Chess Records

Leonard and Phil Chess were Polish-Jewish immigrants who ran clubs on Chicago’s South Side before they moved into records, buying into Aristocrat in the late 1940s and renaming it Chess in 1950. Their timing and their city were everything: Black musicians from the Mississippi Delta were arriving in Chicago, plugging acoustic blues into amplifiers, and Chess put it on wax. Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson II, and the songwriter-bassist Willie Dixon made the label the home of electric Chicago blues. Then Chuck Berry walked in in 1955 with “Maybellene,” Bo Diddley with his namesake beat, and Chess was no longer just a blues label — it was recording the raw material of rock and roll. The Rolling Stones took their name from a Muddy Waters title and made a pilgrimage to the Chess studio at 2120 South Michigan Avenue in 1964.

The label did not go bankrupt; it was sold and then dissolved. Leonard Chess sold Chess to the General Recorded Tape company (GRT) in 1969 and died of a heart attack that October, at 52. Without the brothers, the label lost its ear and its roster. GRT moved operations, the hits stopped, and Chess ceased to function as a working label by 1975. The recordings survived and kept earning — the catalog passed through MCA and now sits inside Universal Music’s Geffen/MCA lineage, reissued and licensed for decades. But the catalog being owned is not the label being alive. Chess as a going concern, the Chicago operation that found the artists and cut the records, ended in the mid-1970s. The studio building is now Willie Dixon’s Blues Heaven Foundation, a museum — which is the honest status of the thing.