I have just recently wrote about my 38th anniversary of my music collection, and at age 51 now I have been trying to think more about the whys and hows concerning that. Due to some other things that have been taking place in my life in recent months, I am in the midst of what is essentially a fresh start for myself, and I have been trying to return to some of the better aspects of things I experienced when I was much younger. At least from the time I was about 10 years old, the type of music I like and have listened to has forged a significant part of my identity, but there are times that feels a little suppressed and I need to share it more, finding a way to articulate it in such a way as to be inspirational and also to give people more encouragement, especially in the times we live in now when terrorists called by names such as Antifa and BLM are seeking to destroy those things many hold as cherished memories, and you have greedy mega-corporatist billionaires obscuring many good things because it is not turning a fast buck for them. That needs to stop, and it really stops with us honestly - we need to make more of a stand. At a later time, I want to address this whole mess as a separate subject on my SPT blog, as the radicalism of these evil demonically-driven hordes called Antifa and BLM need to be met and matched by equally zealous militancy on our part (Ted Shoebat wrote a whole book about this I would highly recommend, and will reference that when I tackle the subject). Being nice and polite is not a language these evil jerks understand, but they do understand it when you show them you are not going to take the crap they dish out. Anyway, I digress, and want to get back to the subject at hand. There are several vignettes that make up this saga, and I want to talk at length about several of them here. Let us now begin.
I am going to wax Sophia Petrillo from The Golden Girls here now - picture it; Kirby, WV, the summer of 1981. An eleven-year-old boy is sitting in his bedroom one night while his single mother, bored and wanting to listen on the radio to something in the nearby room, surfs the AM dial. Suddenly, a sound comes on the air - it is a good sound that gets that young boy's attention, as he is drawn to it. He tells his mother in the other room to keep the radio on the dial, and then a short bit later a jovial man who is hosting that radio show comes on the air and announces that this was a record by Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra from around 1937 entitled "Moonlight on the Ganges." The boy asks himself, what is this music I am hearing, and why is it so good? The mother, supportive as ever, tells the boy that the station is WBT on the 1110 AM dial, and from that point the boy makes it almost a religious duty to tune into that show every Sunday night from 10PM to 1AM. That young boy was me, and the show was a Sunday night music variety show hosted by the late Henry Boggan on a very well-known legacy station out of Charlotte, NC. From that day on, Yours Truly became a huge fan of vintage big band music. Now, let me tell you what a typical Sunday night was like for me then, especially in the summers when I was out of school.
"Hello Henry" Boggan (1935-2006) from WBT-AM back in the day
Mom had another radio in the kitchen of our mobile home, which was situated on the northwest side of town. The kitchen had two windows - one faced our front yard then, while the other was adjacent to the local landlady's corn patch that was just across a ditch outside our window. On a Sunday night, I would sit in between those windows at our kitchen table, with only the small light over the kitchen stove on, while I sipped sugar-laden lukewarm instant coffee or (when more money was available) a can of Pepsi Free and munched on something such as sour cream and onion chips or Dorito's (or in leaner times, saltine crackers with butter), reading a book and listening to some of the best music ever put to record, interspersed with Henry's jovial banter. Sometimes, I would sit and sketch on paper many drawings - I would try to re-create the orchestra in rudimentary drawings with pencil on notebook paper in many cases, and came up with some goofy characters. Mom would already have gone to bed by then, and I was allowed to stay up until the show played out that evening. It was a great thing to look forward to on Sunday nights, and when you were growing up poor in a small West Virginia town with little else to do, it was a nice diversion to have. Common sense would dictate that records of this music did exist, and at times I would even see advertisements for multi-record box sets in old Reader's Digest magazines people had given us - I became quickly familiar with names such as Guy Lombardo, Glenn Miller, the Dorseys, Fred Waring, Bing Crosby, and others. And, I always wondered how I could get those records. Then, as I recounted many times before, a month before my 12th birthday Mom bought my first one for a quarter at the local junk store called locally the "Rio Mall" in the nearby town of Rio, WV, and that started a large collection that now encompasses over 3000 recordings some 38 years later. But, the story didn't end there - after starting to collect records, it meant that I had more access to my music and could then hear it on more than just Sunday nights. This is the next part of the story
As I graduated from elementary to middle school, I was buying up records monthly from the "Rio Mall," and eventually I discovered that I could also order those Reader's Digest sets myself, and ended up with six of them in a short span of time. Although the Reader's Digest records eventually caused me some financial issues - I ordered them without having money to pay for them, which was stupid - I got a lot of enjoyment from listening to them. The routine at this point was still listening to Henry's show on Sunday nights, but on the weekends I could also listen to new records I got, and I would do a marathon listening session with those big Reader's Digest sets I got - they had between 8-10 records each. The routine then was to sit in my room, reading and listening to the records, and I would also munch on potato chips or those really good Duncan Hines mint chocolate chip soft cookies (they don't make those anymore, but they were good!), or on occasion I would take supper (we got chicken nuggets and fish squares in bulk from Cox's Store then, and I would enjoy a few of those while doing my listening). During the summers, I would often have friends that visited - my next-door neighbor Teresa and a couple of other neighborhood kids - and often would listen to those records while sitting in my room playing cards or Yahtzee with these friends, which was fun. I would have the records on, and often had a plate of fried chicken legs Mom cooked up sitting nearby while playing cards or dice with my neighbor friends while our parents would visit out in the living room or kitchen. Those were fun memories too. Many a weekend was spent like that, and it was a good way to socialize too when in a small mountain town without a lot of money or anything else to do. Looking back at that and reflecting on those times, I miss much about that, and over the years I have lost a lot of that sort of carefreeness. But, there were moments in subsequent years that still kept me going though.
When I got into high school, we moved back closer to where I grew up, and at the time we took care of a nonagenarian lady and lived in with her a few miles southeast of Terra Alta, WV, out on Salt Lick Road. Those were good days too, although by that time I was more involved with church activities after becoming a convert to Christ and being baptized on January 9, 1986. But, I still liked my music. However, listening to it took on a new dimension, as often I would lay up during the night listening to records or cassette tapes while thinking and doing whatever else I was doing. I had a world globe I had gotten some time earlier with a lamp in it, and I had the globe set up in a metal cabinet that served as my wardrobe and also my housing for my record collection, which I had culled and reduced. My music interests at this time took on some new directions as well, as I got into more gospel and sacred music as well as discovering stuff like Igor Stravinsky. During my days then, especially in the summers, I would divide my time between gathering things in the woods - fiddleheads and wild garlic, and when season allowed, ramps and sassafras roots - and then would practice and refine my cooking skills. I perfected a sort of stew I made - a spicy reduction containing beef, onions, carrots, and some other stuff - and I also experimented with things such as homemade bagels and pizzas. The soundtracks of that time were Mario Lanza, Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, and my newly-discovered vintage recordings of Bix Beiderbecke. Interspersed with my life then was also my church activities and playing in the school marching band, which also took up a lot of my time and provided me a social life. As I began the shift from listening to more gospel records, I began to get in my collection some Black Gospel recordings such as Clay Evans's classic From the Ship, as well as vintage LP's of groups like the Roberta Martin Singers. I was always a big fan of Clara Ward, but it would be several years before she became part of my collection. Any rate, that was my high school years.
In college, after spending a couple of years at BBI in Graceville, FL, I heeded some bad counsel from my pastor then and decided to transfer to LIFE Bible College in California, which didn't work out well at all. However, all was not bad there either. For the short time I was out there, I roomed in the dorm with two guys, one a nondescript rancher-type from Idaho named Brian, and the other a "surfer-dude" type who somewhat resembled Jason Priestly from southern California named Chris Edwards, and he was the typical Southern Cali-type guy of the time - he ended every sentence with the word "Dude" and talked like he wrote the script to Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. However, he was a good guy too, and I found out he had some diverse musical interests, and he introduced me to something I still like to this day. In the late 1980's, what used to be known as real jazz was becoming increasingly more rare, as this was the era of the advent of the atrocity known as "smooth jazz," which is not real jazz at all. However in the late 1980's, there were still some good authentic jazzmen still recording, and one of them that Chris introduced me to was a bassist named John Patitucci. Let me just preface this by saying up-front that I honestly hate the electric bass guitar, and barely tolerate it even in big bands today, but I can say there are a couple of nice exceptions to that, and John Patitucci is one of those. I really got into listening to Patitucci's recordings, as they are actually very well-done and consistent with the classic jazz tradition, although they would be considered jazz fusion like Freddy Hubbard and Chick Corea. I recently was able to find some of those early Patitucci recordings on CD, and have added those to my collection. While the primary purpose of going to California in the first place was due to bad counsel from certain people I trusted, two good things did come of it - first, I finally got to interact in person with the Armenian-American community, which I had been wanting to do, and secondly, it was meeting some good folks like Chris Edwards who expanded my musical horizons. And, although California is a place now I would not want to visit - walking through piles of crap and cardboard condos in LA or San Francisco is not exactly my idea of a vacation these days - back then things were a little different, and I saw California as symbolizing two things for me - closer identity with the Foursquare Gospel denomination I was part of then, and closer in-person interaction with my beloved Assyrian and Armenian communities. Thanks to the internet, I now have most of that anyway, and I have long since grown beyond the Foursquare denomination as I am now a very contented traditionalist Catholic. The musical bonus of being exposed to a great artist like John Patitucci though was priceless, and I still value that today.
Marriage and the responsibilities of work and other things have sort of suppressed many of these simpler things I used to enjoy in recent years, but as mentioned some circumstances now have allowed me a fresh start, and as I think about these things I am starting to embrace a fresh start as I embrace the good of those times and am re-introducing myself to that. I now have the music collection of my dreams, and over the years Henry has passed on and WBT as moved on, so I don't get the privilege of listening to that show anymore. Also, in 1988, Henry gave up his Sunday night program and what replaced it was even better - a real big band legend named Chuck Cecil (1922-2019) and his popular big band program he had broadcast from 1956 until 2014, "The Swingin' Years," replaced it, and for many years I listened to Chuck until well into the 1990's on WBT, but also on other stations, the local AM station in Brunswick, GA, at the time (WMOG-AM then) also broadcast Chuck's program and it was my dad that brought it to my attention. Chuck was the big band enthusiast's dream broadcaster - he was pretty much exclusively big band, and his show had more variety than Henry's did, and it was in many aspects a better show, although Henry's personality was missed. Chuck unfortunately passed away a year ago at the age of 97, but he left a great legacy. And, he also has a devoted following (including myself) on Facebook and other social media venues, with his Facebook page being operated by his daughter, who has done a tremendous job keeping his legacy alive.
