Paramount Records

Paramount Records was founded in the 1910s as a subsidiary of the Wisconsin Chair Company of Port Washington, Wisconsin[?], Fred Dennett Key, director. The label enjoyed no great success in it's initial years. The Paramount Record pressing plant was contracted to press discs for Black Swan Records. When that later company floundered, Paramount bought out Black Swan and thus got into the business of making recordings by and for African-Americans, which became Paramount's most famous and lucrative business.

Most of Paramount's "Race" (African-American) recordings were arranged by Black entrepreneur Mayo Williams[?].

Paramount is best known for its wealth of recordings of Blues and jazz in the 1920s and early 1930s, including such artists as Ma Rainey and Blind Lemon Jefferson.

Paramount closed down business in 1935.

In 1942 the then inactive Paramount Records company was purchased from Wisconsin Chair Company by John Steiner, who revived the label for reissues of important historical Paramount recordings as well as new recordings of jazz and blues.

The rights to Paramount's back catalogue (the portion of which is not yet in the Public domain) are now owned by George H. Buck[?] as part of his Jazzology Records[?] group, but use of the name "Paramount Records" was purchased from Buck by Paramount Pictures, a previously unconnected company.

List of record labels

External Links

• Online Paramount Discography at library.wisc.edu (http://www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/Music/Jongleur/para.htm)
• Paramount Album Discography (http://www.bsnpubs.com/dot/paramountwis.html) mostly on later Paramount; has some of the label's history wrong