Port Washington played a historic role in the production and distribution of some of America’s greatest blues and gospel music in the 1920s and ’30s. Paramount Records, founded there in 1917, featured many iconic blues figures, including Charley Patton, Son House, and Skip James, while the local F.W. Boerner Company’s mail-order business shipped records to buyers around the country, especially in the Deep South. Paramount gave Port Washington a permanent place in African-American music even though the town had no black residents during the blues recording era. Paramount was an arm of New York Recording Laboratories, incorporated by Wisconsin Chair Company founder Fred Dennett in 1917; early recordings were made in New York studios, later sessions were held in Chicago, and in 1929 the company opened a studio in the Wisconsin Chair Company’s Grafton factory, though the business headquarters of Wisconsin Chair Company, New York Recording Laboratories, Paramount, and various labels remained in Port Washington, where the main furniture factory stood. Dennett had founded Wisconsin Chair Company in 1888, and its move into records began with manufacturing wooden phonograph cabinets, with the Paramount logo used for both phonographs and records. Paramount’s earliest records included pop, vaudeville, and ethnic music, but sales remained slight until the label launched a race series for African-American audiences in 1922 featuring Alberta Hunter and others. Working through black producer J. Mayo Williams of Chicago and record dealers who served as talent scouts, Paramount introduced many leading blues artists of the 1920s, including Ida Cox, Ma Rainey, Papa Charlie Jackson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Blind Blake. Its first recordings of Mississippi-born artists were 1927 Chicago sessions by Gus Cannon, recording as Banjo Joe, and Lucille Bogan. From 1929 to 1932, a succession of Mississippi blues artists led by Charley Patton recorded for Paramount in Grafton, where the records were also pressed. Other blues and gospel artists recruited from Mississippi by dealers, chiefly H.C. Speir of Jackson and Ralph Lembo of Itta Bena, or by Paramount’s Art Laibly, included Willie Brown, Rubin Lacy, Tommy Johnson, Ishmon Bracey, Louise Johnson, Henry Simms, Blind Roosevelt Graves, Charley Taylor, the Delta Big Four, and the Mississippi Sheiks, the last blues act to record in Grafton before Paramount closed in 1932. Another Paramount artist, Mississippi native Henry Townsend, became a central figure in the St. Louis blues scene. Because many of these Mississippians recorded only after the Great Depression forced severe cutbacks, fewer records were pressed, and much remaining stock was later scrapped or recycled, making Paramount blues releases from the 1930s among the rarest collectors’ items. The label was later revived as a collector-oriented reissue company by Milwaukee chemist and jazz enthusiast John Steiner.