Jackie Ross

Chess Records was another giant of Chicago music.

Under its A&R directors and producers, the labels and its subsidiaries released records by artists including The Dells, The Radiants, Fontella Bass, Jackie Ross, Billy Stewart, and Etta James.

Although chess was particularly famous for blues, its soul catalogue really captured the changing sound of black American music.

Yeah! Yeah

Or Minnie Riperton with her incredible operatic vocal range.

Or, you know, Jackie Ross.

And then the think about how these arrangements fit in, these incredible arrangements that did take from jazz, that did take from the big band era.

All these different pieces would fit together.

It could be in the case of Jerry Butler becoming a political...

Cook County Assessor here in Chicago.

Or it could be in the sense of some of the women I spoke to, like Jackie Ross or Pastor Mindy Collier, which is Pastor Collier, standing up for themselves within the Chess Records company and um so everybody was working towards something right in terms of empowering themselves their community um and if there was some sort of opposition ways to confront it or work around it and so that was something that you know i certainly saw in talking to everybody or so johnson You know, another case in point.

And, you know, they also had different responses to their situations, whether it was, you know, growing up in Chicago, dealing with segregation.