{"id":1319,"date":"2024-05-03T16:50:43","date_gmt":"2024-05-03T21:50:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.early1900s.org\/notes\/?p=1319"},"modified":"2024-05-03T17:04:31","modified_gmt":"2024-05-03T22:04:31","slug":"harold-leonard-and-his-red-jackets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.early1900s.org\/notes\/2024\/05\/03\/harold-leonard-and-his-red-jackets\/","title":{"rendered":"Harold Leonard And His Red Jackets – 1922"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Gennett<\/p>\n

“You Know Why”
\nHarold Leonard And His Red Jackets
\n(Gennett 5026-A mx 11261)\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0December 11, 1922<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

“Red Jacket Blues”
\nHarold Leonard And His Red Jackets
\n(Gennett 5026-B mx 11259)\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0December 11, 1922<\/p>\nhttps:\/\/www.early1900s.org\/notes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/Harold-Leonard-And-His-Red-Jackets-Red-Jacket-Blues.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

 <\/p>\n

Here is a pre-microphone era record from the Edward Mitchell collection<\/a> featuring a band with an interesting and rather unique sound. The ensemble consisted of a violin, a sax section, a piano, a banjo, and drums.<\/p>\n

“You Know Why” is a charming dance number with an arrangement that comes across well through the primitive recording technology.\u00a0 \u00a0 Indeed, I think the piano solo passage sounds quite nice for a recording of that era, given that it was an instrument that was often difficult to record.<\/p>\n

“Red Jacket Blues” is an interesting composition that makes me wish this could have been recorded three years later after microphones began to be used in recording sessions.<\/p>\n

The arrangement heavily features Harold Leonard playing the violin and reminds me of something one might hear from some of the later country music bands. Violins did not record well at all with the old technology.\u00a0 Very often, for recording sessions, they would instead use a Stroh violin<\/a>, a variation of the instrument featuring a horn to amplify the sound.\u00a0 \u00a0I don’t know whether or not one was used for this recording session.<\/p>\n

Harold Leonard’s band is best remembered as the house band of the Hotel Windsor<\/a> in Montreal in the mid-1920s and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel<\/a> from 1926-1927 when it was still at its original location where the Empire State Building would be constructed a few years later. During periods when the band wasn’t associated with the hotels, it went by the name of Harold Leonard and his Red Jackets.<\/p>\n

Both of these recordings were made at the Gennett studios in Richmond, Indiana as part of the band’s very first recording session.<\/p>\n

Other than his association with the famous hotels, I was not able to quickly find in any single source much information about Harold Leonard or his band.<\/p>\n

Based mostly on various publications from the era,\u00a0 prior to its extended engagement at the Hotel Windsor, the band was based in Chicago and was a unit of the Benson Organization, a band booking agency founded by cellist Edgar Benson, that dominated the procurement of live music for that city’s hotels and night spots during the 1920s.\u00a0 The organization’s flagship band is well-known to record collectors and fans of the era’s music as the Benson Orchestra of Chicago, which made many records on Victor.<\/p>\n

Famous recording bandleaders whose bands were also units of the Benson Organization included Isham Jones, Charlie Straight, Don Bestor and Jack Chapman.<\/p>\n

For hotels and other venues, the agency eliminated the hassle of recruiting and negotiating with individual bands. For bands, the trade-off was between their independence and a steady supply of gigs.<\/p>\n

The band’s last records were made during its association with the Waldorf-Astoria.\u00a0 I was not able to find much about what became of Harold Leonard after his band’s engagement at that hotel.\u00a0 \u00a0The latest mention I found in my limited research was in a June 1929 issue of Variety<\/em>, which mentioned\u00a0 Leonard had become an orchestra booking executive at the Benson Organization and still had a band, now billed as Harold Leonard and his All Americans,\u00a0 with a current engagement at Chicago’s Palmer House<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"1923

From September 1923<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“You Know Why” Harold Leonard And His Red Jackets (Gennett 5026-A mx 11261)\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0December 11, 1922   “Red Jacket Blues” … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1320,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":60,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.early1900s.org\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.early1900s.org\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.early1900s.org\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.early1900s.org\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.early1900s.org\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1319"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.early1900s.org\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1329,"href":"https:\/\/www.early1900s.org\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1319\/revisions\/1329"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.early1900s.org\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.early1900s.org\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.early1900s.org\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.early1900s.org\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}