Blind Willie McTell

Columbia Records is an American record label, owned by Japan's Sony Music Entertainment, operating under the Columbia Music Group with Aware Records. It was founded in 1888, evolving from an earlier enterprise, the American Graphophone Company—successor to the Volta Graphophone Company.... Columbia is the oldest brand name in pre-recorded sound, being the first record company to produce pre-recorded records as opposed to blank cylinders. Columbia Records went on to release records by an array of notable singers, instrumentalists, and bands. From 1961 to 1990, its recordings were released outside the U.S. and Canada on the CBS Records label before adopting the Columbia name in most of the world. Until 1989, Columbia Records had no connection to Columbia Pictures, which used various other names for record labels they owned, including Colpix and later Arista; rather, it was connected to the original owner, CBS, which stood for Columbia Broadcasting System.
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The Victor Talking Machine Company was an American corporation, the leading American producer of phonographs and phonograph records and one of the leading phonograph companies in the world at the time. It was headquartered in Camden, New Jersey. The company was founded by Eldridge R. Johnson, who... had previously made phonographs to play Emile Berliner's Berliner Gramophone records. Some sources also claim Berliner as a co-founder; others say Berliner was never connected with the Victor company, though that may have been part of a ruse by Johnson to defeat the Zonophone lawsuits that had put Berliner Gramophone out of business and threatened Johnson's phonograph business. In any event, Victor ultimately acquired the remaining assets of Berliner Gramophone; it also acquired Zonophone after defeating it in court. There is some controversy as to how the name came about.
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Okeh Records began as an independent record label based in the United States of America in 1918. From 1926 on, it was a subsidiary of Columbia Records. Okeh was founded by Otto K. E. Heinemann , a German-American manager for the U.S. branch of German-owned Odeon Records. As World War I raged in... Europe, Heinemann thought it best to have an American based company. He incorporated the Otto Heinemann Phonograph Corporation in 1916, set up his own recording studio and gramophone record pressing plant in New York City, and introduced the company's line of records for public sale in September 1918. Heinemann formed the name of the record label "Okeh", from his initials; early disc labels rendered the name as OkeH. The first discs were vertical cut. In 1919 Okeh switched to the lateral cut method of sound recording, more usual for disc records. That same year the name of the label's owning company was changed to the General Phonograph Corporation. The name on the labels was changed to OKeh. The common 10-inch discs retailed for 75 cents each; the 12-inch discs for $1.25.
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