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Records With History

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I thought it might be fun to hear about records in your collection that have history behind them. I’ll start it out…

About ten years ago, I would scour eBay for batches of old 78s to play on my acoustic phonograph. I wouldn’t pick and choose titles, I’d just depend on the luck of the draw and look for batches that seemed to have lots of interesting stuff. (Shipping is cheaper in a batch.) I saw a batch advertised that had a lot of 12 inch Victor Red Seals… Enrico Caruso and other great opera singers from the beginning of the 20th century. It was cheap so I bid the minimum and won the batch. Before the seller shipped, I asked him if he had any other 78s he’d like to sell so it could all go in one box. He asked me my interest and if I was a dealer, and I explained that I had just bought a beautiful Walnut Brunswick phonograph and I was looking for records to play on it. He PMed me back and said that he had one album binder of records but they were very special. He had no way to play them, and I sounded like the right person to have them. He didn’t charge me for them, I just paid shipping. He told me the story behind them…

The guy lived in California North of Sacramento near Yreka. Next door to his house was a nursing home. He would see the residents there when they came outside to get some sun, and he befriended an old man with a big white beard and a German accent. They would sit together and the old man would tell him stories of his youth.

The man was German and had emigrated to the United States after WWI. Germany was in bad shape at that time, and he felt that he had to make a new life for himself in a new place. He had read about the California Gold Rush, and his dream was to become a gold prospector. He made his way to the California Gold country and built a cabin far out in the woods near a river. No electricity or indoor plumbing. Just a one room cabin with a pot bellied stove. He built a sluice trough by the river to pan for gold and made enough money from selling the gold in town to buy supplies to live on. He lived all by himself out there in the forest- a recluse- the people in town knew him as “that old prospector from up in the hills”, no one knew his name.

He lived in that cabin, tending his gold mining operation for over five decades. One time, he failed to show up in town for one of his regular selling/buying visits and the people in the town became worried about him. They sent the Sheriff looking for him. The Sheriff found the old man in his cabin very sick and unable to take care of himself. They brought him back to town and social workers arranged for relief funds to put him up in the nursing home.

He told the guy I met through eBay many tall tales about the animals in the forest and his luck mining gold. They spent many afternoons together. One day a nurse from the home came over to his house and told him that the old man had passed away. He didn’t have many possessions aside from the clothes on his back, but he had let the people there know that he had a folder of records in a drawer that he wanted them to give to his friend next door when he died. They did that, and the guy had kept the records for 15 or 20 years, not knowing what to do with them. He packed them up and sent them to me.

When I received the package, I took out the first record and put it on my phonograph and played it. As I listened, I imagined a young German man who had left his homeland behind to live all by himself in a cabin in the woods for year after year. No electricity, just a fire and a lamp and a wind up phonograph to play the same dozen records over and over after the sun went down. As I listened and thought about the history behind the record, tears welled up in my eyes.

Below is the record he had. (Not the same copy though…)

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Comments

  1. Wow. Great story. The best I can do are a couple of old Beatles albums that my parents were given when they got married (a week before the Ed Sullivan Show).

  3. Thanks Bigshot, What a remarkable story! That made my day.

    I have no stories to tell but yesterday evening I stumbled across a baffling sentence in the novel I’m reading: Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke published in 1973.

    It’s the end of WW2 and Giles, the protagonist is serving in the Royal Navy and finds himself at the big naval base of Trincomalee on the north east coast of Sri Lanka.

    “Sometimes you bum som VJ discs from a bloke in one of the carriers and take them off with a couple of crates of beer to one of the islands in the bay.”

    What is a VJ disc??

    A bit of googling but me straight.

    Just as there had been VE Day for Victory in Europe, VJ referred to Victory in Japan.

    And the US recording industry had produced special recordings to raise the morale of the troops.

    https://www.savethevinyl.org/v-disc-the-story-of-the-american-military-record-label-during-wwii.html

    V Disc was a special American military record label during WW2!

    “​V-Disc (“V” for Victory) was a morale-boosting initiative involving the production of several series of recordings during the World War II era by special arrangement between the United States government and various private U.S. record companies. The records were produced for the use of United States military personnel overseas. Many popular singers, big bands and orchestras of the era recorded special V-Disc records.

    These 12-inch, vinyl 78 rpm gramophone recordings were created for the Army between October 1943 and May 1949. Navy discs were released between July 1944 and September 1945. Twelve-inch discs were used because, when 136 grooves per inch were cut, they could hold up to six and a half minutes of music. Not all releases were pressed of vinyl, many were of the much less durable shellac compound used for standard 78 RPM records of the day.”

    “​Many V-Discs contained spoken-word introductions by bandleaders and artists, wishing good luck and prayers for the soldiers overseas, and their hopes for a swift and safe return. Glenn Miller, for instance, introduced V-Disc 65A, issued in December, 1943, with the following message: “This is Captain Glenn Miller speaking for the Army Air Force’s Training Command Orchestra and we hope that you soldiers of the Allied forces enjoy these V-Discs that we’re making just for you.” V-Discs also featured one-of-a-kind performances, as artists who were not shackled by restrictive record company contracts could now perform special versions of the 1940s’ most popular hits.”

    I found that all quite fascinating.

    There’s a large Commonwealth War Cemetery at Trincomalee but nowadays it’s most famous as a surfers’ paradise.

        • Thanks for your comments @mikethep and @jazzjet.

          I’ve started to nose around and discovered a couple of compilations on Spotify.

          I was very taken by the image of these rather forlorn, homesick British sailors sitting on a Sri Lankan beach in 1944 with a portable record player listening to American jazz.

          Once I’ve finished the novel, I suspect I’ll be returning to the Far East to investigate this further.

        • Not just in WWII.
          A few years back I acquired a batch of 16 digitised V-Disc recordings from the Vietnam war era. Live C&W and Bluegrass recordings from the Grand Ol’ Opry.
          There are 292 tracks, over 13 hours in total.

    • V-Disks are public domain because the copyright and royalties were donated to the Us government. That has meant that there have been a lot of LP and CD collections of the hundreds of disks of musical programs. Another similar thing was Jubillee, a program of music aimed at black soldiers. They were on 16 inch transcription disks and ran about 20 minutes. Lots of fantastic live jazz there.

        • I love the comment:

          “The music is designed for both listening and dancing.”

          Imagine how many parties that had Duke Ellington and his orchestra as a soundtrack.

          I know that the American public was to begin with definitely in two minds about getting involved in the war in Europe. The Axis Powers made great diplomatic efforts to prevent this.

          William Boyd’s novel, Restless, describes this period very well. It’s also a rollicking good read.

          After Pearl Harbour, neutrality was no longer an option. And as a result, many artists were keen to do their bit for the troops.

          Quite a contrast to the Vietnam War!

  4. What a terrific story!

    I’ve got a load of old Yahoo label blues albums that I picked up from a clearance sale years ago, but they are all 33 r.p.m. vinyl albums with nothing like the historical depth of anything on 78 r.p.m. Similarly, I once bought a box full of mint Topic label albums from a bloke who’d bought the stock from a bankrupt wholesaler – he sold me the LPs for about £1.50 each at a time when they were priced by Record Collector at ten times that much. He had yards of shelves of the things, a dozen or more copies of every one on the label. I bought quite a selection of them – as many as I could afford – I think I spent about £50. They weren’t bought to show a profit – I’ve still got them all.

    There are a couple of LPs I own that have some personal history going back to school days.

    I was in the school cadet force, and we sometimes used to get bussed out to Dartmoor for ‘exercises’, which often involved arseing about with rifles and blank cartridges, overnight camping in tents up in the wilds, lighting camp fires, frying sausages and baking spuds in the ashes. All good fun, and there was often a great atmosphere in the coaches as we set off; usually involving rugby songs, folk songs and so on from the older lads at the back of the bus.

    On one occasion, one of the sixth form boys was encouraged by his mates to give us a rendition of ‘That song about Plymouth’ that he knew. After some hesitation he launched into it; he knew all the words very well, and there was a rousing chorus which everyone else quickly picked up and joined.

    I thought the song was amusing and asked him where he’d got it from. He told me it was from an LP his dad owned, and though he couldn’t remember the singer’s name he said he thought that the LP was called ‘Mayflower Miscellany’.

    This nugget stayed with me and eventually, through the later acquisition of an old copy of the big red ‘Music Master’ tome that record shops used to keep behind the counter in pre-internet days, I started trying to find the record. The album turned out to be called ‘A Mayflower Garland’ by the local folk-singer Cyril Tawney, and was issued on the famous Argo label. The songs were interspersed with readings from a contemporary account of the establishment of ‘Plimouth Plantation’ in Massachusetts, and the LP had been issued to coincide with the ‘Mayflower 70’ programme of events celebrating the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrim Father’s departure from the town.

    I eventually found myself a nice copy via the Record Collector small-ads back pages. Since then it’s even become available in CD format on the Talking Elephant label. The song we heard on the bus that day is called ‘A Second Class Citizen’s Song’, and is a lament for the feeling that provincial cities are largely ignored by the government in that London. Plus ca change.

    A couple of years later, I was looking to acquire a small portable cassette recorder, mostly so that I could borrow my mate’s LPs and make cassette copies of them. One of my peers in the sixth form was selling a little Sanyo machine, having had his own stereo equipment upgraded courtesy of inheriting kit via an older brother who’d also upgraded. I registered a keen interest and asked him if he would bring the machine in to school so that I could see it and hear it playing.

    He happily obliged and one lunchtime we sat down to hear what it sounded like. He pressed ‘Play’ and out came the sound of a really interesting band, a little unusual with prominent jazzy B3 playing, great driving guitar parts and intriguing lyrics. I was smitten by the band, and impressed by the sound the little machine delivered.

    We agreed a price and shook on the deal. From memory I paid him £11 for it, after light haggling. I offered to pay another quid or so if he threw in the cassette he’d used to demo the sound, but that didn’t belong to him, it was his brother’s, and he’d get it in the neck if he didn’t hand it back. What he did know was the name of the band I’d liked; ‘Cressida’.

    A new name to me, I decided to see if I could get the LP for myself. What I didn’t know at the time was that their LP had sold poorly; it was a Vertigo title with little promotion from the record label, and it had slipped out unnoticed and sold few copies.

    Fast forward a month or two, and I’m on my regular trawl through the second-hand record shops of central Plymouth, just browsing with little money and therefore little prospect of buying anything. To my surprise, at the back of a big cardboard box of LPs I find not one but two copies of the eponymous Cressida LP, one for 50p and one for £1! On inspecting the vinyl I opt for the more expensive copy and grab myself a bargain. My mate Mike grabs the other one on my recommendation. Good result.

    I’ve still got that LP, and since then I’ve acquired the CD version that came out on Repertoire twenty years later, where it was twinned with their second, even rarer album called ‘Asylum’. To this day I wonder if Mike still has his slightly battered vinyl copy.

  5. I posted up a pic of a 78’s record box I saw at a car boot over the weekend and have many tales of unusual 78’s I have found over the years. From Royal Family and presidential speeches to birds and 1940’s picture discs, but probably the oldest and certainly rarest one I found was quite by accident.

    I was at an auction house in Fife, where I visit every week as there’s a lot of well to do old folks popping their clogs over by Falkland Castle so it’s always unexpected what turns up there. They don’t do the online thing which is unusual for a regular auction so the stuff of interest (records in my case) needs to be seen in person, which I do prefer to be honest.

    So I saw this lot of albums, probably 20 in total and in the middle was an album signed by Larry “shut that door” Grayson, which also had quite possibly the best sticker on any album ever released on the front ‘£1.60 – such a gay price’! It also included a signed photo inside so I simply had to have it. I left a small commission bid of £6 for the box as it seemed to me unlikely anyone else would be at all interested in a record by a long dead English comedian with a fairly niche audience and it proved to be so when I collected the box from the auction the following day.
    When I got home and sorted the good from the bad inside it was pretty much all rubbish (apart from Larry’s album of course) except tucked at the back were a couple of 78’s which I had completely missed when I originally looked inside. One instantly caught my eye as it was titled The Football Match – Rangers v. Celts on the Zonophone label. I knew straight away it must be my oldest football related record (I do have quite a large collection) and with some research was very pleased to discover it was from 1907.

    I posted up a scan to a few 78 collectors Facebook pages and was soon contacted by folks asking me to sell it and 2 local newspapers picked up on it too, within a week it was all over the Scottish press and within a couple of weeks the national press, The Mail, The Sun etc. I told one reporter who asked what I’d do with it, that I’d offer it to Celtic mad fan Rod Stewart, which within a week made the front page of the Yorkshire Post – ‘man offers worlds oldest football disc to Rod!’ erm, it was only supposed to be a joke, but hey.

    After all the press frenzy died down I was still getting offers for it, but the trouble with collecting any stuff and especially records, is that if you have something unique then another collector is likely to keep badgering away with offers and so it proved to be. One guy who I am assured has the biggest collection of Scottish football records in the country (I’m not that dedicated to a particular country but I admit most of mine are English) has made me several kind offers but despite his latest one just a few weeks ago which included his promise that he would also donate it to the Hampden Park Football Museum, I have not relented as IT’S A NICE THING to keep, it still sits on my shelves, probably until my lad donates all the 78’s to a charity shop when my clogs are popped.

    View post on imgur.com

  6. I had a small business transferring 78 for CD release back in the 90s, and got a good reputation for the quality of my work. I got a call one day from a lady who had been recommended to me. She was a concert pianist, and her mother had been one of the handful of Jewish children that made it out of Nazi Germany to an orphanage in England. It ended up that she was the only person in her family to survive. They all were sent to the death camps shortly after she arrived as a refugee in England.

    Her mother dreamed of being a concert pianist but without any family, that wasn’t possible. But she made sure her daughter could take up the piano and make a career of it. Her mother passed away, and the daughter was determined to write a book on her mother’s difficult life. She titled the book “Children of Willesden Lane”.

    Once the book came out, she was contacted by an elderly man who had known her mother. He was her boyfriend for a while. He saved his money to send her to a shop where they recorded and made private records for people. He said he had a copy of the record they made and wanted to give it to her. The daughter had no way to play it and didn’t know what was on it. She brought it to me to transfer for her and said she’d come back later in the day to pick it up. When she came I had it all ready and I sat her down and played it for her. It was Liszt… a piece she had heard her mother play many times, and one she often played herself.

    As she listened a big smile crossed her face and tears streamed down her cheeks. When it was done, she thanked me, saying she never dreamed she would hear her mother perform as a teenager. “So many mistakes!” she laughed.

    A month later, she invited me to a performance in Santa Monica promoting her book. She told stories of her mother and at the end of her talk, she introduced the recording and played it for the audience. Halfway through, she sat at the piano and as her mother faded out, she picked up the melody and finished the piece live.

    There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

  7. I have one more record related story… A friend of mine came over to listen to records with me. He asked me, “Of all your records, which one is your favorite?” I went over to the shelf and got a 78 of Cab Calloway’s band playing “Some of These Days”. He asked to hear it, so I took it out of its sleeve, it neatly broke into two pieces by itself. I did nothing to break it. Since then I’ve been superstitious… I won’t say what my favorite record is lest the fates punish me!

    • My life of crime, such as it was, started when I stole a Jerry Lee Lewis 78 from Keddies department store in Southend High Street. As I was about to go out through the door someone came in and shoved the door into my chest. Demise of Jerry Lee. I resolved to steal only 45s in future.

  8. Another story but this one is about a 12″ single. I started volunteering for a local cable radio station CRMK (Cable Radio Milton Keynes) in early 1991. I did a late night show from 1am to 3am for a few months but couldn’t keep such mad hours and luckily was soon moved to 10pm until midnight where I stayed for 32 years! My move to Scotland in 2020 made it easier to do a show for an Edinburgh based station so here I am, anyway… One of the great things I discovered doing a weekly radio show for a small station (remember it was on cable so I knew hardly anyone was actually listening as it probably took too much effort to connect a wire to a radio amp) but I didn’t care at all as I just love(d) mucking about with records and playing lots of dub, electronica and whatever the heck I fancied. I’d record my show on cassette and was advised to send them to promotion companies as they would be happy to send free records of a similar tip.

    This snowballed to such an extent that within a year I was getting 20+ parcels of free records a week, mostly promos, white labels, interviews, coloured vinyl etc, it was just incredible. I wasn’t going to stop doing the show even when I wasn’t really in the mood or feeling inspirational that week so I just kept at it and for over 20 years the records then CD’s just kept rolling in. I pretty much kept most things, I have crates of promo cdrs in the garage (it’s time consuming just re-listening to them so they’re just sitting there) the records I have culled over the years, I donated hundreds back to the station if they were popular Indie bands, Supergrass, Radiohead etc, I’m sure I’ve let a lot of rare stuff go free, but hey ho. Most of the weird stuff on Warp, Ninja Tune and so on I did keep and I often sorted out on a deeper level.

    It was whilst I was going through the 12″ singles I came across a hand spray painted record which just had the word Blowpop along the top. It was a white label with no other identifying info on it apart from the matrix number in the run-out grooves. I soon discovered it was one of only 100 sleeves spray painted by a Bristol based artist called Banksy. Realising it was probably worth a bit I thought I may as well stick the thing up on eBay then, and bidding went nuts. After a week it finished at £5,850 which today, 7 years later, is still a record price for a Banksy record sleeve. It was in near mint condition though and was bought by a French gallery who I assume still have it. I went on holiday with the kids to Spain that year and ended up more records of course and still have no regrets on letting it go, it had just sat quietly in my racks un-loved/ un-played since 1999.

    View post on imgur.com

    • a caveat to this story is that the guy who sent it to me via Zzonked Promotions in 1999 is now a friend on FB and when I mentioned this story he posted on my page saying how terrible I was for selling something he sent to me as a free promotion item. I apologised in the comments like a pathetic earthling and he replied “GOTCHA!” as he said he still has some copies himself that he had kept by. He said when Banksy came into their offices they laid all the blank sleeves in lines on the floor and he just walked along them spraying away with his can & stencil and it wasn’t very glamourous and he had a mask on even then so they didn’t know who he was either.

  9. I said I had run out of stories, but I just thought of one more. This one is about a cursed CD.

    I was digging through the stacks of used CDs at my favorite rekkid store and I happened upon one called Myron Floren’s Polka Favorites. I like me some easy listening and bouncy polka music makes me very happy, so I picked it up and brought it home. I popped it in the CD player and out of the speakers comes Malcom McLaren introducing the Sex Pistols. I open the player and look at the disc, and it says Myron Floren Polka Favorites and has his smiling mug on it.

    Now I am probably one of the handful of people in the world who likes both Myron Floren and the Sex Pistols, so I wasn’t disappointed. But the contrast of cover to music was funny. I told several friends about it and they said they wanted to see this disc next time they visited.

    Unfortunately, two days later Los Angeles suffered a major earthquake and the contents of my shelves were dumped on the floor and my tower speakers fell on top. One of them had landed square on Myron Floren’s Sex Pistols, breaking the CD in half. When my friends came over, I showed them the disc, but with no way to play it, they thought I was making up stories and didn’t believe me.

    I put the CD in the trash because it had brought me bad luck and I didn’t want more. I never got to play the disc for anyone, so I’m the only one that knows about it. But my advice to anyone who finds a CD called Myron Floren’s Polka Favorites in the used bin, leave it be. You don’t want it.

    • That happened to me, but the other way around (also LP, not CD).
      I bought the latest LP by Nina Hagen some time in the 80s, and when I got it home and played it, it was an orchestra of the “easy listening” (bloody hard to listen to, actually) variety.
      Wasn’t a fan of that genre, so I returned and got it exchanged for actual Nina.
      I guess they must have shared label and/or pressing plant and similar release dates, so things got mixed up! But probably not a big shared fanbase…although I suppose that the easy listening fan who got Nina’s vocal antics instead was probably a bit more shocked than me.

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