Alone At Last - Franklyn Baur (1925)

"Alone At Last"

Franklyn Baur

Harmony 31-H

1925

Song by Gus Kahn & Ted Fiorito

Franklyn Baur was a very successful recording artist from the mid-1920s to 1929, but he made no records in the 1930s.

Born in Brooklyn around 1904, the tenor was a church and concert singer around the time he began making records.

He gained much recording experience in the last two years of the acoustic era and then enjoyed great popularity in the early years of the microphone, between 1925 and 1930.

His last name, curiously spelled "Bauer" on side A of Brunswick 3381, should be pronounced to rhyme with "power." This is how it is said by Ernest Hare, who emceed with Billy Jones a twelve-inch Columbia Artists promotional disc titled "Studio Stunts" (50038-D) on which Baur, called by Jones the "Viva-tonal velvet-voiced vocalist," sings "Put Your Arms Where They Belong." Side A, with the Baur pronunciation, was cut on September 7, 1926, but the disc was not issued that year. Side B, featuring the Shannon Quartet (with Baur) among other artists, was cut February 18, 1927.

His first solo recording was made for the Victor Talking Machine Company. "If The Rest Of The World Don't Want You" was cut in late 1923 and issued on Victor 19243 on February 22, 1924. Other acoustic-era Victor discs of Baur as a solo artist include "You're in Love With Everyone" (19368), "Deep In My Heart" (19378), and "Heart of a Girl" (19495).

He joined the Shannon Quartet in 1923, replacing Charles Hart, who aspired to be an operatic tenor (Hart cut opera arias for Edison around the time he left the quartet and in late 1923 was engaged by the Chicago Civic Grand Opera Company).

Pseudonyms for Baur include Irving Post (Puritan), George Bronson (Regal and Banner), Sydney or Sidney Mitchell (Oriole and Banner), Joseph Elliott (National Music Lovers), and Ben Litchfield (Radiex, Grey Gull, and related labels--he was sometimes Charles Dale on these labels, a name used for various singers).

In 1926 his own name could be found on nearly a dozen labels--the three major ones (Victor, Columbia, and Brunswick) along with several minor ones.

In his Phonograph Monthly Review interview he stated, "The invention of the electrical process was of greater significance than the average layman realizes. Not only are the finished records incomparably better from every standpoint, but the strain on the singer is immeasurably eased. A record can be made in exactly one-third the time it used to take, and no longer is it necessary for us to nearly crack our throats singing into that hated horn...When the electrical system was first introduced, the recording rooms were difficult to sing in since they were 'deadened,' exactly like the broadcasting studio of today. But the phonograph people have learned some secret the radio does not know, and now the recording studios are no longer absolutely 'dead,' but are resonant and consequently infinitely easier to sing in."