Tuesday, June 08, 2010

Transcription Mystery Disc # 54

I bought the disc in a lot of 30 78s from a towering stack in Reedsville, PA at a dusty antique store. The audio here was brutally bad.  The disc was greasy to the touch initially but after cleaning it became clear that it had music on it.  After much filtering, this two minute clip now contains actual words and even a melody.
As tempting as it is to just filter out everything outside the fundamental frequencies of the human voice approx 85  Hz to  255 Hz (male & female range combined) that leave either a tinny or shrill mess without the natural harmonics beyond that range.  I applied two different low bandpass filters to achieve this moderate listen-ability. Much of the disc was hopeless and I discard that portion of the ripped audio.

Thankfully I know this song by the title written on the label. Chickery-Chick (sometimes spelled Chickory Chick) was a number one song for Sammy Kaye in 1945. It was a novelty song mostly made of gibberish lyrics. But this is NOT the Sammy Kaye version. It's too slow. I tried speeding it up, but the voices turn into helium-huffing chipmunks.  This is some other band performing it, or possibly live on the radio, but certainly in the late 1940s. Phonozoic confirms that with congruent dates for 1947 for the same make of Recordio Blank.  My only clue to its origin is that there is a separate track toward the center spindle with a bit of an announcer, and of some amateur crooning... but alas that is unintelligible...

3 comments:

  1. Anita O'day singing with Gene Krupa

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  2. I gave that one a listen yesterday while going through different versions.. I didn't really this it was the Krupa version. Are you sure?

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  3. I went back and listened to the unfiltered master. You're definitely right. Still.. Mine had that announcer at the end. I think it was recorded from a broadcast.

    The B-side is labeled as well.. perhaps I'll post that somtimes.

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