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THE "MILLION SELLER" FALLACY:
A Reappraisal of 1920s Record Sales

By Allan Sutton
With thanks to Dr. John Bolig for locating some of the data cited below in the Victor files.

Pop-culture writers are fond of proclaiming records as "million sellers," often to enhance the status of a personal favorite. These questionable statistics then worm their way into countless websites, term papers, and mass-produced reference books. Unfortunately, most such claims made about 1920s records are purely anecdotal.

The million-selling record is primarily a phenomenon of the post-World War II era, not of the 1920s. For records sold during the 1920s and earlier, most "million-seller" claims are undocumented and highly questionable. More rigorous research is now disproving many of them. Documenting record sales for the 1920s is difficult, but by no means impossible.

Few sales figures for pre-1920 recordings have survived in company files, and those that exist are not necessarily accurate. However, reasonably reliable sales and/or production figures from 1920 onward survive in the Victor and Columbia archives, although not for all releases. Sales figures for the smaller companies have long since vanished. It was rare for a record company to report exact sales figures to the trade or the public during the 1920s. The few known press releases relating to sales tended to make vague references to unspecified large quantities (never "millions") of copies sold.

One of the earliest and most persistent myths is that Alma Gluck's 1914 "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny" (Victor 74420) was the first Red Seal—or the first record of any kind, in some accounts—to sell a million copies. In this case, we are fortunate that Victor researcher John Bolig was able to unearth sales figures in the Victor files at the Sony/BMG Archive (New York). The discrepancy is astonishing: The Victor files show total sales of only 70,189 copies. (No figures have been located for the later double-sided reissue, but as it was in the catalog for only a few years, and is markedly less common than the single-sided issue, it seems unlikely to account for the remaining 929,811 copies.) This, in fact, was quite a good sales figure for a Red Seal during the 1915-1925 period; many of these expensive records sold in far smaller quantities. The relative commonness of this record is due less to huge sales than to the fact that it was on the list of Victor records that dealers were allowed to give away as an inducement to buy a Victrola. Caruso’s famous $7 Lucia Sextet was another such item.

The completeness and accuracy of Victor's early sales statistics are, of course, open to question, but the fact remains that this figure is the only known internal documentation of this record's sales. In the absence of other internal figures, the claim that this record sold a million copies simply cannot be supported. This particular myth seems to have originated during the early 1950s, making one of its first known appearances in RCA promotional material that contained similar exaggerations. RCA seems to have been especially intent on making such claims during the 1950s, even issuing two EP/LP albums titled "The Original Million Sellers" and "Fifty Years of Millions Sellers," both of which contained selections that are shown in the Victor files not to have reached this level.

Equally ubiquitous is the claim that Mamie Smith's 1920 "Crazy Blues" (Okeh 4169) sold 75,000 copies its first month and a million copies its first year. These figures came not from Okeh files—which don't exist for this period—but from composer and promoter Perry Bradford's self-aggrandizing autobiography. Similarly extravagent claims concerning Smith's first release (Okeh 4113) seem at odds with its failure to make Okeh's list of their top sellers for the latter part of 1920 (see, for example, The Talking Machine World for October 15, 1920), although these lists are not necessarily accurate. Both records were widely promoted, and "Crazy Blues," at least, is still sufficiently common to suggest that it was a fairly large hit. But a million-seller? No one can say, for the simple reason that no company document exists that can establish actual sales.

The source of at least one such claim—that Paul Whiteman's "Whispering" (Victor 18690) sold a million copies—seems to be the misreading of a chart reproduced in Volume I of Fagan & Moran's Victor discography (Greenwood Press, 1982; p. lxiii), coupled with a misunderstanding of sales versus production figures. The chart in question originally appeared in an internal history of Victor written by Benjamin Aldridge and reports a production total of 1.4 million copies for the title "Whispering." This account presents several problems: (1) It was prepared for the RCA sales force and contains demonstrable errors, while source citations are generally lacking. (2) In this case, the figure cited is not for 18690 alone, but is a combined total for all recordings of "Whispering.", which include an electrical remake by Whiteman on a different number and a popular vocal version by John Steel. (3) More importantly, this figure represents the number of copies pressed, which is not synonymous with the number of copies actually sold. Certain quantities of any pressing normally were given away to reviewers, dealers, and sales personnel; were rejected as defective, or were damaged and discarded; were returned unsold by dealers under various return and exchange programs; or simply sat unsold in inventory until scrapped.

There is an abnormally large discrepancy between the production figures cited by Aldrich and the actual sales figures in the Victor files in this case. Victor's files state actual sales of 214,575 copies of the Whiteman version—far short of the number of pressings cited by Aldrich, although still an impressive showing for the early 1920s. This particular "million-seller" claim appears in numerous reference works, and was repeated in Ken Burns' PBS jazz series, ensuring the myth will be perpetuated by undiscriminating viewers for years to come. In the meantime, several websites (ranging from the Red Hot Jazz site to a UC-Santa Barbara professors's webpage) have doubled that figure, with several now claiming sales of over two million copies.

Another early Victor hit for which Aldridge cites production figures is Ben Selvin's "Dardenella" with 961,144 copies reportedly pressed. However, Faber's Companion to Twentieth Century Music—a reference work found in many schools and libraries—states uncategorically that this record sold an incredible six million copies!

Vernon Dalhart's "Wreck of the Old 97" (Victor 19427) was a documented million-seller, with 1925-1934 sales of 1,085,985 copies logged in the Victor files (Jack Palmer, Vernon Dalhart: First Star of Country Music, Mainspring Press, 2005, in press), although it must be noted that is a combined total for two different, but identically numbered, records—the 1924 acoustic original and the later electric remake. Despite the existence of such reliable data, several pop-culture writers have claimed sales of up to five million copies for this number, with (of course) no source citation for their grossly inflated claims.

With Victor's adoption of the Western Electric system in 1925, more attention seems to have paid to maintaining accurate sales data, no doubt due to Victor's contractual obligation to pay Western Electric royalties on each copy sold. At this point, we can begin to see a clear range of sales for Victor records.

Victor's major hits in the latter half of the 1920s hovered around the half-million mark. Gene Austin's "Girl of My Dreams" (Victor 21334), widely and erroneously cited as a million- or multi-million seller, actually sold 408,684 copies, according to Victor file data. Far from being Victor's greatest hit of the 20s, as so often claimed, it was outsold handily by such titles as Paul Whiteman's "Valencia" (Victor 2007), with 531,808 copies sold.

Other hits by Victor's most popular scroll-label stars—Jesse Crawford, Paul Whiteman, and Gene Austin among them—averaged sales of a quarter-million copies. The extremely common Crawford-Goldkette recording of "I'd Love to Call You My Sweetheart" (Victor 20257) is typical of this category, selling 261,698 copies. Lesser hits, such as Goldkette's common "Sunday" (Victor 20273), clustered around the 100,000 mark. There were plenty of big-name flops as well, like Goldkette's "Proud of a Baby Like You" (Victor 20469), which failed to break 10,000.

Victor's sales figures for their black artists are also revealing. Here, writers and dealers often go to the opposite extreme, claiming great rarity for all such issues. In fact, many race issues sold fairly well, especially for artists with some crossover appeal to white buyers. On average, Victor's most popular race releases sold in the 20,000-30,000 range, a respectable showing for the period. Jelly Roll Morton's "Black Bottom Stomp" (Victor 20221) sold 22,627 copies; the Memphis Jug Band's "Stingy Woman Blues" (Victor 20552) and "Newport News Blues" (Victor 20576) sold 26,454 and 19,943 copies, respectively.

Lesser-known blues singers with small regional followings fared poorly, however, and their records are truly rare. Luke Jordan's "Pick Poor Robin Clean" (Victor 20957) sold only 5,973 copies, while Richard "Rabbit" Brown's legendarily elusive "Sinking of the Titanic" (Victor 35840) sold 2,572. White jazz performers could make equally bad showings. "Rhythm King," by Bix Beiderbecke and his Gang (Okeh 41173) sold only 2,225 copies in its original incarnation. By the time the Depression was in full swing, many Victor race releases were selling only a few hundred copies, while surving Gennett sales figures show some late Champion releases selling in the two-digit range.

A glaring overstatement of record sales appears in Louis Barfe's recently published Where Have All the Good Times Gone? (Grove Atlantic UK, 2004), which—without documentation of any sort—cites total sales of 100 million Victor records in 1927. In fact, sales totaled 37.6 million records that year, according to Victor's own statistics entered into evidence during a 1943 lawsuit (U.S. Dist. Court, S.D. of N.Y., Jan. 26 1943). The largest number of Victor records sold in any year prior to World War II was 56.3 million copies, in 1941.

Sales and/or shipping figures also survive for many Columbia records. Shipping figures for acoustic Columbia records, reported by Tim Brooks in his Columbia Master Book Discography, Vol. I (Greenwood Press, 1999, p. 24), and more recently in his excellent Lost Sounds (University of Indiana Press, 2004) are roughly comparable to Victor's in and around 1920, with some longer-lived titles achieving sales in the 200,000–300,000 range. “The Moon Shines on the Moonshine,” the largest-selling title by Bert Williams—one of Columbia's top stars of the early 1920s—shipped 246,000 copies. This was an impressive figure at a time when many releases sold a tenth of that amount, and sales of 500 copies represented the break-even point.

Known sales figures for Columbia's Viva-tonal period are substantially lower than Victor's, with dance hits typically selling only 30,000–50,000 copies. Whiteman, for all the hoopla surrounding his 1928 defection from Victor, rarely broke the 30,000 mark, according to Columbia's files. Aside from a few obvious suspects, such as the first installment of Moran & Mack's "Two Black Crows," figures seen so far suggest that few million-sellers will be unearthed in the Columbia files.

During the early Depression years, few records came close to selling 10,000 copies, much less a million. Million sellers would become increasingly common after World War II, but surviving documentation suggests that hits of this magnitude were relatively rare during the 1920s.