Word: okeh
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Today marks the sixteenth anniversary of the first recording session on which a full set of drums was used. It happened in Chicago at the old Okeh studios, and the percussionist who broke away from the hard and fast rule of showing up with only a snare drum, cymbal, woodblock, and cowbell was Eugene Krupa, fresh out of school and still on Camels...
Brakeman Rodgers. For years hillbilly music remained a branch of folklore to most urban Americans - if they knew of it at all. But in 1921 a Kansas City-born folklore fan named Ralph Peer (then sales manager for Okeh Records) took a recording apparatus into the backwoods of Georgia and made some 300 disks. As an experiment, Okeh issued Peer's recordings, listing them in a special catalogue similar to those used for foreign language and "race" records. Within a few years Okeh's hillbilly list sold over a million disks-mostly below the Mason-Dixon line...
...attracted by Okeh's success, Victor decided to enter the field, unearthed in Bristol, Va. a former Southern Railway brakeman named Jimmie Rodgers. His quaintly drawling voice soon became the biggest thing in hillbilly minstrelsy...
Butler who obviously follows the commendable pattern of Louis Armstrong's 1930-1931 Okeh recordings, draws more applause with his vocal and instrumental work during the floor show than any of the regular acts. (Oh, yes--the Hofbrau is a converted theatre and the floor show starts around...
...record, through which Decca revolutionized the popular-record business seven years ago, was almost dead and buried. Columbia put its purple Okeh label into storage for the duration. Victor still clung to its Bluebird name, Decca to its standard blue label, but all three moved their top names (e.g., Victor's Glenn Miller, Columbia's Benny Goodman, Decca's Jimmy Dorsey) up to the 50? platters. Sole exception: Bing Crosby. This reshuffling was inevitable after the mid-April WPB order, cutting the use of all-important shellac in phonograph records by 70%. Another consequence: manufacturers required from...