Jack Kapp

Who was Jack Kapp?

Jack Kapp was a record company executive with Brunswick Records who founded the American Decca Records in 1934 along with British Decca founder Edward Lewis and later American Decca head Milton Rackmil. He oversaw Bing Crosby's rise to success as a recording artist in the early 1930s; four decades later, Crosby still gave appreciation to Kapp for diversifying his song catalogue into various styles and genres, saying, "I thought he was crazy, but I just did what he told me." Kapp could not read or sing music, but to his talent he stressed the credo, "Where's the melody?"

Kapp's father became a distributor for Columbia Records in 1905, and opened the Imperial Talking Machine Shop in Chicago. Kapp worked at the store after high school, and was known for having memorized the catalog numbers of every record in the inventory as well as the addresses and phone numbers of his father's best customers. After marrying his childhood sweetheart Frieda Lutz in 1922, he opened the Kapp Record Store with his younger brother, Dave Kapp. In 1926, Kapp joined Brunswick Records and was put in charge of their "race" label, where he scouted, signed or produced artists including, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Pinetop Smith, Leroy Carr, Frankie Jaxon, and Cow Cow Davenport, among others.