Port Washington played a historic role in producing and distributing some of America’s greatest blues and gospel music in the 1920s and 1930s. Paramount Records, founded there in 1917, featured many iconic blues artists, including Charley Patton, Son House, and Skip James, while the local F.W. Boerner Company shipped records by mail order to buyers around the country, especially in the Deep South. Paramount, an arm of New York Recording Laboratories incorporated by Wisconsin Chair Company founder Fred Dennett in 1917, earned Port Washington a lasting place in African-American music even though the town had no black residents during the blues recording era. Wisconsin Chair Company, founded by Dennett in 1888, entered the record business through making wooden phonograph cabinets, and the Paramount logo was used for both phonographs and records. After early pop, vaudeville, and ethnic releases brought minimal returns, the label’s 1922 race series aimed at African-American audiences, featuring Alberta Hunter and others, helped launch its success. Working with black producer J. Mayo Williams in Chicago and record dealers who scouted talent, Paramount introduced many leading blues artists of the 1920s, including Ida Cox, Ma Rainey, Papa Charlie Jackson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Blind Blake. Recording sessions were first held in New York studios and Chicago before New York Recording Laboratories opened a studio in the Wisconsin Chair Company factory in Grafton in 1929, while the business headquarters of Wisconsin Chair Company, New York Recording Laboratories, Paramount, and related labels remained in Port Washington. From 1929 to 1932, many Mississippi blues artists led by Charley Patton recorded in Grafton, where the records were also pressed, including Son House, Skip James, 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 there before Paramount closed in 1932. Another Paramount artist from Mississippi, Henry Townsend, became a central figure in the St. Louis blues scene. Because many of these artists recorded after the Great Depression forced severe cutbacks, fewer records were pressed, much remaining stock was later scrapped or recycled, and Paramount blues releases from the 1930s became some of the rarest collectors’ items. The label was later revived as a collector-oriented reissue company by Milwaukee chemist and jazz enthusiast John Steiner.