| “Stop Flirting” Meyer Davis’ Le Paradis Band July 10, 1925 (Victor 19728-B) |
| “Alone At Last” Coon-Sanders Original Nighthawk Orchestra; J. L. Sanders, vocal July 13, 1925 (Victor 19728-A) |
From the Edward Mitchell collection, here are two recordings from the period when Victor and Columbia had begun issuing records made using microphones but had not yet announced their new, vastly improved electrical recording technology to the public.
Part of the reason was that the new phonographs capable of reproducing the improved frequency range of the new records would not be available until later in the year. The other reason is that both companies wanted an opportunity to sell off their existing stock of records before they became perceived as obsolete.
Meyer Davis’s career as a bandleader spanned more than 60 years, including performances at inaugurations and White House events for every United States president from Woodrow Wilson to Gerald Ford shortly before Davis passed away in 1976.
Davis is best remembered not just for his band but also for the large music contracting empire he built around it. At its peak, he controlled more than 80 bands employing more than 1,000 musicians that performed as the Meyer Davis Orchestra, primarily along the East Coast but also in other parts of the United States. He was sometimes known as the “Millionaire’s Bandleader” because of the high demand for his orchestras at debutante balls and various resorts and nightspots popular with wealthy and socially prominent audiences.
One such venue was the Le Paradis Restaurant in Washington, D.C., one of the city’s hottest night spots in the 1920s, which Davis owned and built out to his specifications. You can find an interesting article about the history of the Le Paradis, including its Prohibition-era legal difficulties, at this link.
“Stop Flirting” was composed by Russell Tarbox, with lyrics by Henri Sloane, and was inspired by the success of the 1925 silent comedy film Stop Flirting. The film was an adaptation of the 1922 Broadway musical For Goodness Sake, which starred Fred and Adelle Astaire. In 1923, the show moved to London under a new name, Stop Flirting, marking the Astaires’ debut on the London stage. The production was a favorite of the Prince of Wales, who attended ten performances and helped thrust the Astaires into London social prominence.
The song, however, came later and was not part of the stage production or the silent film score.
As mentioned in our June 28 posting, the Coon-Sanders Original Nighthawk Orchestra, led by Carlton Coon and Joe Sanders, was originally based in Kansas City, where it was among the first local, Midwestern bands to achieve national fame through radio, thanks to its late-night broadcasts beginning in 1922 from that city’s Muehlebach Hotel over radio station WDAF.
The band relocated to Chicago in 1924. At the time this recording was made, the band was based out of that city’s Congress Hotel, where it had another successful late-night program, The Insomnia Club, broadcast over radio station KYW.
“Alone At Last” is a rather haunting tune composed in 1925 by bandleader Ted Fio Rito with lyrics by Gus Kahn. Fio Rito’s own band, however, apparently never recorded it. Around eleven other recordings of the song were issued in the United States in 1925, including versions by the California Ramblers, Lee Morse, and Fletcher Henderson, as well as British recordings by the Jack Hylton and Geoffrey Goodhart bands.