Many Radio Dismuke listeners are already aware that Edward Mitchell (known as “Eddie The Collector” when appearing on the station’s New Year’s and other special broadcasts) passed away this past August. Eddie was generous in making 78 rpm records from his collection, some of them quite rare, available for me to digitize for the station. On any given day’s playlist, one will hear a number of his records.
I can now announce that Eddie’s collection will remain intact (as opposed to being sold off piecemeal) and will be fully available to Early 1900s Music Preservation for use on Radio Dismuke. In that sense, even though he is gone, Eddie will continue to contribute recordings to the station for several years to come.
I say “several years” because, due to his collection’s size, it will realistically take me that long to digitize and clean up all of the records in it that are a good fit for the station – which is likely to be a significant percentage of the collection.
Eddie started collecting records in the 1950s and my rough guess is that over 90 percent of his collection consists of 1920s jazz and dance band recordings. I have noticed a few excellent records from the 1930s mixed in. But, for most of his life, Eddie’s collecting focus was on the 1920s. It was only in his later years that he started developing more of an appreciation for the music of the early 1930s and sometimes expressed regret at having, for years, passed over opportunities to acquire outstanding and hard-to-find 1930s records.
While Eddie made a lot of records available for me to digitize, until now I had little idea of the size and scope of his collection. Whenever we got together for me to digitize, Eddie already had a big pile of records that he knew I would regard as a good fit for the station picked out for me. What I didn’t realize until now was that the vast majority of his collection was of similar caliber as the records he had picked out from it.
As I work through digitizing the records for the station, from time to time I will pick out a few to share here on this blog. The recordings below come from a more or less random handful of records I pulled out to listen to. Almost all of them were worthy of digitizing for the station – but here are a few sides that I thought were particularly enjoyable or interesting.
– Dismuke
“The Keyboard Express”
Clarence Williams’ Jazz Kings
(Columbia 14348-D mx 146825) August 1, 1928
“Walk That Broad”
Clarence Williams’ Jazz Kings
(Columbia 14348-D mx 146826) August 1, 1928
“Starlight And Tulips”
Thelma Terry And Her Play Boys
(Columbia 1532-D mx 145855) March 29, 1928
“Lonesome Mama Blues”
Mamie Smith And Her Jazz Hounds
(Okeh 4630-A) May 1922
“Wonder If She’s Lonely Too”
Bennie Krueger’s Orchestra
(Brunswick 2485-B) September 21, 1923
“Satanic Blues”
Lanin’s Southern Serenaders
(Regal 9191 mx 42163) January 24, 1922