Mary Frances Allison was the recording studio manager at Vocalstyle for many years and did most of the editing work, in later years creating some of the Vocalstyle masters from home using a Leabarjan #5 perforator in between teaching piano. The Vocalstyle releases for September 1916 are the first to credit a hand-played roll to her, although she may have been working for them previously.

Her father, James, was born in Pennsylvania on 30 June 1843 to Scottish immigrant parents (died 20 November 1918 in Cincinnati). In 1910, he and Mary's mother, also named Mary (February 26, 1846, Indiana - 4 July 1926, Cincinnati) are the superintendent and matron of a reform school known as the Cincinnati House of Refuge - a public school for delinquent boys and girls to be sent to for vocational and academic training.

In 1902 Mary married Fred Ernst Radina, a clerk, lumberman, and well-known amateur car racer. In 1906 she is listed as Mrs Mary A. Radina, music teacher - House of Refuge in Cincinnati. The marriage didn't last, and in in 1909 she remarried Mason L. Parsons, five years her junior, in Covington, Kentucky. The 1910 census records them living in Newport where Mason is working as a cutter for a clothing house.

In 1914 Fred Radina, Mary's former husband, was killed in an automobile accident in Tennessee while practising for a race - he lost control, plunged through a fence and was struck in the stomach by flying timber - his new wife witnessing the incident from the grandstand. The same year, Mary was granted a divorce from her second husband for 'willful abandonment'.

In her 1916 Vocalstyle debut she is using her maiden name - and in the 1920 Census she was listed as a divorcee living at 39 Erin Ave, Cincinnati with her mother, sister, and niece -  occupation "musician - piano". Her estranged second husband also died tragically - serving as a private in Washington DC, he contracted influenza, and died just a month before the end of WW1.

Mary's professional life was going well, however, as she rose to become the recording manager at Vocalstyle while continuing to arrange, record, and edit rolls herself. In February 1924 she took part in a live radio broadcast from the Vocalstyle studios, in which she recorded a duet with Billy Waterworth of the new hit tune 'Somebody Else', which was then edited, perforated, and played back on roll within half an hour. In 1926, she remarried, to Phillip Sheridan Weitzel (1874-1957), who worked as an insurance agent, then meat cutter, and lived quietly as a housewife (and probably music teacher) until her death in 1945, of Recurrent post operative ependymoma (a form of brain tumour). She was buried on 2 July 1945 at Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati.

Her Vocalstyle rolls reveal she seems to have been a versatile musician - the catalogue featuring her rolls of hymns, salon, march, jazz, blues, and foxtrot music! One press release from the era reveals she was responsible for originating the 'marimba effect' (rapid repeated notes in tremolo style) which was extremely popular in piano rolls of the time.
Mary Allison editing a master roll
during a 1924 radio broadcast.