Boddie Recording Company: Cleveland Ohio

From 1958 to 1993, Thomas and Louise Boddie’s industrious Boddie Recording Company issued nearly 300 albums and 45s, recorded 10,000 hours of tape, and remained in operation longer than any other studio, pressing plant, or label group in the history of Cleveland. Long forgotten even by the standards of the chronically overlooked northeastern Ohio music scene, Boddie was a fusion of its owner’s engineering genius and his limited economic means, its DIY recording studio housed in a humble barn, churning night and day to capture the sounds emanating from Cleveland’s east side neighborhoods. The 58 tracks on these three CDs (or 65-track 5LP) represent the best of the Boddies’ in-house Soul Kitchen, Luau, and Bounty labels, which released an unspoiled treasure trove of kitchen-sink eccentric soul, fuzzbox funk, shoestring doo-wop, and haunted, eerily hook-laden spirituals. Enclosed inside is a mountain of office-styled ephemera: two massive booklets brimming with detail on the Boddies and their artists; extensive notes and scores of unpublished photos; a complete detailed discography folio; reproduced fliers; and a Boddie greeting card—all rendered with the handcrafted charm that was the Boddie hallmark. Call it a self-contained secret record industry crammed into one box.