Last year, Jack White's Third Man Records and reissue specialists Revenant Records released The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records Vol. 1, a doozy of a box set that included 800 tracks from the early days of the Wisconsin label that launched the careers of everyone from father of the Delta blues Charley Patton to a pre-bandleader Louis Armstrong. It was housed in a lovingly constructed oak "cabinet of wonder," based on the iconic Victrola VV-50, and took cues from the Arts and Crafts design aesthetic prevalent during the label's beginnings. It included two books, six 180-gram LP records, a thumb drive containing all the music, and all manner of ancillary material. It was the kind of box set that isn't easily matched, let along outmatched.
But that doesn't mean Third Man couldn't try.
It was never a mystery that there would be a second volume. But we weren't expecting it to be so impressive in such different ways. The Rise & Fall Of Paramount Records Volume 2, 1928-1932, which arrives November 18, focuses more narrowly on the label's later years, when the label's "race records" skewed more distinctly toward blues, and the set eschews wood for aluminum.
The design cues, Revenant's Dean Blackwood says, came from a very real shift that had happened in the country. "We didn't want Volume 2 to be a strict bookend to Volume 1," he says. "That's not an honest reflection of the design themes. The ’30s was the beginning of industrial design coming to the fore with its own brand of modernist design; rather than embracing exotica, our version was around this streamlined moderne version of Art Deco. The machine was the source of America's might and standing in the world, our capacity as an industrial power that connected the vast plains of our country and even other nations—that's really where we found our sweet spot."
In particular, the set draws from two distinct but related sources: the hollow-body resophonic guitars that National String Instrument Corp. began manufacturing in the late ’20s, and the RCA Victor Special Model K, the portable electric phonograph John Vassos designed in the early ’30s. Despite the changes, though, Blackwood says the overarching purpose was to give Paramount a treatment on par with the label's role in early American music. "Our guiding question was what would Paramount have done if they gave a shit—which they didn't—and had the money that one of their more well-heeled rival had like RCA Victor had? What would things have looked like?"
Like its predecessor, Volume 2 boasts 800 tracks, six LPs, two books crammed with artist biography and Paramount art, and a hefty USB drive loaded with all the music and more than 90 Paramount ads from the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper from the time. And like its predecessor, it'll cost you. At $400, it's not an impulse buy, but it's also a rare venture that seeks to preserve not just the music of the time, but the feeling. "We have so few homegrown art forms," Blackwood says. "This is one of them, and this is the only label that was really capturing what we sounded like then. Why isn't this housed in museums along with our other arts and letters? This is our attempt to enshrine that permanently in the psyche—that this is one of America's great cultural products that we want to be available in a form that befits its greatness."
