TOO MUCH MONKEY BUSINESS: The Elvis Forum

The original version was recorded on in may 1927 by Dacosta Woltz’s Southern Broadcasters (Gennett 6143).

Other versions:
27-01-33 - Gene Autry (Victor 23792);
01-03-33 - Gene Autry with Jimmy Long (Conqueror 8096 / Melotone 12700 / Banner 32771 / Vocalion 5498).
He recorded the song again in 1935 for a movie.

Here is the clip with the movie version.

colonel snow

Although there is seemingly no record of it (no pun intended), I would be surprised if songs like this and The Whiffenpoof Song which you mention in another thread were not recorded in some form prior to the mid to late 1920s. As with film, records were seen as disposable. With around 85-90% of silent films now lost forever, I wouldn't be surprised if we were looking at roughly the same amount of recordings from the same period going missing. After all, if films were lost because of their flammable nature, no doubt records were lost because of their breakable nature. I would doubt that very few ever got around to a second pressing, except those by the most popular of artists. What's more there were so many small labels back then, that when they closed down (especially during the depression), the likelihood is that the masters were destroyed or lost. It's remarkable how much has survived when you think about it.

We know more about lost films because of trade mags, posters, cinema programmes and pressbooks which survive - the same can't really be said for the fledgling recording industry - there were rarely posters advertising new recordings by artists during the 1910s, for example. So, not only are the recordings themselves lost, so is the knowledge that most of them ever existed.

You'd be surprised how much knowledge there is about these old recordings.
There are record companies that search for old recordings and release these on CD.
Usually these companies are run by collectors.
There are also sites that have label/number-listings of everything released.
Problem is how to check if the found information is correct.

Sometimes you run into an original by accident. Like "For the heart" which was not recorded by anyone yet, according to all information in session books. But I saw an LP with this song and that LP was released a year before Elvis recorded the song. It even featured the composer on guitar, just like on the Elvis version.

Yes, but we are not talking about the 1970s here, but the period 1900 to about 1925. Paper records of what was recorded and released may well be lost forever along with the recordings themselves. Record labels were often short-lived and often their recordings and paperwork would have disappeared along with them. The record labels that survived over the decades don't suffer as much from the same problem. While we DO know some of the recordings that were made in the early days, there are many many more that are lost forever and no paperwork exists to even tell us what is lost.

As for For The Heart, I only found out recently it wasn't an Elvis original too. The Teresa Brewer version from 1975 is rather good, though, and I would certainly class it as better than Presley's effort.

Whenever I hear it, I think of the hilarious send-up by Stan Freberg !

Stan warns the over-enthusiastic snare drummer:

"You can cover up Yellow & you can cover up Rose, buddy buddy; but don't you cover up TEXAS !!"

It's fantastic, in common with a lot of his other material. The Great Pretender is also a favourite of mine, very funny.