Vocalion Records
American record label
Vocalion Records is an American record label, originally founded by the Aeolian Company, a piano and organ manufacturer before being bought out by Brunswick in 1924.
History
The label was founded in 1916 by the Aeolian Company, a maker of pianos and organs, as Aeolian-Vocalion; the company also sold phonographs under the Vocalion name. "Aeolian" was later dropped from the label's name. In late 1924, the label was acquired by Brunswick Records. During the 1920s, Vocalion also began the 1000 race series, records recorded by and marketed to African Americans. Jim Jackson recorded "Jim Jackson's Kansas City Blues" for Vocalion in 1927. It sold exceptionally well, and the song became a blues standard for musicians from Memphis and Mississippi. The label issued Robert Johnson's "Cross Road Blues"
Vocalion was one of the most popular labels in the late 1930s. However, Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) bought American Record Corporation (which operated the Vocalion label) in 1938, and in July 1940 they discontinued Vocalion, replacing it with the Okeh label.
The City of London Phonograph & Gramophone Society CLPGS published a comprehensive database of British and Australian Vocalion records, including Broadcast, World Records and other labels used by the company in the 1920s and 1930s.
“Vocalion Records” enters the record as american record label. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Vocalion, Records and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Vocalion Records” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Vocalion, Records and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1122815. VIAF identifies the subject as 144514777. The Library of Congress control number is nb2010018083. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1924, 1916, 1000 and 1927.
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This entry incorporates text from “Vocalion Records” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.