Hello folks -
A couple of things:
1) I've now been through all the Gennett recording cards I've been
able to locate. They physically exist at Rutgers and at the Indiana
Historical Society. I now have jpg and bmp files of all the cards
at Rutgers, thanks to the aid of Dan Morgenstern and the patience
and camera of my co-compiler Charlie Dahan, as well as my own hand
written notes of all the cards archived in Indianapolis.
These are the covered dates:
NYC: May, 1921 - June 1928
Richmond:
August 1921 - January 1922
January 1923 - December 1923
January 1927 - April 1929
If anyone knows of any more cards in public collections or private
hands I would surely like to know about them. I also still seek any
information on recordings made in Richmond for the US Starr label
pre-1919. I have quite a bit, but there are some major gaps yet to
fill.
My favorite find? It was the discovery of microphone/musician
placement diagrams on the backs of some of the cards from Richmond,
1926, when Gennett was first engineering recordings electrically. I
was stunned and pleased, to say the least!
2) One of the cards at Rutgers is a puzzler (just one?).It's mx
8289, recorded in NYC at 9 E. 37th Street on June 15, 1920. But,
you say, mx 8289 would be for a recording date on March 21, 1923 -
and so it is. But it's not the same title or artist and the card
gives the 1920 recording date, backed up by a copper master
shipping date (to Richmond) of June 19, 1920. The title on the card
is is "Underneath The Moon (Waltz)" and the artist shows only as
"Orchestra." I have found no release of this title anywhere in the
Gennett catalog. Can anyone explain the anomaly?
Mal Rockwell