Brian Rust - Entertainment Discography

[tinpanalley]

I was recommended Brian Rust's "The complete entertainment discography, from the mid-1890s to 1942" here some time ago and have found a really good price on it online but I'm struggling to find any website that can give me a good description of what exactly I can expect in it.

[jazztrain]

You can look at some pages of it here:  https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Entertainment-Discography-1897-1942-Expanded/dp/0306762102

 

Some excerpts from the introduction (which is not available in the preview):

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All artists?  No, not quite that; a work of such a scope would call for a series of massive encyclopedic works beyond the means of all but the wealthiest collectors and enthusiasts.  So where and how have we drawn the line?  We decided that jazz and blues musicians, entertainers though they undoubtedly are, should be excluded, as volumes on their recordings already exist.  (This accounts for the exclusion from this book of names such as Ethel Waters, Lee Wiley, Rudy Vallee, Will Osborne, George Olsen, Bob Crosby, and Maxine Sullivan).  Artists whose fame spread through their records, and who in this medium were truly prolific, as as Billy Murray, Irving Kaufman, Edward M. Favor, Henry Burr and Ada Jones, seem to us to deserve a volume each.

We are left with the minstrel pioneers, the vaudevillians, the film stars and radio personalities, and the straight actors and actresses -- some of whom even lifted their voices in song, some with delightful results that leave us wishing we had more, others rather less successfully, but with undeniably interesting results -- and these are the subjects of the hundreds of chapters in this book.  A further qualification is that they should be artists of American birth, or of such stature that they are as well-known in America as in their own countries, here we can see in this book biographies and details of the records of not only American citizens such as Bing Crosby, Edwin Booth, Jessie Bartlett Davis and Dinah Shore, but Noel Coward, Beatrice Lillie, Maurice Chevalier, Conrad Veidt, Raquel Miller and Bert Williams.

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If you have any particular artists of interest, I can let you know if they're included.

 

 

[tinpanalley]

1 hour ago, jazztrain said:

If you have any particular artists of interest, I can let you know if they're included.

Thank you, and no nothing in particular, I just have been recommended this here before and I'm seeing it for an amazing price and thinking that every year there are new vocalists I listen to that I didn't know about last year that are invariably in this book and as time passes I've seen my Penguin Jazz on CD and Rust Big Band and Jazz books get increasingly more expensive and rare. I just figure why not get this now but I wanted to have a good sense of what was in it.
By the way, if you're interested, with an archive.org account, you can "borrow" it here for 2 weeks at a time. But there's nothing like paper in your hands.