[78-L] Over There to Over Here

[Michael Biel]

This thread moved from the question of importing foreign pressings of
dance bands to the U.S. before 1923 to U.S. companies issuing foreign
dance bands in the 1930s on American pressings.  While interesting, this
is an entirely different question.  We KNOW that there were foreign
dance bands and personalities issued by the American companies, but the
question was whether the foreign PRESSINGS were imported into the U.S. 
Can anyone cite examples before the Gramophone Shop in the early 30s?  I
have a few HMVs with upper-half label stickers saying something like
"Imported by the Victor Talking Machine Co." but I do not know off-hand
what genre they were, what dates this was done, and more importantly,
what quantity did they import and how did they distribute them.  

In the classical field you can follow the situation thru David Hall's
The Record Book because he discusses the availability of international
pressings in his different editions starting in 1940.  He even retitled
the 1948 edition "International Edition" as the post WW II years opened
up the foreign import market, especially English Decca and Czech
Supraphon.  Earlier,  quite possibly the first quantity of foreign
classical pressings sold in large quantities in the U.S. were the post
WW I Opera Discs.  (Fonotipias possibly were imported in earlier years,
but then they were pressed here in the U.S. as well.  I don't know the
details and the percentage mixture of imports and domestic pressings.) 
And there were ethnic recordings on U.S. pressings from foreign masters
occasionally in the acoustical era, and the first classical sets on
Columbia and Victor were largely European masters, but how often did
this happen with POP records (beyond Hayman's Cohen on the Telephone)? 
And more importantly, to get us back to the original question, how often
were foreign PRESSINGS of pop music imported into the U.S. in the
acoustical era?   

I might also add that in the LP era there were fewer imported pressings,
with the exception of U.S. labeled imported pressings of English Decca
as London, and EMI's as Angel.  In the mid-80s the U.S. industry started
going after "parallel imports" being done by Tower Records and Chris
Strachwitz's Down Home Records.  I even chaired an ARSC panel on this
subject with execs of these two stores at the 1987 Washington DC
conference.  We were a few blocks away from the RIAA, but they declined
the invitation to attend, but they did back off afterwards.  
(See, my anti-RIAA stand goes way back, and even further back than
that.)

Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com