Public domain is not one blanket badge — each source can carry its own caveat
Documented covers, adaptations, and cultural echoes — each with a real, dated source
Sutton’s Pathé–Perfect discography shows matrix 106237 issued as “Sam Lanin & his Orchestra” on Perfect 14497, as “Lanin’s Arcadians” on Pathé Actuelle 36316, and again on Harmograph 1083. Lanin was among the most recorded bandleaders of the decade precisely because of this: the same afternoon’s work was sold up and down the price tiers under whatever name each label preferred.
Whitey Kaufman’s Victor version, cut that October, carries the matrix prefix BVE — Victor’s own marker for a 10-inch side made with the Western Electric electrical system it adopted in 1925. Within one season the song was being recorded both by the older acoustic-era independents and by the majors on the new electrical process.
Harry Woods’s song was introduced by Cliff Edwards in the 1925 musical “Sunny” and was taken up across the dance-band field that season — Victor’s ledgers file this Kaufman matrix under the show’s title, and competing versions appeared on Columbia, Brunswick and elsewhere within months.
Whitey Kaufman, from Lebanon, Pennsylvania, led the Original Pennsylvania Serenaders through Victor sessions from 1923; by the October 1925 date the band was billed simply as the Whitey Kaufman Orchestra. DAHR documents recordings spanning 1922–1928 — a regional dance band with a run on a national label, then out of the catalogue by 1928.
Every sound recording published in 1925 completed its 100-year term at the start of 2026 and is now free for reissue, sampling, remix and scholarship — the class of works this recording belongs to, and the reason it can be chopped here without clearance.
Where this recording is hosted — we link out to the source
Every source cited on this page — 9 in total