Gennett Records Overview

The Starr Piano Company, originally founded as the Trayser Piano Company in 1872, was incorporated in 1878 in the Whitewater Valley Gorge area of Richmond, Indiana by James and Benjamin Starr. In 1893 Henry Gennett and John Lumsden acquired half ownership in the Company, and after the death of Benjamin Starr in 1903, Gennett assumed control of the company. By 1915 Starr was among the largest producers of pianos in the nation, and by 1916 Starr Piano was manufacturing and retailing “Starr” brand phonographs.

In 1916 Starr Piano Company established a recording division, initially with records pressed offsite. In 1917 Starr Piano constructed a six-story phonograph manufacturing and record-pressing facility in Starr Valley in Richmond. In 1918 the Company changed the recording unit name to the Gennett Records Recording Division for ease of negotiations with independent distributors. Mid-1919 Gennett introduced lateral-cut discs without paying a licensing fee to the Victor Talking Machine Company, which held the patent on the technology. Victor sued Starr Piano for the infringement in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. In 1921 the Court ruled in Gennett’s favor, concluding that Victor could not prove they had invented the lateral-cut recording concept, further affirmed on appeal in 1922 in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

By 1920, the Gennett Records label was producing around 3,000,000 records annually, with a catalog offering classical, sacred, popular and military band music, among other genres. Gennett began recording jazz music in 1919 with the white ensemble the New Orleans Jazz Band, and moved in to the production of “race records” as the 1920s progressed, charting the rise of early blues, jazz, and commercial dance tunes.

The Gennett Records Division would go on to record an array of early jazz, blues, country, gospel, ethnic and popular music under a variety of subsidiary labels, releasing early recordings of legends including the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, The Wolverines, King Oliver’s Creole Band, Hoagy Carmichael, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Wingy Manone, Georgia Tom, Gene Autry, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and many more. By the mid-1930s, amidst the Great Depression, Starr Piano Company had shut down all of its affiliated factories and studios, and by 1935 had sold many of its masters to a new Champion label operated by American Decca Records.