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Looking for Kitten on the Keys on Blue Amberol.

Though recorded in 1921 and released on Diamond Disc in early 1922, the Blue Amberol (#5169) was not issued until June 1926. You'll probably find one eventually, but none of the 5000 block titles are exactly common. By this time, Edison was typically only making 800 or so copies of most cylinder issues.

52089 wrote:Though recorded in 1921 and released on Diamond Disc in early 1922, the Blue Amberol (#5169) was not issued until June 1926. You'll probably find one eventually, but none of the 5000 block titles are exactly common. By this time, Edison was typically only making 800 or so copies of most cylinder issues.

Thanks so much..... I was wondering why I found a Edison DD copy of it, and hard to locate a BA copy. I suppose this is another one that I would probably buy if it were issued on resin plastic.

After all this time, I finally found a copy of Kitten on the Keys on Blue Amberol.

You must be a patient guy!

My family regularly tells me that maybe I ought to also become a patient guy...at a mental institution.

The Kitten BA is a cool anomaly, with the initial cylinder offering coming way, way after the extremely popular disc version (well, four years or so). My search for one only took a few months, though (hint: set up an ebay search for the catalog number, and when one turns up, bid way high).

It would be interesting to look in the Edison archives for notes on the process of selecting it for dubbing to cylinder. If we take the notion of Edison only making a bare minimum of cylinders in later years purely out of loyalty to folks who had hung on to their hardware, the profit motive is essentially gone. Maybe they were trying to correct an oversight that this very popular selection, which as we know doesn't really age, had never been made available on cylinder. In 1925 there was a big marketing push to revive the Edison entertainment business, but the Kitten cylinder didn't get released til the following year, so who knows what the motives may have been otherwise.

PeterF wrote:My family regularly tells me that maybe I ought to also become a patient guy...at a mental institution.

The Kitten BA is a cool anomaly, with the initial cylinder offering coming way, way after the extremely popular disc version (well, four years or so). My search for one only took a few months, though (hint: set up an ebay search for the catalog number, and when one turns up, bid way high).

It would be interesting to look in the Edison archives for notes on the process of selecting it for dubbing to cylinder. If we take the notion of Edison only making a bare minimum of cylinders in later years purely out of loyalty to folks who had hung on to their hardware, the profit motive is essentially gone. Maybe they were trying to correct an oversight that this very popular selection, which as we know doesn't really age, had never been made available on cylinder. In 1925 there was a big marketing push to revive the Edison entertainment business, but the Kitten cylinder didn't get released til the following year, so who knows what the motives may have been otherwise.

It is definitely a mystery, but one of those cylinders that I believe to be desirable. The song is pretty popular today. Some of the other mysteries, Why did Edison only release Rachmaninoff's recordings only on DD and not cylinder? Why did Edison only release Come Josephine in My Flying Machine only on Blue Amberol and not DD?

There are alot of mysteries, but again maybe I am missing the point.

I just noticed a copy of KotK on BA, is available here:

https://m.ebay.com/itm/5000-SERIES-EDIS ... 2339984819

Not mine, nor do I know the seller.