Everyone who has delved into early jazz discography knows that the Gennett label introduced Bix Beiderbecke, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver’s band (with Louis Armstrong and Johnny Dodds), Hoagy Carmichael, and numerous other jazz, blues, country, and pop performers. So what does Gennett have to do with Joe Davis, a songwriter and singer who recorded for Columbia in the late teens and twenties?

In the mid-1960s, I walked down 48th Street in New York after visiting a Delmark distributor and noticed a small sign bearing the name “Joe Davis” on the open door of a storefront. A short man in his 70s was supervising two young teenagers in a stockroom crammed with LPs, 45s in boxes, and vintage albums of old 78s. The short man turned out to be Joe Davis. I knew he had started the Beacon and Celebrity lines in the very early 1940s just prior to the first national Petrillo ban. At first Joe said he was too busy to talk, but we talked for a little over an hour. After explaining the Copyright Act, he said Beacon and Celebrity were his two publishing companies and that in pursuance of his business, he had promoted many recordings including many by jazz and blues artists. He casually grabbed one of the albums and showed me a flag-label Columbia, for example. In 1934 he talked the Victor label into changing Thomas Waller’s group name to Fats Waller and his Rhythm.

He later purchased most of the short-lived Varsity label’s hundreds of master records when they went bankrupt in the early 1940s, but had a tiny shellac ration from which to press the records.

His problem was solved when he learned that Decca’s ten-year lease of the old Gennett Records plant expired in 1944. Some portion of Decca’s shellac ration was allocated to Gennett, which had quit manufacturing records in 1934. Joe had masters, Gennett had shellac, and during that time period, if you could press a record, the record sold. Joe loaned Gennett money to refurbish their plant and got the majority of the label’s shellac ration. Business ran smoothly as he quickly built a catalog using both the Varsity label masters and also new recordings of the various artists listed above, among others.

Then the IRS became involved. Joe had set up the label as a Gennett subsidiary with himself as the distributor. At that point records were subject to a 10% “temporary” excise tax. Joe bought the records from Gennett for $0.20 plus $0.02 excise tax, while other record labels had to pay tax on the price at which the records were sold to wholesalers, which was around $0.35. The IRS did not accept the business arrangements Joe Davis had created. As a result, Joe started using the Gennett label, which was usually black or green. He even used some old record sleeves that had been available since the label was discontinued. The IRS did not accept these business arrangements either.

Joe then pressed token quantities of records by the State Street Ramblers (Jimmy Blythe), Thomas A. Dorsey (Georgia Tom), and Bradley Kincaid using Gennett and Champion masters. The IRS still did not accept these business arrangements. Joe may have continued to press records at the Gennett factory, but he soon chose to lease his masters to the MGM label, which did not frequently use the Varsity masters. Several of Joe’s artists moved to MGM.

In 1954 I briefly met with Joe in St. Louis as he was showing his new Lee Castle Dixieland 10” LP to distributors. Joe made important recordings by modern jazz pianist Elmo Hope, but his main business was releasing “party” records that were inescapably displayed in the windows of stores in Times Square. These songs were, not surprisingly, similar to some of the blues he had dealt with in the 1920s. It may be possible that some of Joe’s old copyrights got a rerun. Most of the singers did not do justice to the risqué but usually witty lyrics. By today’s standards, these lyrics were very tame, of course.

Although this is just a part of the Joe Davis story, more information about Joe Davis and his connection to Gennett Records may be gained from the book Never Sell a Copyright.

Author:  Bob Koester, Delmark Records

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