The Record Men: Chess Records and the birth of rock and roll Rich Cohen Profile, 220pp, £11.99 ISBN 1861977662

Rock'n'roll was born from an unholy union between love and theft. The phrase itself is usually ascribed to the white 1950s disc jockey Alan Freed, but in fact it had been used by black artists since the 1920s. From its linguistic origins to its most successful exponent, rock'n'roll is a story written in black and white. Black artists forged their craft in a crucible of injustice, poverty and suffering, and white bosses were only too happy to profit from their pain. The blues singer who signed with a white label boss was arguably just updating the mythic contract that Robert Johnson entered into at the Clarksdale crossroads of the Mississippi Delta: selling one's soul to the devil in exchange for talent and success - only in this case, the devil came not with horns, but with a recording contract.

Who were these alleged devils? There was Sam Phillips, founder of Sun Records, who first recorded a teenage truck driver called Elvis Presley; Syd Nathan, founder of King Records, which signed James Brown; Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records, which was responsible for giving the world Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Bobby Darin; and then there was Leonard Chess, a Polish immigrant who established Chess Records, a label whose roster included Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry. By signing, managing and producing these artists, Leonard Chess helped create what we now call rock'n'roll. And not only that. As Rich Cohen argues in his superb book, Chess Records became "one of the great engines of American life, a creator of teen culture, a presser of race records that crossed into the mainstream". Before Motown, it was Chess that was the sound of young America.

Born Lejzor Czyz, Chess was a Polish Jew who landed as a 12-year-old on Ellis Island with his brother to join their father in Chicago. The brothers worked in the liquor trade and, by the 1940s, owned several bars in Chicago. Among their establishments was the Macomba Lounge, a nightclub which featured blues singers who had left the American South to move to Chicago. Realising that these performers' music was not being recorded properly, the brothers decided to start recording the acts themselves.

The Chess brothers became, in Cohen's words, "the first of a legion of white men who would cross the racial divide in search of riches, adventure and authenticity". Why did they do it? For money, certainly - yet Cohen argues that it was about more than just that. Chess, he suggests, was like the Jews who moved to Hollywood, who "put their faith in progress because what did they have to be nostalgic about".

Leonard Chess could not spot a song, but he could spot something just as valuable: a market. In artists such as Muddy Waters he saw a chance to make money, and the artists, while complaining about being ripped off, generally agreed that it was better to be ripped off by him than by anyone else. Chess, Rich Cohen writes, "was like one of those no-frills old cars that backfires and belches but it gets you there".

Chess Records prospered while the major labels remained uninterested, but when a young singer/guitarist named Chuck Berry had a Top 40 hit for the label with "Maybellene" in 1955, the song's success proved the beginning of the end for the independent record labels. The big bosses realised that there was money to be made from rock'n'roll. As the civil rights movement gained momentum, white record men were accused of exploiting their black artists. The historic link between black people and Jews, from which both groups had profited, began to disintegrate.

Chess, who had donated to black charities (explaining that "I made my money on the Negro and now I want to spend it on him"), was a man out of time. He sold his record label in 1968, the year Martin Luther King was assassinated, and moved into owning radio stations in 1969. He died of a heart attack that same year.

In The Record Men, Rich Cohen displays a deep passion for the music and a profound empathy for his subject; he also writes with flair. The book is fascinating not just because of the life at its centre, but because it underscores the debt that both the blues and rock'n'roll owe to Jews such as Leonard Chess. This debt has been acknowledged by a subsequent generation of artists, including Bob Dylan, whose most recent album was a collection of blues-inspired songs entitled . . . Love and Theft.

Sarfraz Manzoor is a writer and documentary film-maker

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website