Peaches Records 4318 Magazine St. New Orleans, Louisiana United States
A family-run New Orleans institution for over fifty years, Peaches Records fostered the rise of the city’s homegrown hip-hop scene.
BY MATT SONZALA PHOTOS BY LEMAR ARCENEAUX
For a city of its size, it’s wild to think how often New Orleans has transformed music and culture. Jazz was created in its winding streets and back alleys in the late 1800s, and spread throughout the world.The rhythm and blues of Dave Bartholomew, Fats Domino, and their contemporaries inspired sounds ranging from early rock and roll to Jamaican ska.The Meters and Allen Toussaint ushered in a new era of funky dance music in the ’60s and ’70s that crossed every border. More recently, artists from No Limit and Cash Money Records took over the late ’90s with a distinctly New Orleans style of rap rooted in the call-and-response chants of bounce music and the exuberance of second-line brass bands. For over fifty years, Peaches Records has been at the center of it all, promoting New Orleans’s homegrown genres, alongside music from around the world. The late Harris “Lee” Rea III opened the first Peaches shop in the city near the University of New Orleans in 1975, and soon brought on his wife, Shirani, to help grow the business. Lee Rea had moved to New Orleans from North Carolina in 1968 to attend Tulane University and, like many before and after him, fell in love with the city’s rich and diverse music culture. As an undergrad, he was among the students who founded Mushroom New Orleans, a Tulane area record and head shop still operating today. The Peaches name and logo came from a 1974 Capricorn Records compilation, which featured Lee’s friend, Gregg Allman, among other Southern rock notables. Although the store shared similar branding to the national (and now long-defunct) Peaches Records and Tapes chain founded in Los Angeles, Lee Rea explained in a 1980 Billboard interview that his business was a completely independent operation, dedicated to serving the tastes of the New Orleans market. “It was a source of pride for my father that Peaches was a full- service record shop,” says Harris Rea IV, Harris and Shirani’s son, who also goes by Lee.“It made sense for us, being in the most musical city in North America, to work alongside the musicians from across genres who made, and still make, our city great.”
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( opposite ) Illustration by Standby Projects, based on the Peaches logo by Ignacio Gomez.
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