VA - The King & Deluxe Acetate Series: Beef Ball Baby! The New Orleans R&B Sessions (2015)

The latest in Ace's King/De Luxe Acetates series might be the most eagerly anticipated. During 1947 and 1948 the DeLuxe label held many pioneering sessions in New Orleans, long before most other independent labels got there. A significant number of the city's biggest names, including Roy Brown, Smiley Lewis and Dave Bartholomew made their first recordings at these sessions. The original DeLuxe acetates were thought to have perished in a fire in 1948, but when Ace began copying the acetates in 2005 they quickly established that most of them were in existence and still playable. Roy Brown and the company's local A&R man Paul Gayten apart, the surviving acetates by almost all of the other R&B artists who DeLuxe recorded in New Orleans are featured. They include eight previously unissued sides and two by Smiley Lewis, for which no 78rpm disc is known to exist, so it might as well have not been issued. The rest will never have been heard in this kind of audio quality, as to all previous reissues have been from dubs of DeLuxe's poorly pressed 78s.