This year I have reached a huge milestone - this is the 40th year I have collected my vintage big band recordings. It is significant because at this point, I believe I have almost everything I was looking for, and it's a big collection. So much so that at this point I don't even have any plans for new purchases yet for the coming year. Since the 40th anniversary is October 1st, I wanted to begin by telling a little story, and then I will get to the stats for the year.
The date is Friday, October 1, 1982. I am 12 years old, and just a little over a month from my 13th birthday. It was only a year previous that I really got into listening to the music I fell in love with listening on WBT-AM radio. I knew that records had to exist, although at this point the only records I knew about were my mother's small depressing country music collection. Mom's music was something I tolerated but hated, and I was at the age that I was looking for my own musical identity, and I found it the previous year. Now it was time to start moving to the next level - music that I didn't have to wait a whole week to hear on the radio but could play myself any time. Mom was supportive in that too, and fortunately for us there was a junk shop in the nearby town of Rio, WV, that had a good stock of old records that they sold at the time for a quarter apiece. I was not aware of that at the time, but fate would change that quickly.
It was on a Friday afternoon, and I was still in the 6th grade and my elementary school I attended was next door - it took about 5 minutes to walk from the front door of my house to Grassy Lick School. After a relatively normal and good school day, I walked home in the crisp autumn weather that afternoon and when I got home Mom had just came back from shopping - back then, my dad sent us about $100 each month in child support, and I got a little allowance from it. Mom used a little of that allowance to get me something at the Rio Mall (our local name for that junk shop)that would prove revolutionary in my own life. She knew I was into this music I heard on the radio, and she discovered the record pile at Rio and found me a Harry Belafonte LP due to the fact I actually liked Harry Belafonte's "Banana Boat Song" that was played often on my favorite radio show on Sundays. It was a very thoughtful gesture, although that was not really the type of music I was looking for - it scratched the surface, but it was not quite the sound. That would come the following month when I actually got to Rio to shop for myself and would discover a gold mine.
Any rate, I get home that night, and Mom said she got me something at the store, and it was this record. I didn't hate the record honestly - as a matter of fact, some of the tracks on it were good. However, getting that record was extremely significant, as it opened up a whole new door to the music I love. That night I got to listen to it, and it was an experience. From that point, I became a record collector.
That was 40 years ago, and 40 years later, I have achieved levels of what I found I only dreamed of back then. So, where are we now? As of today, my collection stands at 1838 CD recordings, 1141 LP records, and 204 DVDs of vintage big band concerts, "soundies," movies, documentaries, and TV shows. That comes to 3183 total items in my collection. Of course, with the 78s, 45s, and cylinder recordings I also have but don't count, it would be over 3200. I also do not count that first Harry Belafonte record either - I have that, but it is in a frame on my wall next to my CD shelf as a sort of token of where this all started. That being said, let's talk about what we added this year.
As I have generally pretty much found every vintage big band recording I could desire on either LP or CD, the focus this year was on some other stuff that I wanted to add to the collection. There were certain legendary singers and vocal groups from the 1950s in particular I wanted to get collections of, and so we did. Some of these were large ensembles - I got the early Ray Conniff collection, for instance, as his earlier LPs were quite good honestly - and others were individual singers such as Perry Como, Billy Daniels, Pat Boone, and others. I also came across a few rarities too - my good friends the Sprunks in Arizona just remastered all of those Ernie Heckscher LPs I have been wanting to get on CD, so they are part of my collection now. I also got good collections of Larry Clinton, Jan Garber, and other vintage big bands that did not have comprehensive sets until now, so they are part of the collection too. At the beginning of the year, I also boosted numbers a bit as I finally integrated my classic post-1950 jazz collection - about 35 recordings - into the main collection. It is time those were integrated in, and so they are now. I also have decreased buying LPs this year - I picked up a few but there are not really that many to find anymore. In short, it was a productive but different year. I also focused some on DVDs of some vintage movies and TV programs, and now have both Ray Anthony TV shows - the one he had in the mid-1950s with his big band, and the other in the early 1960s with the smaller Louis Prima-style group (both are good at any rate). Any rate, it all looks good.
A lot has changed since I first started collecting 40 years ago. Back then, the primary musical format as vinyl records, although cassettes were around then too and when I first started collecting I did amass several cassettes as well although I never really liked cassettes - they were too unpredictable to preserve good music on honestly. That is why it was actually a good thing when those finally started phasing out about 20 years ago. Then came CDs - the first of those came out in the late 1980s when I was still in high school, but I didn't get the first CDs in my collection until the beginning of 1995. The first ones I still have and still recall, as they were a $5 big band set I got from Walmart which surprisingly had some quality stuff on them - Glenn Miller AAF orchestra, Duke Ellington, the Benny Goodman "Camel Caravan" broadcasts of the 1930s, Earl "Fatha" Hines, and the early Les Brown Duke Blue Devils. Those were issued on a small label called LaserLight, and I am not sure if that label is even still in existence as I haven't seen their stuff in over 20 years. I also got my first CD player at the same time - it was a portable "boombox" type player I also picked up at Walmart the same night. I got the first CDs after a bit of a hiatus for a few years when I was focused on other things - school, getting married, church ministry, Assyrians, etc. - but I always had one or two vintage LPs on hand and never gave up liking my music. I had also lost my whole original LP collection in storage after getting married and moving to start college in 1992, but in coming years I would find practically all of them again and would recover my collection fast. Also, over the years, my buying options have changed drastically - I started out at junk shops and thrift stores in my early collection days, and then as I came into the CD era I began to become more specialized. My first options were music stores - Spec's, Borders, Best Buy, etc. As I began to find out really how much stuff was released on CD, one of my earliest and most consistent vendors was World's Records, which was based in Novato, CA. Beginning in 1997, I began a purchasing relationship with them and their owner, Ren Brown, that lasted until they finally closed shop in 2012. Other vendors I would work with later include Ian Dodds and his wife in Australia, who operate still a company called Crystal Stream Audio that I still purchase from today. Then there was Bob Stone and Bermuda House, based out of southern California - Stone specialized in reissuing good recordings of society/hotel bands like Ernie Heckscher and Jack Malick on CD from the LP era, as well as also specializing in Orrin Tucker's catalog. They have since disappeared, and it is unfortunate too as I would like to replace a couple of CDs I got from them that have a lot of static on them - if anyone reading this knows how to either fix an audio CD with static or if they know where some of Stone's material can still be purchased, feel free to get in touch. Another individual I dealt with over the years was a gentleman named Mark Caputo, who has an extensive collection of vintage big band radio broadcasts. Mark has sort of retired from making those available on CD, but I managed to get several important items from him before he did so. I have also made good friends and purchases from a number of exclusively polka music vendors for rare material, notable Cy Pfannenstein from out of Minnesota and Jimmy K Polkas from Cincinnati. In recent years, my more consistent vendors I have gotten a lot of good remastered CDs from are Gary and Joan Sprunk, who operate Arazol Music in Arizona. Many of the LP reissues on CD I have waited a long time for are available from the Sprunks, and I still deal with them even now. However, with many vendors going offline or out of business due to changing times, I mostly these days rely on Amazon and Ebay for many of my new purchases - practically everything you can imagine is available on those. As time passes, and I don't buy as many, I have a feeling that Amazon and Ebay may be more useful for the things I am still looking for.
As I mentioned, with only 17 items (LPs, CDs, and DVDs in this case) short of the 3200 mark, it essentially means that I am at a place where I can begin to acquire less and find ways to make the collection work for me. So far this year, I have done that in my doctoral program at Liberty, where I wrote a class paper on the business aspects of the big bands for an American Entrepreneurship class. I have also began to explore the opportunity of writing a more in-depth scholarly book on the big bands based on what I have learned over the years as an individual collector, and I have an extensive library now of both big bandleader biographies and general books on the era. Many of that generation that created that great music are now no longer with us - the notable exception is Ray Anthony, who just had his 100th birthday in January, and he looks on track to see his 101st too as he is still in relatively good health. I am not looking to obtain many more CDs this year, and have no goals set for the collection - at 40 years now we are in a good place. So, we will revisit this next year and see where we are at.
Thank you for allowing me to share this significant milestone, and come back again to visit on my virtual "front porch."
