“Stormy Weather”
Elmer Feldkamp & His Orchestra; Elmer Feldkamp, vocal
(Crown 3481-A mx 2039) March 1933
“Was That The Human Thing To Do”
Bert Lown And His Orchestra; Elmer Feldkamp, vocal
(Victor 22908-A) January 12, 1932
“And Then Your Lips Met Mine”
Bert Lown And His Hotel Biltmore Orchestra; Elmer Feldkamp, vocal
(Victor 22582-A) November 24, 1930
If you collect 1930s dance band 78 rpm records, you will inevitably start seeing the name Elmer Feldkamp, a then well-known vocalist who appeared on hundreds of recordings across multiple record labels.
While Feldkamp fronted bands of his own for brief periods, most of the time, he was employed as a clarinet and saxophone player and vocalist for prominent bandleaders of the era, most notably Bert Lown and, beginning in 1932, Freddy Martin, and regularly appeared on both bands’ records.
Feldkamp was also one of a handful of vocalists, along with Smith Ballew, Chick Bullock, Scrappy Lambert, and Dick Robertson, who were in high demand by the era’s record labels for freelance work in recording sessions with their in-house studio bands. Thus, Feldkamp appeared on numerous recordings with pseudonymous bands on Columbia, Brunswick, Okeh, Crown, and the various labels issued by the American Record Corporation.
He was also well-known to radio audiences through his vocals on broadcasts by the Bert Lown and Freddy Martain bands and some of the Fred Rich Orchestra’s broadcasts. For a while, he also had his own radio program on the NBC Red Network’s New York flagship station WEAF.
Unfortunately, Feldkamp’s career came to an abrupt end in 1938 when he died unexpectedly at the age of 36, apparently as a result of complications of appendicitis.
While all three songs presented here were well-known at the time and recorded by multiple artists, only “Stormy Weather” remains widely known today. I think Feldkamp’s recording here for Crown, a short-lived Depression-era budget label, is among the nicer of the many versions of the song that have been made over the years. According to discographer Brian Rust, the band for which the label credits Feldkamp as leader most likely consisted of members of the Freddy Martin band who were recruited for the session.
A month after Feldkamp recorded “Stormy Weather” for Crown, he provided the vocal for the Freddy Martin orchestra’s recording of the song for the American Record Corporation, which issued it under the pseudonym of Bob Causer And His Cornellians on the company’s Banner, Conqueror, Melotone, Oriole, Perfect and Romeo labels, though Feldkamp was given label credit for his vocal and under his actual name. You can hear a recording of that version on YouTube at this link. Of the two, I personally prefer the Crown version.
On Feldkamp’s recording of “Was That The Human Thing To Do” with Bert Lown And His Orchestra, you might notice a bit of improvement in fidelity over the other two recordings. At the time, Victor was experimenting with new ribbon-type microphones and improved cutting lathes. Some of their recordings from this period yielded a level of fidelity not seen again on commercial records until the 1950s. The few people who could still afford to buy records during the depths of the Great Depression usually could not afford to replace their old-fashioned wide-up phonographs with modern, lighter-weight electrical pickups. The heavy tone arms and steel needles on the old windups caused the grooves on the higher fidelity records to wear out after just a few plays, thus making it necessary to dial back the improvements in fidelity for a number of years.
“And Then Your Lips Met Mine” was made at a time when the Bert Lown orchestra had a long-term engagement at New York’s Biltmore Hotel. If you listen closely, 20 seconds into the recording, you will hear what sounds to me like some sort of error, either by the recording technicians or by the musicians. After I completed and listened to my audio restoration, I thought that it might have been a result of a slight skip in the record’s grooves that I hadn’t noticed. But I found copies that a couple of people have uploaded to YouTube and it can be heard on their transfers as well. I suspect that there was some sort of brief hicup with the recording equipment as it was transmitting the audio to the blank wax master. Two other takes of the song were made during the recording session. So either Victor’s staff did not notice the error, or they felt that, in spite of the error, this was the best take out of the three.
You can read more about Elmer Feldkamp and his career in this article by Anton Garcia-Fernandez, who has done a great job researching hard-to-find information about Feldkamp.