Fall 2022 interns of the University of Florida’s program in Digital Business History
In this new issue of the Inquire Capitalism newsletter, meet the Fall 2022 interns Emily Bally and John Carr.
The Inquire Capitalism Internship program offers two students every semester the opportunity to contribute to the Inquire Capitalism corporate archives database and to learn about digital archives and archiving, digital content creation, digital history, and different digital tools that are key for today’s writing and publishing in history and the Humanities job market.
Emily Bally is a fourth-year History and Business Administration double major minoring in Women’s Studies. She started her internship in Digital Business History in August 2022 and is interested in exploring the history of Gainesville businesses in the 20th century. As a business major, Emily is pursuing a career in merchandising but continues to learn about business history as it relates to her career track. “Completing an internship helped me recognize the importance of business history and how it defines a company, its brand, and its culture. Also, business history lets us study the economic and social living conditions of the past, and we can see how businesses lived through financial crises and apply their strategies to business decisions made today.”
Outside of Inquire Capitalism, Emily is the President of Florida Women in Business at the Warrington College of Business. She looks forward to her first internship in History, especially because it combines her interests in business and history.
John Carr is a fourth-year undergraduate student at the College of Liberal Arts. He is majoring in History, focusing on Europe and America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both in his spare time and through other classes, he enjoys learning about business history as well. His interest in business history prompted him to seek productive opportunities to apply this interest, which led to him finding a class offered by Professor Sean Adams on railroads in American life.
Signing up for the class led him to discover the Inquire Capitalism database and apply for an internship. John is eager to investigate business histories and how they intersect with government regulation or lack thereof. Outside of specific research, John is eager to cultivate various research skills throughout his time interning with Inquire Capitalism. He hopes to use the research methodologies learned through the internship and the writing skill cultivated within and through other history classes to enter a career dealing in archival work or other research-related functions for a company or historical society.
Can the Archives Sing the Blues? Music Collections in the Inquire Capitalism Database
By Aimee Clessi
At least one entry on the Inquire Capitalism database is sure to bring music to the ears of inquisitive historians looking to learn about the blues and its origins in the Mississippi Delta: Universal Music Group (UMG). Founded in 1934 in New York City, UMG currently oversees several subsidiary music labels, including Abbey Road Studios, of Beatle-mania fame, Capitol Music Group, and Def Jam Recordings, as one of the “Big Three” record labels, adjacent Sony Music and Warner Music Group.1
Yet, in a world of platinum hits and chart-topping singles, perhaps one of the most important musical contributions of UMG has been its ownership and curation of the publishing and recording music catalogue of Chess Records. Founded in 1947 as Aristocrat Records, and once referred to as “the Aristocrat of Records,” the label only released 183 songs before being bought out by the Polish American brothers Lejzor Szmuel Czyż and Fiszel Czyż, who renamed themselves and the company. By 1950, Chess Records was successfully marketing the blues under the leadership of the record executive duo–now named Leonard Sam Chess and Philip Chess–in Chicago, “when major record companies were oblivious to–or fearful of–promoting the sounds of the Deep South and black American dance music.”2
During its short life as Aristocrat, Chess signed McKinley A. Morganfield, better known today as the legendary blues singer-songwriter and musician Muddy Waters. Born in 1913 in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, Waters grew up on a plantation outside Clarksdale before moving north in 1943. During the Great Migration, a period of over 60 years, Waters was one of the six million African Americans who left the South to travel to different areas of the country.3 Like the thousands of hard-working black migrants who fled the Jim Crow South before him, Waters took advantage of the north-to-south railroads to move to Chicago.4 He and others sought to “to escape the lack of opportunity, as well as the oppression, exploitation, and injustice that characterized the Jim Crow South,” and was personally motivated by the opportunity to record his tunes and succeed as a musician.5 However, even though Chicago did not “exhibit the open racism of the Arkansas and Mississippi river bottoms,” the heavily segregated city still took a toll on Waters when he arrived.6
Although there was little a market for Waters’ country blues when he first arrived, the “father of modern Chicago blues” made his debut on “Johnson Machine Gun” with the blues pianist and singer Sunnyland Slim for Aristocrat.7 As if to reflect how blues songs originating from the Mississippi Delta would “never directly reference racial segregation, oppression or violence,” but “dwell as a kind of latent content behind the surface meanings that largely revolve around love relations,” Slim lamented on the track, “Yes, I feel mistreated, boy seem like my time ain’t long.”8
As the migration of southern blacks increased after World War II, Waters garnered a music market that eventually came to love not only his style of blues, but also his rivalry with Chester Arthur Burnett, a.k.a. “Howlin’ Wolf,” who arrived in Chicago in 1952.9 The two men kept such a close competition that Wolf filed a grievance with the American Federation of Musicians in 1955–which kept an African American chapter in Chicago–claiming that “Muddy had stiffed him out of some gigs at a local club.”10 But Wolf had “already established his reputation based on his powerful Memphis recordings” by the time his competition amped up with Waters.11 Maybe Hubert Sumlin, a guitarist who played for both the Delta bluesman, described the heated blues battle between Waters and Wolf best:
It was endless because they were the two biggest dudes in Chicago, and they were always arguing and competing about who was number one. I’ll never forget the day we played the Ann Arbor Blues Festival, and Wolf and Muddy sat down and talked and made friends.12
The Mississippi Delta may be home to Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, but it is clear that their rivalry, friendship, and legendary performances will live on within the Inquire Capitalism database. With an eye to business history, the database encourages researchers to further explore their songs and music label, Chess Records, with scholarship and digital histories, in addition to traditional archives. As Chess Records and others ultimately helped bring blues artists like Waters and Wolf to the forefront of American life and culture in the 1940s and 1950s, there is no denying the importance of these records, and their usefulness to scholars hoping to study music and the history of a turbulent, evolving industry.
1. McDonald, “How the Big Four Record Labels Became the Big Three,” The Balance Careers, July 29, 2019, https://www.thebalancecareers.com/big-three-record-labels-2460743.
2. Robert Gordon, Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters (Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown and Company, 2002), 89-90; Jo Kendall, “What Happened When Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf Discovered Psychedelia,” Louder, February 8, 2021, https://www.loudersound.com/features/what-happened-when-muddy-waters-and-howlin-wolf-discovered-psychedelia.
3. Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (Vintage, 2011), 9.
4. Julia Simon, “Predatory Lending, Contract House Sales, and the Blues in Chicago: Eddie Boyd’s ‘Five Long Years’ and Muddy Waters’ ‘You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had,’” The Journal of American Culture 40, no. 2 (2017): 145-147, https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.12711.
5. O’Neal Jay, and Amy van Singel, eds. The Voice of the Blues: Classic Interviews from Living Blues Magazine (Routledge, 2002), 159, 229.
6. Kevin D. Greene, “‘Just a Dream’: Big Bill Broonzy, the Blues, and Chicago’s Black Metropolis,” Journal of Urban History 40, no. 1 (January 1, 2014): 117, https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144213489261.
7. Flowers, “Artist Spotlight: Muddy Waters,” Monk’s Walk Music, October 20, 2017, http://monkswalkmusic.co.uk/2017/10/20/artist-spotlight-muddy-waters/.
8. Julia Simon, “Predatory Lending, Contract House Sales, and the Blues in Chicago: Eddie Boyd’s ‘Five Long Years’ and Muddy Waters’ ‘You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had,’” The Journal of American Culture 40, no. 2 (2017): 148, https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.12711.
9. Tim Quine, “Battle of the Blues: Muddy vs. Wolf,” Rubber City Review, August 21, 2018, https://rubbercityreview.com/2016/08/battle-of-the-blues-muddy-vs-wolf/.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Hubert Sumlin, Interview: Hubert Sumlin Discusses Working with Howlin’ Wolf in 1994 Guitar World Interview, December 5, 2011, https://www.guitarworld.com/gw-archive/interview-hubert-sumlin-discusses-working-howlin-wolf-1994-guitar-world-interview.