[78-L] Chicago Indie 78 Labels

[Geoffrey Wheeler]

Over the years, record collectors and historians have been building a 
significant body of research and reporting on 78 and LP record labels, 
including some of the more obscure and harder-to-find small independent 
78 “city” labels. In the past several years, we have had books 
published on the Jump label, and just recently, on the Jazz Man label 
by Cary Ginell. Both provide excellent documentation, illustrations, 
ads, and insight regarding labels best known only to serious 
collectors. There are also a growing number of labels that have their 
own web sites on the Internet. One of the best such record sources I 
have encountered is the Red Saunders Research Foundation. Begun in 1997 
thanks to a team of researchers and collectors, it has gradually built 
invaluable research sites on a number of jazz and R&B artists and 78 
labels of the Chicago area in the 1940s and ’50s. Each site is quite 
detailed with history, discographic details, commentary, quotations 
from authoritative sources, and scans of record labels. Some of the 
articles are exhaustive, and far longer than anything comparable that 
has appeared in print.

In some cases, the label scans cover every single side issued by a 
given label. This makes these label sites invaluable for learning about 
artists, label variations, discographic complexities, and how certain 
labels were merged into others. Labels covered include: Aristocrat, 
Blue Lake, Chance, Chess, Checker, Club 51, Drexel, Hy-Tone, Jazz Ltd., 
J.O.B., Life, Mad and M&M, Miracle, Old Swing-Master, Opera, Parrot, 
Ping, Planet and Marvel, Premium, Saturn, Rhumboogie, S D, Session, 
Seymour, Sultan, Sunbeam, Tempo-Tone, Theron, Town & Country, United 
and States labels, Vee-Jay, and Vitacoustic, The “Session” and “S D” 
sites are the ones I consult most often. The S D site details each of 
the reissues and new recordings on the S D label, the Doc Evans 
Dublin’s album, the Paramount “14000” 78 reissue series, and the 
Paramount 10-inch LPs of the 1950s. If you have questions about any of 
these labels, you will most likely find the answers here!