A radio pioneer from St. Louis Missouri, featured on WDAF (the same station that launched the Coon-Sanders Nighthawks), Duke Yellman had some modest success recording titles for Edison Labs in the final years of that company's existence. Besides co-authoring
a few obscure songs ("Light House Blues" and "Jazzing Down in Monkey Land"), and being the subject of a Vitaphone short in 1929, he didn't leave us much else to remember him by. This Diamond Disc recording from May 31 of 1927, one of the last acoustic sides to
be recorded at Edison Labs, is evidence that the man could play good piano though he does tend to "rush" it just a bit. This number, written by an obscure composer named John McLaughlin (co-authored a song about Lindburgh called "Like An Angel You Flew Into
Everyone's Heart" in 1927, definitely not the guy who played guitar in the Mahavishnu Orchestra), qualifies as a nice exercise in "fingerbustin'". The disc is one of the cleanest in my collection, and only needed a few clicks removed, though there was a
lot of rumble at the very beginning - the bass response fades in gradually over the first 45 seconds to help aleviate the problem. (The book "Coon Sanders Nighthawks," by Fred W. Edmiston, writes interestingly about Duke Yellman on Page 76 - read it at
Google Books.)
