Upcoming Autumn 2008 Special Broadcasts

Radio Dismuke is very pleased to announce upcoming weekends of special programing.

So that listeners in various time zones across the world have an opportunity to tune in, all of the programs will be replayed in a continuous loop throughout their day of broadcast.

Weekend of October 18 - October 19

This weekend will feature two special programs which will play back-to-back and be repeated throughout the entire weekend.

The 2008 Texas Record Collectors' Party Broadcast (Broadcast lasts 4 hours)

The Radio Dismuke "Mobile Studio" recently traveled to Waco, Texas to record this special broadcast. Joining Dismuke on the broadcast are regular Radio Dismuke contributors Eddie The Collector, Matt From College Station and Christian Kohlhaas. The purpose of the get-together was for everyone to have fun sharing with the audience great vintage recordings from their respective 78 rpm record collections.

The program features a variety of jazz and dance band recordings from the 1920s and 1930s and plenty of conversation and commentary about the recordings. Many of the recordings featured are very difficult to find and have not been reissued in LP or CD format. One objective in selecting the recordings was to pick out selections that are NOT currently featured in the regular Radio Dismuke playlist.

The Woolworth Record Counter: Select Recordings from the Depression Era Crown Label (Broadcast lasts 2 hours 45 minutes)

Crown was a bargain priced American record label which was sold through the F.W.Woolworth dime store chain. The records sold for twenty five cents each. Crown got its start in 1930, making it one of the very few American record labels to be formed during the Depression. The label survived for just under three years. Like all dime store labels, Crown's output was primarily targeted to a mass audience and emphasized the popular songs of the era featuring both "hot" and "sweet" arrangements. Crown's in-house band employed some of the top New York studio musicians of the day. The label also occasionally recorded name bands such as the Fletcher Henderson, Eubie Blake and Smith Ballew orchestras.

The program, hosted by Dismuke and Matt From College Station, features 78 rpm recordings from Matt's extensive collection of Crown records. It provides an excellent look at a period when the "Jazz Age" sound of the 1920s was in gradual transition towards a "sweeter" sound which was popular for a few years before the arrival of the "swing" craze in 1935. For most Americans during the early Depression years, records were a luxury item. This program provides a great opportunity to hear the music that inspired Depression era shoppers to part with a hard-to-come-by twenty five cents for something new to play on the home phonographs that they most likely purchased during the more prosperous years of the 1920s.

Broadcast Schedule

The two programs will air back-to-back starting on Saturday, October 18th at:

North American Listeners
10:00 AM Eastern
9:00 AM Central
8:00 AM Mountain
7:00 AM Pacific
International Listeners
2:00 PM GMT

The Texas Record Collectors Broadcast will be the first program to air and will be immediately by The Woolworth Record Counter. The two programs will continuously repeat all day Saturday and all day Sunday. If one of the programs is still in progress at midnight Sunday evening Central Time (5:00 AM GMT) it will be allowed to complete before Radio Dismuke resumes its normal programing for Monday.

NOTE: When converting GMT to local time, International listeners are advised that regional factors such as daylight savings time may differ from country to country. For this reason, it is highly recommended that one use this Online Conversion Tool to make the time zone conversion.

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Weekend of November 1 - November 2; All Day November 8

The Sixth Semi-Annual Nauck's Vintage Records Broadcast with Kurt Nauck
(We anticipate that the program will be approximately 6 hours long)

Twice each year Kurt Nauck, owner of Nauck's Vintage Records, the world's largest and most prestigious auction house of vintage disc and cylinder recordings, generously provides Radio Dismuke listeners access to his auction catalogue of over 10,000 quality vintage records. For three days over the course of two weekends, Radio Dismuke will depart from its strictly 1920s and 1930s jazz and popular music format and feature recordings from a wide variety of genres made between the dawn of commercially recorded sound in the 1890s to the end of the 78 rpm era in the late 1950s. Featured genres will range from jazz and pop to classical, operatic, blues, country, early rock and roll, comedy, spoken word and more.

The best part is that the recordings played during the broadcasts are selected from requests submitted by Radio Dismuke listeners and Nauck's bidders. To submit a request for a selection to be played during the broadcast, simply browse through Kurt's current online auction catalogue. Email your request to radio@78rpm.com no later than October 17, 2008. Note: While Kurt attempts to play as many requests as possible, because of the volume of requests and the limited amount of programing time, unfortunately we cannot guarantee that he will be able to get to all of them. If you are interested in actually owning and placing a bid on any of the recordings, the deadline for all bids is Saturday evening November 8 at midnight Central Time.

In addition to more to the more familiar period artists and tunes, Kurt's auctions always include a number of recordings which are extremely rare and have not been heard by the general public in decades. His semi-annual broadcasts provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for listeners to hear and enjoy some of the world's rarest and most historic recordings before they find new homes in private collections and institutions around the world.

The program also features recordings that rarely get to be enjoyed anymore due to the fact that they were recorded on formats that few people have the means to play back. The earliest commercial sound recordings in the 1890s were issued on wax cylinders - and Kurt will be featuring such recordings on the broadcast thanks to his Archeophone, a machine designed specifically for the preservation and electrical playback of vintage cylinders. Since the Archeophone retails for $16,250 it is beyond the financial reach of the vast majority of private collectors. The machines are usually found in institutions such as sound archives and national archives. Radio Dismuke listeners, however, will have the privilege of hearing one in action during the broadcast. Kurt will also be featuring some vintage radio transcription discs. A lot of the old transcription discs have very interesting content that, because of the 16 inch size of the discs, rarely gets to be heard these days beyond a relatively small number of collectors who have the special turntables needed to play them.

The Nauck Broadcasts have always been well received by listeners and Radio Dismuke is very grateful to Kurt for making them possible. The broadcasts are an excellent example how Internet radio is able to provide to a worldwide audience the sort of unique and quality specialty programing that traditional media outlets are simply not able or willing to take on.

Broadcast Schedule

Saturday November 1- Sunday November 2

The program will continuously repeat throughout the entire weekend starting on Saturday November 1 at:

North American Listeners
Noon Eastern
11:00 AM Central
10:00 AM Mountain
9:00 AM Pacific
International Listeners
4:00 PM GMT

The program will continuously repeat throughout the entire weekend. We anticipate that the broadcast will be about 6 hours in length. If the broadcast is still in progress Sunday evening at midnight Central Time (6:00 AM GMT), it will be allowed to fully complete before Radio Dismuke resumes its normal programing for Monday.

Saturday, November 8

The program will continuously repeat all day Saturday starting at:

North American Listeners
9:00 AM Eastern
8:00 AM Central
7:00 AM Mountain
6:00 AM Pacific
International Listeners
2:00 PM GMT

The program will continuously repeat throughout the day Saturday. NOTE: This broadcast will be a repeat of the same program aired the previous weekend. If the broadcast is still in progress Saturday evening at midnight Central Time (6:00 AM GMT), it will be allowed to fully complete before Radio Dismuke resumes its normal programing for Sunday.

NOTE: When converting GMT to local time, International listeners are advised that regional factors such as daylight savings time may differ from country to country. For this reason, it is highly recommended that one use this Online Conversion Tool to make the time zone conversion. Also note that the time difference between North American time zones and GMT is not the consistent in all of the times quoted above due to the fact that daylight savings time ends in the United States at 2:00 AM on Sunday, November 2.

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To tune into any of the programs, simply follow the tune-in instructions on the Radio Dismuke website

Roter Teufel

My good friend Christian down in Austin sent me a link to this YouTube audio clip of a really nice 1938 recording by the Barnabas von Geczy Orchestra, a very famous German band of the era. 

"Roter Teufel" translates to "Red Devil."  It is a great example of an upbeat "piano orchestra" dance band style that was apparently quite popular in Germany at the time and which had no real counterpart in American popular music.   I have heard other recordings in a similar vein by German bands such as Hans Bund and Otto Dobrindt.  I also have a few that someone found off the Internet and sent to me that I don't have title and artist credits for.   

Barnabas von Geczy was Hungarian and came to Berlin in 1924 where he led the band at the Hotel Esplanade from 1925 through 1937.   The von Gezcy Orchestra was very diverse musically and recorded everything from classical and "salon" music to tangos to popular dance band music. 

Waco Trip For Upcoming Broadcast

Recording the Texas Record Collectors' Party broadcast in Waco, Texas last weekend.

Last weekend I traveled down to Waco, Texas and met up with Matt From College Station and Christian Kohlhaas at the residence of Eddie The Collector to record an upcoming Texas Record Collectors' Party broadcast. The last time the four of us got together to record such a broadcast was in the summer of 2006 - so we were definitely overdue for one. Matt From College Station drove in from.... well, from College Station, of course. Christian came in from Austin. Each of us brought a nice big stack of 1920s and 1930s era 78 rpm records that had been pre-screened to exclude any recordings that are already in the Radio Dismuke playlist.

The broadcast will air sometime within the next month or two - exactly when depends on certain factors in my own personal schedule. Once a date has been set, I will certainly give plenty of advanced notice both here and in audio announcements on Radio Dismuke.

We had some additional fun besides the broadcast. Eddie took us on a walk-though of the restoration work on the lower floors of the historic Roosevelt Hotel in downtown Waco. The hotel in recent years had been used as a retirement home. Developers are now restoring the lower levels and ballroom to their original grandeur with plans for the upper floors to become offices.

After that we went to a nice spot on the campus of nearby Baylor University to enjoy 78 rpms outdoors under large trees with the portable wind-up phonograph Matt brought along.

We also visited an antique store located in a very neat 1909 house that was once the residence of the president of Dr. Pepper. Dr. Pepper was invented in Waco and was headquartered there during its early decades. We did find a pile of 78 rpms at the antique store - but they were mostly uninteresting late '40s and early '50s easy listening stuff. But I did pick up a copy of an Original Dixieland Jazz Band 78 rpm that I am pretty sure I did not already have and Christian got an interesting 1910s Columbia disc of a Serbian band.

Finally, we visited the soda fountain at the Dr. Pepper Museum and enjoyed Dr. Pepper sundaes. A Dr. Pepper sundae is vanilla ice cream topped with Dr. Pepper syrup. It probably sounds kind of gross to most people - but, in fact, it is very delicious and is a definite "must do" whenever one visits Waco.

We played a lot of great records on the broadcast so you will definitely want to check back for the announcement of when it will air.

I did bring my camera along and took pictures throughout the day. Here are a few of them. You can view the rest under the "view my pics" section on Radio Dismuke's myspace profile.

Matt's portable wind-up phonograph playing a mint condition Depression era Columbia blue wax disc.

Eddie The Collector with the wind up phonograph. A second wind-up can be seen in the background.

From left to right: Eddie The Collector, Christian, Matt From College Station on porch of 1909 house.

Me during the broadcast at Eddie's house.


Me announcing a recording while Matt From College Station changes records on the turntable in the background.



Christian pretending to chug down a bottle of Baby Percy Medicine, a patent medicine era remedy which is still made in Waco.


Matt From College Station announces an upcoming recording.


Our host Eddie The Collector, who generously made his house available for the broadcast, announces a recording.


Christian displays a bottle of Dublin Dr. Pepper made by the world's oldest Dr. Pepper bottling plant in the small town of Dublin, Texas. Unlike ordinary Dr. Pepper, Dublin Dr. Pepper is made according to the original recipe using cane sugar instead of corn syrup - and you can taste the difference. Dublin Dr. Pepper has become sort of a tradition during special Radio Dismuke broadcasts.


One of the vintage records Matt brought along from his collection was an unusual and extremely rare early 1920s marble wax Paramount disc.