The Revelers
American vocal quintet
The Revelers were an American quintet (four close harmony singers and a pianist) popular in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Revelers' recordings of "Dinah", "Old Man River", "Valencia", "Baby Face", "Blue Room", "The Birth of the Blues", "When Yuba Plays the Rhumba on the Tuba", and many more, became popular in the United States and then Europe in the late 1920s. They also produced the first known recording of "I've Been Working on the Railroad" in 1923. In August 1929, they appeared in the Netherlands with Richard Tauber at the Kurhaus, Scheveningen and the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam.
All of the members had recorded individually or in various combinations. The quartet, organized in 1917, performed under the name The Shannon Four or The Shannon Quartet before changing their name to The Revelers in 1925. The original Revelers were tenors Franklyn Baur and Lewis James (and occasionally Charles W. Harrison substituting when Baur or James was unavailable), baritone Elliot Shaw, bass Wilfred Glenn (who had popularized "Asleep in the Deep" on phonograph records), and pianist Ed Smalle. Smalle was replaced by Frank Black in 1926.
Early films
The Revelers (with Black at the piano) appeared in three pioneer movie musicals, filmed by Vitaphone in 1927. Only the first one is available for viewing today: The Revelers (1927), recently restored by The Vitaphone Project, is a one-reel short showing the group performing "Mine," "Dinah," and "No Foolin'." Due to the limitations of the primitive sound production, the group was forced to perform the entire nine-minute set in one continuous, uninterrupted take, with the camera in a fixed position.
“The Revelers” enters the record as american vocal quintet. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Revelers, American and vocal can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q164455. VIAF identifies the subject as 140430366. The Library of Congress control number is no2006011561. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1923, 1929, 1917 and 1925.
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