Little Walter

Chess Records was an American record label based in Chicago, Illinois. It specialized in blues, R&B, soul, gospel music, early rock and roll, and occasional jazz releases. Run by brothers Leonard and Phil Chess, the company produced and released many important singles and albums, which are now... regarded as central to the rock music canon. Musician and critic Cub Koda described Chess Records as "America's greatest blues label." The Chess Records catalogue is now owned by Universal Music Group and managed by Geffen Records. Chess Records was based at several different locations on the south side of Chicago, Illinois, initially at two different locations on South Cottage Grove Ave. The most famous location was 2120 S. Michigan Avenue from around 1956 to 1965, immortalized by British rock group The Rolling Stones in "2120 South Michigan Avenue", an instrumental recorded at that address during their first U.S. tour in 1964; the Stones would record at Chess Studios on two more occasions. The building is now home to Willie Dixon's Blues Heaven Foundation. In the mid-60s Chess re-located to a much larger building at 320 East 21st Street, the label's final Chicago home.
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Chance Records was a Chicago-based label founded in 1950 by Art Sheridan. It specialized in blues, jazz, doo-wop, and gospel. Among the acts who recorded for Chance were The Flamingos, The Moonglows, Homesick James, J. B. Hutto, Brother John Sellers, and Schoolboy Porter. In addition, Chance... released three singles by John Lee Hooker and made a coordinated issue of the first singles by Jimmy Reed and The Spaniels with the brand-new and still tiny Vee-Jay Records. The company closed down at the end of 1954. Sheridan became one of the financial backers of Vee-Jay. Chance Records opened for business in September 1950. Initially the company was housed at Sheridan's American Record Distributors, 2011 South Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Among the first artists to record for the company were the Al Sims Trio, an uptown blues group, and a combo led by tenor saxophonist John "Schoolboy" Porter, who had developed a vigorous R&B style in the Cootie Williams band. Porter's rendition of "Tennessee Waltz," a much-covered hit in 1950, sold well enough that Sheridan's pressing plant, Armour Plastics, couldn't meet the demand and many copies were pressed by RCA Victor.
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Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has... its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music. Rock music also drew strongly on a number of other genres such as blues and folk, and incorporated influences from jazz, classical and other musical sources. Musically, rock has centered around the electric guitar, usually as part of a rock group with bass guitar and drums. Typically, rock is song-based music with a 4/4 beat utilizing a verse-chorus form, but the genre has become extremely diverse and common musical characteristics are difficult to define. Like pop music, lyrics often stress romantic love but also address a wide variety of other themes that are frequently social or political in emphasis. The dominance of rock by white, male musicians has been seen as one of the key factors shaping the themes explored in rock music. Rock places a higher degree of emphasis on musicianship, live performance, and an ideology of authenticity than pop music.
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Rhythm and blues, often abbreviated to R&B, is a genre of popular African-American music that originated in the 1940s. The term was originally... used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predominantly to urban African Americans, at a time when "urbane, rocking, jazz based music with a heavy, insistent beat" was becoming more popular. The term has subsequently had a number of shifts in meaning. In the early 1950s, the term rhythm and blues was frequently applied to blues records. Starting in the mid-1950s, after this style of music contributed to the development of rock and roll, the term "R&B" became used to refer to music styles that developed from and incorporated electric blues, as well as gospel and soul music. By the 1970s, rhythm and blues was used as a blanket term for soul and funk. In the 1980s, a newer style of R&B developed, becoming known as "Contemporary R&B". Jerry Wexler of Billboard magazine coined the term "rhythm and blues" in 1948 as a musical marketing term in the United States. It replaced the term "race music", which originally came from within the black community, but was deemed offensive in the postwar world.
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