The Victor Black Label Discography

The Victor Black Label Discography Victor 25000, 26000, 27000 Series John R. Bolig ISBN 978-1-7351787-3-8 ii The Victor Black Label Discography Victor 25000, 26000, 27000 Series John R. Bolig American Discography Project UC Santa Barbara Library © 2017 John R. Bolig. All rights reserved. ii The Victor Discography Series By John R. Bolig The advent of this online discography is a continuation of record descriptions that were compiled by me and published in book form by Allan Sutton, the publisher and owner of Mainspring Press. When undertaking our work, Allan and I were aware of the work started by Ted Fa- gan and Bill Moran, in which they intended to account for every recording made by the Victor Talking Machine Company. We decided to take on what we believed was a more practical approach, one that best met the needs of record collectors. Simply stat- ed, Fagan and Moran were describing recordings that were not necessarily published; I believed record collectors were interested in records that were actually available. We decided to account for records found in Victor catalogs, ones that were purchased and found in homes after 1901 as 78rpm discs, many of which have become highly sought- after collector’s items. The following Victor discographies by John R. Bolig have been published by Main- spring Press: Caruso Records ‐ A History and Discography GEMS – The Victor Light Opera Company Discography The Victor Black Label Discography – 16000 and 17000 Series The Victor Black Label Discography – 18000 and 19000 Series The Victor Black Label Discography – 20000 and 21000 Series The Victor Black Label Discography – 22000, 23000, 24000, V‐38000, V‐38500 and V‐ 40000 Series The Victor Red Seal Discography – Volume I – Single‐sided Series The Victor Red Seal Discography – Volume II – Double‐sided ‐ to 1930 The Victor Discography – Green, Blue and Purple Labels The Victor Discography – Special Labels, 1928 to 1941 The Bluebird Discography – Volume I Allan Sutton announced his retirement in 2016 and informed his readers that Main- spring Press would not be publishing any more books, including some that were in progress. Sam Brylawski and David Seubert, the two leaders of the Discography of American Historical Recordings—a project housed at the University of California, Santa iii Barbara—had supported and encouraged each of my books and we shared information freely for more than a dozen years. When Sam learned that I no longer had a publisher, he contacted me and offered to put my work online as one of their current projects. We agreed to do so with three conditions: We would encourage people to buy Allan Sutton’s remaining inventory of books; We would encourage people to make documented amendments to my data; The online material could be downloaded and printable in a format that looks very much like the style found in the Mainspring Press volumes. Scope of Victor Record Production and Preserved Data Fagan and Moran had an impressive objective, but it was limited. Many of the records issued by the Victor Company were not recorded in the United States, and their de- scription would require research by people all over the world, especially by people who studied the recordings made in Europe by a Victor affiliate that we now refer to as His Master’s Voice (HMV). To make things even more confusing, the Victor Company also had studios in Latin America, and many of those recordings also began to be listed in the standard Victor catalogs. An enormous amount of data has been preserved in various archives, but unfortu- nately some data have been lost. Some of the extant data are “second generation” documents and that adds to the mystery surrounding many of the Victor records. For example, when recordings were made by Victor engineers, the descriptions were sent to clerks who typed data into daily ledgers and then created blue-colored index cards (also called blue history cards) that contained basic statistics for recordings that would actually be published. The great majority of documents written by the engineers no longer exist, so we are not certain that various people in the studios participated in some of the recordings. In fact, other than the major artists, we don’t always know who was in the studio. It is also true that musicians in the studio did not participate in every composition that was recorded. For example, some arrangements did not require various instruments, and there are notes in the ledgers that indicate that musicians were excused early, or were replaced when a second or third take was recorded. Some well-known discographers did considerable research to identify many of the musicians who played for the famous bands and orchestras of the 1930s, and they sometimes made incorrect as- sumptions that those performers participated in every recording made in sessions by those organizations. iv Allan Sutton and I agreed that we would prepare and publish descriptions of Victor records that were not embellished with unproven data. Only those facts that can be seen on the existing ledgers and blue history cards are included in the volumes that we created. I made a few exceptions. In one recording, a performer mentions the name of somebody else on the record. In another instance, a friend of mine advised me that Louis Armstrong mentioned playing his trumpet on a Jimmy Rodgers record, and he provided me with a copy of the videotape on which Armstrong described that recording. I was impressed by the research done by Don Rayno, who did an outstanding job of documenting recordings made by Paul Whiteman in his biography Paul Whiteman, Pioneer in American Music – Volume I (Scarecrow Press, 2003). Victor had released a memorial album in honor of Bix Beiderbecke (a member of Whiteman’s orchestra from 1928 to 1930) and despite the absence of his name in the Victor ledgers, Rayno’s work convinced me to list Beiderbecke as a performer on each record in that album. The publication of discographies with undocumented speculative information is simply unacceptable to me. Collectors should not buy a record because a famous trumpet player is rumored to have participated on a recording. There are instances where two or three relatively famous discographers have made inferences about who may have participated in many Victor recordings, yet I could not find proof that those people were within 100 miles of a recording studio on many of the recording dates. Common sense dictates that Paul Whiteman was the conductor of recordings made by his orchestra. He was not always present, and the fact is that quite a few well-known bands and orchestras were conducted by members of the band or by Victor employ- ees. The great John Philip Sousa’s band made dozens of Victor records conducted by Arthur Pryor and others but never by Sousa. When making the lists of records in this discography, I only list the name of the conductor if his or her name was actually printed in the daily journals. The distinction here is important. If I was not 100% sure that an individual was in the studio, I do not list that person’s name. Labels have always been a problem. In the early years, Victor record labels contained many errors. By the 1930s, the company had proofreaders who spotted and corrected errors, sometimes after a few hundred copies had been sold. The company, and almost every company in the world, had variations on Tchaikovsky’s name. Waltzes were listed as Fox trots, and by the way, “Fox” was a man’s name and I am adamant that it should by spelled with a capital letter. (We are not certain that an entertainer named Harry Fox actually devised that form of dance, but he did popularize it.) So, I can only suggest that I made the very best effort to accurately describe the title of any selection that I listed, and some of the decisions may not agree with those listed on labels. Among other things, I did not list lyricists on orchestral records. v The identification of lyricists and composers was difficult. Victor documents and record labels usually list last names and do not distinguish between poets and composers. I usually listed lyricists first and composers last for each of the records that are described, but that is often misleading because some of those people collaborated on the entire composition. Once in a while I would come across a song attributed to people known as lyricists, and I would devote too much time trying to prove that somebody else must have written the tune. It was always a joy to come across songs written by Cole Porter or Irving Berlin because they almost always wrote the words and the music for their songs and no research was necessary. Pseudonyms are another problem. I cannot imagine why anybody would write a great song and want to be listed under another name, but many entertainers Angli- cized their names in the “good old days” in order to be more acceptable to the ticket- buying public. I made a half-hearted effort to identify quite a few of the more significant people who were known by more than one name, or by a nickname. All of the above comments fall into the category of delimitations for this type of research. I have to confess that I often sense that a performer is probably included on a recording and I regret that I could not document that fact. There are a couple of records described in this discography on which a band deliberately imitates the style of other famous bands.

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