Kenn Sisson and His Orchestra with Vaughn DeLeath – 1927

From the Edward Mitchell collection, here are two recordings by a now-obscure late-1920s band.

Either of these recordings would make an excellent on-air contest asking listeners to guess the name of the band, as, unless they happened to know otherwise, most 1920s popular music fans would immediately recognize the style and guess that it was Ben Bernie’s band.

The reason for the similarity is that before he formed his own band, Kenn Sisson worked as Ben Bernie’s pianist and was responsible for the arrangements on most of the band’s recordings.  Sisson also filled in as conductor on a few of the band’s recording sessions.

The uncredited vocal on both of these recordings is by Vaughn DeLeath, whose voice was well-known in the 1920s through radio broadcasts and the more than 300 sides she recorded for Edison, Columbia, Brunswick, OKeh, and Victor.   She was the very first female vocalist to broadcast on an ongoing basis, starting in 1920 at Lee DeForest’s experimental station 2XG, before the first commercial radio broadcasting license was issued to KDKA in November of that year.

Some credit Vaughn DeLeath as the originator of “crooning,” the soft, intimate singing style that soon became standard for popular music vocals and was made possible by the advent of the microphone, first for radio broadcasting and then for recordings.  She was also the first female vocalist to perform on television through experimental broadcasts made during the late 1920s.

Not everyone was a fan, however.  The February 1928 edition of The Phonograph Monthly Review featured a snark-filled review of recently released dance records.   Here is what it had to say about this record:

“Kenn Sisson is handicapped with a tenor — or is it a boy soprano? –chorus in Whether it Rains.”

The author’s name was not mentioned.  The entire review is filled with similar potshots and assertions that various records were less than good, often with no reason provided for such assessments.

How such a review would have been helpful to readers seeking records they might enjoy is beyond me, especially when the critic’s identity was not disclosed.

I also suspect the potshot about Vaughn DeLeath was likely disingenuous.  Vaughn DeLeath was among the most widely recognized female voices of the 1920s.  Even though she is not credited on the label, given her prominence on radio and her enormous output of recordings for all of the major American labels,  it seems a bit odd to me that someone considered knowledgeable enough to review the latest popular dance records professionally would not have immediately recognized the voice on the record as Vaughn DeLeath’s.