Varsity Eight (California Ramblers) / Brooke Johns And His Orchestra – 1923

Here are two pre-microphone-era recordings of a catchy song from the Ziegfeld Follies of 1923.

The Varsity Eight recording, from my personal collection, is new to Radio Dismuke and will be added to this week’s playlist update.   The Brooke Johns version, from the Edward Mitchell Collection, has been in the station’s playlist since October.

I think these are both excellent recordings.  I am especially fond of the Varsity Eight version as it has several enjoyable hot jazz passages after the one-minute mark.

The Brooke Johns recording is the more historically significant of the two, as Brooke Johns was an actual cast member of the 1923 Follies and performed the song in the show, along with dancer Ann Pennington.

Johns rose to prominence as a jazz banjo player and vocalist in vaudeville. By the early 1920s, he was appearing in Broadway productions, including both the 1922 and 1923 productions of the Follies.  He also formed his own dance band, which recorded 11 sides for Victor between April 1923 and February 1924.

Between July and November 1924, Johns was in London, where he performed at the Piccadilly Hotel Cabaret.  In August, Johns received an invitation to visit the Prince of Wales, where he performed for the other guests, with the Prince himself joining in on drums.  Johns returned to England in August 1925, where he performed at the exclusive Kit-Cat Club and at the Alhambra Theatre. 

During his trips to England, Johns recorded several vocal/banjo sides, seven of which were issued, for His Master’s Voice.  None of those recordings appear to have been issued in the United States.

Johns was also the co-composer of the popular 1924 song “Tessie! (Stop Teasing Me),” which was one of the songs he recorded while in London.

Johns retired from show business in the early 1930s to a large farm he had acquired outside of Olney, Maryland.   However, between various other endeavors he became involved with, he subsequently hosted a morning program on a local radio station and a local children’s television show.  On occasion, he would also sing and play the banjo at local schools and nursing homes, his last performance being in 1986 at a Montgomery College scholarship benefit, when he was 92 years old.

Johns seems to have lived a fascinating, multi-faceted life and strikes me as someone who would have been extremely interesting to have known. You can read a more detailed overview of his life and endeavors that I haven’t mentioned at this link.  (Note: the overview is entirely AI-generated, but it is very good at citing and providing links to its sources.)

The Varsity Eight was a recording pseudonym for the California Ramblers used on the low-priced Cameo label, as well as on Cameo’s various subsidiary labels.  The recording here was also issued on Cameo’s Lincoln label but under the pseudonym of the University Sextette.

Beginning in 1922 and into the early 1930s, the band, whose roster over the years included some of the era’s top jazz musicians, recorded countless hundreds of sides under their own name, as well as a vast array of pseudonyms, for virtually every American record label of the era.

I’ve read that over 100 pseudonyms were ultimately used for the band’s recordings, though some of them were used much more frequently than others, such as the Varsity Eight, the Golden Gate Orchestra, the University Six, the Five Birmingham Babies, and Ted Wallace and His Campus Boys.

It was not uncommon for the California Ramblers to record a song, with slight changes in arrangement, for multiple labels.  However, I was not able to find any reference to indicate that this was the case with “Take Oh Take Those Lips Away.”