When you got to Chicago how did you go about starting to record - did you just walk up to people in clubs and say - hey I've got a recording studio you want to come a make a record? Or did you already have some connections?

Well I had a couple of things that I had recorded in St. Louis, a Bob Graff record and, of course, the Big Joe Williams disc Piney Woods Blues that I released in 1960, a year after I got there, but yeah, basically I would go up to guys in a bar after hearing them and offer to record them. We would do it for a flat rate with no contract, which was good and bad. They could record with us and do a bunch of songs one week, and the next week they could do the very same material with someone else and they'd be in competition with themselves.

I've done the occasional royalty recording and those are the ones where you can run into problems cause the guy might think you're ripping them off. But you've got to pay for the recording and all the stuff we talked about earlier and that comes out of the same pie. If they received an advance, well it was against the royalties - so right there, that could be a thousand bucks. If a record only sold five hundred or even a thousand copies there might not even be enough to pay for the costs of recording the damn thing let along royalties.

This is the end of part one of my interview with Bob Koester - founder and owner of Delmark records in Chicago. You'll be able to read part two tomorrow