🎙️ Delta Crown Records
• Founded in the late 1940s by a Memphis club owner who wanted to capture raw Southern talent.
• It specialized in field recordings, Delta blues, and early gospel-blues hybrids.
• Papa Zee became one of their standout artists in the 1950s.
• Later in the 1960s–70s, Delta Crown partnered with a Chicago distributor to get Papa Zee’s electric blues records onto jukeboxes across the Midwest.
🎙️ Why Papa Zee’s music was lost
• Delta Crown Records, the little Memphis imprint that recorded Papa Zee in the 1940s–50s, was a shoestring operation. Most of the masters were pressed in tiny batches of 78s and early LPs.
• In the late 1970s, the label folded when its founder died, and the archive was left in a warehouse in Clarksdale.
• A fire and subsequent flooding damaged many tapes. Some acetates warped, and many were thought gone forever.
• By the 1980s, Papa Zee had passed (1986), and his catalog was out of print. A few collectors traded bootleg cassettes, but he was largely forgotten outside of local Mississippi and Chicago blues circles.
🎙️ How it was rediscovered
• In the late 2010s, a crate of surviving Delta Crown reels turned up in a private estate sale in Memphis. They contained session outtakes, test pressings, and even a few unreleased tracks.
• These were painstakingly restored by blues archivists with modern audio technology.
• A boutique reissue label partnered with the Memphis Blues Foundation to remaster and digitize Papa Zee’s work.
• By the early 2020s, streaming platforms and niche vinyl reissues reintroduced Papa Zee to a whole new generation, sparking his “revival.”
• Founded in the late 1940s by a Memphis club owner who wanted to capture raw Southern talent.
• It specialized in field recordings, Delta blues, and early gospel-blues hybrids.
• Papa Zee became one of their standout artists in the 1950s.
• Later in the 1960s–70s, Delta Crown partnered with a Chicago distributor to get Papa Zee’s electric blues records onto jukeboxes across the Midwest.
🎙️ Why Papa Zee’s music was lost
• Delta Crown Records, the little Memphis imprint that recorded Papa Zee in the 1940s–50s, was a shoestring operation. Most of the masters were pressed in tiny batches of 78s and early LPs.
• In the late 1970s, the label folded when its founder died, and the archive was left in a warehouse in Clarksdale.
• A fire and subsequent flooding damaged many tapes. Some acetates warped, and many were thought gone forever.
• By the 1980s, Papa Zee had passed (1986), and his catalog was out of print. A few collectors traded bootleg cassettes, but he was largely forgotten outside of local Mississippi and Chicago blues circles.
🎙️ How it was rediscovered
• In the late 2010s, a crate of surviving Delta Crown reels turned up in a private estate sale in Memphis. They contained session outtakes, test pressings, and even a few unreleased tracks.
• These were painstakingly restored by blues archivists with modern audio technology.
• A boutique reissue label partnered with the Memphis Blues Foundation to remaster and digitize Papa Zee’s work.
• By the early 2020s, streaming platforms and niche vinyl reissues reintroduced Papa Zee to a whole new generation, sparking his “revival.”
🎙️ Delta Crown Records
