Kurt Groetsch @ OldTasty.com

Few things aggravate me more than inaccurate or otherwise poor-quality metadata. (It’s no wonder that I wound up in a library and information science graduate program, and even less surprising that I gravitated towards cataloging and metadata creation.) The place this passion for accurate description shows up in my personal life is in my iTunes library. I’m the guy who, when ripping a CD to my machine, will double check the spelling of song titles provided by CDDB/Gracenote. Not only that, but when adding a soundtrack or compilation, I’ll check against the CD booklet to make sure the artist attributions are correct and artists’ names are spelled correctly. I’ll even go as far as adding the correct date to each song, if it’s discernible. It’s excessive I know, but I’m apparently a little OCD because I find this level of accuracy comforting.

I bring this up because I just now resolved an attribution question that has been driving me nuts for weeks. I received the Amélie soundtrack a while back, and noticed while listening to it that one of the tracks was wrongly attributed to Yann Tiersen, who composed the film’s incidental music. So naturally I went first to the booklet that came with the CD, but it contained only composer credits for the song, with no mention of the performer. The logical next step: go to the film’s closing credits — surely the performer would be mentioned there. Nope. AllMusic.com had the performer listed as Russ Colombo but after comparing a clip of his version with the one on the CD, it was clear he wasn’t the performer either. What next? I went to the AllMusic listing for the song, sorted by composer and listened to all the available clips to see if I could find a match, but again, no dice. So I let it drop… for the moment.

But it still bugged me, so I just did another quick search and, lo and behold, I found a reference in a comment on a MySpace page of all places. Quoting Mr. Matt Tolentino:

Wonderful tune- the song is called Guilty, written by Harry Akst, Gus Kahn, and Richard Whiting. The version in question is by Al Bowlly, and the orchestra behind him is Roy Fox, during Fox’s stay at the Monseigneur Restaurant in London. Guilty was waxed for Decca December 2, 1931. I first discovered the tune while watching the French film, Amelie. GREAT song!

Going back, it turns out AllMusic did have a clip of Al Bowlly singing this song, but it was a later performance, not the original 1931 version. I haven’t found a documented version to compare against so the match isn’t authoritative, but the voice is certainly the same.

Why does this even matter to me? I like the song, I like this particular arrangement and this particular performance; I’d like to know who’s responsible so I can track down more of their recordings, but how can I even begin to do so if I can’t identify the performer? However… problem solved for now, and I’m off to find more material by Mr. Bowlly and Mr. Fox.