Little Labels - Big Sound: Small Record Companies and the Rise of American Music - Hardcover

Kennedy, Rick; McNutt, Randy

3.57

30 ratings by Goodreads

9780253335487: Little Labels - Big Sound: Small Record Companies and the Rise of American Music

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0253335485 ISBN 13: 9780253335487

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 1999

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'There would be no record business as we know it without the passion of these pioneers. Today's leaders and label heads pale in comparison to these legendary giants. Show me a man today who could stand up to a Syd Nathan or a Don Robey, and I'll show you a man behind bars - not behind a desk. Why, without Sam Phillips, the founder of Sun Records and the man who unearthed Elvis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Rufus Thomas, and Howling Wolf to name but a few, there might not even have been any rock 'n' roll, electric blues, or rockabilly music' - Al Kooper, from the Foreword.From the 1920s through the 1960s, scores of small, independent record companies nurtured distinctly American music: jazz, blues, gospel, country, rhythm and blues, and the 1950s offspring of R&B, rock n' roll. Operated by families or individuals, often on the fringe of mainstream culture, these labels fostered America's musical voice by discovering original artists who would become giants of popular culture. "Little Labels - Big Sound" profiles ten such companies. Louis Armstrong, Hank Williams, James Brown, Roy Orbison, and other musicians, black and white, 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. And yet, so many of these small labels crashed and burned almost as fast as they rose. Sometimes, their owners 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.Because Sam Phillips of Sun Records in Memphis recorded white country and black R&B singers in the early 1950s, 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 in black consumers a market that had been ignored by the major companies that dominated the recording business. Some small record companies have been extensions of a nightclub, record store, or booking agency. Influencing the development of music wasn't what these record label owners had in mind: they were trying to earn a living. While most of these record labels are long gone, the music that they produced on primitive equipment remains fresh - and bigger than life.

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Review:

"In this era of monolithic record companies and predictably contrived music, it's refreshing to read about mavericks who took chances... a look at ten visionaries who altered the course of popular music." --Playboy " ... close-up portraits of risk-taking label owners who often gambled their careers and livelihoods to release music they believed in." --Billboard " ... [a] volume that--like the labels it celebrates, and the 45s and 78s those labels put out--is full of exciting and vital content." --San Francisco Chronicle "This book is a great piece of storytelling... well written, crammed full of interesting facts, and great fun." --Dirty Linen "Kennedy and McNutt celebrate the predecessors of today's vaunted indie record companies in this rich survey... In profiling the feisty underdogs who produced so much music that 'is still very much with us,' Kennedy and McNutt also explore the commercial and social forces affecting the industry." --Booklist

From the Publisher:

Rave Reviews for LITTLE LABELS--BIG SOUND
". . . Kennedy . . . and McNutt . . . tell how 10 independent labels shaped the course of American popular music. Predictably, Sam Phillips's Sun Labels, perhaps the most celebrated 'little label' in music history, merits a chapter. More interesting, though, are profiles of less familiar independents such as Don Robey's gospel-oriented Peacock Records and John Vincent's pioneering rhythm-and-blues label, Ace. The authors skillfully lay out the complex racial politics of their story, showing, for example, how a shared interest in profits and fresh sounds could bring together personalities as diverse as 'Soul Brother number One,' James Brown, and Syd Nathan, the feisty Jewish entrepreneur whose Cincinnati-based King Records made Brown a million-seller. The book includes scores of fascinating label-artist dramas, some well known . . . others long forgotten. . . . An invaluable guide to the businesspeople, musicians, and hangers-on who transformed regional musical styles into a national soundtrack, this book belongs on the same shelf as Peter Guralnick's 'SWEET SOUL MUSIC' and Alan Lomax's "THE LAND WHERE BLUES BEGAN.' --Publishers Weekly, 4/26/99

"Kennedy and McNutt celebrate the predecessors of today's vaunted indie record companies in this rich survey. . . . In profiling the feisty underdogs who produced so much music that 'is still very much with us,' Kennedy and McNutt also explore the commercial and social forces affecting the industry." --Booklist, 3/15/99

"Journalists Kennedy and McNutt have produced an extensively researched look at a time when primitive recording equipment was the standard and hunger for a quick buck was the rule. A guide to reissue anthologies for each of the labels covered is an added treat." --Library Journal

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