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The Sailors is a recorded version of a theatrical comedy routine by vaudeville performers Stiffy (Nat Phillips) and Mo (Roy Rene). You can listen to part two of The Sailors here in its entirety. Part two is the second side of a two-sided disc.
Curator’s notes
Part two of Stiffy and Mo’s comedy routine is mostly a long joke about a cow and a calf. Recorded in 1927, The Sailors is one of the earliest pressings recorded and made in Australia. The Columbia pressing factory at Homebush in western Sydney had only opened the year before. Parlophone was a subsidiary of Columbia, but operated independently, mostly releasing overseas recordings. The Stiffy and Mo discs were two of only a few local recordings that were issued on Parlophone at that time.
As variety performance such as vaudeville or music hall shows were a major part of live public entertainment of the early years of last century, the early record industry in both Europe and the US drew on many of those performers to make recordings. Short comedy routines were common in early catalogues of record companies but there is little else of this style recorded locally in the early years of the Australian industry.
We know little about how well the records sold. There were no record charts at that time, and the surviving financial information about the record companies doesn’t include information about individual sales.
