LITTLE LABELS-BIG SOUND

by Rick Kennedy and Randy McNutt

Indiana University Press ISBN 0-253-33548-5 (1999)

This is a draft copy review sent to Dirty Linen Magazine and published and copyrighted in edited form.

This book is a great piece of storytelling: my 10 year old son has read Little Labels-Big sound six times! Included are the histories of ten small but important record labels. Paramount was a child of the Wisconsin Chair Company and recorded country blues by Blind Lemon Jefferson. In Cincinnati, King recorded country and r&b artists like James Brown in a converted ice factory. Sun in Memphis recorded rockabillies such as Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley. Delmark, associated with a Chicago record store, still records blues artists including the recently departed Junior Wells (you can even see them on the net at http://www.idsonline.com/delmark/.)

Amateur music scholars may wonder what these companies have in common. Some, like Delmark and Dial, which specialized in bebop, were started by jazz and blues enthusiasts. Others, like Gennett, were a commercial sideline that used a mass shotgun approach and still others, like Houston's R&B Peacock, were shrewd business operations. Most were successful because they recorded genres or artists that the major labels did not yet recognize as profitable or fashionable. Labels ultimately failed for various reasons: the Depression, death of a partner, poor investments...some because their genres and artists were accepted into the musical mainstream and they could no longer hold quality performers.

Kennedy and McNutt are enthusiasts of jazz, rockabilly, blues and other "distinctly American music." This huge, rootsy complex has immensely influenced American popular music and by extension popular culture. Many less soulful chunks of the American music spectrum are missing...Kennedy, a jazz collector, downplays the associated Champion "hillbilly" 78 releases in

the chapter on the Gennett label, and the chapter on the Riverside jazz label made me dive for my garage sale Bob Gibson LP, wondering if this were indeed the same company. Yep. And how about the small labels that record American musics that never make it big? Polka, anyone? Well, you can only write about so much in 198 pages, and only what you're interested in. The result, though, is that Little Labels-Big Sounds is not an essential book for the angloeuro folk/traditional music crowd.. Additionally, I'm not sure that the stories have a universal theme that covers all those small labels that exist today...only the ones that will in time produce musicians important to "American music." But again, the book is well written, crammed full of interesting facts, and great fun.

-Judith Gennett(Bryan,TX)