Product Details:

• Format:                    Hardback
• Publication Date:     November 2024
• Price:                       € 30
• Publisher:                 Agram Blues Books

In 1971, Storyville Publications published a groundbreaking discography of the Paramount label’s famous 12000-13000 “Race” series by pioneering researcher and collector Max E. Vreede (1927-1991). It featured
contemporary advertisements on the left-hand pages, while the right-hand pages listed issues (about ten to a page) in numerical order. Long sold-out, the book has become a cherished collector’s item and an indispensable tool for the serious blues and gospel music enthusiast. In the more than fifty years since publication, a great many records that Max had never seen have been discovered, and the time is ripe for a second edition. Like the original, it features relevant advertisements on the left-hand pages, along with other ephemera; advances in editing and printing techniques have enabled their presentation in greatly improved quality.

The series ran from 12001 to 13156, which suggests a total of 1,156 78s, but there were no issues in the sequence 12190 to 12199, while 12790, 13030 and 13040 each appeared in two versions, featuring different artists. The total of 78s is therefore 1,149, if all the records of which we still have no
details were in fact issued. We cannot recover this information from the Paramount ledgers, which did not survive, and can only hope that the missing issues will turn up. The recordings were made in just under eleven years, between ca. May 1921 and 21 February 1932. New York Recording Laboratories, the label’s parent company, had struggled on after the Wall Street Crash, but went out of business in the latter year.
The 1971 edition of this book featured 26 catalogue numbers (2.3%) for which no details at all were known. That has been reduced to just 10 (0.9%) in this edition. The sixteen discs that have been found in the intervening years are: 12269, 12730, 12763, 12776, 12807, 12908, 12999, 13001, 13007, 13011, 13012, 13025, 13026. 13027, 13029 and 13136. Max Vreede knew some details of 112 records (9.7%) which he had not seen, and inevitably some published data were incorrect or incomplete. Sixtyseven of these discs have subsequently been found, and there are now only forty-five (4.0%) with incomplete data. Some details which Max included have been omitted, notably label types, and the date and newspaper of the first advertisement of a release. However, composer credits as they appear on the Paramount 78s have been expanded, to show the composers’ real names in bracketed italics where necessary. This seemed desirable because credits on the labels are often misspelled, abbreviated, or pseudonymous. Where different artist credits or performer names are used for different editions of the same recordings, these are indicated by A1, A2, B1, B2 etc. In such cases, the composer is only named for A1 and B1, and subsequently “idem” is used, in order to avoid double (or more) counting for statistical purposes.

The discography is presented in seven columns, whose content, from left to right, is: issue numbers, artist names, song titles, matrix numbers, takes, control numbers, and composer credits. Regrettably, and for reasons unknown, there are hardly any composer credits on Paramounts 12584 to 12719, which were issued between October 1927 and October 1928. Most artists in the series were African-American, and the vast majority of them were blues and gospel artists. Among the Paramount records not seen in the course of revision are many that were originally issued by Black Swan. If details of the Paramount reissue of a Black Swan original are unknown, I have added the composer credits from Black Swan, and shown the Black Swan matrix or catalogue number in the matrix column.