XXXI: 1931
On Vocal Pyrotechnics, Delicious Cynicism, and Existential Turns
1. Cab Calloway and his Orchestra: “Minnie the Moocher (The Ho De Ho Song)”
As the Depression continued its spiral into 1931, the national mood, even perhaps the global mood insofar as all ears were tuned to American airwaves, was entranced by a bit of hepcat nonsense. The origins of the song are so obscure as to be labeled folk, but vaudeville song “Willie the Weeper” was published in 1908, and over several recorded renditions beginning in 1927 the basic idea of a drug addict with a lavish, Munchausenisch lifestyle was iterated upon until Cotton Club bandleader Cab Calloway picked it up, recast Willie as the more sexually suggestive Minnie, then lapsed into call-and-response vocalese when he found himself momentarily bereft of lyrics. Audiences adored the act, so on record he had the band shout his increasing garble back at him, and struck immortality. [...]
2. The Mills Brothers Quartet: “Tiger Rag”
In 1917, the Original Dixieland Jass Band first recorded “Tiger Rag” as the flip side to “Dixie Jass Band One Step,” and there’s an argument to be made that their rendition is the definitive one: they, after all, “wrote” the tune. But I’ve been saving it to introduce the Mills Brothers with, because nothing else would do as well. The 10-inch record label bears the legend “No musical instrument or mechanical devices used on this recording other than one guitar,” because otherwise listeners might assume that the trumpet and bass lines they hear were not produced by human voices. Jazz practice spins out into new and untold domains here: they invent lyrics to an instrumental song, as thoroughly nonsensical as the original, but retain its raucous energy and verve.
3. Almirante com “Bando de Tangarás”: “Eu vou pra Vila”
Throughout the 1920s Brazilian samba had been recorded in an unrepresentative way: the drum line (batucada) which rang annually in the streets of Rio was replaced with North American-style dance-band arrangements, as a compromise between the Black authenticity of the favela streets and the pallid tastes of the white moneyed classes. It was not until the early 1930s that actual batucadas began to sound on record, as in this samba about going to Vila Isabel, a Rio neighborhood with deep samba roots and where the band of Tangarás (dancing birds), which included Noel Rosa on guitar, had first assembled. Singer and tambourinist Almirante wryly delivers Rosa’s ironic lyrics, shouting out the official corruption by which the police of Vila Isabel permitted the otherwise prohibited samba to be played there.
4. Orchestre de la Boule Blanche sous la direction de Charlery-Banguio, Refrain chanté par Mlle Leona: “Maladie d’amour”
French-Antillean biguine was reaching a zenith in the early 30s, as the 1931 Colonial Exposition in Paris drew millions of tourists to gawk at Martinican, Guadeloupean and Guianese singers, instrumentalists, and dancers. Banjoist Robert Charlery, drummer Maurice Banguio, and singer Léona Gabriel headlined this track sponsored by dancehall Boule Blanche (the site of some bravura Robert Bresson photographs). It was credited on the label merely as a “Biguine martiniquaise,” a folkloric attribution that meant Columbia owed nothing to any composers. In years to come, Léona at least would finally be credited as co-writer, after her nephew Henri Salvador transformed the song into a standard of French chanson, from which, as “Melody of Love,” it became part of the English-language songbook. But here, in Léona’s forthright patois, it sounded first.
5. Wilmoth Houdini with Gerald Clark’s Night Owls: “Black But Sweet”
And Charlery’s band in Paris was not, in colonial terms, terribly different from Gerald Clark’s band in Harlem; Clark was a Trinidadian who had emigrated to the U.S. to study medicine but fell into music to pay the bills. Backing star Wilmoth Houdini, who had been living and performing successfully in New York long enough for calypsonians still on the island to begin to mutter darkly about sellouts who go soft, was a coup for Clark, whose cuatro keeps an insistent rhythm while cornet and clarinet curlicue around Houdini’s toasting to a “black and homely” woman called Didi. When, at the climax of the song, he declares “it is a positive fact: the sweetest women in this world are Black,” it’s a still-audacious blow against white supremacist norms.
6. Cuarteto Machín: “El huerfanito”
As the follow-up to Antonio Machín’s globe-spanning hit as the voice of Don Azpiazu’s “Peanut Vendor,” “El huerfanito” could be considered slight or subdued by contrast: Azpiazu had returned to Havana with his orchestra, and Machín’s ad hoc quartet, formed of Puerto Ricans already resident in New York, could hardly be as well-drilled or polished as a big band. But “El huerfanito” has had a long life nevertheless, becoming Machín’s signature song, particularly during his long residence in Spain. Even today, writers, cartoonists and filmmakers trying to evoke the ambience of Franco-era Spain cue up “El huerfanito,” in part because Bienvenido J. Gutiérrez’ desolate, existential lyrics of orphanhood and isolation key so well into the bitter, paranoid mood that dictatorship foments. Cuban son continues to grow in international sophistication.
7. Skip James: “Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues”
But for bone-deep existentialism there’s nothing like the Delta blues. Skip James came late to being recorded, which meant that his handful of records sank like a stone in the unpromising waters of the Depression, and he returned to the manual labor of which he wrote in his songs. His open D-minor tuning, intricate fingerpicking style, and ruminative, evocative lyrics were unusually melancholy even for the blues, as in this lament, perhaps the most honest expression of Depression-era feeling to be recorded over the course of the decade. “Can’t find no heaven, don’t care where they go.” The killing floor of the title might be that of a stockyard slaughterhouse, but it can equally be any floor to which a man falls when he can no longer go on.
8. Trio Matamoros: “Lágrimas negras”
Three years since we last saw them in these pages, Miguel Matamoros and his compatriots have also increased in sophistication: this is one of the greatest Spanish-language songs of the century. As through-composed as a ballad or serenade, it still adheres to son structure, giving the montuno breakdown a lyrical turn from the pure suffering of the A and B sections to a wild, almost ecstatic resolution. The portrait of despairing love in Matamoros’ lyrics is both extremely vernacular and extremely modernistic: the singer does not blame the object of his love for abandoning him, but wishes he could join them in that abandonment, “ir gitano” (go [Romani]) even at the expense of his life. “Lágrimas negras” means Black tears, which recasts the whole song in a racialized lens.
9. Elisa Coelho: “No rancho fundo”
Even as samba was approaching its modernized, thoroughly urban zenith, it was also demonstrating that it could equally be put to pastoral uses. Ary Barroso first composed this song with a lyric by cartoonist J. Carlos as “Na grota funda” (in the deep grotto), but writer Lamartine Babo gave it new lyrics (without permission), and Banda de Tangarás played it on the radio. Barroso knew which side his bread was buttered on, and it’s been “No rancho fundo” (on the distant ranch) ever since. He personally requested Elisa Coelho, one of the higher-class radio songbirds of the moment, to record it, and her delicate reading of the almost lullaby-tempo samba, about a brown agricultural worker dreaming of the wicked women of the city, has influenced generations of interpreters since.
10. New Mayfair Novelty Orchestra (with Vocal Refrain): “Twentieth Century Blues”
If British attempts to keep up with American songwriting and dance-band innovations have been treated slightingly here, it is because I was subconsciously comparing them to Ray Noble’s tenure as the leader of HMV’s New Mayfair Dance Orchestra. Their first peerless record, by my reckoning, is this rendition of Noel Coward’s deliciously cynical examination of the current malaise, which as an accurate (if generic) diagnosis of Western social mores has only faltered in relevance insofar as the century has changed over. Singer Al Bowlly, trumpeter Max Goldberg, and arranger Noble gaze into the abyss with the stiff upper lip of delicate orchestration and husky savoir-faire, but the post-vocal double-time recapitulation of the theme hints at the emotional, ideological, and economic maelstroms that have only just begun to take effect.
11. Libby Holman: “Love for Sale”
Even Coward’s cynicism can’t compare with Cole Porter’s most audaciously risqué set of lyrics. “Love for Sale” was introduced in ultra-clever musical The New Yorkers, and family newspapers raced to condemn its frank depiction of sex work while radio banned it from airplay as a matter of course. But both Porter (who was as openly gay as it was judicious to be) and singer Libby Holman, an avowed bisexual, were used to being policed for their expression: the record sold well regardless of moral furor. It helps that it’s one of Porter’s most appealing melodies, borrowing a faint habanera rhythm while Holman coos archly about her “wares.” On stage, though, the number was recast to be sung by a Black woman, because linking race and vice ruffled no feathers.
12. Bing Crosby: “Dancing in the Dark”
The existential turn in Thirties pop has spread even to revues. Schwartz-Dietz confection The Band Wagon was otherwise a cheerful piece of nonsense, with Fred and Adele Astaire in their final appearance together as Bavarian schoolchildren playing hoops, and “Dancing in the Dark,” with its dramatic coloration and none too subtle metaphor for the uncertainty of life, was like something out of Expressionist theater by comparison. Bing Crosby, the first person to record the tune, provides as straightforward a reading as he was then capable of, with wry little quavers and glissandos to let you know that he’s not taking it as seriously as a proper tenor would. Which perhaps only adds to the sense of ominous foreboding that not even the bridge’s invocation of salvific love can allay.
13. Ichirō Fujiyama: “Sake wa namida ka tameiki ka”
This gloomy mood was not limited to the West. One of the biggest-selling hits of Japanese ryūkōka (popular song) in 1931 was this spare, elegant meditation from the bottom of a sake bottle, performed by classically-trained student Ichirō Fujiyama (Takeo Masunaga) in imitation of Western-style crooners because he couldn’t hit the lower notes using traditional vocal technique. The song began as a poem, “Is sake tears or sighs?”, written by newspaperman Takahashi Kikutaro in honor of Chinari, a geisha of his acquaintance, and was set to music by Masao Koga, whose haunting guitar echoes Fujiyama’s misery. The song’s unparalleled success was not without controversy: Fujiyama was forced to withdraw from recording on threat of expulsion from the Tokyo Music School for daring to sing ryūkōka, even under a pseudonym.
14. Mildred Bailey: “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams (And Dream Your Troubles Away)”
At the age of twenty-four, Mildred Bailey knew plenty about trouble: born to a German-Swiss father and a Native American (Coeur d’Alene) mother in Washington state, she grew up on the reservation, was pushed out of the home by a racist stepmother as a teenager, and suffered a horrific car accident in Seattle, all before meeting the young Bing Crosby through her brother, one of Crosby’s co-harmonists in Paul Whiteman’s Rhythm Boys. In New York, she introduced Crosby to the music of Louis Armstrong, suggesting he study the master’s phrasing to sing jazz, and sang for the Whiteman orchestra before leaving over money. This song was recorded with the competing Casa Loma Orchestra, fortuitously her first record under her own name: by 1931, even positive-thinking pop acknowledged grim reality.
15. Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra: “Star Dust”
It’s instructive to compare this with one of Armstrong’s other great records of 1931, “You Rascal You.” Written by a Black man and heartily adopted by the Black jazz community, the latter is a merry delight, delivered raucously, faithfully, and in good humor. Whereas this, an uptempo Hoagy Carmichael instrumental of 1927 that had been slowed down and gussied up with saccharine lyrics by strangers in the interim, is delivered with Armstrong’s characteristic brio but zero regard for Mitchell Parish’s punctiliously selected verbiage. “Melody, my memory,” he murmurs, getting at the feeling of “the melody haunts my reverie” without bothering over details. It’s as much a jazz approach to lyrics as his trumpet playing is to melody, and it transforms the sickly sweet nosegay into a hearty living rosebush.
16. The Boswell Sisters: “Roll On, Mississippi, Roll On”
Something about jazzy close-harmony family acts broke through this year: Ohio’s Mills brothers, noted above, are now joined by New Orleans’ Boswells, a trio of sisters who had been soaking up music, Black and white, for over a decade and finally, with the Brunswick recordings of 1931, were able to put into practice the daring, profoundly syncopated, intricately arranged renditions of jazz and near-jazz songs they had been cultivating together for years. Accompanied by such white jazz luminaries as the Dorsey brothers and the Venuti-Lang duo, they produced vocal fireworks at a rate that startled sedate radio listeners, who protested that they couldn’t hear the tune for the embellishments and sniffed at the “savagery” of their methods. But pseudo-minstrel tunes like this were never worth hearing without Boswellian pyrotechnics.
17. Comedian Harmonists: “Marie, Marie!”
By far the most successful close-harmony act in the world to date, Germany’s Comedian Harmonists had patterned themselves on US group the Revelers, but there was never any hint of syncopation in their militarily-precise rhythms. Despite their name, they generally sang sentimental or merely jolly songs more frequently than humorous or novelty songs, but when they wanted to they could put a little pizzazz on a standard-issue love song. “Marie, Marie!,” which they sang in the musical crime film Gassenhaeur, was just such a standard-issue ditty, but their pepped-up attack on it makes it listenable even for Americans. Not unrelatedly, three of the six Harmonists were Jewish by either faith or descent, which meant that their partnership cannot last much longer; but make hay while the Weimar sun shines.
18. Jazzové klavírní sólo a doprovodem Ježkova orchestru Osvobozeného divadla, Dirigent: Jaroslav Ježek: “Bugatti Step”
Not that there weren’t ears in Europe keenly attuned to Black American innovation. Jaroslav Ježek, an almost-blind Czech pianist and composer who had studied at the Prague Conservatory and wrote in a severe Stravinsky- and Schoenberg-inflected idiom, had fallen in love with hot jazz too, and in his capacity as the musical director of Prague’s Liberated Theater, an avant-garde, left-wing bastion of satirical dissent, he composed fox-trots, waltzes, tangos, rumbas, and blues for populist consumption. “Bugatti Step,” a zooming piano-led tune and quite possibly the hottest record yet waxed to the east of the Atlantic, was written in celebration of Eliska Junkova, a Czech driver, winning a 1927 Swiss mountain race in her Italian touring-car. After the 1938 Nazi annexation, Ježek fled to the US, and died in 1942.
19. Don Redman and his Orchestra: “Shakin’ the African”
But for jazz that manages to be both blazing hot and drop-dead cool at the same time, nobody could beat Black Americans. Don Redman had played with and arranged for Fletcher Henderson and McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, the hottest bands of the 1920s, and finally headlined his own orchestra at Connie’s Inn starting in 1931. Propulsive, powerful, and able to stop on a dime, Redman’s band was swing before swing, as this rendition of a Cotton Club number by white songwriting team Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler makes clear. Redman delivers the vocal himself in a warm croak close to the microphone, barely singing, just conversating (even, you could say, rapping), and he’s a study in hipness, mangling Koehler’s lyrics in order to artfully adapt them to lived jive speech.
20. Jimmy Johnson and his Orchestra: “A Porter’s Love Song to a Chambermaid”
In some readings, the Harlem Renaissance, which had begun in 1921 with Shuffle Along, had come to a close along with so much else in the vibrant 1920s. But there were still some all-Black revues being staged in 1931, including The Kitchen Mechanics Revue, a breezy trifle centered on the Harlem proletariat, with music by James P. Johnson and lyrics by Andy Razaf. “A Porter’s Love Song (To a Chambermaid)” was the longest-lived of the show’s songs, and this rendition by its creators, while politer and less hot than many that would follow, is a rare chance to appreciate the singing of the man born Andriamanantena Razafinkarefo in Madagascar, where he was descended from royalty, and whose manifold contributions to Black popular culture in his adopted homeland remain unrivaled.
21. The Charleston Chasers, Under direction of Bennie Goodman: “Basin Street Blues”
By 1931, white jazzmen had more or less worked out their role in the music’s development: imitate their betters, make the broader audience comfortable. “Basin Street Blues” was written by long-serving Black songwriter Spencer Williams and first recorded by Louis Armstrong, but the collection of accomplished studio musicians who recorded as the Charleston Chasers on this date included clarinetist and leader Benny Goodman, trombonist and arranger Glenn Miller, drummer Gene Krupa, and trombonist and singer Jack Teagarden, whose rumpled delivery of Williams’ lyrics (plus a new introductory verse penned by Miller and himself) virtually invented the image of the white hepcat out of thin air. All four men would become household names by decade’s end, but their relative anonymity here helps focus attention on the tune’s cool, mellow delivery.
22. Clyde McCoy & his Orchestra: “Sugar Blues”
Another direction for white jazz—or perhaps the same direction it had taken from its inception, only more so—popped up the same year. Clyde McCoy was a Kentucky-born descendant of the McCoys who hated the Hatfields, but his most lasting contribution to American culture was the use of an exaggerated form of trumpet muting. Bubber Miley’s solos for Duke Ellington had popularized the plunger mute as a wriggling “jungle” sound, but McCoy’s use of the “wah-wah” mute gave his trumpet a cartoonishly drunken stagger, and on his signature hit record, an instrumental of Clarence Williams’ 1919 sheet-music blues, he updates the ODJB’s squawking novelty uproar for the streamlined 1930s. Reissues and rerecordings of his record would even make the country charts, that’s how corny it came to seem.
23. John White (The Lonesome Cowboy): “Whoopee-Ti-Yi-Yo (Git Along Little Doggies)”
The distinction between country and western music was still very much alive in the early 1930s, when big-name country performers like Grand Ole Opry favorites the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers represented rural (or even urban) Appalachia, while western music, equally a show-business endeavor, endeavored to evoke cowboy life, and was increasingly tied to Hollywood representations of cowboys. The radio program Death Valley Days, which began airing in fall 1930, was an extremely popular western drama, and was even roughly authentic as far as could be expected. A recurring character, the Lonesome Cowboy, was played by John White (a Washington, D.C. native), who sang cowboy ballads both real and ersatz. The only record issued under his actual name included this classic trail song punctuated by a hiccuping whoop.
24. Guty y Añez, Dúo: “La República en España”
1931 was not all Depression and despair: in Spain, the rejection of the monarchy and the declaration of a constitutional republic was cause for rejoicing in idealistic circles worldwide. Mexican troubadour Guty Cárdenas even cut a double-sided corrido in New York commemorating the event, dueting with Colombian studio lifer Jorge Añez on a set of lyrics detailing Alfonso XIII’s flight through France and the populist rejoicing in the streets of Madrid. It was one of Guty’s last great records: his fatal shooting in a Mexico City cantina in 1932 would be described by eyewitnesses as having been provoked by an argument over a woman with a couple of Spanish brothers, but rumors persisted that it was actually a cleverly disguised assassination by monarchist sympathizers in retaliation for the recording.
25. La Argentinita, con acomp. de piano por Fdco. García Lorca: “Anda jaleo”
Spanish modernism was in full flower. Poet Federico García Lorca, the most idealistic and popular of the Generation of ’27, arranged and produced a five-disc album of traditional lyrics he had collected over the years. Colección de canciones populares españoles (Collection of Popular Spanish Songs), sung by his muse, Argentina-born cupletista and flamenco dancer Encarnación López Júlvez, with his own piano accompaniment, was part of the modernist wave attempting to reclaim folkloric traditions for a mass audience. The set was artistically rather than commercially successful, but today it remains an exquisite period document, equal parts stuffy art song, flamenco, and restless experimentation. The first song in the set, pseudo-flamenco standard “Anda jaleo,” was the only one accompanied by orchestra, but La Argentinita’s castanets and zapateando make a greater impact.
26. Ada Falcón, con acomp. de orquesta Francisco Canaro: “La última copa”
Ada Falcón had been working in Argentine show business since childhood, and was the third woman to record a tango in 1925, behind Rosita Quiroga and Azucena Maizani. But it was in 1929, when she began her turbulent working and emotional relationship with bandleader Francisco Canaro (who refused to divorce his wife, but kept Falcón for a decade), that her mezzosoprano became one of the most important voices in tango. Canaro’s full-band arrangements showcasing her passionate readings of suffering and heartbreak would set the future pattern for tango; her rendition of “La última copa” (the last cup), written by Canaro and lyricist Juan Andrés Caruso in the voice of a man drinking to forget a woman, changes no pronouns, inviting queer readings that her performance does nothing to dissuade.
27. Fréhel: “Dans la rue”
Meanwhile, in France, chanteuse réaliste Fréhel made her first of many appearances in feature films singing a dourly humorous song about the seedy side of womanhood. In the finished product of Cœur de lilas, “Dans la rue” plays over a montage of streetwalkers and madames coming to terms with clients as gendarmes stroll unconcernedly by, while Fréhel scrubs stockings in a bordello back-room. The song, written for the film by veteran cabaret and operetta composer Maurice Yvain with librettist Serge Veber, is far franker about the economic and social disadvantages, not to mention the sheer tedium, of sex work than Porter’s arch, glamorized “Love for Sale,” but then that’s why it’s called chanson réaliste. The sound of the hurdy-gurdy approximating an accordion only adds to the dingy, unglamorous atmosphere.
28. Rita Abatzi: “Gia mena den se meli”
I am not enough of an expert to state definitively that this is the first rebetika record, but it is the earliest I know of with the signature sound of the bouzouki underpinning Kostas Karipis’ overlapping couplets. And with Rita Abatzi’s appearance, the legendary generation of rebetika performers of the 1930s is now fully represented here. Born in Smyrna, she was among the refugee populations who made a new home in the hardscrabble suburbs of Athens as the Ottoman Empire crumbled. Unlike her rival and chief competitor Roza Eskenazi, very little is known of her early years, but her vocal style is remarkably rich and confident so early in her career. A spare, finely-wrought lament over a heartbreaker driving the singer to despair, this song is a stunning debut.
29. Tom Ashley: “Haunted Road Blues”
Clarence McCurry, called Tom as a childhood nickname and Ashley after the maternal grandparents who raised him, had been a regular presence in recorded old-time music since 1928, both as a member of the Carolina Tar Heels with banjoist Dock Walsh and harmonica player Gwen Foster and under his own name. One of the finer repositories in the central Appalachian region of the many strains of musical heritage that have come to be marketed as “folk,” Ashley’s dry, flat vocals and clawhammer picking style can sometimes sound primordial, a spectre of a past deeper than any other recorded in these pages, and never more so than on death-obsessed numbers like this one, a white blues haunted more by the graveyard than by the Black blues tradition’s vicissitudes of life.
30. 1y Etnografichesk. strunyy kvartet: “Yevreyskaya eskizy”
One of the hardest-hit casualties of the post-Crash recording contraction in the United States was Jewish popular music: the freilach orchestras and Yiddish comedians who had enlivened the 1920s were now being heard only by local audiences. But in a country where sales figures mattered less than arts ministers, a Jewish ensemble could record a Jewish composer and be published by the state. Alexander Krein had composed his Jewish Sketches in 1914, influenced as much by the klezmer music he heard growing up in Lithuania as by traditional concert music, and under the Soviet regime he composed widely in both ethnic and nationalistic modes. An ad-hoc group labeled the First Ethnographic String Quartet (plus clarinet) recorded Book 1, parts II and III, of the Sketches, making a joyful noise.
31. Duke Ellington and his Orchestra: “Creole Rhapsody”
Six years ago, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue was knocked by the establishment for not actually being a rhapsody, musically speaking. This is; but it’s also genuine jazz in a way Gershwin could never be (and, to be fair, wasn’t trying to). Duke Ellington’s first double-sided composition, and possibly the earliest in all of jazz music, depending on how you classify certain Whiteman records, the “Creole Rhapsody” is still relatively neglected. But as a summation of his musical ideas to the present, as a display of his compositional control of the full orchestra as a unit, and as a showcase for the delicate soloing of Cootie Williams on trumpet, Barney Bigard on tenor sax, Johnny Hodges on alto sax, and the Duke himself on piano, it’s nothing short of majestic.
Appendix: 69 further masterpieces from 1931
For the glory years of electrical recording, I’m continuing to round out the list to an even hundred. I could easily have written a paragraph on each of these records, each of which deserves a spot on the main list, but there were only 31 spots and I had to make choices. The worst part is all the amazing records that have to go unmentioned because I indefensibly narrowed their performers’ catalog to a single entry. These years represent an embarrassment of riches toward which I can only vaguely gesture.
Carlos Gardel (del dúo Gardel - Razzano), con acomp. de sus guitarras: “Tomo y obligo”
Mercedes Simone: “Cantando!”
Azucena Maizani: “Pero yo sé”
Francisco Canaro y su orquesta típica: “Tipo Loco”
Zico Dias e Ferrinho: “Fui passear na cidade”
Grupo da Guarda Velha: “Ha! Hu! Lahô!”
Silvio Caldas: “É mentira, oi!”
Ismael Silva com Bambas do Estácio: “Me diga o teu nome”
Aracy Cortes: “Teu desprezo”
Ana María Fernández con Orquesta de Agustin Lara: “Pervertida”
M. F. Silvia, F. V. Rivera y F. J. Ventura con acompañamiento de Felipe V. Rivera y su Orquesta Típica Boliviana: “Caminito a Yavi”
Alfredo Brito y su Orquesta “Siboney”: “María la O”
Tom et ses Juniors Guadeloupéens: “Robes à queue”
Maria Alice: “A Azenha”
Hermínia Silva, Guitarra (Victor Ramos) e Viola (Abel Negrão):"O dia em que eu nasci”
El Niño de Marchena, con acomp. de guitarra por Ramón Montoya: “Se parecen las almendras (Granaina)”
Tani Zerja, acomp. de guitarras por Hermanos Ricardo: “Rosas de otoño”
Mistinguett du Casino de Paris, Direction Mahieux, Accomp. du Mélodic-Jazz: “J’ai des touches”
M. Georges Milton: “Ah! Quel bonheur!”
Mlle Lucienne Boyer, Accompagnement d’Orchestre sous la direction de M. B. Codolban: “Dans la fumée”
Albert Préjean, avec accompagnement d’orchestre: “Sous les toits de Paris”
Gertrude Lawrence: “Parisian Pierrot”
Marlene Dietrich mit Orchester, Dirigent: Peter Kreuder: “Jonny”
Joseph Schmidt mit Orchester, Dirigent: Wilhelm Grosz: “Liebling, nach dem Tango vergiß mich!”
Josef Pizio: “Pidkamecka kolomyjka”
Roza Eskenazi: “Lili skandaliara”
Umm Kulthum: “Yalli jafak al-manam”
Siddiqa El Mullaya: “Retha’a mohsen essadune”
Georges Fourcade et son orchestre créole: “Zouzoune”
K. B. Sundarambal: “Gandhi London”
Utako Hagoromo: “Jokyu no uta”
Kikuko Inoue: “Miss Shanghai”
King Nawahi Hawaiians: “Flowers of the Island”
Kalama’s Quartet: “Maile Lau Li'i Li’i”
Lonnie Johnson: “Uncle Ned Don’t Use Your Head”
Blind Blake: “Rope Stretchin’ Blues”
“Bo” Carter: “Ants in My Pants”
“Beans” Hambone–El Morrow: “Beans”
Dessa Foster and Howling Smith: “Tell It to the Judge”
Bessie Smith: “Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl”
Ora Alexander: “You’ve Got to Save That Thing”
Blanche Calloway and Her Joy Boys: “I Need Lovin’”
Benny Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra, Vocal refrain by James Rushing: “I Wanna Be Around My Baby All the Time”
Mills Blue Rhythm Boys: “Snake Hips”
Fletcher Henderson and his Orchestra: “Sugar Foot Stomp”
Gene Kardos and his Orchestra, Vocal refrain by Gene Kardos and chorus: “Business in ‘F’”
Ted Lewis and his Band: “Dallas Blues”
Joe Venuti’s Rhythm Boys: “Tempo Di Modernage”
Rudy Vallée and His Connecticut Yankees: “The Thrill Is Gone”
Waring’s Pennsylvanians, Vocal refrain by Clare Hanlon and The Three Waring Girls and Chorus: “I Found a Million Dollar Baby (In a Five and Ten Cent Store)”
Leo Reisman and his Orchestra, Vocal refrain by Lee Wiley: “Time on My Hands (You in My Arms)”
Ruth Etting: “Guilty”
Annette Hanshaw: “Walkin’ My Baby Back Home”
Julia Gerity and her Boys, Vocal refrain by Julia Gerity: “Sittin’ on a Rubbish Can”
Eddie Cantor with Phil Spitalny’s music: “Ballyhoo”
Paul Robeson: “Sleepy Time Down South”
John Charles Thomas: “Home on the Range”
Cowboy Ed Crane: “Starving to Death on a Government Claim”
Cliff Carlisle: “My Rocky Mountain Sweetheart”
Gene Autry: “That’s How I Got My Start”
Jimmie Rodgers: “Let Me Be Your Side Track”
Delmore Brothers (Alton and Rabon): “Got the Kansas City Blues”
Crockett Kentucky Mountaineers: “Cripple Creek”
The Carter Family: “When I’m Gone”
Two Poor Boys: “Take a Look at That Baby”
Hazekiah Jenkins: “The Panic Is On”
Aunt Molly Jackson: “Kentucky Miner’s Wife (Ragged Hungry Blues)”
Deep River Plantation Singers: “Train’s A-Comin’”
Silver Leaf Quartet of Norfolk: “Oh! Glory Glory”