A Black-Owned Label Introduced the Beatles to America Before Anyone Had Heard of Them

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The story of the Beatles' conquest of America usually begins with The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964 and Capitol Records' massive promotional push. What is far less well known is that Capitol had already turned the band down. EMI's American subsidiary concluded, as was standard wisdom at the time, that British acts simply did not sell in the US market. Vivian Carter and Jimmy Bracken, a married Black couple who had founded Vee Jay Records on Chicago's South Side in 1953, took the deal Capitol refused. Vee Jay released "Please Please Me" in February 1963, and disc jockey Dick Biondi at WLS-AM in Chicago became the first person to play the Beatles on American radio — on a Vee Jay record that misspelled the band's name as "Beattles." Vee Jay was by then the most successful Black-run record label in America before Motown, with a roster that included the Spaniels, Gene Chandler, and Jerry Butler. Capitol eventually stepped in when Beatlemania became unavoidable in late 1963, but Vee Jay had the catalog and retained rights to several early recordings, which it reissued successfully into 1964. Rock critic Dave Marsh has argued that had the Beatles stayed on Vee Jay, the entire trajectory of American popular music might have been different.