Dinah. Featured Song Success in the New Plantation Revue (Society’s Rendezvous of N.Y.)

New York City: Henry Waterson, Inc, 1925. Folio, illustrated wraps. 5 pp. Fine condition.. A striking Jazz Age sheet music issue and likely first edition for “Dinah,” the widely popular song composed by Harry Akst with lyrics by Sam M. Lewis and Joe Young, here promoted as a “Featured Song Success” from The New Plantation (Society’s Rendezvous of N.Y.), a Harlem revue-style theatrical production. The revue was advertised as an all-Black production reopening the Plantation Cabaret at 50th Street and Broadway, featuring prominent performers including blues singer Ethel Waters alongside Will Vodery’s Parisian Orchestra, Josephine Baker, Bessie Allison, Leonard Harper, Jimmy Ferguson, and the Plantation beauty chorus.[1] “Dinah” would go on to become one of the most enduring standards of the decade. Multiple versions were published in 1925, this one in June, and though we are not able to establish definitive priority we guess that this is the first edition. Very scarce, with three copies found institutionally, at the Francis G. Spencer collection at Baylor University, BYU, and the British Library reference collection.

[1] “Ethel Waters Is Featured In New Plantation Revue,” The New York Age, June 20, 1925, 6.