78 RPM - Dame Nellie Melba - Chanson Triste / By The Waters Of Minnetonka - His Master's Voice - UK

78 RPM Record

Artist:	Dame Nellie Melba
Label:	His Master's Voice
Country:	UK
Catalogue:	D.A.334
Date:	1924
Format:	10"
Collection:	I Own It I Want It
Community:	1 Owns
Price Guide:	Valuation Page
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Track	Artist	Title	Composer	Rating
A	Dame Nellie Melba	Chanson Triste	Duparc	Rate
B	Dame Nellie Melba	By The Waters Of Minnetonka	Lieurance	Rate

Notes

A In French with piano accompaniment by Professor Lapierre

B In English with piano accompaniment by Sir Landon Ronald

Comments and Reviews


scrough 18th Apr 2024		Confession: My 1924 HMV annual catalogue says at the beginning 'issues up to 31 Dec 1923' but contains many DA/DB numbers! I've since found out that this catalogue was a later issue, and the final 'Celebrity' section lists new double sided Celebrity issues up to 31 March 1924 which it declares on the last page. Many links to the British Library in the comments here no longer work and all their sounds documents have been scrapped. Must be run by the Tories!



xiphophilos 12th Feb 2023		Interesting (and disturbing)!



scrough 12th Feb 2023		It also seems that these records were never released in catalogue number order. The June 1925 list shows DB-835 and DB-109 on page 2, and DB-109 (Gigli) is not in the March 1924 list, only records above DA/DB 200 :(



xiphophilos 12th Feb 2023		I just found that John Bolig and John Milmo released a discography of the DA and DB series (and some others) in 2020 and have made it available through the UC Santa Barbara Library's website at https://adp.library.ucsb.edu/HMVCelebritySeriesDiscography.pdf I have added that link to the HMV bio and updated the initial release month for the DA and DB series to January 1924.



xiphophilos 12th Feb 2023		First of all, thank to you, Mike, for updating these records and confirming the dates of others and to you, scrough, for writing that HMV label biography in the first place. I'm looking forward to the update you are planning. It makes sense to me that the Gramophone Company would bulk-release many of their older single-sided Classics records as double-sided records. That's basically what Victor in the United States had done with them just a few months earlier, when it released 140 of its new double-sided red-label Classical records in September 1923, cf. The Talking Machine World, September 15, 1923, page 24. I hope we can find a similar announcement somewhere in a British newspaper or magazine and thus determine when exactly they started. His Master's Voice must have unleashed a veritable flood of double-sided records in just 3 months if they could be up to the 600's by March 31, 1924. I've looked around a bit more in the 1924 Celebrity Records catalog, and they were already up to D.A. 529 (Fritz Kreisler) and D.B. 690 (Luisa Tetrazzini), having started with D.A. 100 and D.B. 100 (both Theodor Chaliapine) [D.A. 100 is not even any longer listed in that catalogue, only D.A. 101]. So within 3 months, they released 429 ten-inch and 590 twelve-inch records.



scrough 12th Feb 2023		The label bio was written 10 years ago and is now well out-of-date, and I've recently PM'd xiph to say it needed updating. 1924 is given as the beginning of the DA and DB series in many places, and I suspect that many were bulk issued without announcement.



Mike Gann 12th Feb 2023		In the moderator notes on one of these records, scrough had made a comment that these double-sided records didn't go into production until January, 1924. I've moved the 1923 records in the D.A. series up to 1924. D.A. 559 was released January, 1925. If this is all correct, I can move the records in the other series up too.



xiphophilos 11th Feb 2023		I think the comment in our label bio can't be right. I just found His Master's Voice's catalog of "Double Sided Celebrity Records 1924", which contains all records up to March 31, 1924, including quite a few D.A. and D.B. records. The very first artist listed, Frances Alda, is represented, for example, by D.A. 503 and D.B. 596 and D.B. 635. In the "1923 Catalogue of His Master's Voice Records", which contains records issued up to Dec. 31, 1922, none of these records is yet listed, so they did probably come out at some point in 1923. The British Library has this wonderful list of scanned old record catalogues and seems to add to them whenever another volume become copyright-free.



Mike Gann 11th Feb 2023		I enjoy a challenge :-)



xiphophilos 11th Feb 2023		Thanks, Mike! This is a bit of a job, unfortunately. I noticed more than 20 that were off.



Mike Gann 11th Feb 2023		I'll pull up the HMV dating guide and have a look at them



xiphophilos 11th Feb 2023		We seem to have a lot of His Master's Voice D.A.-prefix releases dated to 1923, yet the label bio says, "DA (10-inch) and DB (12-inch) series first issued in August 1924." Do they all need to be changed?