Blues music, created by African Americans in the South more than a century ago, is so powerful, it can make you feel like it’s raining ashes; or cause a commotion in the loins. Not the kind of music that you might think would have any connection to Grafton, the village of 12,000 people (2.5% Black) in Ozaukee County.

But Grafton has a claim to the blues, albeit brief and distant. Even if it’s not widely appreciated locally, Grafton’s connection to music history is singular, given how seminal blues is to many types of popular music, including country and rock ’n’ roll. 

Without a chair manufacturer deciding to record Black musicians on what were known as “race records,” some portions of the blues canon could have been lost.

Paramount Records, owned by Grafton’s Wisconsin Chair Co., opened in 1917. The company’s founders “arrived at the scheme of producing records as a means of driving sales of the expensive phonograph cabinets they had recently begun manufacturing,” according to the book, The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records: A Great Migration Story, 1917–1932.

Blues Clues 

IF YOU’RE thinking about a visit to Grafton to immerse yourself in its blues legacy, you might wonder what there is to see. Not a lot, frankly – Paramount’s recording studio was razed in 1938. But there is Paramount Plaza and its half-mile walking tour (1304 12th Ave.) in the downtown. The plaza features a fountain and Walk of Fame, a stretch of sidewalk designed to look like a piano keyboard. You can pick up a self-guided tour booklet at the Grafton Library or Chamber of Commerce. Beyond that are occasional celebratory music events, such as the Paramount Music Association’s “Springin’ the Blues,” a festival held April 19-21 at the Ozaukee County Fairgrounds in Cedarburg.

Paramount dabbled in numerous genres of music, including dance, country and classical, but its blues recordings are the ones that have stood the test of time. From 1929 until 1932, Paramount in Grafton produced more than 1,600 recordings by blues legends such as Charley Patton, Son House, Louise Johnson and Blind Joe Reynolds. That amounted to about one-fourth of blues recordings released during those three years. The company, which previously recorded at studios in New York and Chicago, brought musicians from blues meccas to record in Grafton. 

Alex van der Tuuk, scholar and author of Paramount’s Rise and Fall, says that Paramount representatives, given suggestions by locals in places such as Jackson, Mississippi, and Birmingham, Alabama, would offer recording contracts to musicians in those cities and then typically give them money to travel by car or train to Wisconsin. The musicians would stay in Milwaukee while recording, using the interurban train to get to Grafton, then walk a mile and a half to the studio.

The Great Depression brought the demise of Paramount Records, he says. Not until some 70 years later did Grafton resident and musician Angie Mack and others launch efforts to memorialize Paramount in Grafton. 

Mack first heard about Grafton’s blues heritage around 2002. She started a website to digitize information about Paramount’s presence in Grafton. “I thought this information needed to be more well known, so I began a crusade to educate people,” she says. Local officials, she says, “were not really aware of the importance of it.”

Her efforts and the work of others led to the dedication of Paramount Plaza in 2007. It’s a concrete tribute, though Mack admits she wishes a museum or more attention to Paramount were paid in Grafton. “I think there’s still a lot of educating that can be done,” she says.