Although I had known about this group for months from MBSI and
AMICA publications, I only now got around to contacting Jody and
learning what I have been missing.
My maiden posting here is to list the music roll catalogs that I
am aware of and to ask whether there are others that I don't know
about. By music roll catalogs I mean modern-day listings,
published or unpublished, which attempt to enumerate as
completely as possible all the rolls of a given type known to
have been produced.
In the piano roll category I am aware of the Billings
Rollography, Charles Davis Smith's Welte opus (from having worked
with Charles on that myself), and his Duo-Art catalog.
In the band organ roll category, there is Mike Grant's catalog of
style 125 rolls (a new ed. of which, completely verified against
Copyright Office records, is due out soon), my two catalogs of
style 150 and style 165 rolls, and my list of the 9 known
Wurlitzer style 180 rolls.
I am not aware of anyone having worked on other types of rolls,
such as orchestrion rolls, at all. There are heaps of data out
there for such work: Dick Howe owns nearly complete runs of
Wurlitzer monthly lists showing the rolls for every kind of
automatic instrument which they issued from 1913 to 1925; I have
copies of Ozzie Wurdeman's notebooks listing all BAB roll masters
by type; the Music Trades Review listed for many years the new
releases of many roll manufacturers (Charles Davis Smith's next
project was to have been an Aeolian (or was it Ampico?) catalog,
and he was combing through a microfilm of the MTR for such rolls
at the time of his death).
What about listings of Violano, Welte orchestrion, APP, Caliola,
or other rolls which have been the subject of extensive recutting
projects? I would think that cataloging these roll series would
be a natural consequence of hunting them down and gathering them
for recutting. Please add any catalogs I left out that you know
of.
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