and affection the story of the people and the small homegrown companies who gave America the beat.

Author Biography

Rick Kennedy, a media relations manager, worked for a decade as a journalist. Kennedy plays jazz piano and is the author of Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy: Gennett Studios and the Birth of Recorded Jazz (Indiana University Press). Randy McNutt is a longtime reporter with the Cincinnati Enquirer and the author of We Wanna Boogie: An Illustrated History of the American Rockabilly Movement and a book on Ohio ghost towns.