After 75 years of music history, Delaware's largest recording studio to be demolished
Tucked away in a nondescript industrial park building near Newport is a big piece of Delaware music history, which will soon be no more.
It's home to Ken-Del Studios, Delaware's largest commercial recording studio, which was designed by innovative architect and acoustician John Storyk, who started his career in 1968 when he built the famed Electric Lady Studios for Jimi Hendrix in New York's Greenwich Village.
Over nearly three-quarters of a century, the list of national performers recorded by Ken-Del includes Dionne Warwick, Bill Monroe, Solomon Burke, Donald Byrd, Jim Croce, "Weird Al" Yankovic, Melba Moore, David Bromberg and The Hooters. Even first lady Jill Biden was there for the audiobook version of her 2019 memoir "Where the Light Enters: Building a Family, Discovering Myself."
And the list of Delaware performers and bands who have come through its doors numbers in the thousands, ranging from Boysetsfire, Tommy Conwell and the Young Rumblers and Johnny Neel to Fostina Dixon, Nik Everett and Cliff Hillis. Everything from music albums, film soundtracks, television tracks, commercials, audiobooks and audio for video games have been created in the space, along with plenty of video production.
But 74 years after first opening on Wilmington's Shipley Street by founding owner H. Edwin "Ed" Kennedy, Ken-Del Studios has recently closed, making way for a marijuana growing facility that will take over the 17,600-square-foot single-story building once the sale closes.
The meticulously planned studio with terrific sound ― one that's a single degree of separation from guitar god Hendrix ― will be demolished with the building stripped down to its bare walls for the new business.
As the deal nears closing, longtime chief engineer/producer Paul Janocha has been dismantling the historic studio one piece at a time as word spread through a Facebook video about the studio's closure, triggering a wave of remembrances from musicians who recorded their albums there.
"I just couldn't believe it was in Newport the first time I was there," says Wilmington-born jazz trumpeter Gerald Chavis, director of the Clifford Brown Jazz Festival Orchestra. "It was the best-kept secret in Delaware."
'On a world-class level'
Kennedy opened Ken-Del Productions on New Year's Day in 1950 at 515 Shipley St. on the second floor of Knowles Inc. music shop, now the site of the new downtown Crosby Hill apartment complex. The studio moved to Ayre Street in Newport for a short time before Kennedy began building its current location in 1988 with Janocha joining the staff five months later.
Kennedy grew up during the Great Depression and refused to finance his projects, so he first built the building and eventually opened its smallest studio and operated only from there for years.
He then used the revenue generated from that studio to fund the sparkling Storyk-designed 48-by-33 Studio A, which was completed in 2014, finally filling out the spacious building. Storyk, now 77, also has designed private studios for everyone from Bruce Springsteen and Bob Marley to Whitney Houston and Jay-Z through the years.
A 24-by12 split-level Studio B stage also was constructed for live streaming, rehearsals, video production and the COVID-19-era livestream of Wilmington's Clifford Brown Jazz Festival.
Chavis has recorded in plenty of big city studios including work with Gamble and Huff's Philadelphia International Records at the city's celebrated Sigma Sound Studios, which closed 10 years ago and hosted everyone from Aretha Franklin and David Bowie, along with The O'Jays, The Jacksons, Lou Rawls, Teddy Pendergrass and more.
"Ken-Del was on a world-class level ― on par with all of them," he says. "I'm so sorry to see it go."
Kennedy's road from Battle of the Bulge to Ken-Del
Kennedy was a World War II veteran whose tour of duty in the U.S. Army Signal Corps included the Battle of the Bulge and the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp before serving as the chief engineer at WILM-AM from 1946 to 1960.
He died at the age of 93 in 2014, just after he "fulfilled his dream" of completing the prized studio, as his obituary put it. He had been able to attend its first recording session even in failing health. His wife, Marjorie, then took sole ownership of the studio until 2020 when she died at 99 in her Newark home.
That's when their three daughters, Shirley, Barbara and Karen, took ownership.
The studio's final session came last month when U.S. Olympic figure skater Gracie Gold was there to record some pickup lines for an audiobook of her upcoming memoir, "Outofshapeworthlessloser: A Memoir of Figure Skating, F*cking Up, and Figuring It Out," set for release next month by Penguin Random House.
The recording wrapped up a 36-year run on First State Boulevard off West Newport Pike near First State Plaza.
"When Ken-Del was built, the big studio boom was kind of dying out with digital multitracks coming out and people having studios in their basements," Janocha says. "Professional studios were getting smaller and smaller and [Kennedy] was building bigger and bigger, bucking the trend. We somehow managed to make it more than 30 years."
Why marijuana is moving in
Janocha says the studio was still breaking even these days, even as more and more recording is being done in smaller professional and home studios.
But here's the twist: That's not where Ken-Del made the bulk of its money.
The back of the building is home to a film and tape vault where Ken-Del stored original prints of television commercials for advertising agencies looking to pay less in taxes than other states, representing major national clients ranging from Macy's to Verizon.
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"And that paid for everything you see here more or less," Janocha says.
Facing that declining revenue with video production going digital, he says the trio of Kennedy daughters made the decision to sell.
Originally, the building and 2? acres it sits on was listed for $2.8 million when it hit the market over the summer as a music studio for sale. But when a marijuana production company (and its cash business) inquired, the offer was too good for Kennedys to pass up and the dream of the studio living evaporated, Janocha says.
When asked if it will be the first time marijuana will have been found at the studio's site, Janocha laughs: "I would be very surprised if it was the first time in this building given the clientele."
Moving on
For Janocha, who has spent the last 35 years within Ken-Del's walls helping transform musical dreams into realizations, the closure is hard. And breaking down the studio system he's built up over that time may even be harder.
"I mean, I started working here when I was 20 and couldn't even buy a beer yet. So my entire adult life has been here and emotionally, it's tough," he says. "It's a shame because they don't build studios like this anymore. It's such a beautiful looking and sounding room."
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The studio equipment, which Janocha has the lonely task of dismantling in recent weeks, is being put up for sale through posts at facebook.com/kendelstudios.
While he hasn't been imagining what that last day at Ken-Del will be like, he has an idea.
"I'm just picturing that last episode of 'Cheers' where the sign on the door says closed and they turn out the lights," Janocha says. "But the bar was still there in 'Cheers.' There will probably just be a few wires left here. So it will be a little more depressing than that."
The 56-year-old engineer and producer who lives in Elsmere will still be working after Ken-Del closes. He has taken his skills to Wilmington's Wavlab Studios and he'll likely have plenty of business coming with him based on the outpouring following his video announcing the closure.
Original recordings still available
Janocha wanted to make the video as a personal goodbye and let the artists know that original tapes of all Ken-Del recordings are still housed in the Ken-Del vault. He wanted to give them a chance to come and get them if they wanted, joking that his "basement isn't big enough" for the massive archive.
Even before the closure announcement, Jane Campbell had reached out to Janocha in recent years to get the original recordings Kennedy made with her father and aunt, folk/bluegrass standouts Alex Campbell and Ola Belle Reed, best known for the song "High on a Mountain."
Campbell, 69, of Avondale, Pennsylvania, was overjoyed when she first discovered Ken-Del had kept the recordings of her father's albums, radio shows and live performances, transporting her back to when she was a child traveling with the duo and growing up at the feet of the Appalachian musicians. Some of the recordings even included renowned guests such as The Stanley Brothers.
Now, she too mourns the loss of the studio that meant so much to her family.
"It feels like closure to a generation," says Campbell, whose father had owned Campbell's Corner market and music center in Oxford, Pennsylvania, and died at 90 in 2013. "I wish Ken-Del could have lasted another 100 years, but you just have to say goodbye sometimes."
Have a story idea? Contact Ryan Cormier of Delaware Online/The News Journal at [email protected] or (302) 324-2863. Follow him on Facebook (@ryancormier) and X (@ryancormier).
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This article originally appeared on Delaware News Journal: Ken-Del Studios is poised to be converted into a marijuana grow facility
