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Melodeon Records is a record label set up in 1964 by Richard K. Spottswood.
A record label, or record company, is a brand or trademark associated with the marketing of music recordings and music videos. Sometimes, a record label is also a publishing company that manages such brands and trademarks, coordinates the production, manufacture, distribution, marketing, promotion, and enforcement of copyright for sound recordings and music videos, while also conducting talent scouting and development of new artists, and maintaining contracts with recording artists and their managers. The term "record label" derives from the circular label in the center of a vinyl record which prominently displays the manufacturer's name, along with other information. Within the mainstream music industry, recording artists have traditionally been reliant upon record labels to broaden their consumer base, market their albums, and be both promoted and heard on music streaming services, radio, and television. Record labels also provide publicists, who assist performers in gaining positive media coverage, and arrange for their merchandise to be available via stores and other media outlets.
Richard K. "Dick" Spottswood is an American musicologist and author from Maryland who has catalogued and been responsible for the reissue of many thousands of recordings of vernacular music in the United States.
Melodeon Records issued - among others - the first recordings after his 'rediscovery' of Skip James and the 1940 Library Of Congress Sessions of Blind Willie McTell. In 1970 the label was acquired by Arnold S. Caplin's Biograph Records.
Nehemiah Curtis "Skip" James was an American Delta blues singer, guitarist, pianist and songwriter.
Blind Willie McTell was a Piedmont blues and ragtime singer and guitarist. He played with a fluid, syncopated fingerstyle guitar technique, common among many exponents of Piedmont blues. Unlike his contemporaries, he came to use twelve-string guitars exclusively. McTell was also an adept slide guitarist, unusual among ragtime bluesmen. His vocal style, a smooth and often laid-back tenor, differed greatly from many of the harsher voices of Delta bluesmen such as Charley Patton. McTell performed in various musical styles, including blues, ragtime, religious music and hokum.
Arnold S. Caplin was an American record producer, founder and (former) owner of Historical Records and Biograph Records. In 1970 he additionally acquired Melodeon Records from Richard K. Spottswood.
