The needle promotion "For best results use Victor needles" seems to appear or disappear almost randomly on these Bluebird discs. Can anyone supply an approximate date when they were introduced or eliminated?
Thanks to the information below, and the info Xiphophilos provided on a Metronome All Stars Victor pressing, I should now be able to give an approximate date on all my Victor/Bluebird/RCA Victor 78 pressings, as well as identify the pressing plant. I must admit that I didn't know too much on the history of RCA's Indianapolis plant before hand. Being from the Detroit area, it will be interesting to see which pressing plants my copies originated from! My guess would be Indianapolis for discs pressed in 1939 and later.. but, you never can tell!
It made sense somehow to treat "Sunrise Serenade", an established melody that Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra had recorded before, as the A-side. This sequence made even more sense considering the song titles.
Anyway you are right that A and B marks didn't have the same meaning as they had from the 1950s on. The main clientele of the record industry were juke box operators who were strongly interested in as many coins as possible for each side of every record, as well as private customers wanted as much good music as possible for their money. Radio stations, on the other hand, did not play recorded music until the 1950s. They had their own orchestras.
Is Moonlight Serenade REALLY the flipside? When records of this vintage are marked A & B, I doubt that they actually mean that 'Side A' is in fact the 'radio play' side
For this record we have all the three variants of the circular or ring label design that appears on Bluebird and Victor in mid-1937.
1. two equally long concentric label rings starting left and right of RCA Manufacturing Co., Inc., Camden, N. J., U. S. A. = probably pressed in the oldest plant, Camden, N.J.
2. two concentric label rings of unequal length (the outer one is shorter than the inner one): appears around 1939, thus possibly pressed in the Indianapolis, IN pressing plant that opened in August 1939.
3. two equally long concentric label rings that are broken at 10 o' clock and 2 o'clock: used first ca. 1940-41 and possibly a Hollywood, CA pressing.
The Hollywood labels are also all missing patent nr. 1637544, which dates them to between late 1941 - fall 1943 (M. W. Sherman, Collector's Guide to Victor Records, 2nd ed., page 105).