Perfect Records

Perfect Records

Disc featuring Cliff "Ukulele Ike" Edwards
Parent company Pathé Records
Founded 1922 (1922)
Defunct 1938 (1938)
Status Defunct
Genre Jazz, pop, blues, country
Country of origin U.S.

Perfect Records was a United States-based record label founded in 1922 by Pathé Records to produce cheap 78 rpm discs.[1]

Many issues of Perfect records were pressed in red-brown shellac as opposed to the more common black shellac of the era. Pathe's acoustic recording technique was to record performances on a giant cylinder and dub the music to create the disc master. This didn't degrade the sound quality, but records produced this way tended to have a lot of rumble that was not detected by wind-up phonographs of the day. Their slogan on the record sleeve was "Better records can't be made".

Perfect's logo and slogan from record sleeve

Artists who recorded on Perfect included Gene Autry, Annette Hanshaw, Willard Robison, Al Bernard, Big Bill Broonzy, Cab Calloway, Vernon Dalhart, Walter Dalton, Morton Downey, Cliff "Ukulele Ike" Edwards, Lee Morse, The Ponce Sisters, Tito Schipa, and Boyd Senter, as well as scores of records by many of the New York area orchestras and studio groups of the day.

From the start, Perfect Records were popular and sold well. The Pathe and Perfect labels were part of the merger that created the American Record Corporation (ARC) in July 1929. After the merger, ARC weeded out some of their poorer selling labels (Pathe, for example), and Perfect continued to be a popular label through the 1930s until ARC dropped their entire group of cheaper labels in late 1938.[1]

The label was revived in 1993 by Dean Blackwood and issued recordings pressed on 78 r.p.m. vinyl by Sun City Girls, Charlie Feathers, Junior Kimbrough, The Balfa Brothers, and John Fahey.[2]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Rye, Howard (2002). Kernfeld, Barry, ed. The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. 3 (2nd ed.). New York: Grove's Dictionaries Inc. p. 263. ISBN 1-56159-284-6.
  2. ↑ Barnett, K.: American Primitive: Revenant Records' Tenth Anniversary, Perfect Sound Forever Online Music Magazine, April 2006, http://www.furious.com/perfect/revenantrecords.html
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