Silver Threads Among The Gold - Elsie Baker (1912)

"Silver Threads Among The Gold"

Elsie Baker

Victor 17474

1912

Music by Hart Pease Danks

Lyrics by Eben Eugene Rexford

Elsie Baker lived from September 27, 1886, to April 28, 1958

This versatile contralto began her recording career with various companies but soon became exclusive to the Victor Talking Machine Company and for nearly two decades was one of the company's most successful contraltos.

She worked her way up Victor's hierarchy of labels, going from the regular black label to the semi-prestigious blue labels and finally to the prestigious Red Seal label. In contrast to many trained singers who came to Victor having already established reputations as concert or operatic artists, she earned fame first through recordings (in this regard and others she was like Victor colleagues Lucy Isabelle Marsh and Olive Kline).

She built upon her popularity as a recording artist in establishing a reputation as a fine concert artist. Notices in Musical America and The Musical Leader indicate that she traveled widely in the 1910s and 1920s to give performances.

Elsie West Baker was born in Philadelphia to Carrie Ella (Greene) and William Drinker Baker. Victor's 1914 catalog gives this background information: "This young contralto has become one of the most valued members of the Victor vocal staff...Miss Baker, who was a pupil of Dr. W.W. Gilchrist and Henry Gordon Thunder, of Philadelphia, and Oscar Saenger, of New York, has recently been secured by the fashionable Church of the Pilgrims in Brooklyn."

The 1920 catalog states, "The ambition of Elsie Baker, she declares, is to live in a New England village--a modest ambition for a successful and brilliant artist. She comes of a Philadelphia musical family. She began at the piano as a child...Unlike most singers, she believes the true school for the American voice is in the church, where she has had wide experience. She had made lengthened tours in concert and oratorio, and had many triumphs. Miss Baker is now soloist at St. Paul's M.E. Church, New York City." Victor's October 1918 supplement quotes Baker about her background as a church singer: "I began singing in church when I was fifteen years old, and I haven't missed a single Sunday since--except when on tour. I got six hundred a year for it when I was nineteen--don't you think that was a lot of money for a girl to make?"

She began her recording career by making cylinders for Thomas A. Edison, Inc.; the Cleveland-based U.S. Phonograph Company, which produced U-S Everlasting cylinders; and the Indestructible Phonograph Record Company at 226 Hamilton Street, Albany, New York (Montgomery Ward and Company issued these cylinders as Lakeside Indestructibles). Early in her career she also made Columbia discs, sometimes using the pseudonyms Edna Brown, Nora Watson, and Mabel West.