I can barely make out the issue number on the Dinah Washington Mercury 78 of Baby Did You Hear. It looks like 5734 as best I can tell.

I checked the Mercury 5000 series discography at

http://78discography.com/

5734 is unfortunately one of the number gaps in the discography. It is incomplete, as such discographies necessarily are while researchers keep trying to fill in the missing entries. Nor does a search turn up the title anywhere in that series. So the mystery rolls on!

The one thing informative is that the 5000 series includes recordings issued between 1950 and 1952. It does include a few earlier recordings originally made in the 1940s, presumably reissues. But if this record is original to the series, it would likely have been made no earlier than 1951—that tallies with the date for the "Blazing Ballads" album where it appears. Chances are that this song was recorded for that album in 1951, but not before.

That's as far as I've been able to get with the Dinah Washington record label. Wish I could read that credit line. Somebody's name is in there, and it's not Burl Ives. Could be "Dinah Washington," but I can't tell.

One more problem rears its head: a "Dinah Washington" author credit might have been inserted to reserve her rights to a song that's either traditional or the composer isn't known. Wouldn't be the first time that's been done! Not that DW necessarily did so herself—that could have been a standard practice of the record label.

More unknowns. Bob