In February 1963, Dick Biondi, a popular nighttime disc jockey (DJ) at WLS-AM in Chicago, dropped the needle on “Please Please Me,” becoming the first person to play the Beatles on American radio. Black with rainbow trim, the label on the record misspelled the band’s name as the “Beattles.” The record company’s name—“Vee Jay,” the initials of co-founders Vivian Carter and Jimmy Bracken, a married Black couple who’d set up shop on Chicago’s South Side in the 1950s—appeared up top.
At the time, the Beatles were enjoying a surge of popularity in Britain but remained virtually unknown in the United States. Vee Jay took a chance on the Liverpool quartet, signing them after Capitol Records, the American subsidiary of the Beatles’ British label, EMI Records, declined to do so. (British artists fared poorly in the U.S.—or so the company believed.) Though Capitol eventually stepped forward to claim the Beatles, just as Beatlemania was poised to sweep America in late 1963, Vee Jay deserves credit for introducing the band to the U.S.
The most successful Black-run record company before Motown in Detroit, Vee Jay invited the Beatles to share an English interpretation of the rhythm-and-blues (R&B) music then popular across the Atlantic. Rock critic Dave Marsh, in his 2007 book The Beatles’ Second Album, notes that the independent record company “made exactly the kind of American pop R&B records that the group admired,” unlike Capitol, which didn’t understand the band’s sound. Still, a key question posed by Marsh remains: “[C]ould the Beatles have been as profitable, prolific and as world-changing” had they remained on Bracken and Carter’s mom-and-pop label?
In 1953—four years before 16-year-old John Lennon and 15-year-old Paul McCartney met at a church garden party in Liverpool—Carter, a charismatic radio personality who hosted a popular gospel show in her hometown of Gary, Indiana, married Bracken, a budding entrepreneur who’d recently helped her open Vivian’s Record Shop in the city’s downtown. The couple’s ambitions were modest: start a record company to stock the store with the music radio listeners were requesting. They borrowed $500 from a pawnbroker to record the label’s first artist: the Spaniels, a local doo-wop group.