A: Introducing "Midnight Maid" (Ben Black, Joseph Meyer).
Personnel:
Walter Rosner (trumpet); Fred Kaufman (trombone); Bert Ralton, Clyde Doerr (alto sax); Steve Douglas (violin); Frank Ellis (piano); Ben Black and sometimes Victor King (banjo); Bela Spiller (brass bass); Art Hickman (drums/leader).
Composers:
"Hold Me": Art Hickman, Ben Black
"Dance It Again With Me": Oliver G. Wallace
A mx: 78694; recorded New York, NY, September 25, 1919.
B mx: 78654; recorded New York, NY, September 15, 1919.(DAHR)
Label Printing Code: BW (= February 1920).
The Talking Machine World, May 15, 1920, page 231: Advance Record Bulletins for June, 1920 (i.e., released in late May 1920).
The Oregon Daily Journal [Portland, OR], May 26, 1920, page 11: New Columbia Records for June – Now on Sale.
There isn't any more reliable publication available, because as Brooks notes, the data required for compiling such a publication simply don't exist and have never existed. Nobody collected the information at the time, so it's lost forever.
The closest thing would conceivably be a book that did not set out to imitate the chart book format at all, such as is mooted by Brooks in the section headed "What Can Be Done?" near the end. But in the quarter century since he wrote, no such book has yet emerged, regrettably.
It needs emphasising that Whitburn's book is not reliable even for determining, however vaguely, that something was a hit or was not.
As Brooks explains, some record companies' complete files still survive, which gives us the exact sales figures for their releases. And so it turns out that some records which sold as much as 300,000+ copies are omitted completely by Whitburn. While records which the same files say sold just a few thousand, but were the subject of promotional drum-banging by the record company at the time, or hype and hearsay later, are included in the book as "hits". Much of what Whitburn includes in his book of hits was never any sort of a hit. It's still a useful book for some limited purposes – but taken with a whole cellar of salt.
interesting. Chart positions in the POP MEMORIES book before 1940 must be taken with a pinch of salt it seems. Perhaps Tim Brooks could come up with his own publication with a different name which is more accurate.
Thanks for all your comments! Rather than become another case of someone who repeats, in Tim Brooks' words, "inaccurate, sometimes wildly inaccurate, information that got into print under seemingly reliable auspices,[...] until it bec[o]me[s], in most people’s minds, fact", I decided to delete the reference to the charts in my first comment completely before it gets picked up by another unwary reader.
I do keep 'Pop Memories' in my reference tool kit solely as a resource for determining release date. The 'chart' info has to be viewed as a bit of a 'relative' thing in as much as, if the book says that a 'record' or 'song' was a top 10 charter, you can rest assured that it was biggie and that for a particular artist one tune was bigger than another. The number itself is rather meaningless.
But then I think the same about the regular Billboard Hot 100 charts of today. How can a song be a a number 1 or 5 or 25 when you can't buy a single of it. Its all smoke and mirrors.
Whitburn's Pop Memories 1890-1954 was an attempt to compile a chart book retroactively for the period before there simply were any accurate charts. Sadly, it is in many ways a complete disaster, and the good reputation of Whitburn's Billboard chart books has caused it to be much more trusted and quoted than would be the case otherwise.
See, for instance, the 1989 review of the book by media historian Tim Brooks.
However, Bullfrogs Pond has no charts from before 1950 anymore, and Billboard top songs of the year listings, that were originally publicly available via the Billboard website, have since been removed. It's very probable that these listings derived from Joel Whitburn's "Pop Memories 1890-1954: The History of American Popular Music", that Whitburn had "taken from a variety of popular music charts". His charts, however, were composed by poetic license and were anything but official. This may be the reason why the last edition of the Pop Memories book dates from 1991 as far as I know.
My source is this site: http://tsort.info/music/a0qj6m.htm. Apparently just as misinformed as I admittedly am. So what charts could they mean (I deleted BB below)? Were there even charts?