Cheryl Pawelski


Cheryl Pawelski is a Grammy Award-winning American record producer and record-company executive. Since 2010, she has been one of the founder/owners of Omnivore Recordings, a Los Angeles-based record label specializing in historical releases, reissues and previously unissued vintage recordings, as well as select releases of new music.

Early life

Pawelski is the oldest child of a Pol­ish-Ger­man fam­ily from Milwaukee. Her fa­ther was an in­dus­trial ex­porter and longtime mu­si­cian who regularly volunteered as a piano player at a Milwaukee hospital. Her grandmother worked at a local department store which sold records, and encouraged Pawelski to begin a music collection at an early age.
Pawelski attended Pius XI High School in Milwaukee, and graduated from Marquette University in 1989. After college but before moving to Los Angeles to begin her career in the music industry, Pawelski worked at a Milwaukee record store, Radio Doctors, to learn about record labels and distribution. A musician herself, Pawelski played in several bands.

Career

Prior to co-founding Omnivore Recordings, Pawelski held positions at EMI-Capitol Records, Concord Music Group and Rhino Entertainment, and worked as a consulting producer for EMI-Capitol Music, Warner Strategic Marketing/Rhino, Rhino Handmade, iTunes, Sony Legacy, Rykodisc, Universal Music Group, BMG and others.
Pawelski has produced or supervised recordings, reissues and boxed sets for a wide variety of artists including The Band, The Beach Boys, Big Star, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, Bette Midler, Willie Nelson, Otis Redding, Nina Simone, The Staple Singers, Rod Stewart, Richard Thompson, Townes Van Zandt, Wilco, Hank Williams Sr. and Warren Zevon. She has also produced or overseen several reissues of film soundtrack albums, including , Fiddler on the Roof, Raging Bull, Shutter Island, Up in the Air and Woodstock.
Pawelski has been both a governor and trustee of The Recording Academy. She has also served on the board of directors for the Blues Foundation and the Farm Aid Development Advisory Council.
An inveterate collector of music and memorabilia, Pawelski's personal archive includes more than 70,000 pieces. A portion of her LP collection formed the core of the exhibit Spaced Out! The Final Frontier In Album Covers, which opened at Experience Music Project in Seattle, Washington, and also showed at The Museum at Bethel Woods in New York. The exhibit featured 117 space-themed albums released from 1940 to 1969.

Other work

Pawelski wrote the foreword for Derrick Bang's 2020 book Crime and Spy Jazz on Screen, 1950-1970: A History and Discography, published by McFarland.

Awards and nominations

Pawelski won a 2014 Grammy Award for Best Historical Album for producing Hank Williams' The Garden Spot Programs, 1950. She received Grammy nominations for the box sets Rockin' Bones: 1950s Punk & Rockabilly, ' and '. She also won a 2017 Blues Music Award in the category of Historical Album of the Year, for producing the Bobby Rush box set Chicken Heads: A 50-Year History Of Bobby Rush.

Personal life

In 2008, Pawelski married Audrey Bilger, a literature professor and president of Portland, Oregon's Reed College.

Select discography