Introduction: Five Years That Changed American Music
There is a building at 309 North Farish Street in Jackson, Mississippi, that currently stands in severe disrepair — a physical casualty of the decades of economic neglect that have hollowed out what was once the centre of Jackson's African American commercial and cultural life. The building's current state of dilapidation is an insult to its history. Between 1950 and 1956, it housed the Record Mart, the Diamond Record Company, and Trumpet Records — the first record company in Mississippi to achieve national stature, the label that gave the world Elmore James's "Dust My Broom" and Sonny Boy Williamson II's "Eyesight to the Blind," the label that documented the Mississippi Delta blues tradition with a directness and quality that no prior commercial recording operation had achieved.
Trumpet Records existed for only five years. In those five years, it recorded a group of musicians — Williamson, James, Willie Love, Big Joe Williams, Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, Little Milton, Jerry "Boogie" McCain, Joe Willie Wilkins, Tiny Kennedy, and others — whose work constitutes one of the most concentrated and artistically significant bodies of blues documentation in American music history. The label competed directly with the Bihari brothers' Modern Records in the battle for the Delta's musical riches, won a landmark legal victory against them that established the principle that an independent label's artist contracts would be respected, and then closed in 1956 when the economics of the independent label world became untenable.
The woman who created it, ran it, fought for it, and maintained its artistic integrity long after its commercial closure was Lillian McMurry — born Lillian Shedd in Purvis, Mississippi, on December 30, 1921, and dead at seventy-seven in Jackson in March 1999. She was, by the formal recognition of the Blues Foundation's Hall of Fame (where she was inducted in 1998), one of the most important figures in the history of American blues recording. She was also, by the more specific standards of the era in which she operated, one of the most remarkable: a white woman in the segregated Deep South, running a record label that documented African American music with integrity and fairness, refusing to adhere to the musicians union's segregationist requirements, mixing Black and white musicians freely on her sessions, and paying royalties to her artists and their heirs long after the label itself had ceased to operate.
This is the story of Trumpet Records — of the building on Farish Street, the woman who ran it, the musicians she recorded, and the music they made.
The Founding: Lillian McMurry and the Sound That Changed Everything
The story of Trumpet Records begins with a pile of records in the back of a hardware store, and with a moment of sonic revelation that transformed a furniture dealer's wife into one of the most important record producers in American music history.
Lillian Shedd had grown up in poverty in Purvis, Mississippi, during the Depression — a childhood in which her family was too poor to buy schoolbooks, and in which she began working part-time at thirteen to help support the household. The hardship shaped her into someone with a precise practical intelligence and an extraordinary capacity for sustained effort: by her early twenties she was managing a pharmacy in Jackson, working seven days a week. In the early 1940s she moved to Jackson to work at the pharmacy and later as a secretary to the governor, and it was in Jackson that she met Willard McMurry, a furniture store owner, when she visited his shop to sell a piano. They were married in 1945 and settled in Jackson, Willard running the State Furniture Company and Lillian working alongside him.
In 1949, Lillian was helping Willard clear out the hardware store he had purchased at 309 Farish Street, which he was converting into a furniture showroom. Among the hardware store's unclaimed inventory was a stack of 78-rpm phonograph records. The workers clearing the building were playing them, and one of those records stopped Lillian in her tracks: Wynonie Harris's "All She Wants to Do Is Rock." Her response has been recorded in multiple sources and deserves quotation in its own words: "It was the most unusual, sincere and solid sound I'd ever heard. I'd never heard a black record before. I'd never heard anything with such rhythm and freedom."
The sentence is extraordinary on multiple levels. It is a confession of the complete cultural separation that defined white Mississippi life in 1949 — a woman living in a majority-Black state, in a city whose most vibrant cultural and commercial district was African American Farish Street, who had never heard recorded Black music. It is also, in its specific sensory response — "such rhythm and freedom" — a description of what made the music she was hearing exceptional and, to her, transformative.
Lillian's response to the revelation was entirely practical. She convinced Willard not to convert the entire building into a furniture showroom, but to reserve part of it for a record store. The Record Mart at 309 North Farish Street opened in 1950, offering a ready market that Lillian had already identified: Farish Street's African American community had a large appetite for blues and gospel records, and no dedicated retail outlet serving that appetite. Sales were immediate and enthusiastic.
The transition from selling records to making them was rapid but not impulsive. Observing the musicians who came into the Record Mart, attending the shows and gatherings at nearby venues including the Alamo Theatre on Farish Street, and beginning to understand the musical talent that was available in her immediate vicinity, Lillian McMurry recognised that Jackson and the Mississippi Delta contained musicians of extraordinary quality whose music was not being documented by any commercial recording operation. New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles had their own labels and their own proximity to the blues and R&B markets; Mississippi, the heartland of the Delta blues tradition, had nothing. The goal McMurry set for herself — and that she subsequently articulated explicitly — was "to record musicians from the Mississippi Delta that did not have access to recording studios in New York City or Los Angeles."
In 1950, she and Willard incorporated the Diamond Record Company — the parent organisation whose primary imprint would be called Trumpet, a name that Lillian chose "in reference to the archangel Gabriel," an indicator of her deep personal attachment to gospel music alongside the blues. The Globe Music company was established simultaneously as the publishing arm. The corporate structure — separate record company, separate publishing company, separate label imprints — reflected a sophisticated understanding of the music business that was remarkable in someone who had entered the industry only months before.
The first recording session took place on April 3, 1950, when McMurry brought the St. Andrews Gospelaires into WRBC Radio's studio in Jackson for Trumpet's inaugural session. The choice of a gospel group as the label's first artists was entirely consistent with McMurry's own musical preferences and with the commercial realities of the Farish Street market, where gospel and blues shared the same audience. Over the next three years, Trumpet would utilise sixteen different studios in Jackson and other cities before McMurry eventually established her own recording facilities — first in the State Furniture Company building and then in Diamond Studio at the Farish Street address.
The Studios and the Production Approach
The variety of recording facilities that Trumpet used across its brief existence reflects both the practical constraints of working in Mississippi in the early 1950s — where no dedicated commercial recording infrastructure existed — and McMurry's determination to find the best available technical resources for whatever she needed at any given moment. The Wikipedia article confirms the range: "Trumpet artists recorded at studios such as WRBC Radio's studio; Ivan Scott's Radio Service Studio in Jackson; and some historic studios of the day (such as Bill Holford's ACA Studios in Houston; Memphis Record Service with Sam Phillips; RCA Victor Studio in Chicago; and Universal Recording in Chicago)."
The most historically important of these external studios was Ivan Scott's Radio Service Studio in Jackson, where the legendary August 5, 1951 session that produced Elmore James's "Dust My Broom" was recorded. Scott employed the "Sonic Disc process" — a direct-to-disc recording technology that had specific characteristics and limitations. As Marc Ryan documented in his history Trumpet Records: Diamonds on Farish Street: "It had none of the advantages of the still-new tape recorder, and its deficiencies were more apparent the larger the band. The Sonic process did yield recordings with very warm and deep midrange, and on small combo recordings of three or four instruments, it served well." The warm, rich midrange of Trumpet's best recordings — the quality that gives the Sonny Boy Williamson sides and the "Dust My Broom" session their particular sonic character — was partly a product of Scott's direct-to-disc technology.
Bill Holford's ACA Studios in Houston — where portable equipment was available for field recording expeditions — produced some of the Sonny Boy Williamson sides through a specific arrangement: the Discogs documentation of the King Biscuit Time Arhoolie compilation notes that "original 78s recorded on portable equipment by Bill Holford of ACA studios in Houston." Holford would travel to Jackson with his portable setup, record whatever sessions McMurry had arranged, and send the masters back for pressing. This mobile recording model was entirely characteristic of the independent label world of the early 1950s, and the portability of the equipment was actually an aesthetic asset: the directness and naturalness of the resulting recordings owe something to the absence of the elaborate processing that a fully equipped studio might have applied.
McMurry's own role as producer was collaborative rather than directive. She understood that the musicians she was recording had a deep intuitive knowledge of their own music and what it required, and her approach was to create the conditions for that knowledge to express itself — selecting the right combination of musicians, making sure the technical environment was appropriate, and then allowing the performances to develop naturally. The Mississippi Encyclopedia account captures this approach: "She acted as producer on many of the sessions recorded for Trumpet, and hired top musicians including B.B. King, Little Milton Campbell and Joe Willie Wilkins to play on them." The hiring of accomplished session musicians to back the label's principal artists was a consistent feature of the Trumpet approach, giving the recordings a musical quality that transcended what individual artists could have achieved with less accomplished accompaniment.
She was also, notably, a producer who defied the segregationist conventions of Mississippi in 1951 by freely mixing Black and white musicians on her sessions. McMurry later recalled: "There were some adverse reactions of the white people because they couldn't understand why a white lady would be recording black music, even though nearly all the white citizens would go to hear and dance to black bands at a local Club, The Rotisserie. Frankly, at that time, few people had any idea of what making records entailed, and hardly any had ever been in or seen a recording studio, much less knew about producing phonorecords." The practical defiance of segregationist norms that this represented — in Mississippi, in 1951, at the height of the Jim Crow era — was an act of significant personal and professional courage.
Sonny Boy Williamson II: The Label's Star
The Mississippi Blues Trail marker at 309 North Farish Street is precise about Sonny Boy Williamson's centrality to the Trumpet operation: "The primary artist on the Trumpet label was Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller), who had eleven records released between 1951 and 1955, the label's final year of operation." These eleven records — representing the first commercially released documentation of one of the most celebrated and influential blues musicians in American history — are the artistic centrepiece of the Trumpet catalogue.
Rice Miller had been performing as "Sonny Boy Williamson" since 1941, when the King Biscuit Time radio programme on KFFA in Helena, Arkansas, had given him the name (appropriating the identity of the more famous John Lee Williamson of Jackson, Tennessee). By 1951, when McMurry first recorded him, he had been a daily presence on Delta radio and a fixture of the Mississippi Delta music scene for a decade. He was, by any reasonable assessment, the most famous blues musician in the Mississippi Delta — famous in the specific, pre-commercial sense of someone whose music was heard by hundreds of thousands of people every weekday at noon on the radio, but whose music existed, before the Trumpet sessions, only in those broadcasts and in live performances.
The first Williamson session at Trumpet took place on January 5, 1951. The recording was made, as the Big Road Blues account confirms, with the core personnel of the King Biscuit Entertainers: Willie Love on piano, Elmore James and Joe Willie Wilkins on guitars, and Joe Dyson on drums. The combination of these five musicians — all of them deeply experienced in the Delta blues tradition, all of them having played together in various configurations for years — gave the session a quality of ensemble cohesion that would prove impossible to replicate in a studio assembled from scratch.
The songs recorded at the January 1951 session — including the first version of "Eyesight to the Blind" — represented Williamson's performing repertoire at its peak. "Eyesight to the Blind" became one of the most celebrated recordings in the Trumpet catalogue: a slow, modal blues that the Blues Foundation inducted into its Hall of Fame, and that Pete Townshend of the Who selected as the only non-original song on the rock opera Tommy (1969) — a choice that speaks to the song's specific quality of raw, quasi-religious emotional power. The song "presents the narrator's beloved as a miraculous figure — her love giving sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf — in a tradition of sacred hyperbole that connects the blues to its gospel roots," as one analysis describes it.
A further nine Williamson sessions took place at Trumpet between January 1951 and November 1954, producing a total of eleven released records and a substantial body of unissued material. The songs that emerged from these sessions included "Nine Below Zero," "Mighty Long Time," "Pontiac Blues," "309," "Mr. Downchild," "She Brought Life Back to the Dead," "Stop Now Baby," "Too Close Together," "West Memphis Blues," "Come On Back Home," "Stop Crying," "Do It If You Wanna," "Cool Cool Blues," and "I Cross My Heart" — a catalogue of compositions that would become blues standards, recorded by other artists across multiple generations and genres.
The relationship between Williamson and McMurry was one of the most artistically and personally significant in the label's history. Williamson wrote two songs specifically about her: "Pontiac Blues," about her Pontiac car, and "309," named for the Trumpet Records address on Farish Street, in the lyrics of which he gave out her home phone number. The latter gesture — embedding a person's home phone number in a commercially released blues record — was an act of specific, personal tribute that acknowledged the quality of their working relationship and the genuine affection that had developed between them. It was also, in its transgression of the boundaries between the public and private spheres, typically Williamson: unpredictable, personal, and slightly mischievous. McMurry's response when she was eventually elected to the Blues Hall of Fame in 1998 included paying for Sonny Boy's gravestone in Tutwiler, Mississippi — a final act of reciprocal loyalty that completed the circle of their relationship.
The specific musical quality of the Williamson Trumpet recordings has been consistently identified by blues historians as exceptional. His harmonica playing — the complex, rhythmically sophisticated, emotionally direct approach that had been developing since his first radio broadcasts in 1941 — was never more fully documented than in these Jackson sessions. The intimacy of the recording environment, the quality of the accompanying musicians, and McMurry's production philosophy of minimal intervention and maximum capture gave the performances a directness and naturalness that the later Chess recordings, for all their technical polish, did not always achieve.
Elmore James: The Riff That Changed Everything
While Sonny Boy Williamson was the primary artist on Trumpet in terms of the quantity of recordings made and released, it was Elmore James who gave the label its only national chart hit and its most historically significant single recording. "Dust My Broom," credited on the original Trumpet pressing as "Elmo James" (Trumpet 146), reached number nine on the Billboard R&B Best Sellers chart in April 1952 — the only Trumpet record to achieve that distinction and the recording that gave the label its one moment of direct national commercial breakthrough.
The circumstances of the recording have been discussed extensively in previous essays in this series, but certain elements deserve emphasis in the context of a Trumpet Records history. McMurry's own account was that she "secretly" recorded James — a claim that she subsequently walked back when confronted with the evidence of the contract and payment check that James had signed the day before the session. The Wikipedia article on Lillian McMurry states clearly: "Elmore James did not realise that his performance of 'Dust My Broom' was being recorded, and after he found out, he refused to record for McMurry again." The Living Blues documentation more precisely notes that this claim was "proven false when Mrs. McMurry produced the August 4, 1951, contract and check that James signed before the session."
Whatever the full truth of the session's circumstances, the consequences were clear: James made one recording for Trumpet — a single that changed the history of the electric guitar — and then did not record for the label again. The flip side of Trumpet 146 was recorded not by James but by another artist, Bobo Thomas, credited as "Elmo James" to match the A-side artist credit — a practical solution to the problem of having only one marketable side from the session.
The historical significance of "Dust My Broom" in the context of Trumpet Records is twofold: it was the commercial proof that the label could produce recordings with national market penetration, and it was the artistic demonstration that what was happening in Jackson, Mississippi, with these Delta musicians, was something that the American music market — and eventually the world music market — would respond to with passion. James's subsequent career for Meteor, Flair, Fire, and other labels was built entirely on the foundation of the Trumpet recording; without McMurry's session, James might never have been commercially documented at all.
Willie Love: The Third Pillar
Second only to Williamson in artistic and commercial importance among the Trumpet blues artists was Willie Love — the Delta piano player whose recordings for the label constitute one of the most valuable documents of the barrelhouse and boogie-woogie piano tradition in post-war blues. Love's role in the Trumpet story was multiple: he was a session musician on Williamson's recordings, a featured solo artist in his own right, and the central figure in a specific ensemble configuration — Willie Love and His Three Aces — that gave some of the most compelling Trumpet recordings their character.
Willie Love Jr. had been born on November 4, 1906, in Duncan, Mississippi. He had absorbed the piano blues tradition of the Delta through years of playing in juke joints and at the same King Biscuit Time radio broadcasts as Williamson; his musical partnership with Williamson dated from their meeting in Greenville in 1942, and by the time Trumpet began recording them both in 1951, the two men had been playing together for nearly a decade. Love's piano was the sonic foundation of Williamson's recordings — his rolling left-hand bass figures and his right-hand melodic improvisations providing exactly the harmonic and rhythmic context that Williamson's harmonica required.
The three sessions that Love led under his own name for Trumpet — in July 1951, December 1951, and 1953 — produced a body of material of considerable artistic quality. The July 1951 session featured Love on piano and vocals, with guitar accompaniment by Elmore James and Joe Willie Wilkins. The resulting recordings — "Take It Easy Baby," "Little Car Blues," "Everybody's Fishing," "My Own Boogie," "Fallin' Rain" — showed a pianist and singer of genuine originality and deep blues knowledge.
The December 1951 session brought a different personnel configuration: Little Milton on guitar (the young musician whose presence on the Trumpet sessions was one of the earliest documented recordings of what would become a major solo career), T.J. Green on fiddle (an unusual addition that gave certain tracks a slightly country-blues flavour), and Junior Blackman on drums. The resulting tracks — "Vanity Dresser Boogie," "74 Blues," "21 Minutes to Nine," "Shady Lane Blues," "Nelson Street Blues," "V-8 Ford" — were more varied in their approach than the July sides, with Love demonstrating the range of his piano vocabulary across different tempos and moods.
"V-8 Ford" became perhaps the best-known of Love's Trumpet recordings — a vehicle blues in the tradition that ran from Robert Johnson through Sleepy John Estes and into the post-war electric blues, the automobile as an emblem of mobility, freedom, and romantic possibility. Love's rolling piano and his matter-of-fact vocal gave the song the quality of a document rather than a performance — here is a man telling you about his car, his life, his particular corner of the Mississippi Delta, with the directness of someone who knows exactly what he knows and sees no reason to embellish it.
Marc Ryan's definitive history Trumpet Records: Diamonds on Farish Street described Love as "second in importance only to Sonny Boy in the label's fortunes." The assessment is accurate both commercially and artistically. Love's recordings gave Trumpet a dimension that the Williamson and James recordings, for all their historical importance, could not provide: the barrelhouse piano tradition at its most warm and accessible, blues for a dancing audience as well as a listening one, music that carried the Delta's social as well as its artistic character.
Love died on August 19, 1953, of a heart attack — the same cause that would eventually take Elmore James, at ages that gave both musicians far less time than their talent deserved. His death at forty-six was a significant loss for both Trumpet and for the Delta blues tradition, and it deprived McMurry of one of the most consistent and highest-quality recording artists in her catalogue. The posthumous compilation Greenville Smokin' (Purple Pyramid Records, 2000) gathered all eighteen of his extant Trumpet recordings, providing the fullest available overview of his achievement.
Joe Willie Wilkins: The House Guitarist
Any account of the Trumpet sessions must attend to Joe Willie Wilkins, the Delta guitarist who appeared on more of the label's recordings than any musician other than Williamson himself, and whose presence gave those recordings much of their specific musical character. Wilkins was, in the formal sense, a session guitarist — paid for his services at specific sessions rather than signed as a featured solo artist — but his contributions went far beyond the merely functional.
Born on January 7, 1921 or 1923, in Davenport, Coahoma County, Mississippi, Wilkins had grown up on a plantation near Bobo, where his father, Papa Frank Wilkins, had been a friend of the country bluesman Charley Patton. He had absorbed the guitar traditions of the Delta through years of playing with the musicians who defined them — by the early 1940s he had taken over from Robert Lockwood Jr. in Williamson's King Biscuit Entertainers, establishing the professional relationship with the harmonica player that would prove central to the Trumpet sessions.
As the Big Road Blues documentation notes: "Joe Willie Wilkins spent the majority of his career in the shadows as a session guitarist, playing behind Sonny Boy Williamson II, Willie Love, Will Nix among others." His Wikipedia entry confirms the breadth of his Trumpet work: "He was also a session musician for Trumpet Records, recording with Williamson, Love, Nix, Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup, Roosevelt Sykes, Big Walter Horton, Little Walter, Mose Vinson, Joe Hill Louis, Elmore James, and Floyd Jones." The range of artists with whom he recorded reflects both his musical versatility and his ubiquity in the Jackson and Delta recording scene.
The Luigi Monge assessment, quoted in the Big Road Blues account, captures what Wilkins brought to these sessions: "Wilkins incorporated in his playing the intensity of downhome blues, the elegance of jazz, and the power of urban sounds." This combination — the rural Delta blues tradition meeting jazz harmonic sophistication and urban electric amplification — was precisely what the Trumpet sessions needed in a guitarist, and Wilkins provided it with a consistency and quality that gave the label a musical backbone it could not have assembled from anyone else.
His influence on subsequent musicians was significant despite his relative commercial invisibility. Those who cite him as a direct influence include Pat Hare, Little Milton, Jimmy Rogers, and Brewer Phillips — a list that encompasses some of the most important guitarists in post-war Chicago blues, demonstrating that Wilkins's shadow extended far beyond the Mississippi delta where he worked.
Big Joe Williams and Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup
Two older bluesmen — both of whom had established their recording careers in the 1930s and 1940s before appearing on Trumpet — gave the label a connection to the pre-war acoustic blues tradition that the younger electric players like Williamson and James could not provide.
Big Joe Williams, the wandering Mississippi guitarist whose nine-string guitar had been a fixture of the blues recording world since his first Victor sides in 1935, came to Trumpet in the fall of 1951 for two sessions that McMurry arranged. His eight recorded sides for the label — including "Mama Don't Allow Me," "Delta Blues," "Overhauling Blues," the poetic "Whistling Pines," "She Left Me A Mule," and "Bad Heart Blues" — represented Williams at a specific and somewhat anomalous career moment: a musician whose acoustic Delta style had been the commercial norm in the late 1930s and early 1940s but was now increasingly out of step with the electrified Chicago blues that was dominating the R&B market.
The Trumpet sides are not, in commercial terms, among Williams's most successful recordings. But they document something important: the acoustic nine-string guitar blues tradition at a moment of genuine historical transition, preserved by a label whose documentary instincts ran alongside its commercial ones. The Big Road Blues account notes that by this point "Big Joe Williams' style of music was something of an anachronism and opportunities to record, even for a wheeler-dealer like him, began to dry up" — placing the Trumpet sessions in their proper context as a document of a tradition already past its commercial moment but not yet past its artistic value.
Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, the Mississippi guitarist who had given Elvis Presley three songs for his earliest Sun Records sessions ("That's All Right," "My Baby Left Me," "So Glad You're Mine"), recorded for Trumpet under the name "Elmer James" — a name that, in retrospect, creates a certain confusion with Elmore James's own Trumpet credit of "Elmo James." Crudup had been recording since 1941 for RCA Victor's Bluebird label, where his recordings had established a significant commercial presence in the race records market. His Trumpet recordings documented a musician whose acoustic Delta style sat at the same historical junction as Williams's.
The decision to credit Crudup as "Elmer James" rather than by his own name has been interpreted in various ways — possibly to avoid contractual complications with his Bluebird deal, possibly because of confusion with Elmore James's recent hit. Whatever the motivation, the alias has added a layer of historical complexity to the Trumpet discography that has required careful untangling by subsequent researchers.
Little Milton: The Teenager Who Would Be King
Among the musicians who appeared on Trumpet sessions in supporting roles, none had more spectacular long-term consequences for American music than the young guitarist who played on Willie Love's December 1951 session and who was present in the orbit of the Trumpet operation throughout the label's early years. James Milton Campbell Jr. — who would become famous internationally as Little Milton — was barely sixteen years old when he played with Love, but already demonstrating the exceptional musicianship that would eventually make him one of the most celebrated blues and soul artists of the 1960s and 1970s.
Milton had been born on September 7, 1934, in Inverness, Mississippi, and had grown up absorbing the Delta blues tradition through direct personal exposure to its greatest practitioners — including, crucially, the musicians who populated the Trumpet sessions. Joe Willie Wilkins, who is credited with being among the influences on the young Milton's guitar approach, was his musical mentor and model; the King Biscuit Time broadcasts on KFFA, which featured Williamson and Wilkins, were the radio education that shaped his musical sensibility.
His Trumpet appearances were in the role of session guitarist rather than featured artist, and the recordings he made for McMurry in this capacity were not released under his own name. But his presence in the Trumpet recording environment — learning from Williamson, working alongside Wilkins, observing McMurry's production approach — was a significant part of his early musical education. He would subsequently record for Sun Records, Meteor, and then Chess, where his recordings of the 1960s and 1970s established him as a major figure in blues and soul. The young B.B. King, who also appeared as a session musician on Trumpet recordings, playing lead guitar behind Williamson on "From the Bottom," followed a similar trajectory: a brief early connection to the Trumpet orbit, followed by a subsequent commercial career that would eventually dwarf anything the label itself achieved.
Jerry "Boogie" McCain and the Later Recordings
Among the younger artists who recorded for Trumpet in the label's later years, Jerry "Boogie" McCain occupies a distinctive place — a musician whose Trumpet recordings documented an R&B harmonica style quite different from Williamson's Delta approach, pointing toward the more commercially oriented sound of the mid-1950s R&B market.
McCain made his debut for Trumpet in 1954 with "East of the Sun b/w Wine-O-Wine," with his brother Walter McCain on drums. His 1954 Trumpet encore yielded "Stay Out of Automobiles b/w Love to Make Up." These were modest commercial propositions rather than historical monuments, but they demonstrated McMurry's continuing commitment to documenting whatever musical talent was available to her, regardless of whether it fit the specific Delta blues template that had characterised her most celebrated recordings.
The Big Road Blues account notes that "Kennedy made his debut with Jay McShann in 1949 and by 1951 singing with Tiny Bradshaw's band. Kennedy cut three songs for Trumpet on Oct. 22, 1951 backed by Elmore James, a four song session cut in 1952 and two numbers cut in 1953 that remained unissued." Tiny Kennedy — born in New York and working in the jump blues and R&B tradition — was another artist whose Trumpet recordings pointed toward the more sophisticated R&B market of the mid-1950s, his smooth vocals and jump blues arrangements quite different in feel from the raw Delta material that formed the label's historical core.
Clayton Love — pianist and member of Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm — also made his first appearance as leader on Trumpet in 1951 with his own jump band, the Shufflers. The Big Road Blues account notes that Love was "a prominent member of Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm during the mid-'50s, making some of his finest records with the band" — his Trumpet sides predating that more celebrated work and demonstrating the versatility of the Jackson and Delta musical environment from which the label drew.
The Gospel Dimension
The gospel side of the Trumpet catalogue has received less attention than the blues recordings, but it represents a significant dimension of the label's identity and of its relationship to the African American musical community it was serving. Lillian McMurry's personal attraction to gospel music — the name "Trumpet" itself reflecting the archangel Gabriel's instrument — gave the label's gospel recordings a particular quality of personal investment.
The St. Andrews Gospelaires, who recorded at the label's very first session on April 3, 1950, were the inaugural Trumpet artists and the group that opened the catalogue at WRBC Radio's studio in Jackson. The Southern Sons Gospel Quartette, the Argo Gospel Singers, the Famous Blue Jay Singers, and other gospel groups contributed to a catalogue that documented the rich tradition of African American sacred music in Mississippi at a moment when its commercial documentation was still limited.
These gospel recordings were not an afterthought to the blues catalogue but its complement and counterpart. In the Mississippi Delta of 1951, gospel and blues were not opposed traditions but parallel ones, drawing on the same emotional materials and the same formal resources, performed by musicians who often moved between them freely. The gospel recordings gave Trumpet access to a segment of the African American music market that the blues catalogue, with its explicitly secular and sometimes overtly sexual content, could not serve.
The Legal Battle with the Bihari Brothers
One of the most important episodes in Trumpet's history — important both for its specific commercial consequences and for what it demonstrated about McMurry's character and her commitment to her artists — was the label's legal confrontation with the Bihari brothers of Modern Records.
Joe, Saul, Lester, and Jules Bihari were Los Angeles-based record entrepreneurs whose Modern Records label had been one of the most aggressive independent record companies in America since the late 1940s, using a network of talent scouts and field recording operations to document blues musicians across the South and West. Their talent scout, Joe Bihari, had become aware of Trumpet's artists — specifically Elmore James — and had attempted to sign James away from McMurry by arguing (incorrectly) that his exclusive agreement with Trumpet was not valid or binding. The Wikipedia article on Trumpet Records is direct about the sequence: "McMurry and the Bihari brothers ended up in a multi-year legal dispute when the Biharis tried to sign artists who had exclusive agreements with Trumpet. The case made major publications and, in 1954, a judge ruled in favor of McMurray."
The legal victory had significance beyond its immediate commercial implications. It established, at a moment when the independent label world was still developing its commercial and legal norms, that a small Mississippi label's artist contracts would be enforced against the claims of well-funded California competitors. It demonstrated that McMurry was willing and able to fight for her artists' contractual relationships on equal terms with the major independent operations, and that the courts would support her claims. And it confirmed that the music being made at Trumpet was commercially significant enough to be worth fighting over — that the Bihari brothers' attempt to appropriate it was not merely opportunistic but a recognition of genuine market value.
The Closure and the Aftermath
By 1955 and 1956, the commercial environment that had sustained Trumpet was changing in ways that the label could not accommodate. The costs of recording, pressing, and distributing were increasing; the competition from better-funded labels with national distribution infrastructure was intensifying; and the specific economic model on which Trumpet had operated — a small regional label serving a specific geographic market with a specific musical tradition — was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
The last recording at the Diamond Record Company was Lucky Joe Almond's session on St. Patrick's Day in 1956. McMurry went back to working in her husband's shop. The creditors moved in, and the artists' recording contracts were sold off: Sonny Boy Williamson's contract went to Chess Records in Chicago, where he would spend the rest of his career recording under Leonard and Phil Chess's supervision and producing another seventy songs. Elmore James had already moved on to Meteor and Flair. The Trumpet roster dispersed into the broader independent label world.
But McMurry did not simply close the books and walk away. For decades after the last Trumpet record was released, she continued to pay royalties to the original artists, their songwriters, and their heirs — a practice that was, in the context of the independent label world of the 1950s, genuinely exceptional. The Mississippi Blues Trail marker's assessment is direct: she was "known for her sense of fairness and her meticulous accounting." She took legal action against labels that attempted to reissue Trumpet material without permission or without payment of the appropriate royalties, maintaining the intellectual property rights of the catalogue with the same meticulous attention to detail that had characterised her operation of the label itself.
In 1965, nine years after Trumpet closed, McMurry paid for Sonny Boy Williamson's gravestone in Tutwiler, Mississippi — completing the circle of their relationship with a final personal gesture that acknowledged the debt she owed to the musician who had been the primary artist of her label. The gravestone was not a commercial investment or a promotional gesture; it was an act of genuine loyalty and respect for a man whose music had given Trumpet its most artistically significant body of work and whose personal tribute to her — the songs "Pontiac Blues" and "309" — had made their relationship one of the most documented artist-producer partnerships in blues history.
The Legacy: Diamonds on Farish Street
Marc Ryan's definitive history of the label takes its subtitle from the street and from a sense that what was produced there had a quality — permanence, brilliance, rarity — that the commercial circumstances of its creation could never quite contain. Diamonds on Farish Street: what the Trumpet recordings were, and what Lillian McMurry had the wit and the determination and the integrity to recognise they were even when the world around her was not paying attention.
The commercial impact of the Trumpet catalogue on subsequent American music has been traced through multiple lines of transmission. The Elmore James recordings launched the most imitated slide guitar tradition in post-war blues, the opening riff of "Dust My Broom" becoming the most quoted few notes in electric guitar history. The Sonny Boy Williamson recordings gave his music a commercial permanence that his radio broadcasts could not provide, establishing the foundation for his Chess Records career and for his European tour appearances in the 1960s that introduced the Delta blues tradition to the British musicians who would transform it into the rock and roll of the next decade. The Willie Love recordings preserved the barrelhouse piano tradition in a form that subsequent players could study and absorb.
The broader cultural impact — the demonstration that a small label in Jackson, Mississippi, run by a white woman with no prior music industry experience, could produce recordings of permanent artistic significance and commercial viability while treating African American musicians with fairness and respect — was perhaps even more important. McMurry's induction into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1998 was a formal recognition of this broader impact: she was, as the Hall of Fame noted, one of the few record producers to receive that honour, a recognition that situated her contribution alongside those of the musicians themselves rather than merely in the supporting role of commercial enabler.
The physical legacy of Trumpet Records — the building at 309 North Farish Street, the Mississippi Blues Trail marker that honours it — is less well preserved than the musical one. Efforts to establish a Trumpet Records museum at the historic address have faced the economic challenges that have been slowly draining life from the entire Farish Street district. But the recordings themselves are preserved and available, reissued in various compilations that gather the best of the Sonny Boy Williamson sides, the Elmore James single, the Willie Love sessions, and the other Trumpet artists into accessible form.
The assessment offered by the American Blues Scene is both historically accurate and appropriately comprehensive: "Trumpet had briefly filled that gap by constructing a studio in the back of a humble radio repair store, where blues artists made prolific, lasting recordings. The music that was created at 309 Farish has strongly impacted and been played by a who's who of rock stars. Among them; ZZ Top, George Thorogood, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The Allman Brothers, Fleetwood Mac, Eric Clapton, The Beatles, and many others." The chain of transmission from Farish Street to those names passes through Chess Records, through the British Invasion, through the folk blues revival, and through the specific channel of individual musicians who heard the Trumpet recordings and were transformed by them.
Lillian McMurry died in Jackson, Mississippi, on March 18, 1999, at the age of seventy-seven, of a heart attack. Her husband Willard had preceded her in death on June 7, 1996. The Blues Hall of Fame induction that had come the year before her death was the formal institutional recognition that her decades of work deserved. The informal recognition — the songs Sonny Boy Williamson wrote about her, the continuing commercial life of the recordings she produced, the Mississippi Blues Trail marker that stands at the address where she changed American music — is perhaps more meaningful.
Suggested Reading
Trumpet Records: Diamonds on Farish Street
Selected Discography
Sonny Boy Williamson - The Trumpet Singles 1947-1955
Trumpet Records (Diamond Record Company) was founded by Lillian and Willard McMurry at 309 North Farish Street, Jackson, Mississippi. The first recording session took place on April 3, 1950. The label operated until 1956. Principal artists: Sonny Boy Williamson II (eleven singles, 1951–1955); Elmore James (one single, "Dust My Broom," 1951, Billboard #9 R&B); Willie Love (twelve releases, 1951–1953); Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup (as "Elmer James"); Big Joe Williams (eight sides, 1951); Tiny Kennedy (three sessions, 1951–1953); Jerry "Boogie" McCain (1954); Clayton Love (1951); Little Milton (session musician, December 1951). Notable session musicians: Joe Willie Wilkins (guitar); B.B. King (guitar, "From the Bottom"); Elmore James (guitar, Willie Love sessions); Little Milton (guitar, Willie Love sessions). Principal recording facilities: WRBC Radio Studio, Jackson; Ivan Scott's Radio Service Studio, Jackson; ACA Studios, Houston (portable equipment by Bill Holford); Sam Phillips's Memphis Record Service; Diamond Studio, 309 Farish Street. Lillian McMurry was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame, 1998. The Trumpet Records building at 309 North Farish Street is commemorated by a Mississippi Blues Trail historical marker, erected 2007.
