Artists
Album Info
Release Date: 1948Label: DC Records
(Taken from http://dcrecords.org/dc_1000.htm )"DC" records was a relatively well established local record label with not less than 14 different 78 rpm single records in release when the American Federation of Musicians' recording ban brought a temporary halt to recording sessions with union musicians on the 1st of January 1948. During the musician's strike "DC" Records had to become creative in finding new source material for record releases. Mrs. Lillian Claiborne and her partner, Mr. Haskell Davis, launched a spoken word series in 1948. While it was not a commercial success, their one spoken word release may well have been their most significant contribution to postwar recording.
The "DC" album set entitled "The Voice of Gandhi" was released after the assassination of the Indian leader on January 30th, 1948. The veteran journalist Alfred Wagg contributed this recording of Mahatma Gandhi in English. Mr. Wagg provided commentary on the speech recorded from New Delhi, on April 2, 1947. Mr. Wagg was granted copyright for "The Voice of Gandhi in four parts" on 9 March 1948. The release of the set should have been contemporary with the copyright. In the speech Gandhi firmly critiques the West. It is one of the few surviving examples of Gandhi speaking at length in English.
This 2 disc album set is distinctive for its presentation in a custom pocketed album jacket with a color hardboard cover, a format which matched the best production standards of the major record labels during the post World War II period. (This is a record album in the original sense -a folio of discs with enclosed "liner notes" -as opposed to a single Long Play (LP) disc in a cardboard sleeve with cover notes.) The four sides are coupled on two discs to facilitate near continuous play on an automatic record changer (sides A and D were on one disc, while sides B and C were paired on the other). While it is not known where Mrs. Claiborne had the jackets prepared, the records themselves closely resemble other discs mastered locally and pressed at the now legendary Paragon Enterprises operation at Chevy Chase Lake on Connecticut Avenue near the DC-Maryland line. Additionally, the cover illustration was rendered by "Davis" which leads one to speculate that Haskell Davis was also a graphic artist. Other 78 rpm album sets were issued by Paragon for artists under the Paragon label. There are no business files surviving which would tell us how many copies were made but, it is a safe guess that for a two disc set by a small independent record company the production run was not less than 100 and not more than 1,000. Unlike many other "DC" releases of the period, there is no evidence of a second pressing.