Doo-Wacka-Doo
This recording by Marion McKay’s Orchestra for Gennett on December 17, 1924, is discussed in detail by Warren K. Plath in the International Association of Jazz Records Collectors Journal, volume 8, no. 2, p. 7, 1972. Apparently, this recording surfaced for public notice when the Italian label Raretone issued the album “Bix – To Be or not To Be” in 1972. The album includes a series of sides that have been alleged to have Bix on cornet or at least highly Bixian solos. However, already in 1964, Frank Powers (who made the commentaries for the Miami University Radio series “Bix”) had found this record and had been in touch with Marion McKay regarding the identity of the soloist in the Doo-Wacka-Doo side.
Eventually, Plath and Powers:
“spent two full afternoons poring over McKay’s scrapbooks, listening to some test pressings, and hearing tales of the musical events of the Roaring Twenties that would make any red-blooded collector positively drool.”
Plath (incidentally, the producer of the 1978 album “With A Bow To Bix”) goes on to discuss the complete output (eighteen recordings, all in Richmond, Indiana, for Gennett) made by Marion McKay between 1922 and 1927.
The article is very informative and contains lots of fascinating tidbits. For example, for a period of several weeks in 1927, the Marion McKay orchestra, who was playing at Castle Farms in Dayton, exchanged places with the Jean Goldkette orchestra who was playing at the Graystone in Detroit. In 1929, McKay’s band was playing at Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s Plantation in Los Angeles. At that time, Don Murray and Joe Venuti, among others, sat with the McKay band. Ernie McKay, presumably Marion’s younger brother:
Recalls seeing Bix (with whom he had briefly roomed at the Bilinghurst in Detroit) walking with a cane, in the company of his (Bix’s) mother.
Returning to the recording of Doo-Wacka-Doo, the solo is unquestionably by Leroy Morris, then a student at Ohio State University and a very talented trumpeter who, at the time, knew of Bix only by his recording of Riverboat Shuffle with the Wolverine Orchestra.