(African American music) OKEH RACE RECORDS – THE BLUE BOOK OF BLUES [ca. 1930] Catalog

New York: Okeh Phonograph Corporation, [ca. 1930]. Vintage original music catalog. Printed pictorial wrappers, stapled, 32 pp., 7 x 5″ (18 x 13 cm). Some creasing and occasional slight dogearing at extreme blank bottom margins, front wrapper slightly torn away at top, overall very good-.

A number of the artists listed here cut their records for Okeh in the 1920s. Others’ last work for Okeh was in the early-30s. Hence the provisional date of ca. 1928.

What makes this book special is that, unlike most record catalogs of music from this period, this has an unusually large number of photos of Black musicians, including Butterbeans and Susie, Lonnie Johnson, Sara Martin, Eva Taylor, Victoria Spivey, Sippie Wallace, Laura Smith, Bertha “Chippie” Hill, Rev. J. M. Gates. Arizona Dranes, Clarence Williams, Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five (as with so many of the artists listed, these recordings were done between 1925 and 1928).

This is a scarce book. WorldCat only records six copies of it, and only four holdings in the US.