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| Who remembers what it was like the first time you heard 78's? |
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| 16th May 2023, 5:28 AM | #1 REPORT | |
 | Break-In Master Member since Dec 2013 251 Points | I guess I was 6 or 8 years old. I discovered we had an attic in the house so, I went up to the third floor to look around and, among other things, found a rather tall stack of dad's 78's!! I'd already been HEAVILY into records since I was at least 2 so, I grabbed a bunch of them and took them down to the living room to play them on dad's stereo. It could play 78's and had the kind of needle that flips over to accommodate 78's. (It wasn't really a stereo, though. It was about 6 feet long and the record player slid out on tracks from the sliding doors across the front and the one side of this console had a woofer and the other end had at tweeter or two!! So much for it being a stereo!! It was more of a mono with widely separated speakers!!) Anyway, I couldn't wait to find out what treasures I'd come across up in that attic and sat there playing all of them to see what they were. I remember the ones I liked best were the ones with the colourful labels!! Most of them were either black, red or blue but the ones I loved were the yellow (MGM) and especially the purple (OKeh)!! Also the promo Columbia singles! I think there were 3 or 4 and most had white labels but, at least one had a soft sea green label! I don't know why but, something about that OKeh label really caught my eye! It was, Cry / The Little White Cloud That Cried by Johnny Ray. I preferred the flip side! Anyway, I guess a whole new world of music opened up to me and I really loved 78's!! I got to hate seeing them thrown away or destroyed and would eventually buy as many as I could find to see to it they had a good home and didn't end up shattered and in a dump, somewhere!! At least once a year, they'd have junk day where people would clean out their houses and toss out all the stuff they no longer had any use for and I'd spend the whole day racing all over town on my bike looking for any 78's that were being thrown out!! I remember one house on Lexington Ave. (9 blocks from my house) was throwing out a bunch but, somebody got to them before me and destroyed a few!! One was a very colourful label on Columbia featuring a cartoon caricature of Paul Whiteman on the labels! Paul Whiteman And His Rippling Rhythm. I think another was also his and had a silver label. To me, they're like photographs of historic events and the more of them that get broken and thrown away, the more of our history we've lost!! Sadly, thanks to my greedy ex-sisters, I lost at least 2000 of them a few years ago!! Including that huge stack of dad's 78's!! Thankfully, in the late `70's, after I bought my first stereo cassette deck, I decided to record all the 78's I could get my hands on, onto cassettes tapes!! As far as I know, I got all of dad's, quite a few hundred of my aunt Jean's, grandpap's, grandma's, Bill Fay's (dad's school buddy that lived down the street) and the first few hundred or so that I bought! Now, I just hope I was able to get those tapes out of the house before I was evicted!! There were at least 20 hour-long tapes and another 20 or 30 2-hour tapes. I DO still have the full list of what's on the tapes!! One of these days, if I still have the tapes, I'll transfer them to CD's or at least hard drive//SD card, etc.. Every so often, I get a strong urge to listen to that kinda stuff but, at the moment, I still don't have any of it here! |
| 20th May 2023, 10:16 AM | #2 REPORT | |
| pinkleton123 Member since Jul 2017 220 Points | Interesting idea (to me, anyway)... |
| 21st May 2023, 11:19 PM | #3 REPORT | |
| TheJudge In-house specialist in drive-by moddings. Member since Dec 2012 3715 Points Moderator | Until I was about six years old, 78s were all I'd ever heard. The only thing we had to play records on in our house (this was in the third quarter of the 1960s) was a wind-up gramophone (phonograph). It was only when my elder brother gave us his old Emisonic when he 'upgraded' in about 1968 that I heard vinyl. He also passed on a number of his singles from the late 50/early 60s, all of which I still have. |
| 1st Jun 2023, 4:40 PM | #4 REPORT | |
| Pridesale Member since Mar 2013 805 Points | Dad had both a collection of 78s a few 7in discs and a smattering of LPs (sometimes augmented from Library Hires) . I probably started playing them from age 3 or less on the radiogram dad built/assembled (plus even earlier recording ourselves/ radio broadcasts on a tape recorder he built too ( the radio dates are really odd as I THINK he built the amp for it AFTER the recording dates - maybe he was repairing it in my childhood memories and built it around 1960 or had used someone elses tape recorder for the early tapes (he was good at borrowing things from neighbours). My uncle never had any 78s that I can recall but had a good 45collection and a Pye Black Box to play them on, mum's aunt had 78s but they resided under the stairs in her house until I got them when I was 8 . then promptly broke rock around the clock while sorting them into label order. ( I had played it often in the weeks before though, ahh the days before daytime TV and we had to make our own entertainment). |
| 14th Jun 2023, 2:32 AM | #5 REPORT | |
| mojofilter Member since Jul 2012 1434 Points | 78s were the first records I heard. I don't remember that my father had any, but my mother was a Doris Day fan (scrapbooks and everything), and she liked Frank Sinatra on Columbia, Jo Stafford, Patti Page, Perry Como, Kay Kyser, Sammy Kaye and Roger Williams, '50s crooners and vocal groups, and big band music. One of her brothers, I never found out which one, was into early C&W, R&R and R&B. In the cabinet under the record player at my grandmother's house were a couple dozen 78s. This is where I first heard "Come Go With Me" by the Del-Vikings, "Ka Ding Dong" by The Diamonds, "I Dreamed Of A Hillbilly Heaven" b/w "Stealing" by Eddie Dean, "So Rare" b/w Sophisticated Swing" by Jimmy Dorsey, "The Swingin' Shepherd Blues" by Moe Koffman, "Don't Forbid Me" and "Chains Of Love" by Pat Boone, "Blueberry Hill" by Fats Domino and "Guitar Boogie Shuffle" by The Virtues. There's a good possibility it was the uncle who named his daughter Nadine after the Chuck Berry song. One of the major regrets of my life is that I couldn't take the 50,000 78s in near-mint shape that a man I worked with wanted to leave me when he died. I have nowhere to put that many records, and the weight would have cracked the foundation of my house (it sits on a concrete slab). I have no idea what happened to them. |
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Vinyl Albums : Live Music : 78 RPM : CD Albums : CD Singles : 12" Singles : 7" Singles : Tape Media : Classical Music : Music Memorabilia : Cinema : TV Series : DVD & Blu-ray : Magazines : Books : Video Games : Create Your Own World
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