[Dixielandjazz] Turk Murphy discography
Dan Augustine
ds.augustine at mail.utexas.edu
Sat Oct 30 20:54:26 PDT 2004
DJML and others--
The following dullness deals with discographies, so go ahead and
hit that delete key now if you aren't interested.
A couple of weeks ago i received a package from Walt Johansson
containing (among other things) two floppy-disks with datasets of his
recordings, all in a special ".C8T" format of DOS-program written by
Steve Abrams. As he said in the accompanying letter, "the C8T files
are a home grown data base format that a friend of mine wrote in DOS
Basic some twenty or more years ago, for use in setting up a data for
recorded sound labels, and currently we have about a half million
sides of records in this format." (This largesse was initiated by
the wonderful Dottie Lawless, who originally sent me a copy of the
printout of this discography.)
He also generously sent three CDs on his own private Alpha Music
of Hawaii label: "Lu Watters -- Acetates -- Vol # 1" and "Lu Watters
-- Acetates -- Vol # 2" ("Acetates from Bill Dart's Home Recorder")
and "AMH -- 122, 78s from Walt's Vault" ("Various Artists" like
Charles Dornberger Orchestra playing "Wonder If She's Lonely Too" and
the Manhattan Merrymakers playing "I Never Had a Mammy")--wonderful
stuff. He deserves a knighthood at least for all the work he did
entering this information, and a sainthood for sending all of this to
me.
The datasets he sent are these (in the C8T-format): TUR-TBLE,
TURK-A-Z, DOWNHOME, GOODTIJA, JAZZMAN, WESTCOAS. The format for a
record in these datasets was as follows:
Artist: 30 bytes (or 30 characters in non-computer speak)
Tune: 50 "
Matrix: 10 "
Label: 10 "
Misc: 10 " (source-code for sorting, like 00-A14)
Vocal: 10 "
Date: 10 " (performance date for printing in mm/dd/yy format)
Comp: 30 " (performance date for sorting in yymmddnn format,
where nn is the tune-number on the recording)
Through the ingenious offices of this mailing-list, others (David
Littlefield ('Sheik') and Craig Johnson) offered to help me read and
translate this format. Sheik also forwarded some information from
the 78-list (the '78-L List' at http://www.78online.com/ ):
"The "C8T" file format is in what is technically called a
"Random-access" text file format. It is structured as follows:
ARTIST (30 bytes)
TITLE (50 bytes)
5 fields with varying uses (10 bytes each)
COMMENTS (30 bytes)
so each data record is 160 bytes long, containing 8 fields as
listed above. This format was developed by Steve Abrams, who has
a web site as well as an e-mail address shown there.
The only program that I know of that can do a direct
conversion (into a dBASE format, or ".dbf" which it uses, is
Lotus Approach. It is possible with a bit of effort to paste the
files into Excel, using the field list above to establish the
cells and rows. This will not happen automatically, since the
files use no defined separators between data fields or data
records, so Excel doesn't recognize them as separate cell
contents (see Excel Help re "importing data.""
I snuffled about on the web like a hog rooting for truffles to find
out where i could get Lotus Approach, and i found a company called
TekDeal at http://www.tekdeal.com/get_list_35.htm who were willing to
sell me not only Lotus Approach but the whole Lotus SmartSuite for
$14.95 (including Lotus products 1-2-3, Word Pro, Freelance Graphics,
Approach, Organizer, FastSite, and SmartCenter). It now costs
$26.99, but is still a good deal, but you have to know that this is
just an 'OEM CD' with those applications on it, without any manuals,
and this is only for Windows computers, not Mac, but i have both
kinds.
I installed the Lotus SmartSuite including Approach and was
indeed able to read Walt's datasets by a) creating a copy of them as
text-files, and b) importing them as fixed-length records of 160
bytes each. Then i saved them as regular .dbf files, which i
converted to Excel files.
Here are the datasets and examples of their formats and contents.
Since i can't show you the full 160-column record, i'll try to give
you an idea of it. These displays look best in a fixed-width font
like Courier 12.
TUR-TBLE: Turk Murphy Recording List by Artist (3,498 records, from
258 recordings; 524K in Excel)
Artist Title
------------------------------ ------------------------------------
SAN FRANCISCO JAZZ Vol 1 (GTJ)
Turk Murphy ldr-tbn-vcl New Orleans Stomp (Armstrong-Hardin)
Bob Scobey tpt Chimes Blues (Joe Oliver)
Bob Helm clt-sopsx-vcl When My Sugar Walks Down The Street
Burt Bales pno Of All The Wrongs You've Done To Me
Harry Mordecai bjo Grandpa's Spells (Morton)
Dick Lammi sbs-tba Trouble In Mind (Richard M. Jones)
" Turk's Blues - aka Social Polecat
" Papa Dip (Lil Hardin Armstrong)
In the preceding records, the contents of
FIELD1 (Matrix) = L 12026
FIELD2 (Label) = GTJ Lp
FIELD3 (Misc) = 2026-A00 through 2026-A08
FIELD4 (Vocal) = Good Time
FIELD5 (Date) = 5/31/49
COMMENTS (Comp Date) = 49053100 through 49053108
TURK-A-Z: 3,281 records (492K in Excel)
TURK MURPHY TUNE TITLES
In the records below, the TITLE (between ARTIST and FORMAT) is always
Alexander's Ragtime Band (Berlin):
ARTIST/NOTES FORMAT SOURCE FIELD3 FIELD4 DATE COMP
--------------- ------ ------- ------- -------- -------- -------
F 112 Fair Lp 112-B03 Fairmont 06/ /50 50060010
Turk Murphy vcl Priv Tape NIC 0602-A01 * 06/02/50 50060201
LPM 2501 Vic Lp 0501-A05 Victor RCA 05/01/61 61050105
Pat Yankee vcl Tape 341 Burkholder 341-B01 05/01/61 61050122
Priv Tape NIC 0568-A20 * 05/28/68 68052820
Pat Yankee vcl Priv Tape NIC 1169-B10 * 11/25/69 69112519
Stanislaus vcl Priv Tape NIC 0414-A17 * 04/14/73 73041417
Priv Tape NIC 0316-B19 * 03/16/74 74031622
Tape 24 Neal 24-A09 09/30/77 77090309
Stanislaus vcl Priv Tape NIC 0805-A06 * 08/05/79 79080506
Stanislaus vcl Priv Tape NIC 0809-A05 * 08/09/79 79080905
Stanislaus vcl Priv Tape NIC 0103-A08 * 01/03/80 80010308
Pat Yankee vcl Tape 341 Burkholder 341-B01 Burkholder 05/06/90 90050612
Downhome 78s dataset: 16 records (12K in Excel)
Good Time Jazz dataset: 801 records (both 78s and LPs; 124K in Excel)
Jazzman 78s dataset: 72 records (24K in Excel)
West Coat 78s dataset: 41 records (16K in Excel)
I'll be glad to send you any or all of these datasets. It would
be easier to attach them to email-messages, but they might take a
fair amount of time to read in if you don't have a fast (cable or
such) connection. I can also copy them to a CD and snail-mail it to
you if you want, but that'll take appreciably longer of course. No
charge for either method, all part of the service others have done
for me and i'm passing on.
By the way, speaking of discographies and their ilk, there are
some very nice bibliographies and discographies for Turk Murphy and
McGoon's in the new _Meet Me at McGoon's_ book that Carol Clute has
available. There is a bibliography for booklets (one page) and for
books (seven pages), and there is a discography of five pages of
recordings, plus a partial list of 14 record dealers for jazz
recordings (of which i was aware of only 7).
Thanks, Walt!
Dan
--
**--------------------------------------------------------------------**
** Dan Augustine Austin, Texas ds.augustine at mail.utexas.edu **
** "If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing." **
** -- Kingsley Amis **
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