company relied on offices and agents in nearby Chicago to find and record artists for its blues and jazz offerings. Paramount's race record series was launched in 1922 with vaudeville blues songs by Lucille Hegamin and Alberta Hunter. The company had a large mail-order operation which was a key to its early success. Most of Paramount's race music recordings were arranged by black entrepreneur J. Mayo Williams. "Ink" Williams, as he was known, had no official position with Paramount, but he was given wide latitude to bring African American talent to the Paramount recording studios and to market Paramount records to African American consumers. Williams did not know at the time that the "race market" had become Paramount's prime business and that he was keeping the label afloat. Problems with low fidelity and poor pressings continued. Blind Lemon Jefferson's 1926 hits, "Got the Blues" and "Long Lonesome Blues", were quickly rerecorded in the superior facilities of Marsh Laboratories, and subsequent releases used the rerecorded version. Both versions were released on compilation albums. In 1927, Ink Williams moved to competitor Okeh, taking Blind Lemon Jefferson with him for just one recording, "Matchbox Blues". Paramount's recording of the same song can be compared with Okeh's on compilation albums. In 1929, Paramount was building a new studio in Grafton, so it sent Charley Patton —"sent up" by Jackson, Mississippi, storeowner H. C. Speir —to the studio of Gennett Records in Richmond, Indiana, where on June 14 he cut 14 famous sides, which led many to consider him the "Father of the Delta Blues". After Williams left Paramount, he placed the business in the hands of his secretary, Aletha Dickerson, who had not been informed that her former employer had quit. Dickerson continued working for Paramount, and eventually moved to the company's new headquarters is Grafton. In 1931, she quit when the management, facing hard times, cut her wages. Depression, closure, reissues The Great Depression drove many record companies out of business. Paramount stopped recording in 1932 and closed in 1935. Like other record companies during the Great Depression, Paramount sold most of its master recordings as scrap metal. Some of the company's recordings were said to have been thrown into the Milwaukee River by disgruntled employees when the company was closing in the mid-1930s. A 2006 episode of the PBS television show History Detectives showed divers searching the river for Paramount masters and