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starting date of Quinn’s Houston residency is unknown. The aforementioned obituary, almost certainly composed or informed by a family member who would know, identifi es Quinn as a “Houston resident for 36
    years”—suggesting that he had made the move by late 1939 or 1940. Producer Chris Strachwitz, in his liner note essay to Texas Blues: The Gold Star Sessions, suggests that Quinn’s decision to settle in the city was motivated in part by chance. It happened while Quinn was on winter break from his seasonal job as a sound technician for a New Jersey–based traveling carnival company (Royal American Shows). On their way back to the East Coast, Quinn and his fi rst wife Lona had come through Houston to visit her sister, but their car broke down, leaving them stranded without funds to pay for repairs. “Bill, however, . . . was soon earning money repairing radios,” Strachwitz writes.
    Operating at fi rst out of his sister-in-law’s house, Quinn encountered a customer who asked him to fi x a nonfunctioning home disc recorder. Quinn was so intrigued by the contraption that he purchased his own disc-recording device and began to experiment with it. By 1941, he had opened his fi rst shop at 3104 Telephone Road and soon started recording individual voice messages direct to disc—mostly birthday greetings and such, novelty items sent to relatives and friends. This unexpected new direction in his vaguely defi ned business plan led him to change the name of his one-man operation from Quinn Radio Service to Quinn Recording Company, and—just like that—what was formerly a “shop” was transformed into a “studio.” The proprietor soon was profi tably producing radio jingles and other types of audio commercials, most likely his main source of income throughout the World War II years.

    Fortunately for Quinn, Houston was a rapidly growing city where the demand for locally produced sound recordings, particularly those used in radio advertising, likely exceeded the supply of businesses that could accommodate the need. In a Houston telephone directory from April 1944, for example, Quinn Recording Company is one of only two clearly defi ned recording services listed in the Yellow Pages. The other is a now long-gone establishment called Sound Sales & Engineering Company, which advertised in-store and on-location recording. Two other businesses, Lil’ Pal Exclusive Radio & Record Store and a place called The Groove, were probably only retail outlets for the sale of prerecorded discs and players.

    The war years and their aftermath were obviously a time of many changes throughout America, but especially so in the media that dispersed recorded music. Thus, though he probably never imagined such a possibility when he settled in Houston, Quinn would soon discover another grand opportunity, one that would cause him to develop new technological skills far beyond 1 2
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    those required merely for engineering the single-disc recording of sound for radio ads. Still working out of his Telephone Road storefront through the end of the 1940s, Quinn would metamorphose into a maverick music producer and studio proprietor and, for a while, even a record label owner.
    During this period, the Quinn family lived in a house located at 1313
    Dumble Street in southeast Houston, not far from the Telephone Road studio. (Incidental numerological trivia: 1313 is also the fi rst number that Quinn used in cataloguing the productions of his Gold Star Record Company.) By 1950 Quinn’s family would move nearby in the same neighborhood to a two-story house at 5628 Brock Street, as would his studio facility, which he would rename also as Gold Star.
    Today there is a small retail strip center at 3104 Telephone Road where Quinn’s original studio once stood. According to Clyde Brewer (a fi ddler, pianist, and guitarist who recorded fi rst at Quinn Recording and then later at its Gold Star and