Before there was Motown, the sound of black America was shaped by Record Row in Chicago. But whereas Motown remains a viable record label with a highly visible past, Record Row has vanished, a footnote in the history of popular culture.
It will take more than documentaries such as “Record Row: Cradle of Rhythm & Blues” (9 p.m. Thursday, WTTW-Ch. 11) to correct this oversight, but it’s a welcome reminder nonetheless of how a loose coalition of black businessmen and artists set a standard for their community that endures decades later.
The emergence of Record Row coincided with the black diaspora from the shrinking rural economy of the South to the post-war industrial North. In 1940, there were 278,000 blacks in Chicago, but by 1960 there were 812,000–23 percent of the city’s population. These immigrants brought their culture with them, especially the blues of the Southern juke joints and the gospel of the Baptist churches, and it was only a matter of time before a mini-record industry arose to serve this newly enfranchised populace.
While major record labels generally ignored the so-called “race” market, what came to be known as Record Row rose up on a seedy stretch of South Michigan Avenue between Roosevelt Road and 22nd Street, and from the mid-’50s to the late-’60s it provided a veritable soundtrack for the African-American experience.
This remarkable convergence of aesthetics and commerce, artistic achievement and entrepreneurial daring is the subject of “Record Row: Cradle of Rhythm & Blues,” in which producer Michael McAlpin accurately portrays Chicago as the home of the blues and a whole lot more. He mixes priceless performance footage of greats such as Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters and Curtis Mayfield with terse but illuminating interview segments, particularly with soul singer Jerry Butler and Vee-Jay label visionary Ewart Abner. R&B legend Etta James provides snappy narration.
McAlpin doesn’t ignore the story of the great Chicago blues artists such as Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Willie Dixon, or the Polish brothers Leonard and Phil Chess who nurtured, exposed and exploited them on their namesake label. But he broadens the view to include the rhythm and blues and soul that were also crucial components of the city’s musical legacy.
Even the Chess brothers–forever linked to the city’s blues heritage–expanded into soul and R&B; it didn’t hurt that they hired one of Berry Gordy’s top guns, Roquel “Billy” Davis, away from rival Motown to become the label’s in-house producer. And with performers such as James, Billy Stewart and Fontella Bass, Chess became more than just a blues label in the ’60s.
But perhaps the quintessential Chicago label of this golden era was Vee-Jay, founded by husband and wife Vivian Carter and James Bracken, who took out a pawn-shop loan to start the label in 1953–in part because two talented acts, Jimmy Reed and the Spaniels, wandered into their record store in Gary, Ind., inquiring about ways to get their music on vinyl. Reed was asked if he had written any songs, and was said to have replied, “No, but I’ve made up a few.” He would go on to become one of the greatest songwriters in blues history, the foundation on which Vee-Jay would build its success.
A man of vision
The best move Carter and Bracken may have made was to hire Abner from a competing label in 1955. It is Abner who emerges as the heart and soul of “Record Row,” for he embodied the era’s boot-straps brilliance and audacity, as well as its downfall. Even today, more than 30 years after his heyday, Abner looks like the life of the party, with his neatly trimmed white hair, earrings and gift of refined gab.
He was a self-described “bag man” who greased the wheels for his artists by paying off deejays to play Vee-Jay records. He also was a marketing visionary who saw the label as a multidimensional music company that served all audiences, rather than one that just filled a racial niche.
By the early ’60s, Vee-Jay had become the most successful black-owned label in the land, not only a major player in blues, R&B and soul, but in pop with such acts as the 4 Seasons and a then-unknown act from England, the Beatles.
“Racism . . . I hated it. It’s bad, it’s immoral, but . . . I gotta move,” Abner says of his dream of operating a full-line label that went beyond black listeners.
But there was no denying that the core audience for this music was urban blacks. With a dozen record labels, 17 distributors and the Chess-owned radio station WVON (“Voice of the Negro”), Record Row in Chicago became an epicenter for black culture in the ’60s, and with the songs of Curtis Mayfield in particular, became a musical touchstone for the civil-rights movement.
Mayfield’s achievement went beyond the timeless art he fashioned on record. He set up his own publishing company and eventually his own series of labels to retain total control over his music, a break with decades of exploitation by white entrepreneurs. As Mayfield’s friend and fellow Chicago soul great Jerry Butler says, the ’60s marked the emergence of a more sophisticated brand of black entertainer in Chicago.
`Musical sharecroppers’
Many of the blues performers who came North in the ’40s and ’50s were “basically illiterate,” Butler says. “They had no education, they never had their own publishing companies, some of them never even had a copyright on the songs they made up. Basically they became musical sharecroppers or musical slaves.”
Not all the black entrepreneurs practiced sound business. “I helped integrate the crap tables in Vegas,” Abner says, acknowledging that he blew some of the profits from his one-third stake in Vee-Jay while living the high life. In 1963, Abner was ousted, and the company’s inability to pay royalties in a timely fashion, if at all, cost them the Beatles, who fled to Capitol where they rewrote musical history.
By the ’70s, Record Row was a memory. The Golden Age of Chicago rhythm and blues was over. But the artists it produced–Muddy Waters, Curtis Mayfield, Jimmy Reed, Etta James, Fontella Bass, Gene Chandler, Jerry Butler, Dee Clark, Major Lance, Betty Everett–changed pop history, and its legacy of black empowerment remains a powerful, if not always explicitly acknowledged, inspiration.
