More rare photographs of early recording artists:

The image above is a very early photograph of the Tenor Albert C. Campbell who recorded from his late teen years in the mid-1890's to well into the 1920's . This was taken when he was twenty in 1892, in the time when he was a star actor in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas.(He was in a production of H. M.S. Pinafore in 1892)

the name of the man above is just as unknown as David C. Bangs', he is C. H. H. Booth, who was at one point trading off as pianist on Edison brown wax cylinders with the extraordinary Frank P. Banta. And in the 1900's he became the Victor talking machine company's pianist(but again trading with Banta on that role, depending who the leading singer or artist is).

another artist who is rather unknown to many record collectors, George W. Graham. He was a very interesting artist who made mostly Berliners, starting in 1895, but progressed to Victors in 1900 and 1901, and then(probably as a suggestion of Len Spencer's) on to Columbia for a month in 1903, and from there he just disappeared from all recording. I call him "Berliner's Drunk" because of he fact that he drank so much at many of his recording sessions(only his Berliners, Victor would not allow that sort of thing in their studio) that the Berliner crew had to make a sort of stand for him so that when he was really drunk that he wouldn't fall over holding the sheet of paper that had his recitation written on it.

this is not only an unusual image of Vess L Ossman, this is a rare look inside the early Edison studio from 1898, very few photographs were taken inside the Edison studio, or any studio for that matter.

this is a rare photograph of the "Tobacco-chewing tenor" George J. Gaskin from the 1890's, but the exact date is something I am unsure of. Now for some information on that odd nickname of his. So when he was in the time towards the beginning of his recording(1891-96) he would, at his recording sessions, chew tobacco and spit the juice in the recording horn, as he thought he hadn't any other place to dispose of it. So after years of doing this, i would assume that he never dared to smile in any photograph of him because of those(probably) awful teeth of his...

here is a rare photograph of Dan W. Quinn taken in 1895 or 1896, from a page from a Berliner catalog that calls him "The King of Comic Singers".

And finally, a very jolly man according to Berliner's pianist and scouter Fred Gaisberg, Burt Shepard(circa 1854-1913, though his birthdate has never really been known, Shepard himself refused to give that information). His relatively few Victor records from 1901 to 1904 are highly desired by early record collectors. This photograph was taken from the book Monarchs of Minstrelsy, and in the book he is labelled as one of the "Feminine fancies", what that means is that he (in his earliest years upon the stage)dressed in full drag and sang parodies of popular songs. the information below is what the Monarchs of Minstrelsy says about Burt Shepard:

the date of the image of Burt Shepard is unknown, but it looks most likely like it could be from the 1890's, but it could be older than that...