There’s an old album cover with an image of a microphone wearing a tuxedo and bowler hat; there’s another with a blue-on-blue background and a lone piano under a yellow streetlight; another has a horseman riding across the neck of a violin. These covers, along with roughly 2,500 others, were designed by the same man; Alex Steinweiss.

From the late-1930s through the early ‘70s, Steinweiss designed album covers for record labels including Columbia, Decca, Remington, RCA, London and more. His portfolio is packed with vibrant, playful illustrations that were designed to catch the eye of potential record buyers. His job was to package classical, jazz, pop, country, soundtrack, vocal, orchestral and blues records in such a way that people would want to buy them. In doing so, he solidified album art’s place in pop art, established a much closer relationship between music and its packaging and became one of the most celebrated and recognizable designers of the 20th century. Steinweiss, who passed away on July 17, 2011 was a key player in transforming record packaging into an art of its own.When Steinweiss began working for Columbia, the company was, like many other record companies, using generic packaging for its records; either flip-through albums or brown paper sleeves that had label designs on them. With the introduction of the long-play album (as opposed to 78s with a song per side), they enlisted Steinweiss to create a new package to house the records. He patented his design for the cardboard album jacket as we now know it and convinced Columbia to let him design the covers.

His massive contributions to popular and musical culture have made Steinweiss a legend of graphic design; a pioneer of album art. But here’s where the story gets a bit tricky. Steinweiss is credited with single-handedly inventing album art. The story that is passed around says that before him, all albums came in brown paper sleeves; that he alone had the idea that images could accompany music.

The problem with this claim is that before Steinweiss’s designs, album covers with images already existed. Decca alone had released somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 albums with photos and illustrations on them. Albums by Bessie Smith, Bing Crosby, WIllie the Lion, Benny Goodman and many more all had images on their covers years before Steinweiss. In 2010, Dr. Michael Biel, a professor at Morehead State University, gave a presentation at the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) conference detailing the many pre-Steinweiss albums that had graphics on them.

So what’s the deal? Here is my best, non-album-cover-expert unravelling of the story: Prior to Steinweiss, records were packaged in either book form or brown paper sleeves. This much is agreed upon. But, what gets lost is the fact that some of these albums featured pasted-on photos and/or illustrations on the packaging. So the idea of having graphics on albums pre-dates Steinweiss, and the idea that he invented album cover art is incorrect. What he did invent (and patent), is the modern album cover; the actual cardboard outer that graphics could be printed directly on. He pioneered a new way of stylistically marrying records to their packages.

The confusion seems to be in the phrasing. Is Steinweiss the inventor of the modern album cover? Yes. Is he the inventor of album cover art? No. While he revolutionized the field and provided the visuals for generations of record appreciators, it’s a bit of an over-swing to say that he was the first to transform brown paper packaging into art. He was one of the most influential artist to ever design an album cover, he was (and still is) the father of the modern album cover (in more ways than one), and he revolutionized the art and opened the doors to the golden age of album cover art, but the first to put an image on an album cover, he was not.