By R J SMITH CINCINNATI, Ohio - Enough about New Orleans, Memphis or Nashville, and other, better-celebrated cradles of American music. For Cincinnati, it’s star time.

On a cold afternoon in November, a crowd gathered at the crumbling headquarters of King Records for the unveiling of a historical marker financed by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

A landmark the city barely knew it had, King Records was once the home of James Brown, Nina Simone and Charlie Feathers.

King started as a so-called hillbilly label in 1943; moved into “race music”? the onetime name for what became rhythm and blues? around 1945; and attempted in ways great and small to merge both audiences until it essentially shut down after the death of its owner, Syd Nathan.

“While no single city has naming rights as the birthplace of rock ‘n’roll, the elements that made rock ‘n’roll? the blend of country, blues and the big beat? were being created at King Records,”said Larry Nager, former pop music editor for several Cincinnati newspapers and the author of the book“Memphis Beat.” “Whether it was the big-voiced jump blues of Wynonie Harris or the hillbilly boogie of Moon Mullican, these were the records that the first generation of rock ‘n’rollers were cutting their teeth on.”

King was also where Little Willie John recorded“Fever”; where “The Twist”was first laid down by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters; and where Wynonie Harris made“Good Rockin’Tonight.”

King also became the epicenter of a music scene, like Sun Records in Memphis and Chess Records in Chicago, the subject of the recent movie“Cadillac Records.”

For about a decade, musicians, fans and local politicians and businesspeople had been working on their own to elevate King’s profile. At the dedication, Bootsy Collins? who was a studio musician at King until James Brown took him on the road, to say nothing of his long membership in Parliament-Funkadelic? exuded an enthusiasm for what King meant .

“The more I hung around King,”he said,“the more I started falling in love with music. From seeing how passionate and dedicated those musicians and artists were, I realized,‘If I’m going to do this, I can’t be joking.’”

Born in Cincinnati in 1904, Mr.Nathan, the label’s owner, worked at a pawnshop as a young man and promoted wrestling matches. Then he opened a record shop and found he had, as he would put it,“shellac in my veins.”(In the early days, records were made of molded shellac.)

One of Mr.Nathan’s innovations was to construct a facility not just for recording music but also for pressing records, designing album-cover art, and packing boxes and shipping them out. An industry outsider who learned as he went, Mr.Nathan to some degree assembled a music industry that he could control, all under his roof. A record could be cut in the morning and acetates placed in D.J.s’hands that night. More than once, a King artist was on the road back home to Macon, Georgia, or Philadelphia, when he would hear his new song on the radio.

Another key to King’s success was its racial pragmatism. It’s probably a stretch to call Mr.Nathan a progressive, but he was colorblind in his pursuit of the widest possible audience. He didn’t just record both white and black acts; he had his ace R&B studio band playing on country records, and his country bands trying their hands at black pop hits, an almost unthinkable practice at the time.

Brian Powers, a city librarian, has written about King and Mr.Nathan.“Guys like this just did so much for American music, and America doesn’t even know about them,”Mr.Powers said.“Heck, Cincinnati barely even knows.”