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Re: [ARSCLIST] Soviet Recordings: labels
How much Soviet stuff did Keynote press? Only the Red Army album comes to mind.
Masters were cut by Reeves and are the same as the ones pressed by Stinson
(with some duplication of titles). Keynote's other commie stuff seems to have
been home-grown.
dl
Michael Biel m.biel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
The relationship between the Soviets and Stinson Trading has been told
elsewhere in books about leftist folk singers, and I can't travel around
to other pages while working on this. The American pressings of Soviet
material on the smaller sized label may have started to fill in sold-out
items in the Soviet pavilion at the fair. But I have never come across
an American pressing that reproduced the full label including the Worlds
Fair titling at the top. That is only on the Soviet pressings. After
those first American pressings, Stinson and Keynote continued to make
pressings of Soviet recordings using their regular label formats. These
were sold as singles and combined into albums. Eric Bernay/Bernstein
owned Keynote, and I forget what his relationship with Stinson was.
Some sources claim that he was an active Communist. Herbert Harris and
Irving Prosky were the original owners of Stinson Trading, and appear to
have operated the sales concession at the Soviet pavilion at the fair,
and then continued with a wider distribution after the fair with their
own pressings. (Although it has been earlier claimed on this list that
Moe Asch owned Stinson, I don’t think that was the case. It looks
like he only had a temporary distribution deal in the mid-40s when he
was re-organizing and also needed a greater shellac allotment. There
was some sort of financial partnership, but Asch Records and Stinson
Records seem to have always been separately managed.) I have one Worlds
Fair Soviet pressing and about 15 of the Stinson and Keynote pressings.