Studio recording  The term studio recording means any recording made in a studio, as opposed to a live recording, which is usually made in a concert venue or a theatre, with an audience attending the performance. In the case of Broadway musicals, the term studio cast recording applies to a recording of the show which does not feature the cast of either a stage production or film version of the show. The practice has existed since before the advent of Broadway cast albums in 1943. That year the songs from Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Oklahoma!", performed by the show's cast, were released on a multi-record 78-RPM album by American Decca. (London original cast albums have existed since the early days of recording, however, and there are recordings in existence of excerpts from such shows as "The Desert Song", "Sunny", and "Show Boat", all performed by their original London stage casts.) Before 1943, musicals were recorded in the U.S. with what might be termed studio casts, although in many cases, such as those of Walter Huston from "Knickerbocker Holiday" and Helen Morgan from "Show Boat", singer-actors from a musical "did" make recordings of songs from the shows they appeared in. Another such example is Ethel Merman, who recorded virtually all of the songs that she made famous, even when there was no original Broadway cast album of a smash hit that she had starred in, as is the case with "Girl Crazy", "Panama Hattie", and "Anything Goes". Paul Robeson, who appeared in several productions of "Show Boat" (though not the original Broadway production), made many recordings of the song "Ol' Man River" from the show. However, early "studio cast" albums were very different from those made today, or even those made from 1950 onward. Many of them were simply a collection of songs from a show, and made no attempt to recreate what a performance of the show was actually like. (In the liner notes for the new studio cast recording of Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1947 semi-flop "Allegro", former Columbia Records president Goddard Lieberson is given credit for virtually inventing the idea of a studio cast recording.) David Hummel, the author of “The Collector’s Guide to the American Musical Theatre” (Scarecrow Press, 1984) was the first person to come up with the term “studio cast” in lists he was making of Broadway recordings. In these lists, which date back to the 1950s, he documented Original Cast (OC), Soundtrack (ST) and when the Goddard Lieberson cast recordings came out he wasn't sure how to catalog them so the term “studio cast” (SC) came into being.