RCA Camden

RCA Camden is a budget record label of RCA Victor, originally created in 1953 to reissue recordings from earlier 78 rpm releases. The label was named "Camden", after Camden, New Jersey where the offices, factories and studios of RCA Victor and its predecessor, the Victor Talking Machine Company had been located since 1901.

RCA Victor originally created the Camden label to reissue select older 78 rpm Red Seal recordings of classical symphonic music on LP records. In the mid 1950s, RCA Camden began releasing some rhythm & blues and, later, pop, country and rock and roll recordings. For example, in 1956, Camden issued an album of the very first recordings made by Little Richard for RCA Victor in 1951 and 1952, expanded with four tracks by Buck Ram and his Rock n' Ram Orchestra. In 1958, Camden released some albums in RCA Victor's new Living Stereo format and subsequently issued popular stereo recordings by the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, The Living Strings and Living Voices. Camden also produced a "Designed for Dancing" series, with titles by Xavier Cugat and Perez Prado, and others.

Beginning in the late 1950s, the RCA Camden label was headed by long-time RCA Victor record producer Ethel Gabriel. Gabriel was soon earning producer credits, which she continued to do for the rest of her career at RCA Victor.

In 1959, Gabriel introduced "Living Strings", a successful series of easy-listening albums mostly released through the Camden label. This later expanded to include "Living Voices", "Living Guitars" and other lines, and became a highly profitable series for RCA Victor.

In a 1992 interview, Gabriel noted that this was not what her unnamed boss had expected when her boss put her in charge of the then-struggling Camden label, saying "I’m sure he thought it was a way to get rid of me... Well, I made a multimillion-dollar line out of it, conceived, programmed and produced the entire thing."

RCA Victor originally reissued its older 78 rpm Red Seal classical symphonic recordings on the Camden label using the actual names of the symphony orchestras involved; but soon, to avoid competing with recent full-priced recordings by the same orchestras, a series of pseudonyms were used, drawn primarily from the names of hotels in nearby Philadelphia, across the Delaware River from RCA Victor's headquarters in Camden. Here is a partial listing of the real orchestras and their pseudonyms:

The RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra was assembled for recording sessions mostly during the 1940s and '50s; It primarily consisted of members from the NBC Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. The New York City Symphony Orchestra, created by Leopold Stokowski in the 1940s, recorded for RCA Victor and some of its recordings were reissued on Camden LPs under the name "Sutton Symphony Orchestra," not to be confused with a British orchestra with the same name.

In 1960, RCA Victor launched the RCA Victrola budget label to reissue lower priced classical and operatic recordings drawn from the Red Seal catalog. With a few exceptions, RCA Camden ceased reissuing former Red Seal titles and began offering many more albums by RCA Victor's pop and country music artists. In Canada, in addition to handling the U.S. releases on the label for the Canadian market, the RCA Camden imprint was also used to issue both current and compilation albums by RCA Victor Canada's country Artists. Country music sold extremely well in Canada and RCA Camden issued a number of albums unique to Canada that were never released in the United States.