Musical Notes

Background information about the recordings can be found below the audio selections. 

“Sign Of The Rose”
Ray Miller And His Orchestra
(Brunswick 3132-B)                                     March 9, 1926

“Stomp Your Stuff”
Ray Miller And His Orchestra
(Brunswick 3132-A)                                  March 9, 1926

Here is a record by Ray Miller and His Orchestra I came across in the Edward Mitchell Collection that immediately brought back a flood of memories for me.  This was not the first time that I handled this particular record.  Back in early 2006, I made a transfer of the “Sign Of The Rose” side.

In those days, Eddie was one of the guest contributors to a long-since-discontinued vintage recordings blog that I published.

I vividly remember how impressed I was with the recording while transferring it.  It has a certain quality that I find to be very haunting.

After Eddie’s posted about it in the blog, I added the recording to Radio Dismuke’s playlist, where it has remained ever since. Whenever I hear it in the rotation, I automatically think of Eddie.

What I had forgotten over the years was just how fond Eddie was of the recording.

The other day, I came across the following comment Eddie made about it in 2014 in an online conversation:

 If I had to name one tune that I like better than any other, it would be this one…I want it played at my funeral.

It is too bad that the people in charge of planning Eddie’s actual funeral in 2023 were as unaware of this comment as I was; otherwise, it absolutely would have been played at his funeral. At the laying of his headstone, however, several of his friends gathered and played on a portable wind-up phonograph another of Eddie’s favorite records, “Excelsior” by the Los Castilians on Brunswick 40250, another very haunting and also hard-to-find recording.

Here is what Eddie wrote about the song in his 2006 blog posting:

“Sign Of The Rose” was recorded about halfway through Miller’s recording career in May, 1926. This is one of those records that I absolutely think of as an all-time favorite and wouldn’t part with for anything. It’s a rather obscure song and was not, as far as I can determine, recorded on any other label. It also served as Ray Miller’s radio theme song according to my long-time collector friend Mr. Gottlieb. There is also some mystery as to the composer as I’ve been fortunate in getting the sheet music for it. The composer credit on the record is Edwards (Gus?), but the sheet music credits words by Sammy Lerner and Billy Rose, music by Buddy Fields and Richard Whiting–it’s absolutely the same song. I’m not a music major, but I think the style of the song is in what’s called question/answer–one phrase will pose a “question”, then the next will resolve it with an “answer” – and I may be all wet about that, too. My favorite section has always been towards the end where the chorus is played by the soprano saxophones. Mr. Gottlieb only had one copy of it, so it was not for sale–I had to come up with a really good trade to obtain it. One day, I found a record by Tony Parenti’s New Orleanians ” In the Dungeon”/”When you and I were Pals.” One listen and Mr. Gottlieb traded it to me, but not before he kissed it good-bye!

Mr. Gottleib, of whom Eddie spoke frequently and fondly, was R.E.M. (Bob) Gottlieb, a Waco record collector who began collecting 78 rpms when they were still brand new in the 1920s and, by the time Eddie met him in the late 1950s, had amassed a large and significant collection.  Based on a comment he made elsewhere, it was sometime around 1967 when Eddie fell for the recording after hearing Mr. Gottleib play it and began plotting a trade for it that Gottlieb couldn’t resit.

The recording on the flip side, “Stomp Your Stuff,” is one that I had not heard until I recently came across the record in Eddie’s collection.  It is also an excellent recording, and much jazzier than “Sign Of The Rose.”

Even though my 2006 transfer of “Sign Of The Rose” is already in Radio Dismuke’s playlist, since I had the record in front of me, I decided to make a new transfer, as the audio restoration tools I have available to me today are better than what I had in 2006.

And the new audio restoration presented here is definitely an improvement.  I was able to remove some remaining crackle that I had no way to address in 2006 without introducing distortions that would have been worse than the crackle itself.   Plus, some instruments, particularly the banjo, can be heard more vividly than on my original restoration.   Thus, on the next Radio Dismuke playlist update, I will upgrade the 2006 transfer with this new one.

One of the things I always enjoyed about Eddie, and that many listeners who heard him on various Radio Dismuke special broadcasts have mentioned enjoying, was that he frequently had an anecdote about his records – things like whose collection it had previously been part of, how he happened to come across it, etc.   So this particular copy of Brunswick 3132 is one that Eddie and I both have fond anecdotes about.  And, perhaps, Mr. Gotlieb had one as well that has since been lost to time.

Background information about the recordings can be found below the audio selections. 

“Stolen Kisses”
Casino Dance Orchestra
(Pathe 020579-B)                        circa May 1921

“Julienne”
Bennie Krueger And His Orchestra
(Pathe 020579)                          June 8, 1921

Here are two rather charming recordings from a 1921 Pathe Actuelle disc.

“Stolen Kisses” is a Ted Snyder composition.  Snyder was a highly successful songwriter and music publisher, best remembered today for songs such as “The Sheik of Araby” and “Who’s Sorry Now?” which remain well-known.

The identity of the band on this recording is not known, as Pathe’s recording logs have long been lost.  The Casino Dance Orchestra was a pseudonym that Pathe assigned to recordings made by several bands for the label.  Discographer Brian Rust speculates that the band on this might have been either the Nathan Glantz Orchestra or Joseph Knecht’s Waldorf-Astoria Dance Orchestra.   Whoever the band might have been, its saxophone player provides some nice Rudy Wiedoeft-style passages.

“Julienne” is a Roy Turk – J. Russell Robinson composition, billed on the record’s label as a “Franco-American Foxtrot.”  While both Turk and Robinson were well-known composers, this particular song seems to have been rather obscure as I was not able to find much information or even very many references to it during my online research.

Prominent on this recording is the Bennie Krueger Orchestra’s banjo player Bill Arenburg.  The banjo was an essential part of the rhythm section of the early jazz and dance bands in the era before the advent of electrical amplification.  Banjos are loud and could cut through and be heard over the ensemble of the various brass instruments.  They also reproduced well under the constraints of the limited frequency response of pre-microphone era acoustic recording technology.

Pathe records during this period were made through an unusual and utterly unique process.  I previously wrote about it in some detail in this May 4, 2024 posting.

Here are a few recordings recently added to Radio Dismuke’s playlist.  You can find brief background information about them below the audio links. 

“Talkin’ To Myself”
Rex Gordon’s Aces; Norman Wallace, vocal
(Champion 15576 A)                                         September 17, 1928

“If It Aint Love”
The Nitecaps, vocal
(Columbia 2648 D mx 152170)                      April 11, 1932

“Down Georgia Way”
Jack Purvis And His Orchestra
(Parlophone R698 mx 403893)                      April 4, 1930

“With You”
Sam Browne, vocal
(Edison Bell Radio 1357 mx 89792)              July 1930

“Just One More Chance”
Hit of the Week Orchestra; Scrappy Lambert, vocal
(Hit of the Week 1158)                               July 1931

Here are a few of the recordings recently added to Radio Dismuke’s playlist that particularly impressed me for one reason or another.

“Talkin’ To Myself” is a catchy and infectiously happy recording with a very nice archetypal late 1920s “hot dance” arrangement.   Rex Gordon’s Aces was a recording pseudonym for another pseudonymous band, the Carl Fenton Orchestra.

Carl Fenton was initially a pseudonym used on a prolific output of recordings by the in-house Brunswick studio band led by the company’s music director Gus Haenschen.  The widespread distribution of the records resulted in a demand for in-person appearances by the non-existent band.  The job of fronting the “Carl Fenton” band in public was assigned to Ruby Greenberg, who was a violinist for Harry Reser’s band and had participated in the ensemble used for Carl Fenton recordings.   When Gus Haenschen left Brunswick in 1927, Greenberg purchased the rights to the Carl Fenton name.

This version of the Carl Fenton Orchestra recorded many dozens of sides between 1927 and early 1930, including the one here,  under a variety of pseudonyms for Gennett and its subsidiary label Champion.  In 1932, Greenberg legally changed his name to Carl Fenton, which he kept for the rest of his life.

“If It Aint Love” comes courtesy of the collection of Matt From College Station, on what I suspect is a rather rare record.

The Nitecaps (sometimes billed as the 3 Nitecaps) were a vocal trio consisting of Ray Kulz, George MacDonald, and Jimmy Noel.  The group, which had previously worked for Ted Lewis’ band, joined up with the Paul Whiteman orchestra in early 1932 to replace the King’s Jesters vocal quartet that had recently left the Whiteman organization.   Whiteman subsequently renamed the Nitecaps to the Rhythm Boys,  the same name as the band’s earlier and most famous vocal trio, which consisted of Harry Barris, Al Rinker, and Bing Crosby.

“Down Georgia Way” also comes from Matt From College Station’s collection on a British pressing of a multi-racial recording session that trumpet player Jack Purvis led for the American OKeh label.   While there had been previous multi-racial recording sessions, in 1930, they were still rare occurrences.  You can read about Jack Purvis’s erratic and troubled life at this link.

“With You” is an Irving Berlin composition introduced by Harry Richman and Joan Bennett in the 1930 film Puttin’ On The Ritz.   This version, with the song’s full lyrics, is performed by Sam Browne, one of the top British vocalists of the 1930s.  He recorded over two thousand sides and accompanied most of the prominent British dance bands of the era.

“Just One More Chance” is a Sam Coslow/Arthur Johnston composition that was first recorded by the Abe Lyman orchestra but made famous by Bing Crosby, who performed in a 1931 musical short feature, One More Chance.

The recording here is from a single-sided cardboard Hit of the Week disc I played during Radio Dismuke’s New Year’s broadcast a few months ago.

Hit of the Week was an attempt to revive Depression-era record sales by basing its business model on the magazine industry.  Like magazines, the records were sold at outlets such as newsstands and drug stores.  They offered popular songs of the day at a low price, with a new release hitting the newsstands every Thursday.  The records were paperboard laminated with a resin material called Durium, which the label’s parent company, Durium Products, was named after.

Other than a tendency to curl, Hit of the Week records have managed to hold up surprisingly well over the decades.   While their fidelity did not match the improvements that Victor and Columbia were making during the same period,  Hit of the Week records, with their laminated surface, usually play back very nicely with far less surface noise than conventional shellac records of the period.

On this recording, you will hear an opening announcer touting another of the label’s technological achievements –  a longer playing time of up to five minutes, compared with approximately three minutes per side for a conventional 78 rpm record.

“Charleston”
The Blues Chasers
(Perfect 14432)                                    May 1925

“What A Smile Can Do”
The Blues Chasers
(Perfect 14432-B)                                    May 1925

From the Edward Mitchell collection, here are two recordings on a fun record that will turn 100 years old a few months from now.

For many years, it was widely believed that the actual band behind the pseudonyms these recordings were issued under was Nathan Glantz’s band due to it being listed as such in Brian Rust’s American Dance Band Discography and his Jazz Records 1897-1942.

Because I consulted Rust’s discographies when preparing my show notes, this was the information that I passed along when I played the “Charleston” side on Radio Dismuke’s recent New Year’s broadcast.

However, when putting this update together, I discovered that, in recent years, a number of discographers have come to believe that the band was, in fact, William Polla’s Clover Garden Orchestra.

This copy of the record is on the Perfect label, which was a lower-priced subsidiary label of the American branch of the French-based Pathe Records.  Unfortunately, most of Pathe’s recording session ledgers are presumed to have been destroyed.  Brian Rust did not provide information as to his source for believing that the band was Nathan Glantz’s.

The author of the Polla discography, The Recordings of William Conrad Polla’s Clover Gardens Orchestra, provides several pieces of evidence in support of the view that the band was Polla’s.  The most convincing to me was the fact Pathe’s parent company imported the master of “Charleston” and made it available for release in France on the Salabert label, which credited the band as the Clover Garden Orchestra.   It was common practice for Pathe to issue recordings from its American subsidiary for the French market using a band’s actual name rather than the pseudonyms that were frequently used on American issues. For more information, you can read the Polla discography via the Internet Archive at this link – scroll to page 6 for details about these recordings.

“Charleston” is the song that is still most widely associated with the 1920s decade and helped popularize the wildly popular dance of the same name.   The song was introduced in the 1923 Broadway production Runnin’ Wild, which had an all-black cast.

The first recording of “Charleston” was embedded within an October 3, 1923 Vocalion recording by the Ambassadors of “Old Fashioned Love,” another famous song from the production.  That recording is in Radio Dismuke’s playlist.

The first standalone recording of the song was made one week later by Arthur Gibbs and his Gang on Victor.

The recording presented here will be the eighth version of the song to be added to Radio Dismuke’s playlist.  In a previous blog posting, I featured an April 1925 Edison Diamond Disc recording of the song by the California Ramblers under the pseudonym of the Golden Gate Orchestra, which you can listen to at this link.

Both of the recordings in this posting were issued on Perfect under the pseudonym of “The Blues Chasers.”  But on parent label Pathe, they were credited to the “Westchester Biltmore Orchestra”

Pathe supplemented the revenues it received from sales of its own Pathe and Perfect discs by leasing out its master recordings to other record labels.  This recording of Charleston was one such recording – and it was issued on several labels under an array of pseudonyms.

On the Bell label, the recording was credited to the “Hollywood Ramblers.”  On Oriole, it was credited to the “Dixie Jazz Band.” On Banner, Regal and Domino, it was credited to the “Six Black Diamonds.” The National Music Lovers label credited it to the “Manhattan Musicians.” And, rather bizarrely, on Silvertone, a label sold through Sears & Roebuck, it was credited as Lanin’s Roseland Orchestra – which was the name of an actual band that had no part in this recording session.

No doubt that many record buyers over the past ten decades have purchased one of these releases believing that they have come across a different version of “Charleston” for their collection – only to discover upon playing it that it was the exact same recording they already had on some other label under a different pseudonym.

“What A Smile Can Do” is a largely forgotten song –  but I think the version on this record is quite charming.

While Victor and Columbia were increasingly using microphones in their recording sessions by May 1925,  Pathe/Perfect still used acoustical recording horns.