Show 50: Alphabet Blues, Pt. 10: Paramount

I'm your host. For today's 50th episode of the Copacetic Communion, we will be resuming our Alphabet Blues series, where I aim to spin, for you, every significant blues label. Because tonight's show will mark a major milestone in this show's history, I hope to make it truly unforgettable. As such, we will be covering my favorite of the early twentieth-century record labels, Paramount Records. To sell phonographic cabinets, a furniture business in Port Washington, Wisconsin, decided to start a label. It became one of the pioneering labels and recorded some of the nation's greatest musicians like Ma Rainey, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Charley Patton. But the caliber of Paramount's talent was not matched by the studio. Most of their employees were poorly trained and were instructed to focus on efficiency, to create a cheap product that wouldn't stand the test of time. Therefore, and as I'm sure you'll immediately hear, the wax cut by Paramount has truly abysmal sound quality. But often the records you hear tonight, plagued by intense surface noise and distortion, represent the only window we have into America's most talented blues musicians, as they pioneered this new mode of reaching their audience. Up first, we have a track from Ida Cox, who recorded 78 songs in her six-year contract with Paramount that she signed in 1923. Here's "Tonite's Blues."