Story of Chess Records is a story of immigrant success

Author Nadine Cohodas tells the story of Leonard and Phil Chess, founders of Chicago's renowned blues record label, in her book "Spinning Blues into Gold: The Chess Brothers and the Legendary Chess Records"

In this story: Immersed in two worlds Source material RELATED SITES

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- The story of Leonard and Phil Chess is a tale of commerce intersecting culture with historic results. It easily could have been no story at all, just the quiet lives of successful South Side immigrant entrepreneurs -- junkmen and liquor store owners.

For the drive that eventually put the oldest of these two Polish Jews in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was aimed solely at money and success, not fame and the founding of a record label synonymous with American blues music.

"If Leonard could have made a million selling brushes, it would have been all right," author Nadine Cohodas said in a recent telephone interview.

As it turned out, Chess and his younger brother, Phil, made a million times some with Chess Records, recording musicians that listeners worldwide recognize as pioneers in electric blues, rhythm and blues, early rock 'n' roll and even jazz. Names like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. Etta James and Fontella Bass. Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. Ahmad Jamal and Ramsey Lewis.

Cohodas set out to tell the story of the Chess brothers and, as such, chronicles an important chapter in the early life of modern American music. Her book, "Spinning Blues into Gold: The Chess Brothers and the Legendary Chess Records," was published in May by St. Martin's Press.

It is a well-reported (and documented) work that punches holes in some of the myths that have outlived Chess Records, though that was not the author's mission.

"The story at one level of Chess Records is the immigrant story of America played out in the music business," Cohodas said.

On another level, the story is the relationship between the white, Jewish Chess brothers and the predominantly black artists they signed and recorded. Some of the artists and others have alleged that the Chess brothers cheated black, uneducated musicians out of royalties. There even have been charges that black musicians were ordered to enter the famous studio at 2120 S. Michigan Ave. by the backstair.

"I was prepared that this was going to be a much uglier story to write than it turned out," Cohodas said. "This is not to say that people didn't have this or that to say about it. I spent a delicious hour on the phone with Etta James and one of the first things she said was, 'Do you know about my house?"'

As Cohodas related it in her book, the elder Chess was concerned about James' drug problems and well-being enough to put the title of her house in California in his name. He made the payments but deducted them from her royalties. A week after Chess died in October 1969, a man showed up at James' house with the deed signed over by Leonard Chess in her name.

Cohodas paints no glossy picture of the Chess operation and Leonard in particular. His language was crude and his motive was business success. What emerges from her research is a portrait of a pragmatist who, upon finding his fortune tied to a different race and culture, immersed himself in two worlds.

One of Cohodas' favorite anecdotes in the book is about the bar mitzvah of Leonard's son, Marshall, in 1955. A cross section of the rhythm and blues recording industry -- white record label owners, producers and disc jockeys and black artists -- was invited to the Chess family synagogue, Agudath Achem.

Cohodas described it this way in the book: "A centuries-old ritual combined with present-day business, the event resembled an R and B convention, Hebrew chants mixed in with blues."

"Not just because I, myself, am Jewish, but the bar mitzvah was very important to me," she said. "To have a socially integrated event in Chicago a year after Brown versus Board of Education was amazing. These men were very comfortable living in the world where they did business."

By the time of the bar mitzvah, Chess Records was a success with a well-known stable of musicians playing a new electric style of blues born in Chicago. There were other labels for R and B and jazz, and a music publishing company.

The Chess brothers were en route to the financial success they sought, first working in their father's junkyard and later operating liquor stores and clubs.

Cohodas relied on as much source material as she could find, augmenting it with interviews and research in the archives of Cashbox and Billboard magazines. Perhaps reflecting her background as a journalist, the book is dispassionate in its chronicling of the Chess story.

Cohodas, the author of two books on race and politics in the South, said she read James' autobiography and was captivated by her description of her relationship with Leonard Chess.

"And, as I thought about my own background, I thought there was a connection there and that this would be time well spent."

Cohodas, 51, was born in Marquette, Michigan, and raised in the Upper Peninsula town of Ishpeming and northern Wisconsin town of Appleton. Her grandparents immigrated from Eastern Europe and her family ran a wholesale produce business.

A graduate of the University of Michigan with a law degree from the University of North Carolina, Cohodas also worked for The News and Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, and for 10 years for Congressional Quarterly magazine in Washington, where she still lives.

The familial parallels are not quite even; the Chess brothers had street sense from on-the-job training, not college. But Cohodas related to the energy created by running a family business.

"It's a wonderful story of entrepreneurship," Cohodas said. "Entrepreneurship that really went across cultural lines. It was an adventure and a very organic thing as it was happening.

"I'm sorry I'm too young to have been there at 2120 S. Michigan Ave., but what a happening place it must have been."

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Spinning Blues Into Gold, by Nadine Cohodas
Chess Records

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