THE VICTOR DISCOGRAPHY: John R. Bolig
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THE VICTOR DISCOGRAPHY: Green, Blue, and Purple Labels (1910–1926) John R. Bolig Mainspring Press Denver, Colorado For Personal, Non-Commercial Use Only Sale or Other Commercial Use Prohibited BOLIG: The Victor Discography — Green, Blue and Purple Labels • Free Personal-Use Edition © 2020 by John R. Bolig. All rights are reserved. Online edition published by Mainspring Press LLC. For non-commercial use only. Sale or other commercial or unauthorized use is prohibited. © 2020 by John R. Bolig. All rights are reserved. This publication is protected under U.S. copyright law as a work of original scholarship. It may downloaded free of charge for personal, non-commercial use only, subject to the following conditions: No portion of this work may be duplicated or distributed in any form, or by any means, including (but not limited to) print and digital media, transmission via the Internet, or conversion to and dissemination via digital databases or e-books. Sale or any other commercial or unauthorized use of this work, whether or not for monetary gain, is prohibited and will be addressed under applicable civil and/ or criminal statutes. For information on licensing this work, or for reproduction exceeding customary fair-use standards, please contact the publisher. Mainspring Press LLC PO Box 631277 Littleton CO 80130 www.mainspringpress.com / [email protected] BOLIG: The Victor Discography — Green, Blue and Purple Labels • Free Personal-Use Edition © 2020 by John R. Bolig. All rights are reserved. Online edition published by Mainspring Press LLC. For non-commercial use only. Sale or other commercial or unauthorized use is prohibited. Preface and Acknowledgments Between 1910 and 1929, the Victor Talking Machine Company published hundreds of records in a mid- priced category, and they used labels that were purple, blue, or green on those records. Collectors of early 78-rpm records are probably quite familiar with them, but they will be quite surprised to find that the numbers of published recordings exceeds anything that they had anticipated because most of these records are somewhat scarce, and many of them were never sold in the United States. The selections available with these labels are varied, and many of them are rather odd and would only appeal to a very select audience Since the records in the purple and blue label series are so varied in nature, it was difficult to find any sources of information concerning them. The discographer Brian Rust listed some of the most important entertainers in one of his discographies, but the information listed in his book was highly selective and incomplete. Alan Kelly and Peter Chaplin, my esteemed colleagues from England, provided almost all of the information about the recordings made in Europe and the Middle East. Mr. Kelly has devoted many years of his life to the listing of records in the Gramophone Company’s catalogs, and I was fortunate that he had finally gotten around to documenting the many recordings in the blue label series that were made in Spain. The promptness, and accuracy, of Mr. Chaplin’s responses were especially appreciated. The source of information about the records made in the United States by the Victor Talking Machine Company exists in New York in the BMG/Sony Archive, but much of the information no longer exists in convenient formats, or it is difficult to decipher. I am especially grateful to Mike Panico and Vince Giordano, who took the time to try to make sense out of fragments of data that we pieced together to identify many of the recordings, especially those made before 1911. Mainspring Press publisher Allan Sutton at first expressed reservations about the amount of interest collectors might have in this discography. Like most of us, he did not fully realize the number and variety of recordings that appeared with purple, blue, and green labels on Victor Talking Machine Company records. After seeing drafts of the discography, he immediately shared my enthusiasm for describing these records. These were not the most beloved, nor the most important records made by the Victor Company, but documenting them has been a very worthwhile and interesting project. BOLIG: The Victor Discography — Green, Blue and Purple Labels • Free Personal-Use Edition © 2020 by John R. Bolig. All rights are reserved. Online edition published by Mainspring Press LLC. For non-commercial use only. Sale or other commercial or unauthorized use is prohibited. About the Author John Bolig is the author of numerous book on historic recordings (including the highly acclaimed Caruso Records—A History and Discography and multiple volumes in Mainspring Press’ Victor Discography Series), and has been honored by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections with a Lifetime Achievement Award. He has collected and archived records since the 1950s. For more than twenty-five years he was an advisor to the Delaware State Museums’ Eldridge Reeves Johnson Memorial in Dover. He was instrumental in arranging the museum’s acquisition of a Dr. Lynwood Heiges’ remarkable collection of phonographs and phonographic memorabilia, which had been assembled over a span of eighty years. A retired educator whose other passion is baseball, Dr. Bolig resides in Delaware with his wife, Darlene. BOLIG: The Victor Discography — Green, Blue and Purple Labels • Free Personal-Use Edition © 2020 by John R. Bolig. All rights are reserved. Online edition published by Mainspring Press LLC. For non-commercial use only. Sale or other commercial or unauthorized use is prohibited. Introduction The term “Red Seal” was a registered trademark that was vigorously defended in legal actions taken against other companies who dared to use that color on their labels. However, no such protections applied to the records described in this volume. Manufactured by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1910 and 1929, they unpretentiously bear purple, blue, or green labels. The records were moderately priced, and there appears to have been no constant rule governing how recordings came to be assigned to these labels. There are some limitations to the listings in this volume. There were Chinese records published with blue labels that were assigned to the 43000 series, and documentation for those is poor, so they are not included. The problem is compounded by the lack of translations for the Chinese titles and artists. A number of Japanese recordings are listed. Some were originally assigned to the Red Seal catalog but were later transferred to the blue label class of records. Translations of their titles, and the names of some of the Japanese artists, do not exist in the Victor archives. Also included in this volume are recordings by Arabic artists in the blue label series, and the translations, or phonetic spellings, of titles or artist’s names are probably not accurate. Certainly, no insult is intended in the title variation or artist’s name that is listed in this book. Because the Victor Talking Machine Company was affiliated with the Gramophone Company in Europe, they shared stampers of recordings made by artists throughout the world. Each company also agreed to sell their products in specific parts of the world. Victor was given exclusive rights to sell their products in North and South America and various locations in the Far East. There is very little documentation about why some Victor records were made for export to Latin America or Asia, but it is a fact that many of the titles were never sold in North America or listed in English-language catalogs. Victor imported large numbers of recording stampers from the Gramophone Company’s Spanish catalog, assigned them to the blue label class of records, and exported them to Latin American markets. Their appeal to buyers in Spanish-speaking countries is easy to understand, but large numbers of Red Seal and blue label records in Italian were also sold exclusively in South America. The recordings in Arabic are somewhat puzzling. Not only are they rarely found in collections, but also one has to wonder where they were sold. Victor did press recordings in many languages that they sold in specific markets in the United States where large numbers of immigrants were known to have settled. Most of the ethnic records were included in the lowest-priced black label category, but most of the Arabic records were featured in the mid-priced blue label class or the higher-priced Red Seal category. No documents have been located that would have described to whom, or where, they were sold in the United States, nor to which countries they might have been exported. The Victor Talking Machine Company prior to its sale to the Radio Corporation of America manufactured all of the records listed in this volume. RCA Victor did publish several series of records with blue, green, or purple labels after 1930, and these have no relationship to those listed in this volume. Purple Labels (1910–1920) With a few exceptions, such as plaid labels used for some Scottish records, Victor records were originally offered with gold print on a black label. The black label series records were popular or ethnic in nature, and they were the lowest-priced records in the Victor catalog. The legendary Red Seal label, featuring classically trained artists, was printed in gold on a red background. There were actually several different categories of Red Seal records, and they were the most expensive records in the Victor Talking Machine Company catalog. In February 1910, Victor created a series of records with purple labels that they sold at mid-range prices. The first artist to be featured on these labels was Harry Lauder, whose talent did not quite fit into either a popular or a classical category. Lauder’s earliest Victor records had been pressed from European stampers and bore black labels.