Without You Sweetheart (1927)

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. "Without You Sweetheart", recorded 1927 with the Peter Van Steeden 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 1927 reaches it in 2027.