Columbia Records

=== Columbia ownership separation (1931–1936) ===

The repercussions of the stock market [[Crash of 1929]] led to huge losses in the recording industry and, in March 1931, J.P Morgan, the major shareholder, steered the Columbia Graphophone Company (along with [[Odeon records]] and [[Parlophone]], which it had owned since 1926) into a merger with the [[Gramophone Company]] ( ("His Master's Voice") to form Electric and Musical Industries Ltd ([[EMI]]).<ref name=Brooks_Early_30s >{{citation |title=Columbia Corporate History: Market Crash, 1929, and the Early 1930s |series=Columbia Master Book Discography, Volume I |editor-last=Brooks |editor-first=Tim |edition=Online |publisher=Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR) |url=https://adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/resources/detail/115}} ''See also'' [https://adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/resources/detail/131 Notes section].</ref><ref>{{cite journal |title=Sir Louis Sterling and his library |last=Walworth |first=Julia |journal=Jewish Historical Studies |volume=40 |year=2005 |page=161 |publisher=Jewish Historical Society of England |jstor=24027031}}</ref><ref name="news.bbc.co.uk">{{cite news |url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/616485.stm |title=EMI: A Brief History |work=BBC News |access-date=15 January 2009 | date=24 January 2000}}</ref> Since the Gramophone Company (HMV) was 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.<ref name=Brooks_Early_30s /> To avoid [[antitrust]] legislation, EMI had to sell off its US Columbia operation, which continued to release pressings of matrices made in the UK.<ref name=Brooks_Early_30s />

In December, 1931, the U.S. Columbia Phonograph Company, Inc. was acquired by the [[Majestic Radios#Grigsby-Grunow years (1927-1934)|Grigsby-Grunow Company]], the manufacturers of Majestic radios and refrigerators. When Grigsby-Grunow was declared bankrupt in November 1933, Columbia was placed in receivership, and in June 1934, the company was sold<ref name=blyn>{{cite news|title=Grigsby Radio Holdings Sold|newspaper=[[Brooklyn Daily Eagle]]|date=June 17, 1936|url=https://www.newspapers.com/clip/63413337/brooklyn-daily-eagle-ap-6171936/|agency=[[Associated Press]]|page=24|via=[[Newspapers.com]]}}{{open access}}</ref> to Sacro Enterprises Inc. ("Sacro") 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. ("CFI") to hold the Columbia stock, while its subsidiary, [[American Record Corporation]] ("ARC"), operated the label. This assumption grew out of the ease which CFI later exhibited in selling Columbia in 1938.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Brooks |first=Tim |date=2013-03-22 |title=360 Sound: The Columbia Records Story. Columbia Records: Pioneer in Recorded Sound: America's Oldest Record Company, 1886 to the Present |url=https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&sw=w&issn=21514402&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA335188716&sid=googleScholar&linkaccess=abs |journal=ARSC Journal |volume=44 |issue=1 |department=Book Reviews |pages=133}}</ref>

On December 3, 1931, CFI made a deal with [[Warner Brothers Pictures|Warner Brothers Pictures, Inc.]] ("WB") to lease [[Brunswick Records|Brunswick Record Corporation]], which included the trademarks and masters of the Brunswick, [[Vocalion Records|Vocalion]], and [[Melotone Records (US)|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|Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys]], a phenomenal 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 brilliant 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&nbsp;million records,<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.rcenter.org/Home/News/Concerts/ChuckWagonGang.asp |title=Solid Gospel series brings Chuck Wagon Gang to Renaissance Center. |access-date=November 8, 2016 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120810135439/http://www.rcenter.org/Home/News/Concerts/ChuckWagonGang.asp |archive-date=August 10, 2012}}</ref> many of them through the aegis of the ''Mull Singing Convention of the Air'' sponsored on radio (and later television) by southern gospel broadcaster [[J. Bazzel Mull]] (1914–2006).

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 (CIO) 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 (a handful of these in this special series were issued in the US). 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 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 ARC.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Wilentz |first=Sean |title=360 Sound the Columbia Records Story |publisher=Chronicle Books |year=2012 |isbn=9781452107561 |location=New York |pages=90–95}}</ref> In a 1941 court case brought by unhappy shareholders of [[Columbia Broadcasting System|Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc.]] ("CBS"), Edward Wallerstein, an executive with RCA 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."<ref name=NYSC/>