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Many Radio Dismuke listeners are already aware that Edward Mitchell (known as “Eddie The Collector” when appearing on the station’s New Year’s and other special broadcasts) passed away this past August.\u00a0 Eddie was generous in making 78 rpm records from his collection, some of them quite rare,\u00a0 available for me to digitize for the station.\u00a0 On any given day’s playlist, one will hear a number of his records.<\/p>\n
I can now announce that Eddie’s collection will remain intact (as opposed to being sold off piecemeal) and will be fully available to Early 1900s Music Preservation for use on Radio Dismuke.\u00a0 In that sense, even though he is gone, Eddie will continue to contribute recordings to the station for several years to come.<\/p>\n
I say “several years” because, due to his collection’s size, it will realistically take me that long to digitize and clean up all of the records in it that are a good fit for the station – which is likely to be a significant percentage of the collection.<\/p>\n
Eddie started collecting records in the 1950s and my rough guess is that over 90 percent of his collection consists of 1920s jazz and dance band recordings.\u00a0 I have noticed a few excellent records from the 1930s mixed in.\u00a0 But, for most of his life, Eddie’s collecting focus was on the 1920s.\u00a0 It was only in his later years that he started developing more of an appreciation for the music of the early 1930s and sometimes expressed regret at having, for years, passed over opportunities to acquire outstanding and hard-to-find 1930s records.<\/p>\n
While Eddie made a lot of records available for me to digitize, until now I had little idea of the size and scope of his collection.\u00a0 Whenever we got together for me to digitize, Eddie already had a big pile of records that he knew I would regard as a good fit for the station picked out for me.\u00a0 What I didn’t realize until now was that the vast majority of his collection was of similar caliber as the records he had picked out from it.<\/p>\n
As I work through digitizing the records for the station, from time to time I will pick out a few to share here on this blog.\u00a0 The recordings below come from a more or less random handful of records I pulled out to listen to.\u00a0 \u00a0Almost all of them were worthy of digitizing for the station – but here are a few sides that I thought were particularly enjoyable or interesting.<\/p>\n
– Dismuke<\/p>\n
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“The Keyboard Express”
\nClarence Williams’ Jazz Kings
\n(Columbia 14348-D mx 146825)\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 August 1, 1928<\/p>\n