Background information about the recordings can be found below the audio selections.
“I’d Love To Go Around With You”
Colonial Club Orchestra; Scrappy Lambert, vocal
(Brunswick 3891-A) March 23, 1928
“I’m Always Smiling”
Colonial Club Orchestra; Scrappy Lambert, vocal
(Brunswick 3891-B) March 23, 1928
From the Edward Mitchell collection, here are a couple of catchy tunes with a pleasant, happy dance band arrangement of style that is uniquely 1920s.
The Colonial Club Orchestra was a recording pseudonym used by Brunswick Records between 1926 and 1931 for dance records of popular songs.
For years, many collectors – including myself – equated the Colonial Club Orchestra with the Bob Haring Orchestra. Some websites, including Bob Haring’s Wikipedia page, continue to do so.
This is entirely understandable because Brian Rust’s American Dance Band Discography credits the vast majority of Colonial Club Orchestra recordings, including the two featured here, to Bob Haring’s band.
However, according to Brunswick’s recording ledgers, the vast majority of Colonial Club Orchestra recording sessions were led by Brunswick’s in-house music director Louis Katzman. Bob Haring led some Colonial Club Orchestra recording sessions in 1929 after he became the music director at Brunswick. But, according to the ledgers and as documented in the Discography of American Historical Recordings (D.A.H.R.), the recording sessions between 1926 and 1928 were led by Katzman.
Harold “Scrappy” Lambert worked as a freelance studio vocalist for most of the major record labels of the 1920s and 1930s. He, and similar studio vocalists such as Irving Kaufman, Smith Ballew, Elmer Feldkamp, and others, made themselves available whenever record labels needed a vocalist to accompany either their in-house bands or even well-known name bands for a recording session.
The recorded output of the studio vocalists mentioned was enormously prolific. D.A.H.R. lists well over 800 sides that Lambert recorded between 1927 and 1931 alone, and he continued to make records well into the 1940s.