Biography
Prior to World War II, Jay Mayo Williams ranked among the scant number of African American executives in the recording industry, holding positions at Paramount, Vocalion, and Brunswick. He studied at Brown University, where he distinguished himself as a track star and earned All-American status on the football field. During the 1920s he played professionally for the Hammond Pros in Indiana and stood as one of three black athletes—alongside Paul Robeson and Fritz Pollard—to appear in the National Football League’s first season. Around 1924 he entered the music business as a talent scout and producer for Paramount’s race series while directing the company’s publishing division. After leaving Paramount in 1927 he established the short-lived Chicago Record Company; once its Black Patti label folded he moved to Vocalion and Brunswick. In the mid-1930s he temporarily exited the industry to coach football at Morehouse College in Atlanta. Decca then appointed him head of its race department, where he supervised recordings by Alberta Hunter, Norfolk Jubilee Quartet, Monette Moore, Grant and Wilson, Trixie Smith, Tiny Parham, and Blind Joe Taggart. Throughout the 1940s he worked as a freelancer and operated several small independent labels, including Harlem Records in New York. In the late 1940s he founded Ebony Records, which issued early sides by a young Muddy Waters, and he guided the company until declining health compelled his retirement in the early 1970s. Williams was also a member of the National Football Hall of Fame Association.