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Argo Records was a record label founded in 1951 by Harley Usill (born c. 1925 - died 1991), and...

Argo Records was a record label founded in 1951 by Harley Usill (born c. 1925 - died 1991), and musicologist Cyril Clarke with £500 capital, initially as a company specialising in "British music played by British artists" (Day p93), but it quickly became a company primarily specialising in spoken word recordings and other esoteric (or commercially marginal) material. The first issue was Music from Bali, dedicated to the Indonesian Gamelan, recorded at the Winter Garden Theatre, London. The catalogue would eventually run to 1,000 items. In 1953, Usill was introduced to the Indian music specialist Deben Bhattacharya, who would be responsible for field recordings of traditional music in India. Bhattacharya had been frustrated by the absence of recordings he could use for his BBC Radio broadcasts. Around the same time Walter Harris recorded an amateur Brazilian choir in Rio de Janeiro. Such recordings as these appeared in the labels "Living Traditions" series. Taking advantage of the capacity of the longer playing time of LP records Argo embarked on recording the complete works of William Shakespeare. Cambridge University's Marlowe Players participated in the series, which was the