[78-L] Introduction (a bit long)

[Bart]

I joined the mailing list about 2 weeks ago and I thought I'd introduce
myself briefly.  I'm surprised at how active a list it is.  

I'm too young to have memories of the 78rpm era except for its dying echo.
I was born after, but not long after, it ended.  As a child, when I had my
first record player, I had some 78's to play with; mostly classical music, 
albums missing a broken disc, that sort of thing, which the grown-ups 
considered too old, obsolete, or incomplete to worry that a kid might break 
them.  And I broke a few, but far less than you might imagine.  It was an 
early training in regarding records as precious and fragile that was only 
strengthened in the Hi-Fi days of the seventies.  I don't have sentimental 
memories of swing and big bands - my memories are of Led Zeppelin, CS&N, and
Pink Floyd and the like.  

I did, as a child, have some non-classical 78's.  I remember a few, like 
Song of India, and the St. Louis Blues on a twelve-inch by Duke Ellington 
with vocals by Bing Crosby, and an album set with a missing broken disc of
songs by Burl Ives.  Also had the Texas A&I (now defunct university) Fight 
Song and Alma Mater on a 10 inch locally produced disk.  That's still around.
I remember the photos of Arthur Fiedler as a young man with dark hair on 
classical recordings of the Boston Pops, and also Sir Thomas Beecham, Bart..  

Really liked that St. Louis Blues.  And Creole Love Call which I also
had by Duke Ellington.  

It was the Ellington sides that reignited my interest in older music.  
Although there was already a sort of inevitability about it.  I lost 
interest in rock-n-roll in the succession of punk to new wave to rap and 
hip-hop.  In those years I was going backwards.  I had always been interested
in the music of the late sixties though my generation's music was rightly
the music of the seventies.  As pop went places I didn't want to go I went 
to the music of the early sixties and fifties; at least the musics that fed
the rock-n-roll stream: blues and doo-wop and rock-a-billy and such.  

In it's early days I largely missed the digital/mp3 revolution.  It would be
better to say I came to the party very late.  For reasons relating to the 
need for a specific, very expensive program in my work, I had to keep running
a Windows 3.x machine longer than most anyone else.  Mp3's were introduced 
after Win 3 and I never found in those days MP3 player software written for 
Win 3.  Eventually got a more modern machine for fun and a few years ago 
wondered idly, "There's supposed to be a lot of music on the Internet, I 
wonder if I could find that old Duke Ellington tune."

What I found were sites like The Internet Archive, The Cylinder Digitization 
Project, and The Virtual Gramophone.  From that I developed a big interest in
old music, but what appealed to me most was the music of the 'teens, the first
decade, and the nineteen-twenties.  Not only was this great music, it was 
completely unheard and unknown - and because of the equipment needed to play
some of it – the cylinders - almost unknowable before the digital
revolution.  
(Sometime in the late thirties, certainly after the war I largely lose
interest.
That's stuff I've had heard before in movies, on TV, radio, LPs etc.  It
wasn't
the boundless unknown of the earlier era.)

I recorded my (legally acquired!) sound files onto CD's and took them to
work, 
played them at home, just surrounded myself with my newly discovered
favorite old
music.  Then people would say, "You like that old stuff?  I've got some old
records
you can have if you want them." And I always do want them.  So I've
acquired a 
small collection (around 200) disks.  I don't expect they are rare, or
valuable, 
or even especially interesting except for a tiny handful.  I'm not
interested in 
what they are worth because I don't intend to sell them - I'm a confirmed
pack-rat.
But I'm full of questions about them.  

I don't have proper a set-up to play them now, though I can play them on 
an old turntable at 33 or 45 and record them on the computer, then speed up 
the recording digitally.  I don't have a proper stylus, and probably don't
have 
enough weight on the tone arm.  I would need to acquire equipment to play them
in a casual fashion, but like (almost) all of us budget is limited.
Nevertheless
I have gotten good transcriptions from some of the latest discs.  (Were the 
grooves smaller at the end of 78 production?)

The bulk of my collection came in two boxes from two individuals.  One was
mostly hot sides from the late thirties, Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman, Artie 
Shaw, and other big recognizable names.  Most were well-loved, which is a 
euphemism for very worn.  The other box from a different individual showed 
more refined taste: Paul Robeson, Edith Piaf, Jack Hylton, Noel Coward and 
Broadway recordings, foreign pressings, durium Hit-of-the-Week records, Paul 
Whiteman, even a Little Wonder.

I apologize for the long post.  My posts will be shorter in the future.  I 
don't expect to post too often - I'm here more as a student than a teacher, 
an enthusiast than an expert.  But I know there are real experts on this list
and I have a million questions.  I want to know what others recommend and what
they've used / are using to play their records.  I want to see a picture of 
Rae Eleanor Ball (there doesn't seem to be one anywhere on line).  I want to 
know when Benny Bell recorded "Humoresque in C major".  I want to know what 
became of the Lass brothers,  Mark and Boris, after they were arrested and
charged
in that fine art forgery scandal.   I want to know the story behind a disc
I have
that has a basically blank label with no record company name or logo, nor 
performers' names, just a song title and a number, and a different performer 
on each side.   Mostly, I want to know when certain records were recorded or 
released, some sense of from when they are dated - for records where that 
information isn't readily available in on-line discographies. 

I understand this list is mainly devoted to record collectors, but I don't 
understand yet the limits of that discussion and what is off-topic.  Has there
been much discussion of old songs independent of the recordings of the song
(who 
wrote it, stories about lyricist, composer, the history of the song itself)?  
What about discussion of the early cylinders and records that can be heard
from 
university and government archives as opposed to just the discs I happen to
have 
in my living room?

Some of that will probably become more apparent as I read more postings.  And 
other questions might have been covered before, but there doesn't seem to
be an
obvious way to search the archive of the group's past postings.

Enough for now.  Hello to all from central Texas and I hope to learn more from
the busy traffic on this board.

How do you read them all???

Bart