"Don't Bother Me" Joe Smith's Martha Lee Club Orchestra (Okeh, 1925) Cleveland

Joe Smith, as, cl, pac, dir: Humphrey Brown, c / Ernie Emma, tb / Eddie Persell, p / Don Baird, bj / Van Price, d, v / John Stover, bb
General Phonograph Co. Studios, 25 W. 45th Street
New York, NY ca. 13 Mar. 1925

S-73235-B “Don’t Bother Me” (Carl Rupp) OK 40322

Transferred with 2.3ET styli via Audiotechnica AT-LP120 Turntable. Discs from Colin Hancock Collection. Discographical and Historical Information from DAHR, Brian Rust’s Jazz Records Discography 1917-1942, “The Drama Yearbook of 1924” Joseph Lawren, “Cleveland Jazz History” by Joe Mosbrook, “Jazzed in Cleveland” by Joe Mosbrook, Newspapers.com, Talking Machine World, and Ancestry.com

Cleveland bandleader and reedman Joe Smith led one of Ohio’s most popular jazz orchestras of the 1920s. An Ohio native, Smith was born about 1895 into a musical family, getting his start as a drummer in his dad’s orchestra. Though he originally wanted to be a lawyer, Smith caught the music bug and after forays into the violin and the piano, he eventually settled on the clarinet and alto saxophone as his primary instruments - though he also dabbled in the accordion (indeed, a big part of his act was his ability to play the accordion with one hand, and hold his reeds in the other!) Smith established a band of his own at the start of the jazz age, and became one of Cleveland’s major orchestras thanks to frequent radio broadcasts, and a residency at the city’s swank Martha Lee Club. Owned by entrepreneur Martha Lee, the social club hosted dancing as well as its a theatre troupe in conjunction with the adjacent Thimble Theatre of the Ohio School of Stage Arts. At one point it was estimated that the Joe Smith band played before a cumulative 1,000,000 dancers, and their fanbase was large. In 1925, the band’s pianist Eddie Persell wrote a tune entitled “Nora Lee” to accompany a popular cartoon in the Cleveland News. The tune became such a hit that the city’s local Okeh records dealer Theodore T. R. Buel organized for the band to record the tune and sell it in his shop and on the bandstand as a personal record. Despite the label’s recent trip to Cleveland that February as part of its remote recordings, the band travelled to the label’s New York labs to record the tune as well as the then popular fox-trot “Don’t Bother Me.” Though only “Nora Lee” was initially released on “Martha Lee Record No. 2,” sales were so high that the label pre-issued it and “Don’t Bother Me” in the regular catalogue and invited the band back to New York for another session the following month. After this, the band continued for a few more years before eventually breaking up at the end of the jazz age.