You actually founded Delmark Records in St. Louis, not in Chicago, can you tell me how that came about, how long you were in St. Louis, and why you made the move to Chicago?
I went to university in St. Louis to study cinematography. My parents didn't want me going to school in one of the big cities like New York or Chicago because they didn't want me to be distracted from my studies by music. Unfortunately, for them, there were black jazz clubs all around the university, oh I don't know maybe six or seven. By the time I was in second year I was selling old jazz records out of my dorm room that I had picked up in second hand stores around the city. I also joined the St, Louis Jazz club, and they used to allow me to sell my records at their meetings. But I needed more space, so a guy name Ron Fister and I opened a store just a couple blocks from campus.
We were still selling mainly records that I would pick up of older recordings, you know buying up stocks from all over the place, but I also started doing some recording at the time, we did five ten inch records, and after they stopped making them I recorded four and a half twelve inch records before I moved to Chicago.
A half?
Yeah I had started recording Big Joe Williams in St. Louis but didn't finish it until I was in Chicago.
How did the move to Chicago come about?
Well, Ron and I had split up. He wanted to start selling pop music and I wanted to keep selling the jazz and blues. So, we had each opened up our own stores by the late fifties. The owner of Paramount records had decided that he wanted to get out of the business and offered to sell me his catalogue. He also told me I should come out to Chicago, that's where they were based, and he'd set me up as well. So in 1959 I came to Chicago and with his help I took over Seymour's Jazz Mart - which had been owned by the songwriter and trumpet player Seymour Schwartz..
I had two small trailers of records that I hauled over with me, but there wasn't really much stock in Seymour's so, just the fixtures and a cash register really.
What about Paramount Records?
Oh, I never ended up buying Paramount because he had made a deal with Riverside Records that had given them the rights to most of the stock - so there wasn't actually much available. Anyway, I was still buying up master tapes from earlier recordings from companies that had gone out of, or that were going out of, business. We're talking about stuff from the twenties all the way up through the war years [World War Two] and the late forties.
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