Columbia Records
Columbia Records is an American record label owned by Sony Music Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony Music Group, an American subsidiary of multinational conglomerate Sony. Founded on January 15, 1889, Columbia is the oldest surviving brand name in the recorded sound business, and the second major company to produce records. It is one of Sony Music's four flagship record labels, along with Epic Records, former longtime rival RCA Records, and Arista Records. RCA and Arista were originally owned by BMG until Sony's acquisition at the end of their merger in 2008.
History
Beginnings (1888–1929)
The Columbia Phonograph Company was founded on January 15, 1889, by stenographer, lawyer, and New Jersey native Edward D. Easton and a group of investors. It derived its name from the District of Columbia, where it was headquartered. At first, it had a local monopoly on sales and service of Edison phonographs and phonograph cylinders in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Delaware. As was the custom of some of the regional phonograph companies, Columbia produced many commercial cylinder recordings of its own, and its catalog of musical records in 1891 was 10 pages.Columbia's ties to Edison were severed in 1894 with the North American Phonograph Company's breakup. Thereafter, it sold only records and phonographs of its own manufacture. In 1902, Columbia introduced the "XP" record, a molded brown wax record, to use up old stock. Columbia introduced black wax records in 1903. According to one source, they continued to mold brown waxes until 1904. The molded brown waxes may have been sold to Sears for distribution.
Columbia began selling disc records, invented and patented by Victor Talking Machine Company's Emile Berliner, and phonographs in addition to the cylinder system in 1901, preceded only by their "Toy Graphophone" of 1899, which used small, vertically cut records. For a decade, Columbia competed with both the Edison Phonograph Company cylinders and Victor Talking Machine Company disc records as one of the top three names in American sound recording.
In 1903, to add prestige to its early catalog of artists, Columbia contracted several prominent singers from the Metropolitan Opera in New York to make a highly touted series of Grand Opera Records. These stars included Marcella Sembrich, Lillian Nordica, Antonio Scotti, and Edouard de Reszke, but the technical standard of Columbia's Grand Opera series was not considered to be as high as the results achieved with opera singers during the pre–World War I period by Victor, Edison, England's His Master's Voice or Italy's Fonotipia Records. After an abortive attempt in 1904 to manufacture discs with the recording grooves stamped into both sides of each disc—not just one—in 1908 Columbia commenced successful mass production of what they called their "Double-Faced" discs, the 10-inch variety initially selling for 65 cents each. Columbia also introduced the internal-horn "Grafonola" to compete with the extremely popular "Victrola" introduced by the rival Victor Talking Machine Company in 1906.
During this era, Columbia began to use the "Magic Notes" logo—a pair of sixteenth notes in a circle—both in the United States and overseas.
In 1908, Columbia ceased the recording and manufacturing of wax cylinder records after arranging to issue celluloid cylinder records made by the Indestructible Record Company of Albany, New York, as "Columbia Indestructible Records". In July 1912, Columbia decided to concentrate exclusively on disc records and ended production of cylinder phonographs, although Indestructible cylinders continued to be sold under the Columbia label for a few more years.
Columbia was split into two companies, one to make records and one to make players. Columbia Phonograph relocated to Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Edward Easton went with it. Eventually it was renamed the Dictaphone Corporation.
Columbia Phonograph Company ownership (1925–1931)
In late 1922, Columbia entered receivership.The company was bought by its UK subsidiary, the Columbia Graphophone Company, in 1925 and the label, record numbering system, and recording process changed. On February 25, 1925, Columbia began recording with the electric recording process licensed from Western Electric. "Viva-tonal" records set a benchmark in tone and clarity unequaled on commercial discs during the 78-rpm era. The first electrical recordings were made by Art Gillham, the "Whispering Pianist". In a secret agreement with Victor, electrical technology was kept secret to avoid hurting sales of acoustic records.
Louis Sterling, managing director of the Columbia Graphophone Company, had been the moving force behind bringing Western Electric's recording process, and the British takeover. Originally from New York, Sterling became Chairman of Columbia NY from 1925 until 1931, and oversaw stability and success.
In 1926, Columbia acquired Okeh Records and its growing stable of jazz and blues artists, including Louis Armstrong and Clarence Williams. Columbia had already built a catalog of blues and jazz artists, including Bessie Smith in their 14000-D Race series. Columbia also had a successful "Hillbilly" series with Dan Hornsby among others. By 1927, the sweet jazz bandleader Guy Lombardo also joined Columbia and recorded forty five 78 rpm's by 1931. In 1928, Paul Whiteman, the nation's most popular orchestra leader, left Victor to record for Columbia. During the same year, Columbia executive Frank Buckley Walker pioneered some of the first country music or "hillbilly" genre recordings with the Johnson City sessions in Tennessee, including artists such as Clarence Horton Greene and "Fiddlin'" Charlie Bowman. He followed that with a return to Tennessee the next year, and recording sessions in other cities of the South. The Two Black Crows 1926 recording "The Early Bird Catches the Worm" sold 2.5 million copies.
In 1929, Ben Selvin became house bandleader and A. & R. director. Other favorites in the Viva-tonal era included Ruth Etting, Paul Whiteman, Fletcher Henderson, Ipana Troubadours, and Ted Lewis. Columbia used acoustic recording for "budget label" pop product well into 1929 on the labels Harmony, Velvet Tone, and Diva. When Edison Records folded, Columbia was the oldest surviving record label.
Columbia ownership separation (1931–1936)
The repercussions of the stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent Great Depression led to the near collapse of the entire recording industry and, in March 1931, J.P Morgan, the major shareholder, steered the Columbia Graphophone Company into a merger with the Gramophone Company to form Electric and Musical Industries Ltd. Since the Gramophone Company was now a wholly owned subsidiary of Victor, and Columbia in America was a subsidiary of UK Columbia, Victor now technically owned its largest rival in the US. To avoid antitrust legislation, EMI had to sell off its US Columbia operation, which continued to release pressings of matrices made in the UK.In December, 1931, the U.S. Columbia Phonograph Company, Inc. was acquired by the Grigsby-Grunow Company, the manufacturers of Majestic radios and refrigerators. When Grigsby-Grunow declared bankruptcy in November 1933, Columbia was placed in receivership, and in June 1934, the company was sold to Sacro Enterprises Inc. for $70,000. Sacro was incorporated a few days before the sale in New York. Public documents do not contain any names. Many suspect that it was a shell corporation set up by Consolidated Films Industries, Inc. to hold the Columbia stock, while its subsidiary, American Record Corporation, operated the label. This assumption grew out of the ease which CFI later exhibited in selling Columbia in 1938.
On December 3, 1931, CFI made a deal with Warner Brothers Pictures, Inc. to lease Brunswick Record Corporation, which included the trademarks and masters of the Brunswick, Vocalion, and Melotone labels to ARC. WB would receive a portion of the sales of its catalogues, while ARC was free to use the labels for new recordings. Brunswick immediately became the premium $.75 label, Melotone would release new hillbilly and other $.35 dime-store discounted discs, and Vocalion, while re-releasing prior ARC records, would also be the blues-R&B label, and the exclusive outlet for Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, a mid-1930s Western Swing band which drew 10,000+ customers nightly to dance. Columbia was added in mid-1932, relegated to slower sellers such as the Hawaiian music of Andy Iona, the Irving Mills stable of artists and songs, and the still unknown Benny Goodman. It tried a marketing ploy, the Columbia "Royal Blue Record", a blue laminated product with matching label. Royal Blue issues, made from late 1932 through 1935, are particularly popular with collectors for their rarity and musical interest. The Columbia plant in Oakland, California, did Columbia's pressings for sale west of the Rockies and continued using the Royal Blue material for these until about mid-1936.
As southern gospel developed, Columbia had astutely sought to record the artists associated with the emerging genre; for example, Columbia was the only company to record Charles Davis Tillman. Most fortuitously for Columbia in its Depression Era financial woes, in 1936 the company entered into an exclusive recording contract with the Chuck Wagon Gang, a hugely successful relationship which continued into the 1970s. A signature group of southern gospel, the Chuck Wagon Gang became Columbia's bestsellers with at least 37 million records, many of them through the aegis of the Mull Singing Convention of the Air sponsored on radio by southern gospel broadcaster J. Bazzel Mull.
In 1935, Herbert M. Greenspon, an 18-year-old shipping clerk, led a committee to organize the first trade union shop at the main manufacturing factory in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Elected as president of the Congress of Industrial Unions local, Greenspon negotiated the first contract between factory workers and Columbia management. In a career with Columbia that lasted 30 years, Greenspon retired after achieving the position of executive vice president of the company. Columbia also hired talent scout, music writer, producer, and impresario John Hammond in 1937. Alongside his significance as a discoverer, promoter, and producer of jazz, blues, and folk artists during the swing music era, Hammond had already been of great help to Columbia in 1932–33. Through his involvement in the UK music paper Melody Maker, Hammond had arranged for the struggling US Columbia label to provide recordings for the UK Columbia label, mostly using the specially created Columbia W-265000 matrix series. Hammond recorded Fletcher Henderson, Benny Carter, Joe Venuti, Roger Wolfe Kahn and other jazz performers during a time when the economy was bad enough that many of them would not have had the opportunity to enter a studio and play real jazz. Hammond's work for Columbia was interrupted by his service during World War II, and he had less involvement with the music scene during the bebop era, but when he returned to work as a talent scout for Columbia in the 1950s, his career proved to be of incalculable historical and cultural importance – the list of superstar artists he would discover and sign to Columbia over the course of his career included Charlie Christian, Count Basie, Teddy Wilson, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Ray Vaughan, and in the early 1960s Hammond would also exert an enormous cultural effect on the emerging rock music scene thanks to his championing of reissue LPs of the music of blues artists Robert Johnson and Bessie Smith.
By 1937–38, the record business in America was finally recovering from the near-death blow of the Great Depression, at least for RCA Victor and Decca, but privately, there were doubts about the survival of ARC. In a 1941 court case brought by unhappy shareholders of Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc., Edward Wallerstein, a high executive with RCA Victor from 1932 thru 1938, was asked to comment on ARC. "The chief value was that the record industry had come back tremendously, especially in the case of two other record companies; and the American Record Company, with all its facilities, had not, so far as I could learn, increased its business in any degree at all in the previous six years."