Ooh, while reading Marlitharn’s post I was suddenly reminded of the 45s I got from my Mother. In her younger days she worked at a local radio station and accumulated some of the cast-offs. I’ve still got some of those - Dean Martin, Andy Williams, Perry Como, Jackie Gleason & Walter Pidgeon if you can believe it (from Take Me Along - I adored Little Green Snake), Margie Rayburn, Hank Snow. I used to play them all on a Show 'n Tell. The flip side of some of the Show 'n Tell records had fun music too like El Capitan and Blue Tail Fly.
My Mum mostly had:
Olivia Newton John
Barry Manilow
Engelbert Humperdinck
Petula Clark
Johnny Mathis
My Dad didn’t listen to much music. He had a Greatest Hits of Country Music album, a Charley Pride album and one Elvis LP that Mum wouldn’t let him put on.
So, no, I did not raid their collection. But good news! With intensive therapy, I’ve managed to live a normal life.
I *have *my parents’ record collection now. Like many above, the classic Tom Lehrer/Allan Sherman/Vaughn Meader comedy albums.
My father liked folk music and the louder, crashier classical composers, which I disdain. He also liked show tunes (hmmmm . . . . ) so there’s a lot of Broadway cast albums of the '50s and '60s, and some Judy and Barbra (*hmmmm *. . . . ).
Mom liked the Baroque composers (as do I) and had lots of big band music of her youth–Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, all of which I adore.
Alas, Mom & Pop did little to role-model a love of music for me. They did like Hank Williams, whose songs bring me fond memories to this day.
There were some gas station and Montgomery Wards Christmas albums, some Herb Alpert (should we just assume that every child of the 60’s had this in the house?), and the odd, old-skool country (Buck Owens? Marty Robbins?)
Oddly enough, late in life Dad developed a fondness for CCR that astounded me.
Now, if only my kids had shown any interest in my collection (sigh).
mmm
The ones I’m thinking of were arranged very oddly. Besides a lot of left-right swoops to show off the cutting-edge stereo technology, the arrangements seemed to be designed to show off your hi-fi’s dynamic range rather than in a way that made musical sense, so you end up with a orchestra of pocket trumpets and contrabassoons with a theremin playing the melody line. I’m exaggerating, but not by much.
I may also be one of the few people born later than 1963 familiar with Vaughan Meader’s First Family record.
Are you my brother? My parents didn’t listen to music at home, not at all. There was a radio but they only had it on for sports or news. My grandparents had a record player and actual albums, and they’d let me play them. Guy Mitchell, Frankie Laine, Little Orley.
My daughter is the only one of my four who inherited musical taste from me – Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, and Elvis. But I did get something from my kids – Styx, Foreigner, Cinderella, Springsteen, ELO, REO Speedwagon, Queen, and The Kinks.
The record in my parents’ collection that made the greatest impression was a 78 rpm Ella Fitzgerald-Louis Jordan song* that I hold responsible for fueling an interest in novelty songs and '30s-40s-era jazz/R&B music (I have a bunch of Louis Jordan and Cab Calloway recordings on my Ipod).
*nothing like a cheery song about spousal abuse and murder to get you in the mood for, well, something.
**my other big fave from the parents’ collection was another 78, this time of Bing Crosby doing “The Iowa Indian Song” (I think it was recorded with Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians), which I used as the intro music to my college radio show.
I buy a ton of LPs, so I’m in a lot old record shops (“I just love the smell of mildew in the morning!”). And I hit numerous garage/estate sales.
I see the EXACT twenty albums that my parents had: Herb Alpert, Harry Belafonte, An LP called “Ebb Tide” (no kidding, I’ve seen hundreds of this one album…WHAT was the big deal?), Baja Marimba Band, Kingston Trio, Bill Cosby, Bob Newhart, “The First Family”… I could go on.
I’m beginning to suspect that from 1954-62 all (midwest white bread) parents received a mandatory shopping list.
Oh, to answer the OP: I sneered at all my folks’ bland “101 Strings Play Family Favorites” records.
But the Kingston Trio albums were exciting. Two of the three grew up in Hawaii listening to a lot of international music, and incorporated indiginous folk tunes into their sound.
They could do any type of folk tune… and the hippest hipster song ever: “Scotch and Soda”. read the notes for the provenance of the song.
Big Brother and the Holding Company – “Cheap Thrills”
Jimi Hendrix – “Are You Experienced”
John Mayall – various
some other stuff, but it wasn’t until their hipper friends let me come over to fuck their daughters that I could hear Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and everybody else.
I didn’t even hear the Beethoven piano sonatas or Mahler’s Symphonies until I was old enough to walk over to the library and check them out on my own card. My parents were so white…they were so white…never mind, got nothing.
My uncle had the shit record collection though – Duncan Swift, Max Morath, Eubie Blake, Joshua Rifkin, William Bolcom, playing Jelly Roll, Blake, Joplin, Lamb, everybody and he let me play them all. Then he gave them to me and still got all that shit.
You’re not giving Barbra Streisand credit. I’m working on the theory that Barbra Streisand fans of the '60s and '70s had in common a predisposition to some mysterious illness leading to early mortality, resulting in their relatives cleaning house and selling off all the Barbra Streisand records to used LP dealers for maybe 5 cents per album. Then, since no one ever buys them, they stack up in the bins to the point that every third album is one of Barbra’s. Gah.
The illness was especially virulent if the victim had bought Barbara’s Broadway Album or Je M’Appelle Barbara.
Later generations would succumb to the Boz Scagg’s Silk Degrees Syndrome, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors Rheumatism, and the lesser-known Abba/Air Supply/Manilow Plague.
Tchaikovsky, Hungarian Rhapsodies (1 and 2? not sure, but definitely #2). Yeah, I’d heard #2 first in cartoons, but I loved it sans TV. I wore a hole through that album.
By the time I was finally interested in music* my parents had pretty much stopped listening to records in favor of CDs (it was the early 90s, after all), so I raided those instead. I was most impressed by Dad’s Tom Petty albums and Mom’s Moody Blues ones.
*in 9th grade, mind you. As a wee little kid I *hated *music and would request talk radio on long car rides instead (!!), and after that was indifferent until I was a teenager.
Tennessee Ernie Ford, Spike Jones, Nat king Cole and South Pacific. Sort of a weird combination but these are what they played the most. No wonder I go for eclectic mixes.
