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The Revelers were an American quintet (four close harmony singers and a pianist) popular in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Revelers' recordings of "Dinah", "Old Man River", "Valencia", "Baby Face", "Blue Room", "The Birth of the Blues", "When Yuba Plays the Rhumba on the Tuba", and many more, became popular in the United States and then Europe in the late 1920s. They also produced the first known recording of "I've Been Working on the Railroad" in 1923. In August 1929, they appeared in the Netherlands with Richard Tauber at the Kurhaus, Scheveningen and the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam.
All of the members had recorded individually or in various combinations. The quartet, organized in 1917, performed under the name The Shannon Four or The Shannon Quartet before changing their name to The Revelers in 1925. [1] The original Revelers were tenors Franklyn Baur and Lewis James (and occasionally Charles W. Harrison substituting when Baur or James was unavailable), baritone Elliot Shaw, bass Wilfred Glenn (who had popularized "Asleep in the Deep" on phonograph records), and pianist Ed Smalle. Smalle was replaced by Frank Black in 1926.
The Revelers (with Black at the piano) appeared in a pioneer movie musical, The Revelers (1927), filmed in Warner Bros.' sound-on-disc Vitaphone process. This one-reel short film, recently restored by The Vitaphone Project, shows the group performing "Mine," "Dinah," and "No Foolin'." Due to the limitations of the primitive sound production, the group was forced to perform the entire nine-minute set in one continuous, uninterrupted take, with the camera in a fixed position. A second short, filmed the same day with another three songs, awaits restoration.
Franklyn Baur was replaced by Frank Luther and then James Melton (later a Metropolitan Opera tenor).