52089 wrote:Aloha Oe by Frieda Hempel. Bad enough on Diamond Disc but on Royal Purple Amberol? Yuck!!
Ah, but a LOT of "classical/concert" singers recorded that at the time, when Hawaiian was much in vogue, and Edison redeemed himself relative to Hempel by later issuing her sole electric recording (diamond disc 80888, Dvorak--Songs My Mother Taught Me and Mendelssohn--On Wings of Song).
Not sure that I'd call it the "worst," and I hesitate to say anything unkind about any Anna Case record, but her account of "Song of India" (82088) could be a poster child for ill-considered efforts to translate a foreign text into English. Maybe a stronger contender would be one of those Harry Lauder numbers sung by Glenn Ellison, or whatever the guy's name was; those songs are just about tolerable in small doses when they have Lauder himself trying to put them across, and I hate to think how they'd sound sung by a "pretender." Of records I've actually heard, there's certainly little good to be said of Rachmaninoff's famous C-Sharp Minor prelude played on a pipe organ....