20. JAZZ 78 Victoria Spivey & Lonnie Johnson Okeh 8652

$

26

Victoria Spivey and Lonnie Johnson – Furniture Man Blues Part 1 b/w Part 2

Okeh 8652 (black label) – VG+ record is very clean. Labels look pristine. There is a small mark on the A-side that looks like a hairline crack, but the record is NOT actually cracked. The mark does not appear on the B-side. This mark will not affect play. Comes with the original sleeve! (“race records, hillbilly stars… 35 cents"). These sleeves usually sell for a pretty penny alone...

Victoria Spivey got her start in music at age twelve when she began playing piano in a movie theatre in Houston, Texas. From there she expanded her musical career to playing in saloons and whorehouses. She was was a big fan of the Blues singer Ida Cox and modeled her own career after Cox's. In 1926 at the the age of twenty she travelled to St. Louis where Okeh records was on a field trip looking for new acts to record. She recorded her own songs Black Snake Blues and Dirty Woman Blues which became a best selling record. Over the the next two years she was quite a hot item and recorded records almost once a month, often with the accompaniment of great Jazz musicians like Lonnie Johnson, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Clarence Williams, Luis Russell and many others, including her sister Addie "Sweet Pease" Spivey. In 1929 she played a small role in King Vidor's early film musical "Hallelujah". As the Blues craze and the record industry in general hit the skids in the early 1930s, Spivey somehow managed to keep recording and performing unlike almost all of the other Classic Blues singers. She expanded into playing in vaudeville musical revues, including the acclaimed Hellzapoppin' Revue in New York City and recorded and toured with Louis Armstrong and his Orchestra. Spivey was constantly working, playing countless one-night stands throughout the 1930s and 1940s, but by the l950s, Spivey had left show business, but continued singing in the church choir in her home in Brooklyn. Victoria returned to show business in 1962 when she formed her own record company, Spivey Records. Her first record on the label featured Bob Dylan as an accompanist. So, Spivey's career began again in the early 1960s; she began performing in folk and blues festivals and in nightclubs in and around New York City and continued to record for the rest of her life.

ABOUT THE RECORD:.

I work at an Audio Archive in Indiana and once a year our librarian weeds through the collections and sort out the duplicates. We then hold a sale, which I attended recently. I usually collect 45s and LPs, with an emphasis on honky-tonk and rockabilly music, but our recent sale was dominated by 78s. I was blown away by what I found. No country, but some amazing music. In the first box I found dozens of early jazz, hot jazz (whatever you want to call it) 78s on Gennett, Victor, Puritan, Okeh, Paramount, Vocalion, Blue Note, Folkways, Asch, Bluebird, Columbia, Brunswick as well as numerous one-offs and smaller independent labels. I was stunned! In that first box were 78s by Charlie Johnson and his Paradise Band, King Oliver and his Orchestra, Connie’s Inn Orchestra, Clarence Williams’ Blue Five, Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers, Ma Rainey, New Orleans Rhythm Kings, the Louisiana Sugar Babes, Dixieland Jug Blowers, Napoleon’s Emperors, Ed Lang, Bessie Smith, etc. There were also numerous blues 78s by Blind Willie Johnson, T-Bone Walker, Leadbelly, Big Bill Broonzy and even “atomic” gospel recordings by the Golden Gate Quartet. Then of course there were the amazing recordings of the usual early jazz suspects: Duke Ellington and his Cotton Club Orchestra, Benny Goodman, Oran “Hot Lips” Page, Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Fats Waller, Hoagy Carmichael (our local hero), Fletcher Henderson, Johnny Dodds’ Black Bottom Stompers, Louis Armstrong and his Orchestra and also with his Hot Five. In later boxes I even found some Blue Note 78s, some Folkways recordings as well as some field recordings by John A. Lomax.

The sad news? I couldn’t buy it all. The great news? I bought a lot of it. The sadder news? I’m broke and have to sell it. A few amazing things about these records: 1.) Since their arrival in the archive (usually a donation from a well-known jazz collector), they have been stored in upright position, in sleeves, in a temperature-controlled environment (I believe in the 60 degrees range). 2.) Once in control of the archive, these records are never played more than once (to transfer the files digitally), using the most up-to-date audio equipment to meet preservation standards. 3.) Most of these records, because they were donated by serious collectors, have been kept in amazing condition and come in their original sleeves! (or at least a company matching the label that I believe was probably the original sleeve). My thanks to redhotjazz.info for much of the accompanying information.

GRADING:
My system uses the following:

P - filler copy only. unplayable.

G - will likely play through, but has lost its luster and has several scratches

VG - will play through, but may have some light scratches

VG+ - a very clean, record. may have a few light surface marks

VG++ or M- = super clean, looks unplayed

I do not own a proper needle to play these and thus, the 78s listed here are visually graded.

SHIPPING:

Records will be carefully packaged and bounded by cardboard and placed in a box of peanuts for safe shipping. Due to the fragility of 78s, insurance is required. After the auction closes I will inform you of the insurance price (whatever the USPS charges) based on your total purchase price. Please do not pay for your item until you have received an invoice from me. I do offer combined shipping for multiple purchases. For overseas bidders, please ask for shipping quotes before bidding. Payment by Paypal only…Domestic USPS Priority Mail is $7.00 (this saves me on buying boxes and extra packing materials, it also means your record arrives faster) for the first item. Note that shipping is not $4.00 as ebay has imposed in the shipping listing above (for the reasons just stated). Each additional item purchased is only $1 (plus the added insurance).

Please also see my other auctions as I am also selling many more Jazz 78s, as well as many 45s and LPs of the honky-tonk, hillbilly bop, rockabilly, bluegrass and country variety. Thank you for reading and happy bidding!!