{"id":40700,"date":"2019-11-30T03:18:47","date_gmt":"2019-11-30T03:18:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/navytimes\/uncategorized\/2019\/11\/30\/free-records-8-million-of-em\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T19:58:59","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T19:58:59","slug":"free-records-8-million-of-em","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/navytimes\/news\/your-navy\/2019\/11\/30\/free-records-8-million-of-em\/","title":{"rendered":"Free records \u2014 8 million of ’em!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The letter, signed by a GI attached to one of the Army\u2019s far-flung radio stations, arrived from somewhere in Alaska.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cUSO shows, talent, entertainers, or what have you haven\u2019t reached us yet,\u201d the soldier told editors of Down Beat<\/i>, the jazz magazine in Chicago. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAbout six months ago we saw our last jukebox. All we have are old movies and a good radio station that has only a handful of records. If you could help us in any way you would accrue the glory of a minor saint, at least in the eyes of us up here. We need records, all kinds.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fresh phonograph records at that point in the war \u2014 June of 1943 \u2014 were in short supply everywhere, not just in military bases and on the front lines but on the home front, too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The American Federation of Musicians<\/a> was in the 11th month of a 27-month strike against the recording industry, its members under orders to stay out of studios until compensated for songs played on jukeboxes and radios. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the strike dragged on, soldiers and civilians alike grew weary of tunes recorded in the years before Pearl Harbor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, in the same month Down Beat <\/i><\/a>ran the letter from Alaska, a five-foot-three lieutenant named G. Robert Vincent<\/a> came up with a novel idea to lift the spirits of homesick troops in lonely outposts around the world: The Army should seek the talents of America\u2019s leading music figures and produce and distribute its own records. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The War Department instantly approved Vincent\u2019s proposal. It put him in charge of the project and gave him $1 million plus a captain\u2019s rank to get it going. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As an officer in the American Army in World War II, G. Robert Vincent helped establish Armed Forces Radio and created the popular V-Disc program which sent popular music on unbreakable discs to servicemen in the field. His amazing work has been collected by the Vincent Voice Library at Michigan State University. (Michigan State University)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Rather than risk being branded unpatriotic, the musicians\u2019 union president James Caesar Petrillo endorsed the plan too. He told members they could donate their performances, as long as no commercial use was involved. None of the records could be sold, it was agreed, and all would be destroyed when no longer of use to the military.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By November 1943, the first V-Discs<\/a> \u2014 records solely for the troops \u2014 were being shipped to units far and near. A few months later, the Navy was making V-Discs too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the time the program ended in 1949, soldiers, sailors, and Marines had received more than 8 million copies of some 900 different discs, encompassing over 2,700 songs by virtually every major musical star of the day. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis is Count Basie,\u201d went a typical introduction. \u201cWe\u2019re making some V-Discs for all you cats. Some real jump stuff. So here we go and hope you like it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two decades later, when Vincent established at Michigan State University academia\u2019s largest recorded-voice library, he spoke with a New York Times <\/i>reporter about his V-Disc days. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEverybody thinks they were V-for-victory discs,\u201d he said. \u201cActually I named them for myself, V for Vincent.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps, the Times <\/i>noted, he was joking. But there was no doubt that recording had been Vincent\u2019s passion since his New York childhood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At age 14, armed with an Edison wax cylinder recorder, he visited Theodore Roosevelt\u2019s home on Oyster Bay and secured the only TR ad-lib ever preserved for posterity: \u201cDon\u2019t flinch, don\u2019t foul, and hit the line hard.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hoping to gather sounds of World War I, Vincent quit school in 1916 and stowed away on a ship to Europe. He was a teenage dispatch rider in the French infantry when an artillery explosion knocked him unconscious. In the hospital he began deliriously speaking German (his mother was Austrian) and was promptly arrested as a spy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only with the help of the American ambassador did he get out of jail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sent home,Vincent joined the U.S. Army. By war\u2019s end, he was a second lieutenant, back in France with his portable recorder. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few years later, with a Yale diploma in hand, he landed a job in New Jersey as one of Thomas Edison\u2019s sound engineers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Music Inspires in the Service – Industry – Home – School, World War II Poster, 1941\u20131945.” (Office for Emergency Management, Office of War Information, Domestic Operations Branch, Bureau of Special Services, now in the collections of the National Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Pearl Harbor stirred Vincent at age 43 to try to be a soldier again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Too old, he was told. But the Army let him record the sounds of troops preparing to go to war, and before long he was playing his recordings in the White House for a grateful Franklin Roosevelt. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

His commission as a lieutenant and an assignment to the Army\u2019s radio section shortly followed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once the V-Disc scheme won the support of Petrillo and the Pentagon, Vincent faced a major technological challenge. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Army had been sending its military disc jockeys 16-inch, 33-rpm shellac discs \u2014 mostly transcriptions of American radio shows. But shellac records were brittle. Four of every five of the army\u2019s discs arrived looking like jigsaw puzzles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shellac was also scarce. The lac beetles that secrete the resin-like substance are indigenous to Southeast Asia, and the region had fallen to the Japanese in 1942. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After extensive testing, Vincent and his aides settled on a new polyvinyl resin developed in Canada called Formvar, akin to the vinyl that by the 1950s formed virtually all phonograph records.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The results were superb. Fidelity was high and breakage low. Like standard records, the V-Discs spun at 78 rpm and could be used on soldiers\u2019 spring-wound record players.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But V-Discs were bigger than ordinary records, 12 inches wide instead of 10, and had narrower grooves. That meant longer playing times, up to 6 \u00bd minutes per side on a V-Disc compared with less than 4 minutes on a standard record.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first monthly shipment from RCA Victor\u2019s pressing plant in Camden, New Jersey, included 1,780 \u201cHit Kits,\u201d each containing 30 V-Discs, a total of 53,400 records. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By war\u2019s end, the Camden plant was producing 300,000 V-Discs a month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With their red-white-and-blue labels, the V-Discs were an instant and enduring hit in barracks, mess halls, and officers\u2019 clubs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe visited many, many places in England and France,\u201d recalled band leader Spike Jones in 1945, \u201cand everywhere we went, we saw the men playing V-Discs. We heard them on the boat going over and on the boat coming home. We played them on the LST boat crossing the channel, and we saw them being played everywhere in France, including in foxholes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vincent\u2019s New York staff, a few servicemen with a lot of recording experience, relied on an array of sources for their music. Hundreds of recordings were transcriptions of commercial radio programs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

All but a few of Bing Crosby\u2019s 60-plus VDisc recordings, for example, were lifted directly from broadcasts or rehearsals of NBC\u2019s Kraft Music Hall. Many other V-Discs were reissues of commercial records cut before the strike (like Duke Ellington\u2019s \u201cMood Indigo\u201d) or recycled from movie soundtracks (like Lena Horne\u2019s \u201cGood for Nothin\u2019 Joe,\u201d from the 1943 movie Stormy Weather<\/i>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Bing Crosby\u2019s “White Christmas” was a big V-Disc hit with service members during World War II. Nine years after the conflict ended, Paramount Pictures crafted a movie starring Crosby and Danny Kaye featuring the song and the troops it inspired, “White Christmas.” (Library of Congress)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The most significant recordings, though, and the ones today most treasured by collectors, were the hundreds of original performances captured in special sessions run by the V-Disc team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some took place in New York studios borrowed from the record companies. Others had V-Disc engineers dragging 400 pounds of gear into concert halls, nightclubs, and military bases across the country. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much of the music was, and still is, unique: Tommy Dorsey and Judy Garland together for \u201cSomewhere Over the Rainbow\u201d; Lionel Hampton, of \u201cFlying Home\u201d fame, now \u201cFlyin\u2019 on a V-Disc\u201d; Duke Ellington\u2019s 5-minute and 42- second version of \u201cIn the Shade of the Old Apple Tree\u201d; Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, after feuding for years, patriotically uniting their orchestras for a V-Disc special called \u201cBrotherly Stomp.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For two years, Benny Goodman recorded nothing but V-Discs. Frank Sinatra sang dozens of songs for V-Disc that he recorded commercially either many years later or never at all, including \u201cThe Way You Look Tonight,\u201d \u201cLong Ago and Far Away,\u201d and \u201cCome Rain or Come Shine.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was a 1943 V-Disc session that brought forth Fats Waller\u2019s final recordings before his death, including richly praised performances of \u201cAin\u2019t Misbehaving,\u201d Duke Ellington\u2019s \u201cSolitude,\u201d and, on the organ, a brooding rendition of \u201cSometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a tune for every taste. Soprano Lily Pons trilled for V-Discs as well as for the Metropolitan Opera. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u201cCaruso of Mountain Music,\u201d the Grand Ole Opry\u2019s Roy Acuff, sang \u201cThe Great Speckled Bird\u201d and \u201cPins and Needles (In My Heart).\u201d (Acuff was so well known wherever America\u2019s military went that Marines dug in on Okinawa at one point heard Japanese soldiers taunting them, \u201cTo hell with Roosevelt! To hell with Babe Ruth! To hell with Roy Acuff!\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Music Inspires” poster (Office for Emergency Management, Office of War Information, Domestic Operations Branch, Bureau of Special Services, now in the collections of the National Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Black and white servicemen alike savored the V-Discs of Louis Jordan, a rhythm and blues pioneer who scored such hits as \u201cIs You Is or Is You Ain\u2019t My Baby,\u201d\u201cI Like \u2019Em Fat Like That,\u201d and \u201cCaldonia (What Makes Your Big Head So Hard?).\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

His VDisc \u201cYou Can\u2019t Get That No More\u201d told zoot-suited hepcats on the home front they could not escape the woes of war: \u201cNo more standing on the corner day and night \/ Uncle Sam says you got to work \/ Or you got to fight.\u201d Food is rationed, Jordan noted, and \u201cthe fine chicks is cuttin\u2019 out each day \/ Joining the Waves and the Spars and the Wacs \/ No, fellows, you can\u2019t get that no more.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Capt. Glenn Miller and his Army Air Force Band saluted an on-the-wall fantasy, \u201cPeggy, the Pin-Up Girl\u201d with \u201cthe chassis that made Lassie come home.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

V-Discs helped circulate a number of the war\u2019s famous catch phrases. Included among Nat King Cole\u2019s V-Disc hits was \u201cStraighten Up and Fly Right,\u201d one of the war\u2019s most repeated lines. Officers barked it to enforce discipline. Friends used it when a buddy drank too much. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And for a while everyone was parroting Spike Jones\u2019s comic recording that went, \u201cVen der Fuehrer says \/ ve ist der master race \/ ve heil \u2014 PFFFT! \u2014 heil \u2014 PFFFT! \/ right in der Fuehrer\u2019s face.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The songs the servicemen liked most, though, never mentioned bombs or foxholes or Hitler. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Armed Forces Network polled troops based in England and found they overwhelmingly preferred ballads that stirred memories of a loved one across the sea. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nearly all the top favorites were on V-Discs: \u201cAmor\u201d by Bing Crosby, \u201cI\u2019ll Walk Alone\u201d by the bands of both Harry James and Louis Prima,\u201cLong Ago and Far Away\u201dby Frank Sinatra,\u201cI\u2019ll Get By (As Long As I Have You)\u201d by both Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. The song most requested of all by the fighting men, Bing Crosby\u2019s \u201cWhite Christmas,\u201dappeared on a V-Disc, as did his \u201cSilent Night,\u201d \u201cAdeste Fideles,\u201d \u201cJingle Bells,\u201d and \u201cI\u2019ll Be Home for Christmas.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The No. 1 non-holiday song,\u201cStardust,\u201d graced six V-Discs, two by Artie Shaw and one apiece by Glenn Miller, Marie Greene, Edgar Haynes, and the composer, Hoagy Carmichael.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The end of the war did not mean the end of V-Discs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Army and the Navy valued the program as a morale booster and kept it going until May 1949. That year, as required by the musicians\u2019 union, metal masters of V-Disc recordings were gathered and destroyed. The deal called for the records to perish too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But many came home in the footlockers of returning warriors. The FBI cracked down, but only in cases involving lots of records. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A record company employee in Los Angeles served jail time for possessing a secret hoard of 2,500 V-Discs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fortunately for music lovers, two large collections survived. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Library of Congress apparently has a copy of every V-Disc. And an almost complete set was kept by the officer who ran the Navy\u2019s V-Disc program, the late E. P. \u201cDiGi\u201d DiGiannantonio. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Decades later, after getting approval from the artists or their estates, he assembled and sold cassettes and CDs made from the collection. For the last dozen years, the Collectors\u2019 Choice label has distributed the V-Disc releases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a result, a few hundred V-Disc songs are now accessible, to the delight of critics and collectors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But nothing is as special as an original, a fact sensed even by the enemy: A German oberleutnant<\/i>, negotiating the surrender of his troops to American forces in 1945, asked if anyone had a Count Basie V-Disc.<\/p>\n\n\n\t