This is the earliest royale release in my collection so far (it being 1206 with the series begining at 1201 making it the fifth release Royale Records ever made). This record has something unusal for a royale release, liner notes and good ones at that. The record is pressed out of the odd breakable, nonflexible mixture of shallac and vinyl, yet the cover states unbreakable, how odd.
This is yet another example of Royale's "An Hour Of" albums. This one plays for almost 45 minutes, the most that any of these so called hour long records played. Here is the cover and catalog back slick (a term I use to describe budget releases that only have a list of other records instead of liner notes on the back). I Have found a Royale release that has liner notes instead of this back slick you see here. This album's last two tracks are strange because they are basically sea shanties, yet are labeled as Hollywood Concerto Parts one and two.
Halo made many showtune records and this is one of them. On many of these releases the label lists a couple of the tunes on side one and has several unlisted tracks on it from My Fair Lady, the musical that is being featured on this album. The second side has showtunes mostly from Friml's hit muscials. See the Vagabond King post for the "Song Of The Vagabond" to here what side two sounds basically like. Below are the first three selections from side one and a track from side two is here.
I Could Have Danced All Night
Get Me To The Church On Time/ With A Little Bit Of Luck
Halo is one of my favorite budget label of all time, second only to Crown. This is one of their show tune records I have no idea when this record was originally recorded i'm guessing by the sonic properties of the recordings to be from the 40's. This record was issued in 1957 based on the date on the back slick. However I could be wrong as recycling the generic back slicks were very common practice for RCA (Record Corporation of America not the other RCA) issued records. The reason behind Eli Oberstein's use of the acronym RCA for his company name was on purpose. He worked for RCA records in the 30's and 40's. The selections below represent recording from the featured musical on side one and filler instrumental material on side two. I hope you enjoy these selections from this album.
One may look at the cover and find it odd that a song like Londonderry Air would be on a Country themed record. For whatever reason Red Rhodes pulls it off and makes this song sound like a sad old country song. Red Rhodes was and still is a well known steel guitarist, and these recording came from albums that he made on Crown records in the mid 60's.
I collect Halo Records which were made by Eli Oberstein who ran Royale Records. This was a album released on a different label he also ran, however this same album was also issued on Halo records. So I found this record at my local thrift store and I checked to make sure it had the right record (because records have the tendency to be in the wrong jackets) and it did. I got it home and I was pumped up to hear some great show tunes, I put the needle down and all I heard was this classical sounding stuff and none of the songs listed on the label were on the record! I checked the dead wax, and sure enough the matrix number was WAY different from what was on the jacket and the record label, it was 1737 which turned out to be a Royale record release that featured Slavonic dances,instead of the showtunes the record label and the jacket promised would be there. It appears that this may have just been a screw up in the pressing plant, and of course it wasn't caught. No surprise to me as the pressing and quality control standards were pretty poor for this label.
The real number that is written in the dead wax (it was 1737 and not 2057 like it should be)
Royale records issued many different albums with "An Hour Of....". The album were and still are very generic albums, and to top it all of the albums were not even an hour long! This album is just 38 minutes in length, making it a whooping 22 minutes short of being a hour long. In fact the longest "An Hour Of..." albums are about 45 minutes in length. This album back slick mentions a copyright date from 1952, so I guess that was when the album was released.
On a different note, I uploaded these onto Youtube and it seems that people think they own the rights to these PUBLIC domain compositions. I disputed the content ID match, and it was resolved, then another group called, get this "Public Domain Compositions" collection group claimed they owned the rights to these compositions!
The selections are below:
Marche Slave
La Gazza Landra
Light Cavalry Overture
Russian Easter Overture
Enjoy a half hour of "An Hour of the World's Greatest Overtures"!
This post contains two additional selections from the album "Latin Hour With Noro Morales" on Royale Records. The two selections here are Rhumba-themed incidentally; but, I didn't even plan that when I uploaded these today either!
