The program will feature a dynamic conversation between roundtable participants and highlight a profound listening experience as each participant plays a selected song in its entirety and discusses its deeper implications and dimensions.
Roundtable discussion featuring:
Jack White (Third Man Records, Lazaretto)
Greil Marcus (Rolling Stone, The Believer, The History of Rock ‘n Roll in Ten Songs)
Dean Blackwood (Revenant Records)
Scott Blackwood (Revenant Records)
Adia Victoria (Oh Wow Dang Records)
Daphne Brooks (Professor, African American Studies & Theater, Yale University)
Background
Paramount Records was founded on a modest proposition: produce records as cheaply as possible, recording
whatever talent was available. Over its lifetime (1917-1932), the label compiled a dizzying array of performers still unrivaled to this day, spanning early jazz titans (Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller), blues masters (Charley Patton, Skip James), American divas (Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters), gospel, vaudeville, hillbilly, and more. But how did a Wisconsin chair company, run by men with little knowledge of their audience or the music business, build one of the greatest musical rosters ever assembled under one roof? How and why were its fortunes directly linked to the Great Migration, and what is Paramount’s legacy today?
Sponsored by the Yale Department of African American Studies, the Program in American Studies, and the Program in Theater Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale, and Sound Hall.
- See more at: http://afamstudies.yale.edu/event/exploring-rise-and-fall-paramount-reco…