From:   "Dik de Heer" 
Date:  Tue Mar 12, 2002  1:18 am
Subject:  Born To Be With You : Leonard Chess
 
LEONARD CHESS

Born Lejzor Shmuel Czyz, 12 March 1917, Motele, Poland
Died 16 October 1969, Chicago, Illinois

Leonard Chess and his younger brother Phil (born Fiszel Czyz, 1921)
were Jewish immigrants from Poland who settled in Chicago in 1928.
They worked their way into the liquor business and by the 1940s they
owned several taverns on Chicago's predominantly black South Side,
venues like The Macomba which attracted jazz musicians and jump
blues bands. Noting the lack of recording facilities for the artists booked
into his clubs, Leonard bought into Evelyn Aron's Aristocrat label in 1947.
The success of Muddy Waters drew a host of significant bluesmen to the
label (Little Walter, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon, Willie Mabon, Lowell
Fulson, Elmore James and many others), which changed its name to
Chess in 1950. The Checker subsidiary was added in 1953, Argo in
1956. The Chess brothers were first of all businessmen, who knew
very little about music, but had a good ear for what would sell.
Chess's greatest years were the mid-fifties, when the R&B charts were
dominated by Muddy, Wolf, Walter, Willie Mabon, the Moonglows, etc.
Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Dale Hawkins crossed over to the pop
charts and made the label world famous. By the late fifties Chess had
dropped blues acts except for the biggest and entered the sixties with
Etta James, Clarence "Frogman" Henry, Sugarpie DeSanto, Koko Taylor,
Fontella Bass and others. In 1963 Leonard bought the radio station WVON
in Chicago (and turned it into a hugely succesful operation) and in 1968
WFOX in Milwaukee, which was renamed WNOV. Shortly before Leonard's
death in 1969, Chess Records was sold to GRT, USA's second-biggest
tape company. MCA Records acquired the entire Chess catalogue in 1985,
and by 1986, an organized and increasingly ambitious reissue program
began. In October 1999 the old Chess studio at 2120 South Michigan was
given a special landmark status as part of the Clinton Administration's
"Save America's Treasures" program.
The company's influence on rock 'n' roll and the English beat boom was
huge ; it's almost impossible to imagine either landscape without the
contributions of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.

Further reading: Nadine Cohodas, Spinning Blues Into Gold : Chess
Records, the Label that Launched the Blues. London : Aurum Press,
2001 (US edition St. Martin's Press, 2000). Highly recommended.
Michel Ruppli, The Chess Labels : A Discography. Westport, CT :
Greenwood Press, 1983. 2 vols.
Interesting website: http://www.bsnpubs.com/chess/chesscheck.html