Sperry Records was owned and operated by Sperry Boge, a Macedonian immigrant. All recordings were issued between 1951 and 1953, producing approximately forty 78 rpm records. At the end of the fifties Sperry issued three long play records. All the records were custom pressed by RCA.
Sperry Boge was born as Spiro Bogojević on 15 of April 1907 in Leunovo (municipality Mavrovo and Rostuse, Macedonia, Greece). He emigrated to the USA and arrived in New York on 28 Sept 1923. He moved to Detroit and settled as a cabinetmaker on 10625 Shoemaker Ave, Detroit 13. He died there in December 1975. In the early fifties he started Sperry Records Inc.
Most of the following recordings are from Larry Weiner, Tom Deering and a few of my own. Larry’s own comments are included below.
I’ve been intending to digitize and remaster the 78 rpm Sperry records for a long long time, and I’ve finally completed it (though in fact I don’t think projects like this ever are “complete”). Back in 2001 I’d started on the 12 inch 78 rpm records, and then got sidetracked doing other records (mostly old Bulgarian stuff).
Over the years I’ve been able to locate fairly pristine copies of all the 78 rpm records that (I think) Sperry produced. I’ve broken them down into 3 groups.
- Sperry 10 Inch Red Label – pressed by RCA in 1951 [#1519 – #1532]
- Sperry 10 Inch Blue Label – pressed by RCA in 1953 [#531, #532, & #6101 – #6159 (except as noted below)]
- Sperry 12 Inch Blue Label – pressed by RCA in 1953 [#6109, #6119, #6126, #6127, #6129, #6131, #6132, #6133, #6135, #6137, #6153, #6161]
I’ve figured out the year the records were produced because of the Matrix numbers stamped into the records (and also appearing on the label).
This Sperry collection is really quite interesting from many perspectives. I particularly like the Chalgija tunes – and these are the only recordings I’ve heard made by Olga Sichan (who has a wonderful voice). On listening to the records, they presented some remastering challenges because the recordings were originally on 1/4 in magnetic tape. Some of the “glitches” that are on the records are actually the kind of thing you hear on tapes when there are recording (or playback) problems. I’ve been able to work my way around some of the problems, but others were seemingly unfixable.