[Dixielandjazz] growling baby

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I'm still fairly sure it was a Paramount records label typo which created the GROWLING BABY
The initial jazz discographies were heroically based on actual 78rpm records owned by collectors, and the corrections came in later with the gradual discovery of advertisements in the Chicago Defender and other periodicals, supplemented as the documentation of recording companies became available. 

And then not only did the number of recordings on vinyl reissue increase, it actually became possible to hear them. What a disappointment to discover it was a misprint. 

In the past three or four years one fan did play a blues item he'd discovered in a junk shop, to a scholarly collector, just to luxuriate in the quality of the disc. And thus he discovered that he had the only known copy of a Blind Boy Fuller 78 (the details can be googled).
  

I did once find a US issue Bert Williams 78 of about 1919 in a Scottish charity shop for ten pence. 

OKOM it ain't. A vaudeville number with no more hint of jazz than the performance by Harry Lauder some of my now departed relatives witnessed about 400 metres uphill of the shop some years before 1919. They thought he was awful, Bert Williams is OK, though not OKOM.

I do have a memory of Ralph Sutton displaying a penchant for playing around with song titles in his announcements. And George Melly louchely switching to "My Blue Movie" in the middle of the whippoorwill calls -- I'd love to hear an instrumental version of MY BLUE HEAVEN by a band merely thinking Blue Movie. Such prospects of fresh expression...

Robert