The Georgia Melodians

With the mid-’20s, the Edison phonograph record company had longer since abandoned its founder’s curmudgeonly plan regarding jazzy entertainment, as well as the label’s catalog was peppered with game titles by Mal Hallett, Joe Herlihy, B.A. Rolfe, Frank Winegar, the Piccadilly Players, Oreste & His Queensland Orchestra, as well as the Georgia Melodians, a durable little Southern device that still left about 27 game titles for posterity. Unlike many dance bands from the 20s, like the California Ramblers and the initial Memphis Five, this group in fact hailed in the geographical area whose name they bore. Produced in Savannah in early 1923 by saxophonist Clarence Hill Hutchins and trumpeter Ernie Intelhouse, the group had taken on clarinetist Merritt Kenworthy at Lynchburg, Virginia within the springtime, performed ballrooms and seaside resorts in NEW YORK throughout the summer season, worked its method northward carrying out for collegiate viewers during the fall months, and produced its NY debut in Feb 1924. During its three-year living, the band’s lineup included trumpeter Mickey Bloom; cornetist Crimson Nichols; trombonists George Troupe, Plant Winfield, Charlie Butterfield, Al Philburn, and Abe Lincoln; an unidentified tuba handler; banjoist Elmer “Merry” Morris; pianist Oscar Youthful (who in 1911 experienced come to NY from Ohio with vaudevillian Ted Lewis); and drummer Carl Gerrold. Though actually led by Hutchins and Intelhouse, the music group operated beneath the nominal management of violinist Charles Boulanger, who become Jack port Teagarden’s band supervisor through the early ’40s. It had been while keeping down a normal engagement in the Cinderella Ballroom at 48th and Broadway the Melodians began documenting for Edison because of the efforts of the agent, Verdi Fuller. Within several months that they had become one of the groups operating beneath the auspices of bandleader Paul Specht. In Sept 1924, they opened up in the Strand Roof Backyard, and their last general public appearance because the Georgia Melodians was at a fresh Year’s celebration in the Resort Alamac at Broadway and Western 71st Street. Like a studio room music group, the Georgia Melodians continuing to record for Edison through Apr 1926. Based on jazz historian Joe Moore, after Dec 1925 the Melodians soaked up personnel from your lately dissolved W.C. Polla orchestra, and serenaded the general public because the Mountaineers in the Rosemont in Brooklyn beneath the management of Boulanger and bassist Rex Gavitte. Edison halted making records completely in 1929, as well as the Georgia Melodians had been largely overlooked for 70 years until 20 of the recordings had been reissued by Timeless Historic in 1996.