One of my first memories involving music is the theme music of Star Wars. I remember after seeing the movie I could still hear the music in my head, and I tried to get my mother to listen to my ear so she could hear it too.
I also remember watching The Who smashing guitars on television.
Not sure what year it was released but American Pie is the first song for me that comes to mind. I was born in '71.
I was born in 1970 (hence my screen name). The first recorded music I can actually remember was when I was two years old. My mom would play her Carpenters and Fifth Dimension records all the time while I played in the middle of the living room floor.
While I have no memories of it, my parents told me I liked to sing along with Neil Diamond’s “Song Sung Blue” and they bought it on 45 single so I could sing along to it. Obviously I had to have heard the song on the radio first.
I don’t remember the first song I actually heard on the radio, but among the first ones that come to mind are Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock” and “Here Comes the Sun” by the Beatles.
The Beatles. My parents had a million Beatles records and played them all the time when I was little. I learned all the songs and would sing along. The Beatles broke up ten years before I was born, but of course as a toddler what would I know or care?
Also, I have a distinct memory of sitting in the kitchen with my mother and the radio was playing Billie Jean. I was confused and asked “Mommy, why is that girl singing about a girl?” my mother said “that’s not a girl, that’s Michael Jackson.” This had to be like what, 1983 or so.
Also around 1983 or '84 I saw Cyndi Lauper on tv and thought she looked so cool I wanted to look like her. I remember hearing a lot of early Madonna too…and when I was in kindergarten We Are The World was playing every two seconds.
“Teddy Bears Picnic”
It was the theme of Big John and Sparky.
A kids show.
On radio.
The earliest that I can remember in this regard is asking my dad to play Fly Like An Eagle (Steve Miller) again and again. That and The Angels Want To Wear My Red Shoes (Elvis Costello).
The first music I remember is a toss-up between "Mornin’ " by Al Jarreau and “Sign Of The Times” by Petula Clark.
The earliest TV theme is the theme for “The Waltons”. I remember being scared by the lead trumpet part; it sounded rather haunting.
I was born in 1980.
I Wonder Why -Dion & Belmonts-1958. Still amazed by the vocal gymnastics.
Eve-how right you are . Cameo label lifted the tune from Rinky Dink for Rydell’s" Cha Cha Cha"
My earliest memory of recorded music is of my grandnparents and I listening to old singles by The Beatles. More specifically, Hey Jude/Revolution and Yellow Submarine/Eleanor Rigby.
I was about three or so. This was back around 1988.
I also remember my dad playing Star, Star by The Rolling Stones, but I don’t know if that was before or after the Beatles incident. I think it was before. I do remember the chorus from Star, Star and not knowing what it meant.
Well I guess I’m older than the self-proclaimed “Old Fart” Nycteris, but not as old as Zeldar. My earliest remembered song would be (How Much Is) That Doggie In The Window by Patti Page (1953-yeah I had to look up the year). My parents used to watch the The Hit Parade on TV religiously and that’s probably where I first heard it. Anybody else remember that show? The song probably stuck in my head because it talked about puppies in a pet store window. I could relate to that.
nebco9-Let’s see- Dorothy Collins, Gisele Mckenzie, Snooky Lanson &??. Snooky had a big problem w/ Sh Boom & At My Front Door(Crazy Little Mama).
Dorothy Collins & Gisele McKenzie kind of ring a bell. Other songs I seem to remember are a little bit later. How about:
[ul][li]The Wayward Wind by Gogi Grant- I think it set a record for longest #1 on the Hit Parade I still love that one[]Fever by Peggy Lee[]Hernando’s Hidaway by ?[*]Hot Diggity, Dog Diggity, (Boom What You To Me) by ?[/ul][/li]
Probably a few more, but I can’t think of them right now. Old age and memory loss…Oh well… I’m really starting to to live up to my sig 
nebco9 & doctordoowop
I very much remember the Hit Parade you describe. And all the songs you’ve mentioned. In fact, the very first TV I saw (several years before our family had our own) was at a friend’s house across the street.
IIRC the demise of said show came with the cast’s inability to deal with the beginning of the era (dubbed Rock ‘n’ Roll) where hits were less song-based than performer-based. Their total lack of persuasion on things like “Don’t Be Cruel” – it’s laughable how they had two syllables in “cruel” – meant the older cast had to be shunted aside while folks like Jill Corey and Tommy Leonetti made their vain attempts to modernize things.
In effect, the dawn of R&R was witnessed to the dismay of the Hit Parade audience.
Oddly, based on reading I have done lately, the music industry of the older days shot itself in the foot with the recording ban in the early 40’s. Before that the major publishers (under the ASCAP aegis) ruled. Once the ban went into effect BMI gained in power and all the previously outside things like blues, “hillbilly,” R&B and even folk music became part of the mainstream available on the air. Thus the old Big Band sound gave way to the smaller group and the vocalist. (This, of course, is a major over-simplification of the forces involved in that switch in styles and eras.)
C’est la vie.
Good to see folks from roughly my generation on this thread!
Doug Bowe
Big Jon and Sparky was how I spent Saturday mornings as a kid.
That’s where I first heard “classical” music in the form of “Peter and the Wolf.”
Do you recall the “Man Without A Country” from that show?
Or Gil Hooley Mahoney’s Marching Band? (sp?)
My parents were part of the Hit Parade audience. My earliest memories of recorded and broadcast music were of what they listened to. That’s why I remember some of it, but not very well. Listenig to some of those songs brings back those “childhood memories”.
I was born in 1945, so my music began around the time of “the dawn of R&R”. People like Bill Halley and the Comets, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Elvis, etc.
I still like some of the older stuff but I was part of the crowd that watched “American Bandstand” instead of "The Hit Parade. I guess I’m partly to blame for the "dismay of the Hit Parade audience. Sorry about that, but it wasn’t all my fault. I had help.
nebco9
For those diehard Hit Parade folks, there’s still Lawrence Welk. Whenever we visit my mother-in-law, if it’s Saturday we have to find something else to do while she watches that. Usually we get as far away from the tube as possible, like outdoors.
The move away from the Hit Parade fare was nobody’s fault so much as it was a “paradigm shift” in American culture. That shift spread around the globe and came back in the 60’s from abroad just to show that the USA didn’t have sole rights to the music.
But the old-timers who thought music had died (cf. Don Maclean’s “American Pie”) with the advent of R&R just didn’t have the spokesperson to say it as well.
Perhaps the most poignant attempt at that eulogy can be found in Johnny Mercer’s lyrics to “Early Autumn.”
Ahh,“The Lawrence Welk Show”. That one I didn’t like at all, but my parents did.
For me, the best thing that came out of that show was Stan Freberg’s parody Wun’erful, Wun’erfu.
“Help-uh, help-uh, help-uh.
Somebody turn off-uh the bubble machine.
The whole Aragon Ballroom is floating out to sea”
or something like that.
That was funny!
Stan Freberg!!
Memories galore surround that guy.
The Dragonet bit.
The thing about calypso with “I come through the window.”
Even his commercials.
I just read a book with a title something like “The Golden Age Of Novelty Songs” which has some good data on Freberg and many of the topics we’ve been hinting at in this thread.
The book opines that with the exception of Weird Al Yankovic and the Dr. Demento efforts that the novelty song, as such, is pretty much a dinosaur. Too bad.
My grandma had a big wooden radio, a floor-model. It was a combination radio-record player. She used the radio for her “stories”, the soap operas, and she let me use the record player when I went to visit. I don’t remember a radio in our house until I got my own when I was about 10, but there must have been one.
Grandma had 78 rpm records in an album, and the ones I played over and over were Frankie Laine – somebody else said Moonlight Gambler, that one, and Mule Train – and Guy Mitchell – the song was a parody thing about Christopher Columbus and I think it must have been a B-side to something more popular.
The other memorable records at grandma’s house (which I recently found on CD) were the Little Orley stories, in particular Little Orley and the Haunted House and Little Orley and the Bubble Gum.