[78-L] Mae Questel, the Betty Boop girl

[zimrec at juno.com]

Re two postings with subject header Mae Questal, see below:

With regard to You'd Be Surprised, two takes of the tune by Eddie Cantor from Oct 31, 1944 show up on a CD fresh from the pressing plant two days ago.  The Cantor CD contains recordings from the late 1930s into the 1950s, with several alternate takes and a promotional recording of Cantor reminiscing.  Sound is excellent except for some clicks, most notably in the promotional recording, that the producer could have but didn't remove.  The sides are all studio sessions, not broadcast recordings.  38 tracks -- that's not a typo -- in all.  Anyone interested can contact me off list.

As for Jan's query about record company archives indicating quantities pressed and sold, the so-called blue cards of some early Trinidad recordings, 1914, at Victor that I saw at BMG archive, before the Sony merger, indicated sales figures.  I've never seen indication of quantity pressed.  I have photocopies of those blue cards which show the following sales - record number followed by sales:

67028 - 1988
67029 - 2535
67030 - 3176
67031 - 2054
67032 - 1948

It would be interesting to know how many were pressed and distributed.  The 4500 and 4900 series Bluebird 78s of Trini artists are equally scarce, if not more so in some cases.  They may have been pressed in larger quantities, but all were exported to Trinidad.  The British colonial authorities, acting as good censors in protecting the morals of the citizenry, dumped them into the sea.  The blue cards indicate: Do not sell in US unless international approval.  Apparently, such approval didn't exist.  Copies of those Bluebird records have turned up in hands of collectors and there are metal parts of many in the archive, but between extant shellac pressings and the metal, there are still many missing recordings.  The only physical surviving trace are the label samples that were pasted to the blue cards.  Anybody for putting on some scuba gear and searching the Caribbean for shellac?

With regard to those 1914 recordings, no metal exists: Probably Victor's contribution to the WWII scrap metal drive.  Apparently people high up at the company decided back then that nobody would ever want to listen to those acoustic ethnic records.  The unfortunate thing there is that there were more recordings made and not issued than those that were issued.  So, unless test pressing turn up, we'll never here those unissued sides.

Art
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Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2009 09:46:52 -0400
From: David Lennick <dlennick at sympatico.ca>
Subject: Re: [78-L] Mae Questel, the Betty Boop girl

Mae's Deccas are all fairly scarce..it took me years to find them all. (You'd 
Be Surprised, for some reason, DOES turn up with more regularity than the others.)

dl

Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:00:30 +0200
From: Jan Hovers <janhovers at hotmail.com>
Subject: [78-L] Mae Questel, the Betty Boop girl

May I understand that there are no files left from Record Companies with figures how many 
records they pressed and sold of a certain title? Does this mean that nobody knows 
exactly by means of sources how unique a certain record is?


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