Arthur “Art” Sheridan, who made major contributions to the history of blues and rhythm and blues as founder and owner of Chance Records, passed away at the age of 99 on September 26th, 2024. In 2023, the Library of Congress acquired the Chance Records master tape library.
After World War II, Chicago abounded with independent record labels who specialized in the music that the major labels tended to ignore, from foreign language records for immigrant communities to traditional country styles closer to the roots of the music than many of the pop oriented records then coming out of Nashville studios, and the music for which Chance Records is now revered: the classic rhythm and blues vocal group stylings of young groups such as the Moonglows and the Flamingos, and the riveting amplified sounds of Chicago blues at its peak by artists such as “Homesick James” Williamson, J.B. Hutto and others, as well as pre-war blues performers such as Willie Nix and Tampa Red.
Sheridan was born in 1926 and served as an infantryman with the 20th Armored Division at the liberation of the Dachau Concentration Camp in 1945, which he spoke about online and in public presentations in recent years. He learned the record business from the ground up after leaving the service, and while he became a successful businessman in many areas, he never lost interest in the music he recorded from 1950 to 1954, and remained the sole owner of Chance, as well as its Sabre and Meteor imprints, which he later reissued on his Constellation label in the 1960s.
He started in his father’s record pressing business and later started a distributorship. He was in contact with the full range of musical genres and record labels operating in Chicago, including Aristocrat, who released Muddy Waters’s first commercial disc in 1947, before being taken over by Chess Records, whose offices were on the same block as Chance. As a young independent operator, he was working in all aspects of the trade, even taking over a disc jockey friend’s show for a few months.
Though it was a small company, Chance made use of the best recording technology available, recording master tapes with noted sound engineer Bill Putnam at his Universal Audio recordings studio. The recording quality is exceptional for the time, and recent playback of the tapes has shown them to be very good condition for archiving, and many will be available to researchers once the collection is fully processed.
Sheridan and Chance were well positioned to capture many magical moments, even if their successes were in local markets, and not on national sales charts. One such moment is the Flamingos’ “Golden Teardrops,” a haunting, near a cappella original ballad that the group rehearsed for three months before bringing it confidently to Chance in 1953, though they had never tried it out before an audience, and rendered a passionate live performance with no overdubs that remains thrilling more than 70 years later, as so many Chance recordings still do.[i]
One of the most memorable Chicago Blues recordings on Chance is “Combination Boogie” by J.B and His Hawks. “J.B.” was J.B. Hutto (1926 – 1983), a brilliant slide guitarist making his recording debut with an instant classic. Though the record did not sell well beyond Chicago, it served notice that here was a major artist in the new electric blues style, and when he was featured on the first volume of the “Chicago: The Blues Today!” series of albums in the 1960s on the nationally distributed Vanguard label, Hutto began to achieve the recognition due him.
Art closed Chance Records at the end of 1954, and became a partner in Chicago’s Vee-Jay Records whose roster of blues, R&B and gospel artists was expanding quickly. Art had pressed some of Vee-Jay’s early releases, and even had a friendly radio rivalry with fellow disc jockey Vivian Carter, co-founder of Vee Jay. He and his accountant Ewart Abner also co-owned a pair of Chicago nightclubs with Vee Jay’s other found James Bracken. Abner also joined Vee Jay and eventually became its general manager and president before joining Motown in the 1960s.
Art never fully retired, continuing to lead an active life with his wife Barbara in Florida. He kept his hand in the record business, licensing reissues of his recordings and pursuing his hobbies of flying small planes and skydiving, as well as speaking to young audiences about his wartime experiences. Blues and R&B scholar Dan Kochakian, a good friend of the Sheridans who has done much to publicize the Chance Records legacy, interviewed him for a profile in the November, 2022 issue of “Blues & Rhythm Magazine.” Looking back, Art reflected: “I enjoyed my time in the record business. It made me more an open person and gave me the opportunity to find myself, to take me from a very young man to a comfortable stable human being…I’m very lucky that I had the opportunity and the gumption to do all of these things in my career.”
For more information related to this blog or any Library of Congress holdings, please see Ask a Librarian, and if you plan to come in to view or listen to any collection items, please reach out to our reference staff in the Moving Image Research Center and the Recorded Sound Research Center.
[i] From Lou Rallo’s April, 1982 interview with Flamingos member Sollie McElroy, quoted on the Flamingos page of Marv Goldberg’s “R&B Notebooks” website. https://www.uncamarvy.com/Flamingos/flamingos.html