Despite being strapped for cash and with little in the way of commercial success, James Hobart Stanton, a Do-It-Yourself One-Man recording entrepreneur based in Johnson City, Tennessee, persisted in operating various music ventures for several decades. Along the way, he produced powerful, even revolutionary, recordings that had contributed significantly to shaping the future of American music. RICH-R-TONE RECORDS, one of several labels Stanton founded, was ahead of its time in celebrating the emerging genre of bluegrass music and was also a prototype for small independent record companies that documented and marketed regional roots music for a national audience. In the case of RICH-R-TONE, the national record-buying audience during the era of the label's greatest activity (the late 1940s and the early 1950s) was not broadly responsive to the ground breaking records released by the company. Yet, RICH-R-TONE, and its subsidiary custom label FOLK STAR, not only released pioneering records by key acts from bluegrass music's "first generation" (The Stanley Brothers, The Bailey Brothers, The Church Brothers, The Sauceman Brothers, Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper, Jim Eanes, Curly King, and Pee Wee Lambert) but also documented many other genres of post war Appalachian music (honky-tonk country and country boogie, folk and gospel, as well as old-time music and novelty numbers). Together, those two labels yielded approximately 320 released sides on 78 RPM discs during the years 1946-1954. Stanton's legacy is now appreciated internationally. This set from BEAR FAMILY RECORDS® compiles all of the extant.