Paramount Records & F.W. Boerner Company

Paramount Records and F.W. Boerner Company. . , Port Washington played a historic role in the production and distribution of some of America's greatest blues and gospel music in the 1920s and '30s. The talent roster of Paramount Records, founded here in 1917, featured many iconic blues figures, including Mississippi bluesmen Charley Patton, Son House and Skip James. The local F.W. Boerner Company's mail order business shipped the records to buyers around the country, especially in the Deep South., Paramount Records earned Port Washington a permanent place on the map of African-American music despite the irony that during the blues recording era the town (population 3,693 in the 1930 census) had no black residents. Paramount was an arm of New York Recording Laboratories (NYRL), a firm incorporated by Wisconsin Chair Company (WCC) founder Fred Dennett in 1917 when Paramount was using New York studios for its first recordings. Sessions were also held in Chicago before NYRL opened a studio in the WCC's Grafton factory in 1929. The business headquarters of the WCC, NYRL, Paramount and various labels was, however, always here in Port Washington, where the main furniture factory was located. Dennett founded the WCC in 1888., The WCC's entry into the record business began with the manufacturing of wooden phonograph cabinets. The Paramount logo was used both for phonographs and records. The first Paramount records included pop, vaudeville and ethnic music, but returns were minimal until the label launched a "race series" aimed at African-American audiences in 1922 featuring Alberta Hunter and others. Relying on black producer J. Mayo Williams of Chicago and a network of record dealers who acted as talent scouts, Paramount introduced many of the top blues stars of the 1920s, including Ida Cox, Ma Rainey, Papa Charlie Jackson, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Blake., The first Paramount recordings of Mississippi-born artists included 1927 Chicago sessions by Gus Cannon, then a leading figure in Memphis, who recorded under the name Banjo Joe, and Lucille Bogan, then based in Birmingham, Alabama. From 1929 to 1932 a succession of Mississippi blues artists, led by Charley Patton, recorded for Paramount in Grafton, where the records were also pressed. Other Paramount blues and gospel artists recruited from Mississippi by dealers, primarily H.C. Speir of Jackson but also Ralph Lembo of Itta Bena, or by Paramount's Art Laibly, included Son House, Skip James, Willie Brown, Rubin Lacy, Tommy Johnson, Ishmon Bracey, Louise Johnson, Henry Simms, Blind Roosevelt Graves, Charley Taylor, the Delta Big Four, and the Mississippi Sheiks, the final blues act to record in Grafton before Paramount closed in 1932. Another Paramount artist and Mississippi native, Henry Townsend, was a central figure on the St. Louis blues scene. Unfortunately, most of these Mississippians only recorded after the Great Depression had forced Paramount and other companies to make severe cutbacks in their operations; fewer records were pressed and in later years much of the remaining stock was scrapped or recycled, so that Paramount blues releases from the 1930s are now among the rarest collectors' items. The label was later revived as a collector-oriented reissue company by John Steiner, a Milwaukee chemist and jazz aficionado.