Transcription Mystery Disc #255

 This is a 8-Inch, metal-core, Recordisc. I've digitized one side, the other has a thick layer of waxy palmitic acid which is hard to remove, and renders the audio into a muddy mess on playback. If I was optimistic about the recording's value I'd have spent the time with some Disc Doctor solution and a rag... but I'm not. So today you get just the one side. I'm also trying a new playback service. Feel free to comment on that.

On the sleeve is the name Texas Jim Robertson, in pencil, that may be one of his cowboy songs on the opening. In the middle of the recording at about the 1:50 mark the first tune ends and it becomes clear this is a radio program. Then there's an ad for rolling tobacco that sticks to the paper. You might recognize it.

Mono radio recording by Josefritz on Mixcloud

I'm mixed on the possibility of Texas Jim Robertson performing for the first minutes of the disc. He was a singer of cowboy songs. He recorded dozens sides for RCA in a long but now overlooked career. some of his works are now looked back on as early Rockabilly.This may or may not be him. I don't find his style so compelling that I can confirm or deny the possibility.

Transcription Mystery Disc #254

This is a Wilcox Gay Recordio. It's undated, unlabeled and like many others it's origin is somewhat in doubt. It has a metal-core, spins at 78 rpm with an outer-edge start and is 8-Inches in diameter. The recording showcases a solo pianist who breaks meter to bang out a few chords seemingly annoyed by what might have been a sound check.

Ode to an Annoyed Pianist


Despite being undamaged by age, the disc is in rough shape. When it was originally cut, the lathe was bumped and it cut snake-like arcs across many of the grooves. This makes it particularly difficult to get contiguous segments transferred to digital. I managed only about a one-minute segment I consider listenable which is posted above.

Transcription Mystery Disc #253

This is the B-side of that Sherman Clay disc I ripped back in December. It's a metal-core, 6.5-Inch acetate recording bearing the date February 16th, 1950.  Both sides were recorded the same day. It's unclear which is Side A or B. the subject is still an audio letter by Louise and Bill Murphy.

Louise & Bill Murphy

In this episode Louise is trying out to be an opera star. Bill thinks he may find work as a Chorus Girl. Louise comes on to sing more and does a version of "Oh, You Beautiful Doll" Which in 1950 was already a 40-year old song with a long history in Ragtime. Which is to say...it's nothing she'd sing at the opera. Regardless we all hope she found work, it was 1950. WWII was over, the economy was booming and hopefully everythign worked out for them.

Transcription Mystery Disc #252

I have now digitized half of the Frank L. Eulau sides. I'm actually savoring it a bit since it's so rare to fine such well-recorded good material from this kind of media. I'll try not to drag this out too much longer. I've promised to donate them to his family when I'm done.

Frank L. Eulau

This disc was recorded on December 23rd 1954. Interestingly it was the date of the first kidney transplant. I'm sure this recording has nothing to do with that event. they're just randomly concurrent. The piece this time is a solo string instrument played with a bow. It sounds like a rebab.. but there are certainly other possibilities. A second rebab joins in harmony about 2 minutes in which  is more bad-ass than dual guitar.

Transcription Mystery Disc #251

This is a 6.5-Inch 78 rpm metal-core transcription disc. This week I have an actual radio recording. It's a short 5 minute recording from an episode of the Roy Rogers Show. The program was a 30 minutes long so we're missing some 25 odd minutes.  The show first aired in 1944 and ran into 1955— a nine year stretch that produced 348 episodes most of which have been lost. This could be one of them... but it could be difficult to prove.

The clip opens with men singing in harmony, probably the The Riders of the Purple Sage. It's the very end of a song. There is part of a skit, and more music. At the end Roy Rogers keys up his mic and signs off  "That's all for now folks. This is Roy Rogers saying to all of you from all of us, goodbye, good luck and may the good lord take a liking to you."  Then after a nod to Quaker Oats they cut to the song  "Save a Smile for a Rainy Day."

Roy Rogers Lost Episode


But some key details. The Quaker Oats spot lists off Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, Gabby Hayes and the Riders of the Purple Sage. Not all of those members appeared on every season. Dale and Rogers were only married in 1947, and met perhaps as early as 1946 and she is not assumed to be on episodes before 1948.
It's also notable that Quaker Oats cereal was the sponsor only for the 1948 season of which only ONE episode has ever been found out of 138.  So odds are this is a "lost" episode. More here.

Transcription Mystery Disc #250

I've been saving this one for a special occasion and I think #250 has a nice ring to it. It's a 12-Inch metal-core acetate. This disc is a Star Sound Studios disc. It's further labeled "Cavendish Square, Langham 2201 London  W.I. England" the backside of the disc is just clear lacquer over metal.. it's actually quite heavy, clearly has a very thick steel base. This is doubtlessly a pre-WWII recording.  The handwriting reads "WDDM,  Difference a day made."

What a Difference A Day Makes


Star Sound Studios dates back to 1937. Originally just named "Star Sound" it was designed as a small theater for the recording of live audience shows for Radio Luxembourg.  They recorded tens of thousands of radio programs and commercials. In 1990 the Studios became AIR Edel. I can't find enough good information on the dates of their various labels to corroborate a date. Actually, I never even found another label that looked like this one.

This isn't' a transcription exactly. This is a master recording. Before magnetic tape, (which at Star Sound debuted in 1949) master recordings were cut into acetate lacquer with a lathe. They're jsut like hoem recording acetates but of a much higher quality.  The song What a Difference a Day Made" was written by Maria Grever in 1934. The Dorsey brothers recorded it the same year. (Dinah Washington won a Grammy Award with it in 1959.) I've heard the Dorsey version and it's similar to that swing version but it's not the same recording. This is some unknown, other jazz version that I estimate to date from the early 1940s. It's possible it dates to the 1930s but that would make it one of the earliest Star Sound Studios recordings. I'm not quite that optimistic.

Transcription Mystery Disc #249

This is an 8-Inch, paper-core, Wilcox-Gay Recordio. It's unlabeled and in rough shape. The acetate lacquer coating is spider-cracked throughout, and it's somewhat warped. Where metal-core discs can sometimes be carefully unbent, paper just cracks and de-laminates more with the application of force. Thankfully the recording levels were set pretty high on this recording and it can be heard well above the noise.

"You Come On Out"

As with most discs, condition improves as you approach the center. But with the outer-edge start being the standard (as it is here) much of the recording is in poor shape. I've edited out the worst of it from the start of the recording to spare your ears. Notably at the very end you can hear an emcee speak to the crowd. It appears to be a recording of a live broadcast but he only gets in three words before the recording ends "You come on out..."

Transcription Mystery Disc #248

This is a paper-core, 8-Inch Wilcox-Gay Recordio. It is not labeled or dated except for the single pencil marking on the sleeve "655 Warren." I would guess that number and name were part of a filing system. The recording itself is pretty peculiar.

655 Warren


It's a recording of two comedians. One man sounds a lot like the Ed Norton Character from the Honeymooners. The other man has a very deep voice which was difficult for the hardware of the time of record. I've compensated with EQ and compression to make him more clear. There is an audience you can hear laugh and titter through out.

Transcription Mystery Disc #247

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.This is another recording by Frank Eulau. I have not tired of ripping these sides, it's clear Frank was a man with his ear to the asphalt like some long lost A&R guru man. The last of his mojo is cut into these grooves and this unknown Turkish band with him.

More from Frank Eulau



I really need to get about to digitizing the rest of these...

Transcription Mystery Disc #246 (New Years Edition)

This is a 6.5-Inch, metal-core, Wilcox-Gay Recordio. It's the flip side of that Xmas disc I ripped last week. This side was recorded earlier and is labeled with the date 12-25-49. I ripped them out of sequence, purists will just have to get over it. The disc is also labeled "WHITE CHRIST" and the song isn't White Christmas.

Santa Claus Is Coming to Town



As Christmas songs go it's an oldie. The tune was written by John F. Coots and Haven Gillespie in 1934. It's first broadcast was on Eddie Cantor's radio show in November 1934, making it a solid 80 years old now. This recording isn't as clear as the A-side, it had small chip destroying the first couple rotations, and the levels aren't quite as good. Notably the engineer also fumbles the mic early in the tune making that tell-take wiggling cable sound.

Transcription Mystery Disc #245 (Xmas Edition)

This is an Xmas edition of the Transcription Mystery Disc series. This is a 6.5-Inch, metal-core,  Wilcox-Gay Recordio. It's dated clearly to 1-10-49. The attribution is just listed as "All The Gang."  The other side is the same group (more or less) recording White Christmas on 12-25-1949. I thought this take came out better.

Incidentally, for trivia fans, 1/10/49 was the day of the first Beatles release "Introducing the Beatles," in the United States. It's also the day the 45 RPM 7-Inch record was debuted in the UK. Those three events of course have nothing to do with one another, or Christmas.

Jingle Bells - All the Gang 01-10-1949
**audio expired***

The recording is good, very low noise, very good dynamic range.. it's clear for it's entirety.  The recording is of a large group singing together but not a choir, this is a group of amateurs, a whole family or a whole bar full of them. But one thing I must add... not all of these people are sober. the recording is clear enough that you can hear specific voices giggling, singing flat, out of key, wrong verse.. too off to be just horsing around. Somebody had a little egg nog.

TranscriptionTranscription Mystery Disc #244

This is a metal-core, 6.5-Inch acetate recording on a brand of blank I've never heard of before: Sherman Clay. The company was founded in San Francisco in 1853, as as A. A. Rosenberg, and renamed Sherman Clay when partners Leander Sherman and Clement Clay bought him out in 1879. the company then sold Organs, pianos, and other musical instruments. In 2013, Sherman Clay announced it was going out of business on May 31, 2013 after 142 years. More here.

Louise & Bill Murphy


In the middle of that company's lifespan, this recording was made by Louise and Bill Murphy. The disc is clearly dated to February 16th, 1950.  They were in San Francisco and it's unclear if it's a vacation or a new home for them. The recording is a letter to Bill's parents and Louise sings a quick rendition of My Sunshine. They planned to go to Lake Tahoe the following day. Bill mumbles a bit,and then Louise says she'd like to come home.

Transcription Mystery Disc #243

This 6.5-Inch, metal-core, Voice-O-Graph is dated September 4th 1954. My Voice-O-Graph labelography calls this a Black on Green (metal variant).  I've found them dated as early as 1951 with the green label and as late as 1955 and the Blue label of the same design as early as 1947. There are a few locations by that name:  a beach park near Cleveland, a township in New Jersey, and a neighborhood of the Bronx, NY. It's impossible now to say which it was.

Edgewater Park


The recording rates in my top 5 most bizarre out of anything I've ever digitized.The recording was partly backwards. All of it had strange audio artifacts that I'd have trouble doing without digital manipulation. the parts that are intelligible mostly consist of strange shouts, hoots and hollers toward the end I can clearly understand words.. but they do not make sense in the order they are used. It's just odd. I'm assuming that none of these people were sober.

Transcription Mystery Disc #242

This is a6.5-Inch, metal-core Recordisc. It has an outer edge start and has started to de-laminate and crack, even in the un-cut center area. Thankfully it have arrived on my desk in time to be saved. The recording date is give as 49 which I'll interpret as the year 1949 which is certainly plausible.

I Know Whom I Have Believed


It's labeled, but in cursive written in tiny pencil script. Because of that it took me some time to decipher but the Title is "I Know Whom I Have Believed." It's a hymn from 1883, words by Dan Whittle and music by James McGranahan. More here.  In this recording the music is played by organ and vocals by a solo male singer, possibly the organist. Only the first stanza and refrain are performed, but the disc barely holds 2 minutes of audio so a short version was rather prudent.

Transcription Mystery Disc #241

This is a 6.5-Inch, paper-core Voice-O-Graph acetate home recording. I've already worked out a good labelography for this type of recording blank. I classified this as Red-On-White and have seen dates around 1964.It was the end of the line for Voice-O-Graph discs.

Kerry Hills by Barry Murray & E. Mahoney

The recording is of a man and a woman, singing in harmony (sort of). He is quite flat.  They find their pace toward the end of the recording and I can start to make out the words clearly. As titled, they are singing a traditional Irish tune, The Kerry Hills a tune more recently recorded by Brendan Begley in 1987. It's a more obscure traditional, something that indicates they were very serious Irish music fans, or otherwise. they also sing a slightly different version then the Begley recording [source] again indicating a much older song with a wider array of lyrical variants. Ex.

Of the days so merry
When we plucked the berry
On the verdant slopes
Of the Kerry hills

I've seen the Atlantic
Both wild and frantic
I have traveled far
From my native home

Transcription Mystery Disc #240

This is a 10-Inch, metal-core, Silvertone acetate recording disc. Like most discs it has some reference to being "slow burning," though being made of acetate lacquer must make that hard... the paper core discs especially.  It's labeled in pencil "Alfred Erb 1/25/46 4th in Lent."  The opposite side merely has a date 4/21/48. So this disc was used a couple years apart by the Erbs.

Alfred Erb - Lent March 25th, 1946


Lent covers a period of approximately six weeks before Easter starting on Ash Wednesday. But Easter is a moving target.  Easter is just an approximation of the March equinox, so Ash Wednesday can be as early as February 4th and Easter as late as the end of April. Normally in the United States we round off holidays to make for more 3-day weekends, but these have yet to be tamed.  Nonetheless, it's certainly out of season for me to post this today... Lent 2015 won't be until April 5th.

Transcription Mystery Disc #239

I've posted some of Frank L. Eulau's recordings before. It's quality stuff, low noise bed, good levels. He clearly knew his way around a lathe and around his recording gear. His daughter was kind enough to tell me a bit of his history. Frank was born July 4th, 1921 in Germany. He was a German Jew and in 1939 shortly after Kristallnacht his family left Germany on one of the last boats allowed to leave and they went to the Philippines.

There he worked at a hi fi store and built and worked on short wave radios. In 1952, he went to New York  and his parents returned to Germany. Frank worked for Audio Exchange and Harvey Radio for many years, managing the stores until he opened his own high end hi fi store, Audio Experts in White Plains, NY. He was a collector of 78s and had a sizable personal collection. He died in 2005, he was 84 years old. His family still has the record cutter he used to make the records that I've been digitizing here.

Frank Eulau - 02-17-1955
 
This recording is of a man and a fiddle and it's more of the same mysterious sounding Greek-klezmer something-or-other. It's on the dazzling side of amazing... these are the kinds of acetates collectors dream of finding.

Transcription Mystery Disc #238

This is a 5-inch, paper-core, home recording acetate. The blank is an obscure brand called phonocord.It's the second side of a disc I digitized a few weeks back. I want to say for the record I really dislike center-start records and I can see why it was less popular then outer-edge start. center start records contrary to the name do not start at the center. they start at some random point away from the center. Dropping the needle on, at or near this point is really hit-or-miss.

 "These darn little records..."
 
The  recording is another letter from that young man to some unknown young blonde woman. He says he's going to take her shopping. But there is one great sample on the record "These darn little records are swell." But he runs out of things to say and mumbles a bit until the groove runs out. Like the others there are no dates or names so the mystery remains.

Transcription Mystery Disc #237

This is a metal core, Voice-O-Graph. It's clearly dated to August 17th 1949. It also notes that it was recorded in Washington D.C. The disc is the earliest I have seen for this make of Voice-O-Graph blank. All those others I've found are after 1951.  But as expected the earlier discs typically have the metal core.

Mother and child


The audio is quite serviceable for being 65 years old. The recording is of a mother and a child that is learning to speak. The child is hard to understand, but that's not the fidelity, the kid just doesn't have that talking thing down yet.  You can't glean much context from that kind of conversation. But I did catch that daddy went to Georgia on the train. No first names no last names... that's all there is.

Transcription Mystery Disc #236

This is a 6.5-inch metal-core Federal Perma Disk. It spins at 78 rpm and has an outer edge start. it's labeled on each side with the phrase "Play this side first" and "Play this side second." The date is written as Dec 1940. It's refreshing to find one with a date for once.

 Play this side first (Dec 1940)

The label is torn on one side and the disc slightly bent. But as with many metal core discs.. that can be ameliorated with a very judicious application of force. I don't recommend that technique for archival work... but that's not what we do here. The recording isn't free of surface noise but it was entirely listenable with no apparent wear. I ripped both sides and edited them together with a short gap.

The recording is an Xmas greeting with organ accompaniment to a couple in Florida. The recipients are identified only as Dr. and Mrs. Knight. The recording engineer briefly speaks on Side B and his name was Mr. O'Brien.The speakers accent and cadence are confident.. like an orator, DJ or preacher. I wish that his name had been included.