Stripes and released hi solo album blunder bust last year. He founded the label together with the late roots music pioneer john fahy. Im pleased and some of his recordings turned out were actually pressed by paramount records. Although they were on another label and it just seemed like at every turn paramount sort of reared its head and was sort of irresistable as a force. And so jack and i have long shared a passion for this music. Rose the point here is to give people who may not know the story or may not know the music or to have the Music Together in 1 place. Yeah. Theres plenty of labels like columbia that have been around for a 100 years and they are still around today, that they can, you know, that have muscle an money behind them to be able to expose it in a bigger way, paramount is sort of like, theyre sort of a strange part of the history of record labels in america. But the beautiful part about them is they accidentally in my opinion sort of captured American Culture by wanting to sell record player cabinets. They were a Furniture Company that started as a wisconsin Chair Company. And they fell into this by getting a job from the edison phony Graph Company to make cabinets first. And that is what i thought about it. When dean brought that up, my record paramount label has history and history with furniture as well. So we had a laugh about that. An those kind of similarities started to creep into the idea of how can we put this all together in something bigger to bring attention to all these lost gems and these people who recorded one record or maybe only two records. And lets put something together where there is a massive amount of music. It just the case alone how we were going to do. Look at that case. I said lets do, its at home here on this table, i said it really is at home here. Yeah. Lets do all those fonnograph cases and at that time period coming out of arts and craft, lets start with the coroson oak case to highlight the fact that it was a Furniture Company, they put the badge of the wisconsin Chair Company in there. That was one of the first design components. And we kind of kicked it off from there. What was the Business Model from paramount . As jack said they really, they started out in 1917. They under contract made some fonnograph cabinets for edison because his factory had burned down in orange, new jersey. And they just wanted to sell phono graph cabinets and the records were a Necessary Evil to them. They had no interest in the music or the artses on there. Anybody, any time, any genre, it didnt matter t was religious, secular, blues, gospel, country, hill billy, whatever, if you can sell ten copies lets do it, an on to the next one. They didnt have any knowledge of what was good or bad and they didnt have the money to get the big artist names. Rose think of the name blind lemon jefferson, ma rainy, louis armstrong. Who were unheard of when they were recording for paramount. These were lower grade artists at that time, most of them. They were unknowns. Who maybe some of them went on to record for the bigger labels afterwards. And what happened to them . I mean what was the evolution from paramount to stardom . Well, there was this producer at the time that was the link from the paramount business white executives to the black artists, named mayo williams. And he was their link to getting them to come and record and also to sign the contract which he was apparently really good at. So much so that he got the nick name inq because he could get the ink on the contract. Without him a lot of these artists wouldnt have been discovered and founded. He was finding them in chicago and bringing them up to wisconsin to record. Rose and so this release will capture what paramount was about. For anybody who has heard about it but dont know about it, this is a sense of well give it to you, the paramount experience. Its the first of a, we consider it like a two volume omnibus telling this curious tale it has this classic curious tale aspect to it. I mean paramount didnt, certainly didnt intend to you know to do something important from a document arians or anything like that they merely wanted to move units in the modern parlance, you know. And it just, they almost, they almost, you know, triumphed in spite of themselves. They produced, the records are notorious for sounding terrible, the sound quality is bad. They made they did everything on the cheap. Recording, pressing, they used the cheapest materials to actually make the records. And so you do have to sort of penetrate through this gauze of static to hear these gems. But when we were putting this together, we sort of made this in a way lets do everything paramount didnt have the money to do and didnt have the care to doofthinking how important a cultural thing they were capturing at the time. We said lets put everything into this that they wouldnt have had the know how or the means to do. And putting together like this. Rose this is the way it should have been done. We, gold foil labels and we tried to make the vinyl look as much like burled chestnut as possible. And with the whole set we skipped over the cd and we just did vinyl and this, it is supposed to like like a needle die gram, this is a portable phonograph case, and there has 800 songs and all the advertise testimonies, the beautiful advertisements that they put out. Rose look at this so you can see exactly, you can see here. So that plugs right in. 800 songs which is probably one of the biggest if not the biggest set of music all of one time of this area of American Culture. And i think whats great about that is you can really just sink into this for a long time this is a box you could listen to on the way to work for a couple of days, you could spend months delving into allthis material. Rose does any of the artists particularly speak to you . Oh, well, the number one artist that paramount fell into which is going to be highlighted in the second set of this is Charlie Paton who was basically the great grandfather of all pop music in American Music especially. He just seems like an alien to me. Doesnt seem like someone who could have actually existed. The only known photograph of him doesnt look like a real human being to me. But that is where were getting to. Were laying the groundwork of this is where paramount started, the Furniture Company, what they started to do. And when we get to Charlie Paton it is the crescendo. He is the saviour of this. Rose all right. Well get to that in a moment. Lets look at some images, here is ethyl waters black aad you can see that image there, hopefully. The next image is paramount phonograph images, lets see that, there you go. And then finally they celebrate 60 yearsofthe emancipation proclamation. Uhhuh. Now that may seem like a really, what a wonderful thing they were doing to highlight the emancipation proclamation but i got to think that theyre doing anything they can possibly do to sell records too, to rural families. Black families and sell record players to them. And you know, but heres the beautiful part about all this. Is that these are the first times that people are allowed to speak their own voice, minorities and women are telling their own stories. I think theres a comparison that could be made about early hollywood, black actors were sort of given a character, a stereotypical character and told okay, be this character and say these lines. Thats in film. With none of their own voice. But in this scenario, were going to drop the needle and record. Do your thing. Rose right. What is your thing. And so many of these records came out, even this ethyl waters aad, this is as here girl left in cold vows revenge. Like we dont sort of think of black women being allowed to have revenge and have it being highlighted in the 1920s, like this being a thing that is applauded and used as a selling point. That is a massive amount of freedom that kind of goes against, i mean women were just given the right to vote a couple years before this record was put out. It does have a feel of america at a particular time. And maybe because, and i think paramount was unique among labels of that era just because they, maybe it is because of expediency, their cheapness, just wanting to get to the point. They wanted to get people in the studios, they didnt really have a filter so you really do get this sense of what, much more representative view of what america really sounded like, in all its, you know, multitudes during this time frame. Rose a point of musical history. Did the blues get hijacked by rock n roll . Rock n roll is sort of the blues, you know, a thousand rpm or Something Like that, you know. Rose not 78. A thousand. Thats right. All modern music to me is the blues, and sort of. Rose really, all modern muss sick the blues. I feel that way. I think its that important. The blues hijacked music. And i think it made people not really care. Rose and has been better because of it. I think so because now if you talk to people who are sort of purists or maybe into or chet or chest ral, opera, sheet music, that kind of level of musicianship, people who are composers, the class and respect theyre given, its still to this day hard for them to get the exact same respect if you wrote a song, even the beatles, a song of theirs that is so important culturally to the world is still not given the exact same respect as ludwig beethoven. And i think that is a strange thing still. But this is the people speaking, not someone who has been trained ors with a product i believey, this is the people prodigy, this is the people speaking. And the blues was not only the people speaking, these werent big bands with a trained singer and someone wrote the other song and there was a push button and made it happen. Which are beautiful things is we are dropping the need told record and this is a person from blah blah blah, mississippi, who has one song that we can record right now in five minutes. Go. And thats america right there. In a nutshell. Rose this is boweevil blues, here it is. Bo weevil dont some more yeah boweevil dont chase the blues no more boweevil yeah boweevil everywhere you go. Boweevil. You once said i think that the blues is sort of like the physical pain your brain gives your stomach when someone leaves you and is not coming back. Uhhuh. You felt the blues . I think that what you were saying before when this came, when the blues finally came into existence sort of, no one really knows when it started but it seems like a 20th century phenomenon. When it first came out this is the first time humans are actually singing out loud their own story about their own pain. Instead of somebody else writing a grand piece with 40 people involved this is a single individual. And we need to be able to see women playing their own guitar and accompanying themselves in the 1920s. And just playing by themselves, especially the black male version of the blues at that time, one man, one guitar, his own story, the whole world gets to see it or has the possibility of hearing it. And its so anybody who is feeling any kind of pain which is every Single Person on earth has a chance to relate to this intimately. That story could be your own story and probably is your own story in whatever version it is. Im glad you picked boweevil, because every blues and folkmusic musician and seemed to cover that. Her is really slow, you know, really slowed compared to led bellies. And led belly was able to sell a bigger audience and bring it to almost like a standard like this land is your land in a way. So but still the pain is there for everyone, to like a caption, put it into their own persona. There is another one we have which i think you requested. I want jesus to talk to me. Give me the sense of that song. This is an interesting example i think that paramount would record anything as long as they thought there was a group of people that might like it like those North Carolina ramblers, okay we have the carliners covered this is hill billy music, religious music, christian music, whatever we can get. A lot of the artists that recorded religious songs like i want jesus to talk with me by homer quincey smith, that we should take a listen to, this shows you that this is an evil sounding son. This doesnt sound like some happy religious song that you would sing on sunday. This song sounds evil. By the time he is finished with it has transend mood something incredibly beautiful that i cant even imagine the people in the room that recorded it even knowing what they had just recorded. I think they probably just moved on and saw that as something novel. It is hard to imagine who the intended audience was for this, this kind of anguish cry. We were talking about this yesterday. But my mentor fahy, he thought of songs like this as, he said im not sure if im hearing the serious beating of angels wings or shall you know, the clove and hoove beating out time because it really has that quality where you dont, what did i just listen to, it all i can tell is its sort of a wail, a wailing. So it would be great to have a listen to homer quincey smith. Rose lets hear homer quincey smith. I got jesus in me journey lord i want jesus to walk with me. Rose you said its just evil. I cant imagine a religious person walking into the room and hearing you know grandma listening to this record and saying yeah. Rose because the title is i want jess to us walk with me. I want to talk with he me and by the end hes just wailing and in pain almost at the end. Its just beautiful. It sort of covers 15 Different Things about america, the black side of things, the religious side of things, the Southern Side of things. The capitalism of this company just wanting to sell records if people will buy this and think it is religious music fine, well sell it to them. Fine, doesnt matter. Rose so somebody sees this and says i want some of that, what do they do . Well, we, there has been releases of paramount throughout the decades and there is then there are collectors too who have found they are really hard to find there is only one of these disks in existence people know about. It was just an idea to get together a set that could, you could just dive not entire world and absorb it all so we are, you know, selling these through thirdmans web site and also at Record Stores everywhere. Rose but i mean my understanding is you got all kinds of people that are going to sort of define america. Yeah. I i guess for example third mann records started about five years ago and this year i took off from touring and i wanted to dedicate to archival projects that we could get involve with, this being the biggest one. We also partnered with sun records rereleased all their 45s. I was thinking about sun. And document records out of europe and rereleasing their collections and trying to make this more available. When i was a teenager i had to go look for blues records in vintage bins and there wasnt, you couldnt just easily, readily available get them. You definitely couldnt get them at kmart or whatever. You had to go looking for them. And i want to make it more and more available, more and more a peeling. The design aspect of putting it together is all just a trick. The melodies and songs are a trick. The cover of the album are a trick. The commercials for them are a trick. Its all to get to you go down to the store and get you involved in the story and lure you in my trend burnett who you know said digital sound has dehumanized it and taken away some of of what we hear without telling us. Hes ck in that i think that the downfall in technology in the 80s when digital equipment started to come around really saturated music with really bad feelings and tones. And its theres an analogy about analog versus digital. And analog is this. If you drop a needle or magnet on a tape recorder, and you record you are dragging that pencil across the table. And youre hurting. Digital is this. It doesnt matter how many samples you do per secretary t is still that. There is empty space and i think some people think it psychologically fat agencying which is a whole other story but the idea is these scratches in this stable table. Some people think that is recording sound if i scratch this table it possibly could be recording what we are talking about right now. And so i think when i listen analog recordings and digital recordings sidebyside they dont have any warmth, any romance to them. And theres a lot of to do with mechanics. I think once we get away from mechanics and mechanical thingsing things that turn that we can actually watch and things that are actually recorded and working in a mechanical way, we lose warmth and romance am you can sing about an old phonograph like Robert Johnson but ipod blues, there is nothing romantic about that. Rose you feel the same way about lps, vinyl. Of course. Its the best format that music was ever attached to. Its in there. The music is in there mechanically. You can retrieve it with a needle. You can take a needle and put it in a cup and listen to that music and thats pretty amazing. I dont think it was ever bested by anything else. It may be more portable, no problem with that. I listen to an ipod in my car too, you know, but portability does not mean better sound and better feeling. Rose but it does mean portability and access. Exactly. Rose thats important too. Exactly. And we didnt want to be antitechnology with this thing. How else are you going to deliver 800 tracks to people other than through some sort of digital carrier. Right. Rose so last time were here, you were not a solo artist. Right. Rose tell me about your evolution. As a musician. Rose personal, as a muss ig, you know, i dont get you but once every eight years im getting all i can. I work every single day of my life. Its a privilege to me to be able to think of myself as an artist and think of myself as a creator and i dont take it lightly. Its not an, cus for me to wake up at 2 00 in the afternoon, so every day i create something. And mi always putting them out under different names or different ideas or different people involved, whether im producing or directing or writing or performing it myself. It doesnt matter to me, you know, all my albums could be called, you know, whatever john doe, it doesnt matter what the name is on it. I just wanted to make something that didnt exist before. Sometimes i have fun with the design of how it is werented and how it is put on display or how it is recorded or whatever. But at the all that really matters to me making something that didnt exist. Rose so whats changed. What has changed is my ability to do things that i couldnt do when i was younger. I used to think you kno