Beaudry, R. (Louis-Roméo), 1882-1932

Beaudry was a French Canadian author, composer, pianist and record producer who played a determining role in the early initiatives of the recording industry in Québec. He worked for his father’s music store and then with the Starr Sales Company.

In 1915, the Columbia Gramophone Company of New York requested that Beaudry put them into contact with Québécois artists, hoping to obtain French language music for their New England francophone customers. Beaudry did and more than a dozen artists recorded with Columbia. He also established his initial contacts with the French market.

In 1917 Beaudry participated in setting up the Canadian Phonograph Supply Company to take advantage of the approaching end of the patents for lateral-cut recording. This prompted the Starr Piano Company of Richmond, Indiana which produced vertical-cut records to establish itself in Canada and to look at lateral-cut recording. The Starr Company of Canada was thus founded and Beaudry became vice president and general manager.

Beaudry wanted to increase the Canadian and francophone presence in a market that until then had been monopolized by American firms. He introduced the Starr series that presented thousands of recordings of popular French-speaking artists and obtained the distribution rights for several recordings by French music hall artists. Almost all the great names of his time recorded for Starr.

The American chansonnette experienced impressive growth after the First World War and to enable local artists to profit from Canadian and Québec audience's craze for this music, Beaudry recorded more than 150 of his French adaptations of American hits by Starr and His Master's Voice artists. He composed original songs of which more than 75 were recorded, a number of them big hits. As a producer, he was a pillar of the record industry during the 1920s, combining the folk style of artists like Ovila Légaré and American and French-inspired popular songs of such artists as Hector Pellerin.

He also established the Radio Music Publisher/Éditions Radio, a sheet music company set up in Starr's Montréal office. He died suddenly aged 50.