[78-L] Discographic question

[Steve Shapiro]

With the comments below, I agree in part and disagree in part.

Some discographers are slavish to preserving record company label mistakes, although selectively.  One ethnic discographer gives no annotation to the mistake on Decca 17269 as "Yaraba Shango", although the singer, Tiger, always referred to this as Yoruba Shango and re-recorded it under the correct title.  (His ancestry included people from the Yoruba and Congo tribes.)  Similarly, the unissued Decca calypso "Tina, Have Sympathy" gets listed in a discography as "Teener Have Sympathy" due a mistake in the recording log done by Noo Yawkas who went to Trinidad to record in 1940, heard "Tina" with their Noo Yawk ears and made the "correction".  (In Noo Yawk City, a "super", short for a building superintendent, is called the "soopa".)  But where there are notoriously sloppy labels, such as ethnic Columbias from the 1910s, there are selective discographic corrections, such as one of the Syrian Band records where the Arabic titles are upside down.  I think I have some Jewish Columbias where the titles are also upside down.  But the discographer wouldn't list these upside in the discography.

Such are discographic challenges.

Discography should be more than re-reporting what comes out from a record company.  It should also to a degree respect the material itself, including the artists' intentions.

In my view, a discographical information should be both accurate and useful.  Accuracy includes both reporting and correcting obvious mistakes, so that the reader can correctly identify the record and mx and also know what the material really is.  This is commonly done with jazz and blues records, e.g., Big Bill is identified variously as Big Bill Broonzy and Big Bill Broomsley, etc., and this is without even getting into the phenomenon of pseudonyms.  Sometimes wrong artist credits appear mistakenly, sometimes deliberately, often due to contract restrictions.

Reversed labels, wrong mxs, even incorrect names of the artists, etc.  Happens all the time.  Again, I believe that disgographical information should be both accurate in terms of conveying mistakes found on the records themselves and useful in enabling the reader to understand what really went on with the piece and the record./steve

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> The idea being that, ,just like antiques and and art, the provenance is 
what is important - you want to list the source information first, when 
possible. Then add your copy info and a note to the listings explaining 
what the variations are.

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> The recording as such, 'as it is in the grooves', is what it's about. 
Therefore this is what has to be listed. 

Anything else, like inversed labels, inversed masters or wrong titles printed on the labels 
are to be dealt with in comments or footnotes.   

So, list the correct information, and make annotations. This is what I suggest.
 
 
 
 
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