Trumpet Records

Trumpet Records became the first record company in Mississippi to achieve national stature through distribution, sales, radio airplay, and promotion. Willard and Lillian McMurry launched the label from their retail store, the Record Mart, at 309 North Farish Street in 1950 and later turned the back room into a recording studio. Furniture dealers by trade, they had entered the record business after buying a hardware store at this site in 1949 and acquiring its stock of blues and rhythm and blues 78 rpm discs, then discovering a ready market for blues and gospel records on Farish Street, a center of Jackson’s African American music and commerce. The Record Mart also served as headquarters for Diamond Record Company, Trumpet Records, Globe Music, and Globe Records. On April 3, 1950, the McMurrys took the St. Andrews Gospelaires to local radio station WRBC for Trumpet’s first recording session. Over the next three years, Trumpet used sixteen studios in Jackson and elsewhere before Lillian McMurry began in-house recording, first at the McMurrys’ State Furniture Company at 211 South State Street and then at Diamond Studio in this building. The first releases by Mississippi blues figures Sonny Boy Williamson No. 2, Elmore James, and Willie Love appeared on Trumpet in 1951. The label’s primary artist was Sonny Boy Williamson, Rice Miller, who had eleven records issued between 1951 and 1955, the label’s final year, while the McMurrys continued recording country artists for their Globe label until 1956. Elmo James’s “Dust My Broom” was the only Trumpet record to reach Billboard’s national rhythm and blues charts, in April 1952, though records by Williamson and Willie Love also reached regional charts as far away as California and Colorado. Other Trumpet artists included Jerry McCain, Big Joe Williams, Tiny Kennedy, Luther Huff, Arthur Crudup, Clayton Love, Wally Mercer, Sherman Johnson, the Southern Sons Quartette, the Blue Jay Gospel Singers, Lucky Joe Almond, and Jimmy Swan. Lillian McMurry, the creative force behind the company, became known for fairness and meticulous accounting, and for decades after the last Trumpet release she managed the company’s musical rights, pursued legal action when needed over reissues and recordings, and paid royalties to original artists, songwriters, and their heirs. She was elected to the Blues Foundation’s Blues Hall of Fame in 1998 and died on March 18, 1999; Willard McMurry, who supported their business ventures, died on June 7, 1996.

Jackson, Mississippi · United States