Tales", "Manners Can Be Fun", "Raggedy Ann Songs", and hundreds more established Frank Luther as the dean of children's recordings. Decca claimed, in 1946, that 85% of the records for young people sold in the English-speaking world were Luther's. Stephen Foster melodies While his recordings for children remained his chief claim to fame, Luther made a number of successful 78rpm album sets for Decca in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Focusing on Americana (he wrote a book, Americans and Their Songs, published in 1942), he made an album of Civil War songs entitled Songs of the North and the South in the War between the States (1861-1865) which he and Zora Layman sang with the Century Quartet, songs of early New York, songs of old California, Gay Nineties songs, Irish favorites, and rare Christmas carols. Many of these he and Zora Layman performed on their own radio series. Most widely acclaimed were two albums of compositions by Stephen Foster. Performed with a sensitivity and sentimentality stylistically consistent with the famous American composer's approach, Luther's renditions were active in the Decca catalogue for some fifteen years. His interpretations of such compositions as "Ah! May the Red Rose Live Alway", "The Hour For Thee and Me", "Beautiful Dreamer", "Sweetly She Sleeps, My Alice Fair", "My Old Kentucky Home" and "Comrades, Fill No Glass For Me" were acclaimed by music critics of the day. After World War II In 1946, Luther - by now a Decca Records executive, in charge of children's, educational, and religious recordings - returned to the studios to re-record many of his pre-war albums for children and to make many others, including "The Birthday Party Record" released on Decca in the fall of 1950. He had taken college-level courses in child psychology and was now busy as an educational lecturer, also doing hundreds of personal appearances in schools each year. Recording prolifically, his tenor voice began to mellow. By the early 1950s, he was singing baritone. Some years earlier, Luther and Zora Layman had divorced. He remarried and had two children, a daughter and son, in the late 1940s. He continued to record regularly for Decca through 1954. While planning a record album based on Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, Luther began writing songs based on the book and soon found that he had enough for a full-length play for adult audiences. The show he devised did not reach