Unfortunately, little is known about the people who arranged the hundreds of rolls produced by the Rudolph Wurlitzer Company. Whoever they were, they maintained a remarkably consistent -- some would say formulaic -- style and level of quality until 1933 when the company cut its last 10-tune roll. Without knowing more about how Wurlitzer assigned its arranging work, it is difficult to say whether the stylistic differences that can be noticed in Wurlitzer music over the years are attributable to its arrangers or merely to changing styles in American music.

Beginning with roll 6672, produced in early 1934, Wurlitzer cut some corners in its roll production process. The ember days of the band organ business were approaching and perhaps the incentive to cut really fine rolls was diminishing. Thenceforth, each roll contained only 6 tunes. To keep the 10-tune length and to permit advertising its rolls as being the "length of a ten tune roll," Wurlitzer simply repeated verse and chorus of each tune, note for note, until it played long enough to fill one-sixth of a roll. This practice reduced arrangement costs but made the tunes sound endlessly repetitious. (The Play-Rite recuts of 6-tune rolls avoid this shortcoming by combining two 6-tune rolls into one 12-tune roll, shortening each tune accordingly and alternating the tunes so as to preserve the proper tempo.) The practice of making only 6-tune rolls was continued by Wurlitzer's successors, the Allan Herschell Company and T.R.T. Manufacturing Company.

There are various stories about what became of the assets of its Roll Department after Wurlitzer decided to cease making music rolls in 1945. But the closest we can come today to the truth is contained in the recollections of North Tonawanda resident Douglas R. Hershberger from conversations he had with Ralph Tussing. When the Allan Herschell Company learned that band organ rolls were no longer going to be produced, the company probably realized that, without music being available, its carousel sales would be negatively impacted. Therefore Ralph Tussing was asked to go to the Wurlitzer plant and select anything needed for Herschell to carry on the band organ roll business, which Mr. Tussing was to run for them.

At one time Wurlitzer owned as many as twelve roll perforators, but most of them were scrapped as materiel for the WW II war effort. Mr. Hershberger remembers being told by an old-timer who lived near the Wurlitzer plant of seeing a mountain of scrap metal piled against the building. Ralph Tussing selected at least two perforators and their accompanying racks, a paper slitting machine, a master marker, and a huge quantity of roll masters, band organ parts, and patterns. Whatever he did not take for Herschell was junked by Wurlitzer.

The Allan Herschell Company's venture into the roll making business was short-lived, probably because of their development of the Merri-Org. (The Merri-Org was a 78-rpm record player with a large amplifier and three speakers housed in a case. Herschell is said to have had a special band organ constructed to play the music for the Merri-Org records, because although the Merri-Org music comes from style 165 rolls, the organ does not sound exactly like a Wurlitzer. The recording was done by the Howell Recording Studio, Buffalo, N.Y.) Apparently feeling relieved of the burden of running a full-scale roll making operation, Herschell sold the business to Ralph Tussing. Herschell produced only one style 165 roll (6691), in mid-1946, and not more than two or three rolls in the other Wurlitzer styles (125 and 150). How much of their output was simply material already started by Wurlitzer in 1945 and thus in the pipeline and how much was actually arranged and mastered by Ralph Tussing in the Herschell band organ department is uncertain.

Ralph Tussing (his name pronounced TWO-sing, not TUSS-ing, as is commonly supposed) incorporated with his son-in-law Lloyd Robins and son Gordon Tussing as the T.R.T. Manufacturing Company, North Tonawanda, N.Y., to carry on the band organ repair and roll-making business. Although Ralph was sometimes assisted by his son, he largely worked alone in his shop, first at 825 Main Street, later at 138 Miller Street. It would be interesting to know more about all this; but Ralph Tussing was not very motivated to pass his knowledge on to others, and much lore undoubtedly died with him on June 29, 1974.

A misconception exists that T.R.T. stands for "T. Ralph Tussing." The truth is that Ralph Tussing was born and died Ralph Tussing. The initials in the firm name represent the surnames of its three partners: Ralph himself, his son-in-law Lloyd Robins, and Ralph's son, Gordon Tussing, hence Tussing, Robins & Tussing. Unfortunately Ralph himself fostered the misconception by stating in a 1964(?) newspaper article for the Tonawanda News that "TRT stands for 'Tussing, Ralph Tussing'." (A similar misconception is that the large T in Wurlitzer's corporate monogram somehow reflects the way the Wurlitzer family wrote its surname; in fact, the large T is merely a matter of artistic design; examples of Farny Wurlitzer's holographic signature show no unusual formation of the "t" in "Wurlitzer")

Ralph produced his first new roll, 6692, in late 1946 and his last one, 6724, in 1967, whereupon the production of new rolls on a systematic basis ceased for good.

Most of the machinery in the Perforating Room of Wurlitzer's Roll Department is known to us only from a company photograph taken March 1919. There were twelve production perforators in operation in the long room, each machine watched over by a female employee and each machine numbered in white paint on its side, as can be seen in the photograph on perforator no. 11, the second from the front. (The machine in the immediate foreground, with the wire cage around its drive belt, appears to be the paper slitter used to cut the blank paper as it came from the mill to exact roll width for use in the perforators.) A perforator by itself is a fairly compact machine taking up only about three feet of floor space. The bulk of the space in each perforator aisle is occupied by a wooden rack holding the dozen or more pre-trimmed rolls of blank paper to feed the perforator, plus at the other end of the perforator a take-up spool rack, holding a like number of spools on which the finished perforated rolls were temporarily wound, pending final spooling, labeling, and boxing.

Using Ozzie Wurdeman's notebooks, information from Larry Villano and George Karpel, and labels from rolls in various collections, we have attempted to reconstruct the contents of the forty-four 66-key rolls produced by B.A.B. during its existence. In addition, one ten-tune roll was arranged by J. Lawrence Cook for a group including Villano and Karpel in 1971; that too is shown at the end of this list.

Some of the listings below may unwittingly be based on Wurdeman recuts rather than on original B.A.B. rolls, as may be the case with roll 039. It is possible that Ozzie Wurdeman, lacking the master for a certain tune that was supposed to be on the roll, substituted another tune in producing his recuts.

Lack of tune numbering in a few cases indicates that the order of tunes on the roll is unknown. Copyright dates for tunes are shown as an aid to dating the rolls, as well as for their value as a check on tune identification. Composers are not shown except in a few cases where the information is not obtainable from one of our Wurlitzer roll catalogs.

The tunes listed below are some, but not necessarily all, of the tunes for which 66-key masters exist but which could not be given their place in one of the 44 B.A.B. 66-key rolls above: