Various Artists - Paramount Masters / Various (Box) (CD)

All Music Guide

Paramount Records didn't know it at the time, but they created one of the most valuable catalogues of early blues and jazz music ever assembled. Formed by a furniture company called the Wisconsin Chair Company in the midteens to facilitate sales for their new phonograph cabinets, Paramount Records (along with its subsidiary labels Broadway, Famous and Puritan) sent a young man named Arthur Satherley on the road in the south to explore/exploit the growing "race records" market beginning in 1917. Over the next 15 years, Satherley and the other Paramount Records representatives recorded well over 100 sides featuring blues and jazz artists as wellknown as Charley Patton, Ma Rainey and Meade Lux Lewis and as otherwise unknown as Side Wheel Sally Duffie, whose "Bunker Hill Blues" is a piano blues showcase for a highregister, vibrato heavy vocal of uncertain pitch that sounds almost like a 1920s' equivalent to Bjork. These 100 sides are presented in chronological order, with as much informati...on is as known about each recording. Sound quality varies widely, and of course is at times atrocious, but the historical import and entertainment value for students of early jazz and blues is immense. - Stewart Mason, All Music Guide Read more Less