Like his fellow record company owners, the Bihari brothers in Los Angeles (for whom he once worked) and the Chess brothers in Chicago, Hyman “Hy” Weiss was a Jewish immigrant who tapped into a postwar black music market that was largely ignored by both radio and the leading music companies.

Based in New York, Weiss’s company, Old Town records, catered in the Fifties for a growing interest in R&B, gospel, blues – and especially doo-wop. The street-corner vocal harmonies of groups such as the Solitaires, the Valentines, the Harptones and the Capris ensured that the label held a special place in the hearts of doo-wop fans.

But the company also enjoyed success with the balladeer Arthur Prysock, the blues duo Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and the rock’n’roll singer Billy Bland, whose Let the Little Girl Dance made the US Top 10 in 1960.

Independent record company bosses such as Weiss were not renowned for being modest or self-effacing. Roger Armstrong, of Ace Records, which has reissued much of Weiss’s catalogue in the UK, described him as a “Runyonesque character” who was “simultaneously irascible and funny as hell”.

He told Armstrong that only three of the four walls were painted in his Harlem studio. If the fourth got painted the artists who recorded there might think he had money to splash around. He also insisted on keeping a swivel chair with four legs but only three castors. He didn’t want people to think he was wasting money on office trappings.

Hyman Weiss was born in Romania in 1923. When he was young his family emigrated to New York and he was brought up in the Bronx. His introduction to music came through the radio — Cab Calloway was an early favourite. He served as a staff sergeant in the Army Air Force during the Second World War and worked as a furrier when discharged.

But music remained a passion and he got a job as a bouncer at a Manhattan club. He eventually landed a job as a salesman for Exclusive Records, one of the first of the independent R&B record companies. From Exclusive he moved on to Modern Records before forming his own distribution company with his brother, Sam, and Bob Green.

With his own company and, later, working for Cosnat Distributors, he broke several large R&B hits in the New York area including I Don’t Know by Willie Mabon and Crying in the Chapel by the Orioles.

In 1953, again with his brother, Sam, he founded Old Town Records, largely to record a vocal group called the Five Crowns which he had managed to steer away from a rival label, Jubilee Records. The name Old Town came from the carbon-paper company Sam Weiss had been working for. With typical adroitness, the Weiss brothers used the company’s headed notepaper as its own, complete with its prestigious Madison Avenue address, even though the two were working out of a small office at a Triboro cinema.

Old Town soon picked up on the large number of black vocal groups present in New York at the time. The Solitaires, the Valentines and Ruth McFad-den & the Supremes all provided solid releases which registered locally without reaching the national charts. Finally, in 1958, We Belong Together, a ballad by Robert (Carr) and Johnny (Mitchell) broke into the Top 40 and So Fine by the Fiestas climbed to No 11. However, So Fine’s success was soured by a claim from the bandleader Johnny Otis that the song was originally his.

Other hits followed, although it was never clear how much of a record’s success was due to what Weiss called “the $50 handshake” he would offer to radio disc jockeys in the days before payola became a dirty word.

Before the Beatles invasion, Weiss produced hits by Billy Bland and the Earls and reissued an earlier doo-wop record, There’s a Moon out Tonight by the Capris, which promptly rose to No 3 in the charts.

By the mid-Sixties Weiss and his label had moved into the soul market. But his love for the blues also resulted in recordings by Rosco Gordon, Buddy Johnson, Tarheel Slim and the ballad singer Arthur Prysock, who provided the resurrected Old Town company with a surprise disco hit, When Love is New, in 1976.

Weiss managed to hang on to his masters as the label wound down during the Seventies and Eighties. He eventually did a licensing deal with Ace Records of Harlesden, West London, which reissued much of the company’s work, including five well-received CDs of vocal groups tracks.

Weiss’s wife, Roz, died in 1996 and he is survived by his son, Barry, who also works in the record business.

Hyman “Hy” Weiss, record company owner, was born on February 12, 1923. He died on March 20, 2007, aged 84