John Bolig Victor Black Label Discography Volume 5

The American Discography Project is proud to announce the availability in electronic form the concluding volume of John Bolig’s Victor Black Label Discography. This fifth volume in the series covers Victor Records’ black label popular releases from catalog number 25,000, through to the end of the series, with disc 27,980. Concurrent with the preparation of the downloadable version, ADP editors have completed DAHR online entries for every master issued on double-sided Victor black label recordings.

The Bolig black label discographies provide authoritative descriptions of close to 24,000 master recordings issued by Victor Records between 1908 and 1942. The earliest discs documented in the volumes were the company’s first releases of two-sided recordings. Considered as a whole, Victor’s double-faced black label discs represent the very broad spectrum of music popular in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. Some of the first releases were reissues of recordings made as early as 1904. The series concluded in the summer of 1942 when Victor’s musical recording activities were interrupted by the Recording Ban of the American Federation of Musicians.

The previous volumes in this series have been published, and and are offered for sale, by Mainspring Press. In recognition of his Victor research and discographies, John Bolig was awarded the Association for Recorded Sound Collections Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010.

American Discography Project editors have been working with John Bolig for twelve years. We have been guided by his expertise and inspired by his standards of scholarship. The ADP is honored by the opportunity to make this significant achievement and important resource available to the public. Volume five of the Victor Black Label Discography is available here as a PDF that may be downloaded free of charge. Database records for the same group of recordings have been added to DAHR, a sampling of them with embedded streaming versions.