Gus Haenschen: The Brunswick Years (Part 2)

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The James A. Drake Interviews

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Were actual bleachers used for recordings that were made in the studio?

Yes, depending on the size of the orchestra we were using for a particular session. A typical studio orchestra for us would be twelve or thirteen men. The brass players would usually be placed either on the sides of the bleachers or, in the case of the tuba, standing next to the bleachers. The strings were always placed as close to the horn as possible because the volume of the violin and viola was lower than the reed and brass sections.

In the reed section, the clarinets were placed in front of the saxophones because the saxes were much louder than the clarinets. Now, if the arrangement I approved called for a small group of instruments—say, a clarinet and two saxophones—to play several measures of this song being recorded, those players would rush toward the horn. As soon as they were finished playing their part, they would move away so that they wouldn’t be blocking the horn.

 

About the violins, did you use the so-called Stroh violins, or was the recording diaphragm sensitive enough to pick up a true violin? And did all of Brunswick’s studio orchestras use the banjo for rhythm?

We used Stroh violins in our earliest recordings. And, yes, banjos were used for rhythm—usually just one banjo place near the horn. We had excellent banjoists who played multiple string instruments. Probably the best banjoist we had was Harry Reser, who went on to lead the Clicquot Club Eskimos on radio. Harry played banjo, mandolin, lute, ukulele and guitar.

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Horned Stroh instruments, like this violin, provided the volume needed to register well on acoustical recording equipment. (National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution)

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So did Nick Lucas, who was a regular in our studio orchestra.  Nick played the mandolin principally, but he was also an excellent acoustic guitarist. Nick became a real student of the recording process, and convinced me to let him play the guitar rather than the mandolin, and to position himself and his guitar very near the horn—literally, almost touching the bottom edge of the horn.

 

Did he sing then, or was he playing in the studio orchestra?

Well, there came a time in 1923 or 1924 when Nick asked me to consider letting him sing, although his voice was a rather high tenor, and a very small voice at that. But around 1924 or maybe in early 1925, before we switched to electrical recording, Gene Austin made some records that sold very well for Victor. Gene was really the first “crooner.”  [1]

Well, I decided to have Nick become Brunswick’s crooner.  I thought it was a great idea, but Nick didn’t. When I told him that we would bill him as a crooner, he balked and said, “But I’m Italian and I’m from the trovatore tradition.  I can’t be a crooner!”  So we compromised, and Nick became Brunswick’s “crooning troubadour.”

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Nick Lucas

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Nick had a terrific sense of humor, and he used to kid me all the time about how he nearly had to stick his entire head into the acoustical recording horn for his voice to register. I can still hear him saying to me, “My head was so far into that horn that I could feel my lips kissing that damned diaphragm!”  Of all the singers I can think of, Nick Lucas was the happiest when electrical recording came in. He could stand in front of a microphone and sing naturally.

 

During the acoustical period, singers seem to have used various “tricks,” for want of a better word, that they had to use to record consonants and sibilants that the recording diaphragm did not always pick up.  I’m thinking, for example, of the “S” sound.  How was that insensitivity of the recording diaphragm overcome?

That was gotten around by having the singer put a consonant with the “S.” The early recording artists, and we had all of them under contract under pseudonyms, knew exactly how to create the effect I am trying to describe. As an example, when Henry Burr, as Harry McClaskey or one of his other pseudonyms, would record “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree,“ the “sh“ in the word “shade” would not record most of the time. So he would put a “J” after the “S” and sing “s-jade,” which the diaphragm would pick up.

 

When Brunswick began making and issuing its own recordings, did you have almost all of those same singers that Victor and Columbia had—singers like Henry Burr, Albert Campbell, Elliot Shaw, Lewis James, Royal Dadmun, and Billy Murray?

We had all of them except Billy Murray, whose voice we felt was too well known because he had recorded for everybody since almost the very beginning of the industry.  But we had all the others [2], and they were easy to work with because they were professional recording artists. That was their income.

We recorded them under pseudonyms, and each one of them had about three pseudonyms that he used for different companies.

The same for the women singers like Elsie Baker, who recorded under about three different names at Victor alone. Victor and Columbia used most of the male singers I mentioned in trios and quartets with different names—the Sterling trio, the Shannon Four, and so on. Individually, none of those singers was what anyone would call a great vocalist. But when they sang together in small groups, the effect was very, very good.

 

You recorded under pseudonyms yourself, correct?

Yes, mainly as Carl Fenton. I came up with that name by combining the St. Louis suburb where I grew up, which is called Fenton, with the first name of one of my mother’s relatives. He spelled his name with a “K,” and I changed it to a “C.” That was sort of a carryover from the songwriting and arranging I did before I joined Brunswick. Over the years I have written about fifty songs under assumed names.

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The fictitious Carl Fenton’s Orchestra was Brunswick’s house dance band. Haenschen managed the group and wrote many of its arrangements, but he did not play on the recordings. [3]
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Bandleaders sometimes sent surrogate groups on the road under their names in the 1920s. Here, a “Carl Fenton” orchestra plays Muncie, Indiana, on December 15, 1926 — the same day the actual orchestra was recording in New York.

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For example, I got a call from Charlie Chaplin, whom I had gotten to know quite well, telling me that Mary Pickford needed a song for a United Artists movie she was making called “Rosita.” I wrote the melody under the name “Paul Dupont.”  Two others I used from time to time were “Paul Krane” and “Walter Holliday.” One of the reasons I used pseudonyms was because I was associated by name with Brunswick, so if a song like “Rosita“ was scheduled to be recorded by Victor, my counterpart there—I should say my competitor there—would kill the song because my name was on it.

The person I’m talking about, incidentally, is Nat [Nathaniel] Shilkret, who was my counterpart at Victor.  Shilkret was an excellent arranger and a very fine musician, but he was very difficult as a person and he took competition to a frankly silly degree. Because of that, any song that I had anything to do with was not going to be recorded by anybody and Victor.  But since “Rosita” was written by “Paul Dupont,” the song sneaked by Shilkret and was recorded by several singers at Victor.

Recently I found out that even Rosa Ponselle had recorded that song for Victor. Now to be fair, that could be because Shilkret was not the director of Red Seal recordings. That was Rosario Bourdon, not Shilkret.  And Ponselle, of course, was one of the biggest stars in the Victor Red Seal catalog, so if she wanted to sing it, they weren’t likely to say no to her.

 

Speaking of Ponselle, did Walter Rogers ever try to lure her or other Victor Red Seal vocalists to Brunswick as far as you know?

Yes, several of them. Walter knew Rosa Ponselle personally, so it was not hard for him to get to her with an offer. Although she had a manager, a wonderful woman named Libbie Miller, Rosa made all of her own decisions. What I heard was that she was being paid so well by Victor, and that she had had a bad experience when she recorded for Columbia, that she would not leave Victor because of the status of the Red Seal recording label and the amount of money they were paying her.

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Although Brunswick’s Hall of Fame series boasted some stellar artists, Haenschen admitted it was “no match for the Victor Red Seal label.”

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We could have more than matched what Victor was paying her, but our “Hall of Fame” series, which was what we called our classical recordings, was no match for the Victor Red Seal label.  We did try to get Carmela Ponselle, her older sister, to leave Columbia for Brunswick. Walter [Rogers] talked to her privately several times, but she was quite indecisive, as I recall, and I think she was hoping to become a Red Seal artist like her sister.  But as I said earlier, we had Elisabeth Rethberg, Sigrid Onegin, Maria Ivogun and others, so we did very well with them.

 

Giacomo Lauri-Volpi, whom you mentioned earlier, was also an exclusive Brunswick artist. Later in the 1920s he went to Victor, but his start was with Brunswick.  I realize that Walter Rogers was responsible for recording him, but do you remember any of the sessions with Lauri-Volpi?

It’s funny you should mention that because I had a small role in dealing with Lauri-Volpi.  Our negotiations with him had gone smoothly, although he was rumored to be a very difficult person.  It wasn’t that he was difficult, just that he would get very frustrated because didn’t speak English.  Walter understood some Italian but could not speak the language, so he couldn’t communicate with Lauri-Volpi except through a translator.

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Giacomo Lauri-Volpi, from the 1924 Brunswick catalog

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As you probably know, Lauri-Volpi was an erudite man.  He was a trial lawyer in Italy, and was also one of the most decorated soldiers in the Italian army during World War One.  As it turned out, he spoke German and French fluently, and since German was my first language, I was able to talk with him as if we were both speaking English.  That put him at ease, and almost every time he came for a recording session, Walter asked me to be there as a sort of intermediary.

The recording sessions went very smoothly, and Lauri-Volpi was always fully prepared and learned how to sing into the recording horn very ably. Yet his was one of the voices which simply did not register well in acoustic recordings.  He was, so to say, the polar opposite of Mario Chamlee, whose voice was relatively small, as I explained earlier.  Lauri-Volpi’s [Brunswick] records, on the other hand, sounded almost nothing like he did in person.  His voice had incredible squillo—what singers call “ping”—especially in his high range, but our recording diaphragms didn’t capture it.

 

Let me ask you for your recollections about singers and instrumentalists who recorded for Brunswick during your years there.  Please tell me what come to your mind when you hear their names.  I’ll begin with Paul Ash.

I had known Paul from some of his tours on the West Coast, and from St. Louis.  At the time we signed him he was leading a theater orchestra in San Francisco, at the Granada theater. I think we began recording him in 1922 or 1923, I’m not sure.  Paul couldn’t use his theater arrangements in the recording studio because of the acoustic process, we did arrangements for him that approximated the style of his dance band, which he called “Synchro-Symphony.“  He did well for Brunswick, and Brunswick did well for him.

 

One of the most famous bands that Brunswick had was Red Nichols and His Five Pennies.  The “Pennies” [at various times] included Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller and others who became famous on their own in the late-1930s.  Did you put together the “Five Pennies”?

No, they recorded for Brunswick after I left. [4]  I used Red a lot in our studio sessions, but just as a member of our studio band.   Although the name he picked for his group, Red Nichols and His Five Pennies, is an obvious one, when I was at Brunswick we had a suggestion box in our outer office.  We encouraged anybody who worked there to come up with names for new bands.  If we ended up using one of the names, whoever suggested it got a cash bonus.

Some of the names were of non-existent hotels and cafés—but if they sounded good, we used them and then made up arrangements to give the new band a distinctive sound.  The actual “band” was nothing more than the same dozen or so musicians that we used in every other [acoustical] session—but the arrangement and the made-up name usually worked, and the records sold well enough.

 

You also had Gene Rodemich’s orchestra under contract at Brunswick.

Yes, Gene was one of the first we signed at Brunswick.  I had known Gene in St. Louis, where he had an orchestra exchange.  I worked for him at that exchange, and I bought it from him when he decided to go to Chicago and then to New York with his band.

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Gene Rodemich’s Orchestra, from the 1924 Brunswick catalog

 

Next, Al Bernard.  What do you recall of him?

Al Bernard was more of a novelty singer, rather like Frank Crumit was. He could do songs in different styles and did them well.  Most of what he did were blues like “Memphis Blues” and “Beale Street Blues” and such.  And he did a lot of novelty songs—for instance, “Lindy Lou,” songs like that. He recorded for Columbia and may have recorded for Victor, but I’m not sure about that. [5]  In the mid-1920s we also paired Al [Bernard] with Russell Robinson, and gave them the name “The Dixie Stars.” They did some of the same types of routines that Billy Jones and Ernie Hare did.

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Al Bernard (left), and with Ernest Hare (right), Bernard’s performing partner before Hare joined Billy Jones. (G. G. Bain Collection, Library of Congress)

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What do you recall of the Brox Sisters? 

They were a popular group that did three-part harmony on novelty songs and some blues and southern songs.  They were actual sisters, siblings, which you might already know. They were only a couple of years apart.  Lorayne was the eldest, then Bobbe, and the youngest was Patty.  They had a good run in vaudeville on the Orpheum circuit.  We signed them when they were performing in one of Irving Berlin’s Music Box Revues in the early 1920s, and we backed them with Gene Rodemich’s band. [6]

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The Brox Sisters, c. 1924 (G. G. Bain Collection,
Library of Congress)

 

Next, the Capitol Grand Orchestra. What do you recall of that orchestra?

It was the pit orchestra of the Capitol Grand Theater in Manhattan. The conductor at that time was a fellow named Dave [David] Mendoza, a very good conductor and arranger.  A little later, Erno Rapee became the band’s conductor.  As a pit band for a large theater, this was a sizable group, although we had to pare it down because of the limitations of the acoustical process.  So we used mainly their brass, reeds, and some of their violas and cellos for their recordings.

By the way, the acoustical process was problematic for some instruments.  For some reason, our recording diaphragms, both in the studio and in our field-recording machines, would vibrate excessively on one note played on a cello. We would have to get around that by having our cellists play that particular note one octave higher or one octave lower, depending on the arrangement.

Back to the Capitol Grand Orchestra, when they were at the Capitol Grand Theater they played all sorts of instrumental music, but we recorded them in classical pieces only—the Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana, Peer Gynt Suite, and overtures from Traviata and a few other operas.

 

You also signed a group called the Castlewood Marimba Band.  What do you recall about them?

That was just the Yerkes [Jazzarimba] group under a different name.  Marimba bands were very popular, and the Yerkes band had a distinctive sound. [7]  Now, as the Castlewood group, they didn’t play jazz music.  We had them record mainly Hawaiian songs, which were popular back then.  Before I went to Brunswick and made “personal records” of my banjo orchestra at the Columbia studios in New York, I made one called “I Left Her on the Beach at Waikiki” [sic; “at Honolulu”]. There must’ve been twenty songs with the word “Waikiki“ in the titles.  The Castlewood, or Yerkes, marimba band recorded a couple of those Waikiki pseudo-Hawaiian songs for us.

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Haenschen and some popular Brunswick bandleaders gather on the roof of the recording studio for a publicity shot. (Talking Machine World, February 1923)

 

Among the major symphony orchestra is you had under contract at Brunswick was the Cleveland Orchestra, correct?

Yes, but we didn’t do much with them until electrical recording came in.  The limitations of the acoustical process made symphonic recordings very difficult, very challenging. The conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra at that time was Nikolai Sololoff, who was born in Russia but emigrated as a teenager to this country and studied music at Yale University.

 

Do you know what percentage of Brunswick’s sales came from popular-music recordings as opposed to classical recordings?

Somebody in the company once calculated the percentage on a fifteen-part basis.  Why fifteen was the number they chose, I have no idea, but I remember that thirteen-fifteenths of our revenue came from popular-music recordings.  Only two-fifteenths, then, came from our classical recordings.  But there was a prestige market in classical recording—the Victor Red Seal was the epitome of prestige back then—so at Brunswick, as long as our popular releases kept the profits up, we were able to sustain our classical wing.

 

During the 1920s, so-called “collegiate bands“ were very popular.  Is it true that you tried to sign several of those groups including Waring’s Pennsylvanians and the Yale Collegians?

Yes, but we weren’t successful in either case.  Fred Waring and I were very good friends, and I did everything in my power to get him to sign with Brunswick.  But Fred had a very lucrative contract at Victor, so we weren’t successful.  We played a lot of golf together, especially on the West Coast when I went there to record and set up a temporary studio in Los Angeles.  I tried every tactic I could think of to get Fred to sign with Brunswick, but I could never get him to come with us.

 

His brother, Tom Waring, was more popular for a while than Fred, if I’m correct.  Tom Waring wrote some beautiful songs, and was one of the early pop singers and pianists who made Vitaphone short films.  Did you try to get both Warings under contract with Brunswick?

No, and that’s a touchy subject because the relationship between Fred and Tom wasn’t the best after their banjo orchestra became popular.  This was before Waring’s Pennsylvanians, when it was just Tom and Fred and one or two other boys that they had grown up with.  Tom wrote “Sleep,” which was the Warings’ theme song for years, and he also wrote “So Beats My Heart for You,” which is a great song, almost a classical song.  Tom wasn’t a good pianist, nor was he much of a singer, but he got popular on his own.  But there was a rift between them after a while, and Fred went his own way—very, very successfully.

 

Some of the singers and musicians who were with the Pennsylvanians almost since the beginning have said that the rift was because Tom was gay and that Fred couldn’t accept it.  That was rumored, but is there anything to that?

As I say, the relationship between Tom and Fred was strained—and yes, that was rumored.  But I have no idea personally, and even if [Tom Waring] was, it has nothing to do with his music or anything else for that matter.  Like Fred, Tom was a very nice guy, and his songs are his legacy.  But let me talk about Fred, because there are things about him that not a lot of people would know.

First of all, Fred doesn’t play any musical instrument.  Tom was a self-taught pianist, but Fred didn’t play an instrument.  In their banjo-orchestra days, he played the musical saw, but that doesn’t count that as a musical instrument.  Fred never had any formal training as a conductor either, yet he became one of the best choral and orchestral conductors in the music industry.  Robert Shaw credits Fred with convincing him to become a choral conductor.

Fred was also a “tinkerer.”  He didn’t have any formal training as a machinist or an engineer, but he was intrigued by gadgets of any kind, and would always try to improve them.  One of the reasons we became such good friends was because I was a machinist and a mechanical engineer.   Fred often came to my little “factory“ on my acreage in Norwalk, and I designed and made gears and other parts for some of his inventions.

You might know this because you mentioned the Yale Collegians, but there’s a connection between Fred and Rudy Vallée and me.   In the 1930s Rudy developed quite a liking for daiquiris.  He also developed a disdain for having to wait so long for a bartender to chip enough ice with a hand pick to be able mix a daiquiri.  We were at an American Federation of Musicians event when Rudy mentioned this to Fred Waring.  That sparked Fred’s interest in developing what became known as the Waring blender [which Waring spelled “Blendor”].

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Fred Waring and his “Blendor”

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Fred talked about that blender design with me several times because he was trying to develop a combined electric motor and high-torque gearing system, or transmission, that would fit into the base of his blender.  He had already designed the glass pitcher that would contain the ice and ingredients in daiquiris, and he designed a configuration of blades that was entirely his own.  I had suggested something like propeller blades in miniature, but Fred tried that and the blades didn’t work very well.  So he designed a bi-level set of blades—two near the bottom of the pitcher, and two more blades about an inch higher than the lower pair.  That turned out to be much more efficient.

When he finally arrived at the ideal combination of an armature, field coils, and a transmission that gave the motor more than enough power to crush ice, he had “invented“ one of the best-selling appliances of all time. I still have one of the very first ones and that he gave me.  Naturally, the very first one off the production line went to Rudy.

 

In his autobiography, Rudy Vallée maintains that the vocal trio which sang the chorus in George Olsen’s recording of “Who?” was responsible for the rise of jazz vocal trios such as the Rhythm Boys.  Do you remember that recording, and what its impact was at that time?

I know Rudy has said that, but I tend to think it had an impact on him, and possibly [Bing] Crosby when he and Al Rinker and Harry Barris became [Paul] Whiteman’s Rhythm Boys, but I don’t remember that particular recording having any impact on us at Brunswick.  But it may have had an impact on Rudy, who was singing in a trio himself at that time.  He was the saxophonist of the Yale Collegians and he also doubled on clarinet—he was a very good clarinetist—but the leader of the Collegians at that time was a fellow named Les Laden.  Rudy succeeded him, if I remember rightly.

 

Today, Rudy Vallée is associated nostalgically with the “Roaring Twenties” of flappers, bathtub gin, raccoon coats and such.  The year 1920 is now associated with the beginning of jazz on recordings, and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band is credited with making the first ones.  Other sources maintain that either Ted Lewis or Paul Whiteman were the first to make jazz recordings.  What do you recall of that time period?

It depends on what you define as “first.”  In my opinion, it was Ted Lewis who was the first to make jazz recordings.  He had an exclusive contract with Columbia, and he had made a name for himself and his band at Rector’s restaurant before Nick LaRocca and his group [the Original Dixieland Jazz Band] were playing at Reisenweber’s Café. [8]

 

Where would you place Paul Whiteman, who was billed as “King of Jazz” and made two recordings for Victor, “Whispering” and “The Japanese Sandman,” that seem to have sold over 100,000 copies. 

Well, first of all, Ben Selvin had some big-selling records for Columbia, so Paul [Whiteman] wasn’t the only one who was recording “syncopated jazz,” as it was called then.  Ben also recorded for Brunswick and sold a lot of records for us.  But Ted Lewis, not Paul Whiteman, was the first to record jazz for a major label. [9]

 

What was your relationship with Paul Whiteman like?  How would you describe it?

We knew each other through mutual friends when Paul began recording for Victor.  When he announced the Aeolian Hall concert where Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” was introduced, he hadn’t told George [Gershwin] about it, so Paul had to get an orchestral arrangement together pretty fast because George had written the “Rhapsody” for piano, not an orchestra.  I was one of about a dozen or more arrangers who were invited by Paul to review the arrangement that Ferde Grofé was writing for the “Rhapsody.”  We would meet in the late afternoons or after dinner at different venues where Paul, George and Ferde Grofé would hold these meetings.

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Paul Whiteman (center, standing), with Ferde Grofé at the piano
(G. G. Bain Collection, Library of Congress)

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Do you recall the other arrangers who were part of the group that Whiteman invited to review Grofé’s emerging score?

Not all of them, but I remember that Frank Black, Robert Russell Bennett, Isham Jones, Ben Selvin and I think Harry Akst were part of the group.

 

Who was more involved in those sessions—Whiteman, Gershwin or Grofé?  And who had the final say in the resulting arrangement?

Ferde Grofé was the center of it because he was writing the arrangement.  George was there during most of the sessions, but he didn’t say much.  It was Paul who was in charge—it was his orchestra—and he handled those sessions wonderfully.  I remember how he would take each of us aside as these sessions went on.  He would lean over my shoulder and say, “How do you think it‘s going, Gus?  Do you see any part that could be better?”  He really “fathered” the “Rhapsody” as it was first played at Aeolian Hall.

 

Was the orchestra present for those sessions?

No.  None of us needed the orchestra because we were hearing the arrangement as we were reading the copies that were handed to us at the start of each session.  No professional arranger needs to hear an orchestra, or any instrument in an orchestra, because he knows the timbre and range of every instrument, and which ones go together better than others.

 

Were you at that now-famous Aeolian Hall concert?

No, but I was at two of the orchestral rehearsals of the “Rhapsody” after Ferde Grofé completed the arrangement.  I don’t think he scored all of the piano passages that George [Gershwin] played in that premiere.  George did a lot of improvising, from what I was told.

 

When I interviewed Elizabeth Lennox, she told me about an incident that happened between you and Paul Whiteman when you conducted a performance of “Rhapsody in Blue.”

That was the strangest thing that ever happened to me during a performance.  I was asked to conduct the “Rhapsody,” which I had done on other occasions, so I was glad to do it again.  Frank Black was the pianist, by the way.  I was about a fourth of the way into the performance when suddenly I felt myself being lifted off the podium—lifted by Paul Whiteman, who was drunk.  He hoisted me with his big arms wrapped around my chest.  As he was lifting me, all he said was, “Sorry, Gus, this is my baby!”

 

How did the orchestra and the audience react?

The guys in the orchestra could see him coming to the podium, so they sensed that he was going to do something but they just kept playing and didn’t miss a beat.  There was a kind of gasp in the audience, some murmuring that I could hear, but when the performance was over they applauded loudly.  My guess is that many of them thought the whole thing was a stunt that had been planned so that Paul could make a surprise appearance and conduct his “baby.”

I do want to say about Paul that he was the first bandleader I know of who insisted on written arrangements for his recordings.  During my first years at Brunswick, if somebody played a good “lick,” we’d use it on other recordings but we never wrote it down, never put it on score paper.  We could have, because all of the guys in our bands were sight-readers.  But we were only using about a dozen players for our [acoustical] recording sessions, so we didn’t use formal arrangements.

 

As the years went on, Paul Whiteman seemed to denigrate you whenever you did something new—for example, when you formed an all-string orchestra. 

Yes, he said in some interviews that he was the first to have an all-string orchestra, the “Swinging Strings,” and that he was a violinist and cellist but I was a pianist and didn’t know how to arrange for an all-string orchestra.

 

Why do you think he reacted that way?  He was still a top name in popular music, so it’s hard to understand what his motive was.

He was still a big name, but not like he had been in the 1920s.  During the late-1930s and throughout the [Second World] War, the Dorsey brothers [Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey], [Benny] Goodman and [Artie] Shaw, Glenn Miller, and so many other bands eclipsed Paul’s popularity.  Paul was still trying to establish himself as a “serious” conductor and was fronting what he called a “concert orchestra.”

Paul did everything to excess, including his drinking, which got worse after the War.  I think he felt that these other bands had surpassed him with the public, and that he needed to make sure they [the public] knew that he had been the “King of Jazz” who started it all, and who had made the “Rhapsody in Blue” famous.

You probably know that he became a disc jockey on network radio, and he used those broadcasts to tell his version of the history of jazz—especially how he introduced the “Rhapsody” to the public.  George [Gershwin] was dead, and Ferde Grofé had written “The Grand Canyon Suite” and was famous on his own by then, so the other principals in the birth of the “Rhapsody in Blue” weren’t there to tell their stories of how it came to be.

 

Going back to collegiate groups for a moment, at Brunswick you had a group called the Collegiate Choir. Was that group affiliated with a particular college or university?

No, not at all. It was just a group of vocalists we had under contract, ones we used for any number of groups like that.  I doubt that many of them ever saw the inside of a college. [10]

 

You had a number of very well-known pianists under contract, including Zez Confrey.  Did you direct and conduct his recordings?

Well, I directed them but there was nothing to conduct really.  Zez was a very good novelty pianist who is known for “Kitten on the Keys,” which became a very popular piano piece. We would like to have had Felix Arndt under an exclusive contract, but we couldn’t get him. [Arndt had died in 1918]  Yet we certainly made the most of his very popular composition “Nola,” which he named after his wife.  I had my Brunswick band, the Carl Fenton Orchestra, record an arrangement of it.

 

Did you play the piano part yourself?

No.  I was the recording director and in this case the bandleader, but I didn’t play on the recording.  There was a sort of unwritten rule that Walter [Rogers] and I were not allowed to play in any of the recordings we directed.  We had all sorts of great commercial pianists at Brunswick, including some in the administrative staff like Bill Wirges.  So we had no trouble getting very good pianist for all of our recording sessions.  But I did play in some of our first recordings—I remember playing piano on Rudy Wiedoeft’s first recordings with [Brunswick] soon after I joined the company in 1919.

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Rudy Wiedoeft in the early 1920s
(G. G. Bain Collection, Library of Congress)

 

You also recorded one of the very popular dance bands of the World War One era, the Joseph C. Smith orchestra, which was associated with Victor for the most part.  Some have wondered whether there was an actual musician and band leader named Joseph C. Smith.  Was that a pseudonym or was this a real person?

Sure, he was real all right, and a very capable ensemble leader.  He recorded for us, he recorded for Columbia under different names, and of course his band was a good-selling outfit for Victor. But his style was eclipsed by [Paul] Whiteman’s by the time we signed [Smith]. If I remember correctly, we just used him as the leader of a trio.  I don’t think we ever used him as a bandleader like Victor did. [11]

 

You also recorded Bennie Krueger’s orchestra, correct?

Oh, yes.  Bennie was one of the great saxophonists of all time, on a par with Rudy Wiedoeft.  We were so pleased to have both of them under contract at Brunswick. They were good friends, by the way. Although Bennie didn’t write songs like Rudy did, they were pretty much equal so I would say as far as the instrument.

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Bennie Krueger’s Orchestra, from the 1924 Brunswick catalog

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You also had Herb Wiedoeft, Rudy’s brother, under contract at Brunswick, am I right?

Yes, Herb came with us, and he was an excellent brass player and a very fine bandleader too.  During the acoustic [recording] days, he brought a handful of his men to the studio and they sat in with our players.  Later on, he got a lucrative contract at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, and he called his group “The Cinderella Roof Orchestra,” from the rooftop dance floor at the Biltmore.  I recorded Herb in Los Angeles when I went there to set up a temporary studio for Brunswick in the summer of 1923.  You may know this, but Herb was killed in a car accident when he and his band were at the top of their popularity [in 1928].

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© 2019 by James A. Drake. All rights are reserved.

 

Editor’s Notes (Added with interviewer’s approval)

[1] Lucas’ first vocal Brunswick recordings were made on December 23, 1924; Austin did not begin recording for Victor until January 1925.

[2] Burr, Campbell, and Dadmun made only vertical-cut Brunswicks, presumably before Haenschen’s arrival. Of that group, only Burr appeared under a “pseudonym” (as Harry McClaskey, his actual name) on Brunswick.

[3] Personnel of the “Fenton” orchestra varied by session. Full personnel were not listed in the Brunswick files, but “extras” were, including at various times Hymie Faberman and Red Nichols (cornet), Bennie Krueger and Rudy Wiedoeft (saxophones), Phil Ohman and Frank Black (piano), John Cali and Harry Reser (banjo), Joe and George Hamilton Green (xylophone, marimba), Edmund Thiele and Rubie Greenberg (violin), and John Helleberg (tuba).

[4] The Five Pennies recorded several sides for Brunswick prior to Haenschen’s departure, beginning on December 8, 1926 (Haenschen’s orchestra was recording in another studio on the same morning). Most of the Five Pennies’ many Brunswick recordings were made after Haenschen’s departure.

[5] Bernard made several recordings for Victor in 1919 and 1921, including vocal choruses with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.

[6] Accompaniments were by Bennie Krueger’s Orchestra (sometimes with arrangements by Arthur Johnson, the sisters’ pianist), not Gene Rodemich’s Orchestra, according to the Brunswick files.

[7] Haenschen is referring to Harry A. Yerkes, who managed several bands that performed under his name. (This was  not the same individual as Columbia executive H. [Hulbert] A. Yerkes, as has been erroneously claimed in some works.) Yerkes left the band-management business in early 1925, and subsequent Castlewood recordings were made by a group that usually included Joe and/or George Hamilton Green, according to the Brunswick files.

[8] Haenschen apparently is referring to the band that recorded as Earl Fuller’s Rector Novelty Orchestra, a unit from which (including Ted Lewis) recorded for Victor as Earl Fuller’s Famous Jazz Band. The Rector orchestra did not begin recording until June 1917, by which time Victor had already released the first true jazz recordings, by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.

[9] Haenschen is in error here; see footnote 8. Whether the music Whiteman’s orchestra was performing in the early 1920s constitutes jazz in even the loosest sense of the word remains a topic for debate.

[10] Participants at various times included Rose Bryant, Wilfred Glenn, Charles Harrison, Theo Karle, Elizabeth Lennox, Virginia Rea, and Marie Tiffany, among others, according to the Brunswick files.

[11] Brunswick did record a number of titles by the full orchestra during 1922–1923, in addition to the trio selections.