Painted Smiles Records
record label based in New York City, USA
Painted Smiles Records was a small record label, based in New York City and run by Ben Bagley, which operated from the 1970s to the 1990s. It is best known for its Revisited series of recordings of little-known songs by well-known songwriters.
History
Genesis
During Ben Bagley's long stay in a hospital while recovering from tuberculosis, his best friend Arthur Siegel brought him tapes of little-known songs by great Broadway songwriters. Bagley was inspired to produce his own recordings of such songs, initially for existing record labels. In 1971, he founded his own label, Painted Smiles Records. Painted Smiles released cast recordings of Bagley's own revues and of historical and contemporary Broadway musicals, and many collections of those little-known songs.
The Revisited series
Most Painted Smiles recordings, most titled ... Revisited, were anthologies of the lesser-known songs of the top Broadway musical composers and lyricists from the 1920s through the 1940s, including Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Noël Coward, DeSylva, Brown and Henderson, Vernon Duke, George and Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein II, Yip Harburg, Jerome Kern, Alan Jay Lerner, Frank Loesser, Johnny Mercer, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Arthur Schwartz, Kurt Weill and Vincent Youmans.
The Revisited albums shared a distinctive design. Their covers displayed bright watercolors by Harvey Schmidt (better known as a composer) of showgirls in improbable and sometimes surreal costumes, often naked or nearly so above or even below the waist, on white backgrounds.
“Painted Smiles Records” enters the record as record label based in New York City, USA. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Painted, Smiles and Records can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7125026. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1971.
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This entry incorporates text from “Painted Smiles Records” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.