Rio Rita (1929)

A dance-band side sung by Harold "Scrappy" Lambert, one of the most recorded American vocalists of the late 1920s. He worked as a freelance singer rather than a star, turning up on sessions for whichever orchestra had booked the studio that day — Sam Lanin, Ben Bernie, Nat Shilkret, Fred Rich and dozens more — and often under a pseudonym, because the same performance was frequently issued on several budget labels under different names. That is why a collection of his work is also a cross-section of the whole New York session scene of the period. "Rio Rita", recorded 1929 with the Harry Reser Orchestra. The source marks the vocal as his explicitly. On copyright: United States sound recordings published from 1923 to 1946 enter the public domain a hundred years after publication, so a side from 1929 reaches it in 2029.