[ad_1]
Scott Blackwood
The Rise and Fall of Paramount Data
Printed by LSU Press
Aug 07, 2023
Scott Blackwood’s The Rise and Fall of Paramount Data, subtitled A Nice Migration Story 1917-1932, chronicles the historical past of Paramount Data, the primary main document firm to blow up in the US, specializing in largely blues, jazz, and folks music. Begun within the early 1900s as a subsidiary of a Wisconsin chair-making firm after the explosion of curiosity in information, and whose well-known demise featured the story of manufacturing facility staff hurling their firm’s product into the Milwaukee River after being fired in December of 1933, Paramount Data is notorious for bringing to the world such luminaries as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ma Rainey, Son Home, Charley Patton, and Ethel Waters.
Blackwood’s historical past just isn’t precisely what you would possibly suppose. It doesn’t observe a linear path, as a substitute telling the the Paramount’s story by a sequence of chapters which tackle particular subjects or artists. For instance, “A Transient Historical past of the Phonograph” and “A Transient Historical past of Black Minstrelsy” sit alongside chapters of Blind Blake, label man Mayo Williams, and Clarence Williams and his jazz piano. As such, it typically feels just like the reader is piecing the label’s story collectively themself. As well as, at fewer than 200 pages, The Rise and Fall appears unusually transient for what it purports to do in recounting the story of one among America’s first and premier document labels, which got here from inauspicious beginnings, is lush with historical past, is sophisticated with problems with race, and which fell in most superior trend on the time of the Nice Melancholy.
That every one mentioned, The Rise and Fall of Paramount Data is important studying for anybody who needs to dig into the historical past of American music. [The previous tome, Alex van der Tuuk’s Paramount’s Rise and Rall: The Roots and History of Paramount Records, from which much of Blackwood’s information is taken, has been long out of print.] Simply perceive the constraints herein and take from it what is effective relatively than bemoaning what it might lack.
Creator ranking: 6.5/10
[ad_2]