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She didn't live down the street,but the town over, a few miles away. I have driven by the church many times over the years, and had no idea of the history. Anyway, I have to thank the writer of the articles, Mr. Gillette for sharing this with me. He tells me he's her "Last Living Fan". He has 25 articles in all. If you guys are interested, I will post them too. Enjoy, I know I did.

https://cnhillsborough.blogspot.com/sea ... _cO0FNntM4

Fill us in! I never heard anything other than Anna Case's name before...she sounds like an interesting person. While we're all waxing ecstatic over dead celebrities, let's try to remember a little more of the amazing talent of these people.

Thanks for posting that. I've loved Anna Case's records ever since I began collecting Edison discs as a high school kid in the '70s. Later, I met up with some of her electrical Columbias, and they, too, are delights. Off the top of my head, I can think of only one Anna Case record I've ever heard that was a complete dud: "Song of India" from Rimsky-Korsakoff's Sadko; even there, the fault is mostly that the aria simply does not take well to being sung in English translation.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Edison's A&R practices may not have been perfect, but they were a lot better than his label gets credit for. In many cases, the singers appearing there were really first-rate, but their names have faded from public consciousness because Edison records were essentially unplayable for decades and those who sang for them didn't have the benefit of Victor's mighty PR machine.

This is great. I'm another who has always been fond of Anna Case. She also did a lot of radio work in the twenties. She seems to have appeared on the Atwater Kent Hour with a certain degree of regularity. This was a quite a prestige program on early network radio. I remember as a kid being pleased to read mention of her in Opera News magazine which was published by the Metropolitan Opera Guild. She had an interesting life. For example, she was also Irving Berlin's mother-in-law by virtue of the fact that her husband ( and his first wife) were the parents of Ellin Berlin. Mary Ellin Berlin, in her memoir of her family life as a child, says some very nice things about her step grandmother Anna. This in fact seems to be a refrain in anything written about Anna Case: she seems to have been quite well liked.
I love her voice, and her Vitaphone short, La Fiesta captures it very effectively. She has such an easy vocal production, as the voice teachers say and her diction is exemplary. I've always though it was rather unfortunate that she and Geraldine Farrar had essentially parallel careers. They both had warm dramatic/lyric soprano voices, they were both American girls and they both could play the glamour card. It just seems that Farrar won the match. Sometimes the timing of a performer's career comes at at bad time...like all the excellent violinists who were contemporaries of Jascha Heifetz. Fate is sometimes a bit cruel.

Jim

"Fate is sometimes a bit cruel."
That's true, but when I start thinking that way, I get a grip on reality and think it would have been much worse to have been born in Germany in 1920...