Two men born elsewhere have recently passed away, each of whom took a love of music and turned it into an essential record label that made vital American music available at the end of the 20th Century.
Barry Poss, co-founder and longtime owner of Sugar Hill Records, died just after midnight this morning in Durham, NC. He 79 years of age at his passing.
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Canadian Barry Poss founded Sugar Hill Records (not to be confused with the hip hop label of the same name) in 1979. He released an astonishing number of uniformly high quality albums in the old time, bluegrass, Americana and country genres. As the linked obit by John Lawless observes, he provided a commercial outlet for dozens of boutique artists at a time when the major labels walked away from roots music.
Marty Stuart, Chris Thille, Ricky Skaggs, Doc Watson, Guy Clark, Chris Hillman, Townes Van Zandt, Connie Smith, and even the ubiquitous Willie Nelson all released albums on Sugar Hill.
In Memory of Johnny Parth (1930–2025) Founder of Document Records It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Johnny Parth, founder of Document Records, who died today in Vienna at the...
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Johnny Parth came to love American jazz and blues music while living in his native Vienna during the dark days of WWII. By the late 1980's, he started a label with an objective that was unimaginably ambitious: to release the complete recorded works of every pre-war blues, gospel, and spiritual artist in chronological order. The magnitude of this project combined with the extreme rarity of the source material would have scared anyone else away. But over the course of more than 1,000 releases on Document Records, he came very close to achieving that goal.
Both of these men left a priceless legacy that will entertain and educate music lovers for decades to come.