Jack White to “make no profit” from release of pre-war blues records

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Jack White has unveiled plans to re-issue obscure blues recordings via his own label, Third Man Records, but says he’ll make no profit from the sales.

The musician has struck up a deal with obscure Scottish independent imprint Document Records, who have a catalogue of more than 25,000 tracks.

White is now aiming to release all the records on remastered vinyl in chronological order.

“It’s very important to American history and also to the history of the world,” the former White Stripes frontman told BBC 6 Music.

“I had been looking for Blues records when I was a teenager and the older ones seemed to have been kinda swallowed up,” he continued. “This was the first time in history that a single person was writing a song about themselves and speaking to the world by themselves. A man with a guitar or a woman singing by herself a cappella.”

The singer also spoke about the restraints of labels having to turn a profit and look for things that will sell in big numbers, saying: “At Third Man Records, we don’t really care. We just want to create things that we want to see exist and if it breaks even, we’re lucky – if not, it doesn’t really matter.”