Roméo Beaudry

Born in Montreal on February 25th, 1882, he spent most of his youth in Quebec City, where his father worked for the Willis Piano Company.

After finishing his classical studies, he became a partner in his father’s music store. In 1912, having found employment as a representative for the Starr Sales Company, he moved to Montreal where he was hired as a music critic for the daily newspaper ‘La Patrie’.

During the era historians have named the Great Haemorrhage, a tremendous number of French-Canadians crossed the border to New England, where they settled and founded many populous exclusively French-speaking communities that became known as ‘Little Canadas’. Having made somewhat of a name for himself as a music critic, Roméo Beaudry, as commissioned by Columbia Gramophone in New York, proposed a list of noteworthy Quebec artists from this vast colony of exiled French talent. Thanks to Beaudry’s recommendations, more than a dozen Quebec artists, including Hector Pellerin, Alex Bédard, Arthur Lapierre, Joseph-Henri Thibodeau, François-Xavier Mercier and Alfred Nohcor, traveled to New York to record at Columbia.

In 1916, the Edmond Archambault store in Montreal hired Beaudry to work in the piano department. In 1918, because of his knowledge of the French-Canadian artistic and musical scene in Quebec, Beaudry was made general manager of the Starr Company of Canada, a newly founded subsidiary of the Starr Piano Company, an American record production company. The following year, Beaudry conceded the pressing contract for the entire production of Gennett records to his friend Herbert Berliner, then owner of a record-pressing factory in Lachine.

In 1920, Roméo Beaudry founded Starr Phonograph of Quebec and created the Gennett 11000 series with the help of Berliner who opened HMV recording studios. This series produced many Quebecois artists, including J. Hervey Germain and other artists Beaudry had brought into Columbia some five years earlier. French artists whom Beaudry had met in France in the summer of 1920 were also included in this series.