Reiff and Helt was a furniture dealer and funeral director in Lykens, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, in 1921. The business was the leading distributor of the RCA Victor machines in the Lykens Valley area and therefore sold the most recently available records that could be played on the machines.
The above newspaper ad from the Lykens Standard, December 2, 1921, lists the December records available for sale. Under the last category, “Standard and Popular Records,” one record is listed which has two songs by “Black-Face” Eddie Ross, who was a well-known vaudeville and minstrel entertainer and banjo player. The record label is pictured at the top of this post and below is a picture of his with his banjo.
No evidence has been located that Ross ever performed live in the Lykens Valley, but there are many newspaper ads for his performances in other places in Pennsylvania, including Harrisburg, York and Reading.
In a review on September 20, 1914, the Harrisburg Courier noted the following, when Ross performed at the Orpheum in Harrisburg:
Eddie Ross — Of Minstrel Fame!
There are few more clever or more popular exponents of black face comedy than Eddie Ross, who has been a featured star with many of the best minstrel shows. He has been with them all and is a positive favorite with theatre-goers everywhere. At the Orpheum this week he will unload of knapsack of bright gags and sing a few songs and do a couple eccentric dances in the Eddie Ross style. This latter quality is the artist’s greatest asset, for he is original in its most extreme sense.
Black-face was very popular in the Lykens Valley area up through the mid-1960s, in parades, in minstrel shows, and in plays.
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Eddie Ross record and portrait images are screen captures from YouTube.
Newspaper ad and article from Newspapers.com.
Corrections and additional information should be added as comments to this post.