Talk:1931 in country music

victor sales numbers
Jimmie Rodgers Blue Yodel No. 8 (Mule Skinner Blues) Victor 23503

Jimmie Rodgers T.B. Blues Victor 23535 47,355

Bud Billings (Frank Luther) and Carson Robison When Your Hair Has Turned To Silver Victor 22588 38,805

Jimmie Rodgers Jimmie the Kid Victor 23549 36,450

Jimmie Rodgers Travellin’ Blues Victor 23564 31,734

Jimmie Rodgers Nobody Knows But Me Victor 23518 28,959

Jimmie Rodgers Blue Yodel No. 9 (Standing On a Corner) Victor 23580 25,071

Jimmie Rodgers Moonlight And Skies Victor 23574 24,093

Carter Family Little Log Hut In The Lane Victor 40328 17,990

Carter Family On the Rock Where Moses Stood Victor 23513 16,407

Carter Family Lonesome Valley Victor 23541 15,107

Carter Family Where Shall I Be Victor 23523 13,275

Jimmie Davis Arabella Blues Victor 235175 9,653

Carter Family When I'm Gone Victor 23569 9,566

Carter Family There Is Someone Waiting For Me Victor 23554 9,490

Carter Family Fond Affection Victor 40328 7,261

Jimmie Davis Where the Old Red River Flows Victor 23525 3,931

Jimmie Davis Penitentiary Blues Victor 23544 3,915

Stuart Hamblen The Big Rock Candy Mountains, No. 2 Victor 40319 3,159

Jimmie Davis The Davis Limited Victor 23601 3,128

Jimmie Davis Before You Say Farewell Victor 23559 2,684

Jimmie Davis There's Evil in Ye Children, Gather 'Round Victor 23573 2,553

Jimmie Davis She's A Hum-Dum Dinger (From Dingersville) Part 2 Victor 23587 2,128

Floyd County Ramblers Step Stone Victor 40331 1,994

Gene Autry Do Right Daddy Blues Perfect 12722 1,901

Gene Autry I'm Atlanta Bound Perfect 12776 1,244

Dave & Howard Serves 'Em Fine Victor 23577 936

Carolina TarHeels Got the Farmland Blues Victor 23611 886

Woodie Brothers Chased Old Satan Through The Door Victor 23579 864

Tillywilly17 (talk) 04:42, 5 March 2022 (UTC)


 * Vernon Dalhart's "Wreck of the Old 97" (Victor 19427) 1,085,985 copies 1925-1934logged 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.
 * Gene Austin's "Girl of My Dreams" (Victor 21334), 408,684 copies
 * Paul Whiteman's "Valencia" (Victor 2007), with 531,808 copies sold.
 * Crawford-Goldkette recording of "I'd Love to Call You My Sweetheart" (Victor 20257) 261,698 copies
 * Goldkette's common "Sunday" (Victor 20273), 100,000
 * Goldkette's "Proud of a Baby Like You" (Victor 20469), which failed to break 10,000.
 * Blowing Bubbles Burr   674,000
 * Prince Dance "Dardenella" with 892,144 copies
 * Ben Selvin's "Dardenella" with 965,144 copies
 * Bessie Smith Downhearted Blues   275000
 * Alma Gluck's 1914 "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny" (Victor 74420) 70,189
 * Jelly Roll Morton's "Black Bottom Stomp" (Victor 20221) sold 22,627 copies
 * Memphis Jug Band "Stingy Woman Blues" (Victor 20552) 26,454
 * Memphis Jug Band "Newport News Blues" (Victor 20576) 19,943
 * Luke Jordan "Pick Poor Robin Clean" (Victor 20957) 5,973
 * Richard "Rabbit" Brown "Sinking of the Titanic" (Victor 35840) sold 2,572
 * Bix Beiderbecke and his Gang "Rhythm King,"(Okeh 41173) sold only 2,225
 * Mamie Smith's 1920 "Crazy Blues" (Okeh 4169) sold 75,000
 * Two Black Crowes - Moran and Mack  2m+
 * 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.
 * Mamie Smith's 1920 "Crazy Blues" (Okeh 4169) sold 75,000 copies its first month and a million copies its first year.
 * Victor's major hits in the latter half of the 1920s hovered around the half-million mark.
 * 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 reas
 * 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. However, known sales figures for Columbia's Viva-tonal period are substantially lower than Victor's, with typical dance hits 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.
 * The Columbia master book discography
 * by Brooks, Tim
 * Publication date 1999
 * Topics Columbia Records, Inc -- Catalogs, Columbia Records -- Catalogs, Columbia Records, Inc, Columbia Records, Inc. -- Catalogues, Music -- United States -- Discography, Music, Musique -- États-Unis -- Discographie, United States
 * Publisher Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press Tillywilly17 (talk) 21:59, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

Sources and ranking
Please note that 18 of 21 records are ranked by sales figures tabulated by Victor Records, the original blue cards stored in the Sony Archives in New York. No, these are not verified final units sold, I don't think absolute numbers exist for this time period, but they were all derived in the same way, and we will never get such useful data for this year from another source. If you are in the mood to revert my pages, this is the last one you should pick on. I researched the hell out of them, and spoke to the source more than once to access reliability. Any questions, don't be shy. Tillywilly17 (talk) 00:32, 20 September 2023 (UTC)


 * None of Joel Whitburn's charts were used. Tillywilly17 (talk) 00:34, 20 September 2023 (UTC)