From WTIU, a 2018 documentary, The Music Makers of Gennett Records. Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Uncle Dave Macon, and Charley Patton were among the musicians who recorded for Gennett in Richmond, Indiana. Here’s a list.
Driving back from the east coast on I-70 one summer, totally beat, we went through all of Ohio without finding a hotel room. Something was going on: the Indy 500? a state fair? both? It was past midnight when we ended up snagging the one available room in Richmond, in the Leland Hotel. I realized that musicians — at least white musicians — might have stayed there in the late 1920s and ’30s when recording for Gennett.
[The Leland now provides housing for older people.]
Tuesday, August 8, 2023
A Gennett Records documentary
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comments: 4
Richmond! I know the area well; both sides of my family migrated to Eastern Indiana from Pennsylvania after it became a state. I was the first to be born outside Indiana and now, only a cousin and an elderly aunt still live there.
For a typical Midwestern town, Richmond strikes be as more enlightened than other Indiana communities. Maybe it had a more Eastern-looking perspective. It's one of the older, more historical settlements since it was on a major road of expansion (National Highway, then US 40 & I-70). You mention Gannett Records, which seems unusual for an area of farming and manufacturing. There is also Earlham College, a Quaker-founded institution.
And in the last 50 years, Amish families have moved to the area because farmland was too expensive in the East. I'm stil touched that, although I moved my Mom to California twelve years earlier, several Amish women who had gotten to know her came to my Mom's funeral in Indiana. They of course came by horse and buggy.
They were a piano company getting in on the record business. There was also Paramount, in Grafton, Wisconsin, which grew out of a chair company. It’s amazing to think of small towns in Indiana and Wisconsin as major locations for blues and jazz history.
We have a friend who went to Earlham — excellent school.
I didn’t know that there was an Amish community in Richmond. Here in downstate Illinois, the Wal-Mart one town over has hitching posts for horses — Amish families take the back roads to get there from twenty-or-so miles away.
Thank you for sharing this. I had always seen Richmond, Indiana on recordings and wondered about it. It's nice to know the story. Time to look through my collection and remember what was recorded there.
Happy to share it!
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