The Melody Man: Joe Davis and the New York Music Scene, 1916-1978

Preface to the New Edition

vii Preface to the New Edition I first encountered Never Sell a Copyright the year after Storyville published it in 1989. I’ll confess to reading through it rather quickly and then occasionally referring to it over the years. Largely, however, like most of my books, Never Sell a Copyright sat quietly in my bookshelf. In early July of 2009 I spent an afternoon visiting with Bruce Bastin, whom I first met in 1973, at his home in sunny southern England. My family and I were in the UK for my niece’s wedding and I spent the afternoon swapping stories with Bruce, who only lives about twenty-five miles from my sister’s home in Lewes. During the course of our multifaceted conversations , I mentioned how valuable a resource his Joe Davis book had proven to be over the years. Bruce downplayed its significance, though he lamented the fact that so many copies had languished in the basement of Laurie Wright, the late editor of Storyville magazine and books. I knew the book was all but impossible to find in the United States and remained largely unknown except to a handful of discographers and others interested in sheet music publishing, copyright, and the history of the recording industry. Never Sell a Copyright contained so much original material derived from the files of Joe Davis, as well as important information about Davis himself, that I told Bruce that it deserved a second life with a scholarly publisher located outside of the UK. I first brought the project to the University Press of Mississippi in late fall 2009 and within six months the American Made Music series editor Dr. David Evans and the assistant director/editor-in-chief Craig Gill jointly approached me for help in preparing Never Sell a Copyright for an American audience in the twenty-first century. After reading the Press’s assessment , Bruce and I discussed what needed to be done and by November 2010 I had signed onto the project. Now, for the first time, with a new title and many small updates and revisions, The Melody Man: Joe Davis and the New York Music Scene, 1916–1978 is readily available to the larger audience it deserves. This revised edition largely remains the work of Bruce Bastin, who sifted through all of Joe Davis’s files in order to write the version Storyville published in 1989. My job in the second edition is trifold. I’ve updated the Preface to the New Edition viii manuscript to include information about, for example, the 2002 passing of songwriter and singer Otis Blackwell. The form and scope of the book remains true to the first edition, though I have grouped Bruce’s short chapters into longer chapters and lightly edited the original prose. Thirdly, I have added more contextual information on topics such as the development of the race record industry that will help the nonspecialist reader to better understand Joe Davis’s life and work. Davis’s biography remains somewhat incomplete largely because no interviews with him exist. Bob Koester, who came into the business around the time that Davis was in his fourth decade of selling American music, met Joe on several occasions. He wrote: In 1954 I briefly met with Joe in St. Louis as he was showing his new Lee Castle Dixieland 10” LP to distributors. Joe made important recordings by modern jazz pianist Elmo Hope, but his main business was releasing “party” records that were inescapably displayed in the windows of stores in Times Square. These songs were, not surprisingly, similar to some of the blues he had dealt with in the 1920s. It may be possible that some of Joe’s old copyrights got a rerun. Most of the singers did not do justice to the risqué but usually witty lyrics. By today’s standards, these lyrics were very tame, of course. In the mid-1960s, I walked down 48th Street in New York after visiting a Delmark distributor and noticed a small sign bearing the name “Joe Davis” on the open door of a storefront. A short man in his 70s was supervising two young teenagers in a stockroom crammed with LPs, 45s in boxes, and vintage albums of old 78s. The short man turned out to be Joe Davis. I knew he had started the Beacon and Celebrity lines in the very early 1940s just prior to the first national Petrillo ban. At first Joe said he was too...