My Story - Why I Became a Collector of Big Band Recordings

The creative blog posts on this page have a lot of facets and dimensions, and you have already sampled my limited attempts at fictional stories, which I hope you all enjoyed.  One facet of this page is to display my writing abilities beyond religious subject matter, and a lot of that involves many of my other interests and pursuits.  For many who know me, it is common knowledge that my musical tastes are unique, and the prime focus of my tastes are vintage big band records, and I want to spend some time telling you about that here now.   Also, it should solve the mystery for many of you of how I got into this stuff in the first place!

My interests actually started when I was very young, because one thing my mother never allowed around me or in her presence was rock music, so except for a passing knowledge of it I was largely not exposed to a lot of the stuff kids my day were exposed to.  When I think about that now, I have come to personally consider that a form of divine protection, as if God was shielding me from that junk, and if that be the case I am very glad he did that.  Mom was a little old-fashioned herself in her tastes too, for although she grew up as a teenager in the mid-1960's, when "Beatlemania" and all of the other rock music fads were assaulting American youth culture, my mother listened to some very tame stuff.  She liked classic country (Kitty Wells, Marty Robbins, and Jim Reeves, the "Country pop" stuff popular during that day and age with country music enthusiasts) as well as stuff like Doris Day, Billy Vaughn, Pat Boone, and Mitch Miller.  She also listened to a lot of polkas and old-time Gospel records as well (my mom has always been, and will always be, a big Rambos and Chuck Wagon Gang fan).  As a young kid - about the time I was 5 or 6 years old - I was exposed to a lot of that stuff.  Some of it I was not thrilled about listening to, but other records she had I developed a liking to.  One of those records was a Mitch Miller Christmas album Holiday Sing-a-Long with Mitch (Columbia LP65673, released in 1961), that for some reason just captivated me with its sound.  I must've worn that vinyl disc out during the summer of 1975, when although it was uncharacteristically hot at my grandmother's house in Augusta, WV, I was playing this Christmas record!  Still like it to this day, as I have it on CD.  Unfortunately, Mitch Miller recently passed away, at the ripe age of 99 years, but he will always give me a fond memory because of that Christmas record.

A little later on, in 1976, when we moved to my great-grandmother's in the town of my birth, Hendricks, WV, Mom made a little more money working for the local shoe factory in Parsons and as a result she managed to buy this HUGE red-and-white Ford Galaxy off my Uncle Bonzo, although prior to that she owned a Cadillac.  One essential thing any car Mom had to have was an 8-track tape player, due to the fact she loved to just drive on Sundays, and Granny looked forward to those drives as well.  Mom had a small collection of all types of music then; gospel, polkas, pop music of the 1950's, etc.   And, due to my mother's tapes, I was exposed at an early age to polka music, and to this day still love it despite the derision I sometimes get as a result from more "progressive" friends.  The one polka recording from those early ages that really stuck out to me was by this guy by the name of Papa Joe who played an organ, and the series of records he produced were called "The Magic Organ."  Mom had two of this guy's tapes, one a collection of old hymns that sounded pretty on that Hammond he played, and the other was a polka record.  The polka album, called The Polka Album (Ranwood R-8150, 1975) was a favorite I liked a lot, and Mom wore out her copy of it as well.  I had been exposed to a lot of other polka recordings prior to that, as back a year previous Mom worked at Annabelle's, a tavern outside of Martinsburg, WV, and Annabelle's jukebox had a good stock of classic polka records that I got to hear a lot of.  A strange association developed from that time as well, because Annabelle's was noted for some pretty good homemade pizzas, which Mom would often make one for me of a night for dinner.  So, even to this day, I somehow have this "Pizza and Polkas" mentality, as they seem to go together well.  As I began to develop my own interests, my polka affinity became more defined as I began to collect my own records and study up a little bit on the music, and as a result it wasn't long before I was introduced to legends on record such as Frankie Yankovic, Johnny Pecon, Whoopie John, the Six Fat Dutchmen, and Larry Chesky, among others.  Then, as a young adult, I married into a Milwaukee Polish family, and they were both elated and amused that their new in-law loved polkas, the music they had at all their week-long weddings and wakes.  However, it didn't end with polkas, because in late 1977-early 1978 I began to evolve many of the likes and dislikes I have now, and a couple of things played pivotal roles in that one too.

It was October 1977, and at the time Mom and a friend of hers from the shoe factory in Parsons, Wilda (or "Willie," as we called her; she later married my grandfather and is now of course my step-grandmother, and I love her dearly as she's always treated me like a prince) found out they could make a little more money by transferring to another shoe factory location (owned by the same company, Kinney Shoe) in Romney.  Romney, of course, is the county seat of Hampshire County, and only 10 miles east of there is Augusta, where my grandmother and step-grandfather lived then.  I transferred to Augusta Elementary School that year, and was in 2nd grade then, and due to the fact I was a little out-of-place with many of those kids, I took a strong counter-cultural stand in which I went to great lengths to stand out from my classmates.  I dressed differently (I stopped wearing jeans, would not wear tennis shoes or white socks, and wanted to always dress up for school), ate differently (I HATED, and still do, hamburgers and other things many kids like), and of course listened to different music.  In late 1977, many kids my age were into listening to a group of degenerates called KISS, but I personally found them sickening, loud, and repulsive.  I didn't want to be associated with that stuff, so I went in search of my own musical niche.  Thankfully for me, Wilda had it for me, as with her to Augusta came a large collection of several different records of diverse stuff, and one record of hers caught my attention and I remember listening to it over and over.  The record was by an obscure group called Happy O'Houlihan and the Teardrops, and was entitled Winchester Cathedral (Design DLP259 - released originally 1967).  The title song of the LP was a cover of a very popular "one-hit wonder" by a British retro big band called the New Vaudeville Band that became a very big hit in 1966 as a sort of counterweight to the Beatles and other garbage coming out of England.  The song, "Winchester Cathedral," had a 1920's feel with a 1960's beat behind it, and for many years afterward it would prove to be a new standard among big bands. The original New Vaudeville LP (Fontana SRF-67560) was something I was introduced to a few years later, in 1982, when I began my actual record collection.  It is still one of my favorites today.  The O'Houlihan record Wilda had though was a little different, as most of it was vintage honkey-tonk piano tunes of classic standards such as "Rambling Wreck from Georgia Tech," "Wild Irish Rose," and other such old and good standards.  The New Vaudeville album sounded more like the classic big bands of the 1920's with a pepped-up contemporary sound, and was a mixture of original compositions by bandleader Geoff Stephens ("Winchester Cathedral" and "There's a Kind of Hush," as well as "Peek-a-Boo," which was on the CD reissue but not on the original LP) as well as such 1920's era classics as "Whispering," and "A Nightingale Sang in Berkley Square."  Despite the fact that this LP was released when the Beatles, "psychedelic" hippie-rock, and other nonsense was capturing popular fancy, the New Vaudeville boys sold well too.  Any rate, both of these LP's are part of my collection today still.

For a few years, music was not really that important to me personally, and I just sort of ignored it.  We moved around a lot then, and by the summer of 1980 Mom and I had our own home in Kirby, WV.  The town of Kirby, which was so small that you could blink and miss it if you drove on Grassy Lick Road through it, was obscure, and Mom and I were poor, living in a trailer we rented off of Nellie Cox, the feudal owner of most of the town to whom many residents also owed their practical souls.  Being we were poor, in a small place without much to do, and we had no television, we spent a lot of evenings just listening to the radio.  One night in particular - it was the summer of 1981 - it was a hot Sunday, and Mom was surfing the dial on the radio to find something to listen to.  All of a sudden, she tuned to 1110 on the AM dial which was WBT in Charlotte, NC, and I heard the most heavenly sound I had ever listened to come from her radio, and had to ask Mom to keep on that station.  The sound I heard was a recording from around 1937 or so of Tommy Dorsey's orchestra playing a song called "Moonlight on the Ganges," and I was transfixed by that sound.  Listening for a while, I heard some other songs I liked that were played by men by the name of Glenn Miller, Billy Vaughn, Artie Shaw, and Count Basie, and soon I learned that this was a type of music called "big bands."  It was a sophisticated sound, with a variety of instruments playing together like one organism, and although something new it also sounded familiar, as it was a lot like some of Mom's polka tapes too.  I needed  to find out more about that music, and began to read up on it.  And, I began listening to that station, which on Sundays had this 3-hour show from 10 at night to 1 in the morning, hosted by a jovial disc jockey by the name of Henry Boggen.  It was a show I would listen to for many, many years too

The late Henry Boggan, host of my old show on WBT up until the early 1990's

Henry Boggan with his "mascot," Queenie the Goose

As I became more hungry for that great music, I began wondering where I could get it on records, and what came to me was this local junk store in the nearby town of Rio, WV, called by us locals the Rio Mall.  This store, a big green metal building, was located on the old Delray Road in "downtown" Rio, and being owned by the Fitzwater family, it had a variety of stuff ranging from clothes to furniture.  On October 1, 1982, Mom bought me my first LP record from there which although not a big band record, still proved significant.  The record itself was of Jamaican folk singer Harry Belafonte, and was a green LP with Belafonte's picture on the front.  The reason Mom got that was because she knew Henry played Belafonte's famous "Banana Boat Song" record on my show a lot, and therefore she assumed I liked him (a picture of the LP is at http://www.akh.se/harbel/lpm1150.htm, and apparently was released on the RCA label in 1955 as LPM-1150-C).  Within a couple of months thought I got to shop there on my own and was able to find some great albums of the music I really wanted, and in a bit I will share some pics of those LPs.  First though, here is a good picture of the Rio Mall as it looks today:

My first official shopping spree happened on November 2nd, 1982, when at the first of the month Mom got a child support check from Dad and I got a few bucks from it as an allowance.  Records there were a quarter apiece, and I managed to rack up quite a few in a very short time.  Some of the first LP's I got that next couple of months became some of my favorites - one was Guy Lombardo's 1962 Capital album Waltzing with Guy Lombardo (Capital ST1738), and Vaughn Monroe's 1961 Dot Records release of Vaughn Monroe Sings the Great Themes of the Famous Bands and Famous Singers (Dot DLP25470), then Lawrence Welk's 1961 Dot LP Tribute to the All-Time Greats (Dot DLP25544), Sammy Kaye's Columbia LP Popular American Waltzes (Columbia CL1018, 1957), Webley Edwards and Hawaii Calls Capital LP Waikiki After Dark (Capital T2315, which I estimate was released in 1961 also), and finally a collector's promotional compilation album released in the early 1960's by Columbia entitled Fall Festival of Stars (Columbia Special Products CSP 160).  There were some others too, but these were among the first good records I got.  And, here are pictures of their album covers for you to see:

These records were all hard to find, but in the past couple of years I managed to recover them all, thanks to the wide variety of junk shops in Florida here as well as E-Bay!  I continued to collect records actively well into the time I graduated from high school in 1989, but as I became more involved with ministry and church activities took up much of my time, I sort of put my musical interests on hold until around 1995, when I discovered a recent invention called the compact disc and took up my collecting again! 

At the present time, my LP collection as it stands is counted at around 850, while my CD's number 1057.  They cover practically the entire big band spectrum, from the early 1900's to the late 1950's, and I also have an interest in early vocal groups such as the Four Lads, the Crew Cuts, the Four Freshman, the Hi-Lo's, and the Four Aces, among others.  I am also a big fan still of Mitch Miller, and collect the records of singers such as Pat Boone, Frankie Laine, Johnnie Ray, Guy Mitchell, and others of the genre.  The love of this great music will always be part of me, and it has produced a set of memories all my own, and I am fortunate to have developed an affinity for this great music.  And, I hope to collect it still for many years to come.  Anyway, more fun to come next time.