The Decca Test Records

It took seventy-five years, but here they are. The two surviving records from Judy Garland's first studio session are in your hands.

DLA 158

On March 29, 1935, twelve-year old Judy Garland (née Frances Gumm) (1922-1969) and her sisters Mary Jane (1915-1964) and Virginia (1917-1977), known professionally as The Gumm Sisters then The Garland Sisters, recorded three tests for Decca Records. The recording session, with Judy's mother, Ethel Gumm, at the piano, took place at the Recordings Incorporated Studios at 5505 Melrose in Hollywood, California. Decca Records A&R man Joe Perry, aka "Decca Joe," initiated the session and wanted to sign them to a contract. According to Perry’s wife, Elise: "Judy and her mother and two sisters were appearing at the theater, and we just happened to go to see the movie and, of course, they had this vaudeville in between pictures. My husband thought Judy was pure magic, and he just couldn't get her off his mind. He talked about her all the way home, and the next morning he went back to the theater and sat through four shows. Joe talked to the mother, and then I remember she came out to the house and brought in some papers and things to my husband because she couldn't get all the way out to the studio, which was on (5505) Melrose. He signed up Judy, and then she made her first record." Perry prepared a Decca memo that day, listing the "Matrix No." as DLA 158, the "Series" as "Test", and incorrectly listing the "Artist" as Francis [sic] Garland. The hand-written note he put at the bottom of the memo reads "12 yr. Old Girl I Wrote About, 3/28/35 – Joe," thus indicating that he had already notified Decca's New York office of his new discovery the day before the girls came in.

The first track The Garland Sisters recorded was "Moonglow.” Frances Garland (as Judy was still professionally called at that time) then recorded "Bill," the Hammerstein/Kern song from Show Boat that was identified with torch singer Helen Morgan. Finally, Frances recorded a medley consisting of "On the Good Ship Lollipop/The Object of My Affection/Dinah." “Moonglow” was given the master number DLA 157, "Bill" DLA 158, and the medley DLA 159.

Sadly, a contract never materialized, and Judy did not make another studio recording until a second Decca audition on November 27, 1935. In September, she had signed a standard studio contract with M-G-M, and in October and early November made her first two highly successful radio appearances on The Shell Chateau Hour, on which she sang “Broadway Rhythm” and “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart.” This second Decca audition was actually a tag at the end of a recording session with Johnny Mercer and Ginger Rogers, for which Decca musical director Victor Young conducted. Young, who also conducted on The Shell Chateau Hour, liked Judy, and had arranged this second audition. Judy recorded "All's Well (Down in Coronado by the Sea)" and "No Other One." Unfortunately, these records were kept until 1942, when it is thought they were lost as part of the wartime metal scrap drives. In the end, Decca released Judy Garland’s first 78 rpm, “Stompin’ at the Savoy” and “Swing Mr. Charlie” in 1936, and signed her to the label in 1937. She made recordings for them until 1947, at which time the newly created M-G-M Records took over and released her movie soundtrack performances.

It is fairly certain that the two surviving Decca test records are Judy's personal copies which she or her mother, Ethel, kept. Upon close inspection of the labels and the records themselves, it is apparent that they are either the originals or copies made at the same time. Judy may well have been given these as demos to keep, and possibly use, if she were to go to another record company or movie studio. Had they been vaulted by Decca, they would have been found in 1994 when Decca issued Garland’s complete recordings at the label. What exactly happened to the them immediately after 1935 is pure conjecture. Once signed by the label in 1937, Decca kept most of Garland’s recording session alternates, which have been amply exploited in the past few decades. Garland’s star status did not, however, guarantee that recordings, even Decca tests, done before she was signed were any of their business. Legally speaking, it is doubtful they were ever Decca’s intellectual property. The spirit of preservation and the commerce of releasing archival material did not exist in the early part of the century, and Garland was not considered classical or historical, as we consider her today. She was a commodity. If the tests were in fact given back to the Garland family, they were considered private recordings, relics of a past about which no one knew nor cared. They were out of circulation, on a shelf, lost.

Until 1960

DLA 159

At that time, Dorothy K. found two of the three records - “Bill” and the medley “On the Good Ship Lollipop/The Object of My Affection/Dinah” - in a trash heap outside Judy's recently vacated and utterly empty home, then in renovation, at 144 South Mapleton Drive in Holmby Hills, California. Dorothy’s brother, Leonard, had a neighbor who worked for a demolition business. He invited Leonard and his family to visit the site. Like junk in an attic, stuff in a basement, or old records one doesn’t know what to do with anymore, the Decca test records had been tossed on the street for removal. Had they not been found by Dorothy K. at that very moment, they might well have been picked up a minute later by a dumpster truck. The family moved seven times in the years following the find, but the two records remained in their many homes. Dorothy K. died in 1990. When one of the Dorothy’s children, Cynthia, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1995, her father, Steve, brought her a round-top wooden cane, perhaps used for dancing, that Dorothy K. had also found in the Mapleton heap. Two years later, Steve gave her the records. He had nearly thrown them out. “On that occasion,” recalls Cynthia, “my Dad said, ‘Here, take these, maybe they're worth something!’ I literally took them and put them in my closet wrapped in towels for a later time when I could check them out. They sat there for years and years. We never had a clue they were the lost Deccarecordings.” In 2003, “I took them from the closet one day when I felt I could maybe make some moneyselling them in order to help my husband/family.Then I went on a quest.Here we were with this cardboard storage box, the records wrapped in towels, and weheaded to Hollywood for the last Wednesday of the month’s antique appraisalat Bonhams & Butterfields.The line was very long, so we drove around town looking at the homes, came back, and were almost the last people to be seen that day. The guy at the estimate desk did not know what to tell me when he looked at them, so he handed me a business card to call someone. I was very disappointed, and we drove home. Then, my son, Cody, and I took them to a record shop in Orange, California. The owner looked at them, and in a discouraging tone said, ‘Those are worthless.’ His son also was in the record shop and asked me if he could listen to them. I let him play them on his record player in the store. He listened to my story about where they came from, but said nothing. We again left.” Encouraged by Cody, they drove to yet another store. “We drove across town to a neighboring town, Tustin, California. It was there that the owner told me, ‘Those are the mother records. Keep them in a safe place.’ He knew!” Capitol Records, for whom Garland had recorded between 1955 and 1964, showed no interest in purchasing the records in 2003; nor did The Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota pursue the matter in 2006. So, that same year, Cynthia and Jay, her husband, put them up for auction. When bidders failed to meet the reserve price, the couple took them off the market. “Some days I wonder why this is happening to me at all,” concludes Cynthia. “After the stories started to surface when I exposed that I apparently had the original recordings,I thought to myself, ‘I should have made up a story that I bought them at the swap meet!’ I did not realize that no one would want to believe the true story that they were found in a pile of trash at the emptyformer home of the family.” In 2010, thanks to negotiations conducted by Lawrence Schulman, the family agreed to allow JSP Records to license the sound recordings of, as Cynthia puts it, “their treasures.”

Most amazing about these treasures is not just that they have miraculously survived three quarters of a century, but that on them Judy’s raw talent is already there. She had it even before being taken under the wings of M-G-M. Like the song’s originator, Helen Morgan, Judy performed “Bill” on stage in the 1930s seated on a piano with just a spot framing her face. At the end of the number, the lights would come up and audiences would applaud in amazement that this woman's voice had come out of such a young girl. The cover photo of this box set, taken during a working trip to the Chicago World’s Fair in July 1934, is a publicity shot showing Judy posing for her “Bill” staging. At the beginning of the “Bill” recording, Judy sounds like she’s thirty, then in the recitative like she’s twelve, then starts singing again and sounds thirty. Her spoken “I don’t know” towards the end of the recording is a dreamy coda to the earlier recitative. This singing-to-recitative technique, which would later be developed at M-G-M in such songs as “(Dear Mr. Gable) You Made Me Love You” and “I Cried for You,” can already be heard here. Ethel Gumm, of which the Decca tests are the only surviving recordings with her at the piano, obviously had Judy on the right track, developing her natural talents long before Garland’s M-G-M vocal coach, Roger Edens, was in the picture. This uncanny ability, crafted in vaudeville, to go from the spoken word into song is the very basis for Garland’s success in movie musicals. For her, there was no barrier between speech and song. Judy’s gift at expressing the inner meaning of the lyric can also be heard in her slight pause before each “thrill” in “Bill,” as if her breath had been taken away by him. In the medley, Judy opens with the 1934 Shirley Temple number “On the Good Ship Lollipop,” a song suited to a twelve year old. On “The Object of My Affection” which follows, Judy’s comic inflection on the word “mine” foreshadows her innate comic predisposition that would be demonstrated in future years. But the next number, “Dinah,” is another story. Judy’s swinging delivery includes brassy wah-wahs, jazzy riffs, practiced improvisations, crooner colorations, scatting, and even bluesy vocal growls, a technique she would use until the end of her life. She goes from child to chanteuse all in the course of three minutes.

Judy Garland’s voice, as heard on the 1935 Decca test records, is strong, pure, and well rounded. That quivering, slightly emotional vibrato is already there. So is the vulnerability. It’s all there in fact. When you listen to these recordings for the first time, you are so moved you cannot move. These lost tracks will stop you in your tracks.


SCOTT BROGAN AND LAWRENCE SCHULMAN