04/2/2015 4:43 pm  #1


It's time to play my Crosby 78s again! Anybody else doing that?

The pages of the new Wiggins-Reilly Crosby discography have me looking through my Crosby 78s again, handling them, peering at the labels, worrying about their fragility...and more and more dying to play them again.  I recall that when I grew up the first records I ever remember seeing in our house were about 21 78s my brother was given by our maternal grandmother.  These were perhaps half of the records my mother and her younger siblings had grown up with on a tiny farm about 20 miles from Quincy, Illinois, where they played what records they had on a wind-up Edison player. 

At the time, we had a single-speed (78-only) electric record player.  We didn't have a three-speed record player until around 1958 or 59 when my father made one for my brother's birthday present.  My father did construction and steel fabrication, but as a hobby tinkered with electronics. Sometimes people gave him radios and other equipment that was broken.  My brother's "new" record-player-am-radio combination was made out of parts from two units that my dad repaired an mounted together in a painted wooden case he designed for it.  It had a flip-over cartridge, and as mentioned before three speeds, so now we not only could play those 78s, but my brother (who was about 12 or 13) could start to buy and play rock-and-roll 45s and Mom could get that Guy Lombardo LP she saw on the small record rack at the grocery store. 

I was a bit too young and butter-fingered to handle the records at that time, but I remember that around the time I was about 11 years old, I had become very interested in those 78s again.  The old single-speed record player had migrated to a little table in the basement of a different house, in a different town, and I recall spending hours sometimes playing through that stack of old 78s from the farm. At least one platter was a Crosby: "God Bless America"/"The Star-Spangled Banner."  There were other pop tunes, as well as novelty tunes and some country-western.  I would play through the stack in order, over and over, but sometimes I would play certain sides again and again before moving on.  Then I found a dusty table top Victrola at a thrift shop.  It was about 10 or 12 dollars.  The spring was broken.  It could only play part of a record before running down. 

When I got it home and tried to wipe the dust off of it, I found that it wasn't only dust. The outside finish was so worn that it was gray.  But when you opened the lid, the inside was nearly pristine.  Opening the lid was as dramatic as the scene where Dorothy steps out of black-and-white photography into the technicolor of Munchkinland in The Wizard of Oz.  But, in this case, it was like opening the door on musical history.  It took weeks, but I repaired the spring, which had become unrivited on one end inside of its drum, and I restored the outside finish, and I found where I could still buy steel needles for it.  Now, I could hear what those old 78s sounded like down on the farm in the 1930s and 40s.  When they are not terribly worn out, the richness of 78s played on totally acoustic equipment is surprisingly rich and impressive.  And if you want more power, just open those two little doors on the front of the Victrola farther!

Around the time I got the Victrola and was a freshman in high school, I started actaully collecting records. Let me be clear, I had a very few rock-and-roll 45's and Lps, but I couldn't afford to collect them.  My pocket change was what I saved out of my school lunch money.  It would take weeks of savings to buy an LP.  But I could often get a 78 for a nickel, sometimes less, at a thrift store or garage sale.  The 78s collection grew.  By the time I was out of college and married, people were giving me 78s rather than throw them away.  How many total were amassed?  600?  1200?  Do I even know? 

Was it a Bing Crosby collection? No, not at first, but there were nearly always Crosby records among the records available, wherever it was I was finding more 78s. And I did form the habit of looking for more records by artists I already had on 78 and liked.  Because of Bing's popularity in the 78 era, merely that practice made the Crosby collection segment explode, compared to any other artist or group in this very, very eclectic collection.  So, now, maybe there are 70-80 or even somewhat more Crosby disks, with of course some duplication and a few not really playable anymore.  Not at all impressive, if I had been focusing only on collecting Bing, true, but it means a lot to me.  And while, a number of his hits are included, it is remarkable how many of the sides are songs that never appear on the usual CD compilations.  But, I think, listening to them is a little like what you would hear if you could randomly go back into mid-American households during any of the years between the mid-1930s and very early 1950s and hear what they had been buying and listening to. If Bing sang a song, it didn't always have to be a big hit for people to want to hear it again, and more often than they could hear it on the radio. 

So, I've caught the 78 bug again, not the measles or the flu.  I just ordered a new needle the right size for 78s for the cartridge I now want to keep on my turntable, which does have the 78 rpm speed.  The needle will be here in a few days.  I can hardly wait.  Will the 78s be a little noisier than the LPs? Sometimes, yes.  It is helpful to imagine that's just the sound of someone frying bacon while you're listening, or to hear what's in the background as a sound created by ordinarly people, not always replacing worn phonograph needles on their old Victrola or Philco, loving that song to death, playing it over and over. Not to worry, though--Bing's voice never fails to penetrate any background sizzle.  It's not like Rudy Vallee's.

I will check back into this thread to talk about particular Crosby 78s in a few days, BUT MEANWHILE...Is anyone else on this forum enjoying their Crosby 78s lately.  Please post some of your related experiences, thoughts, etc. here.  Would anyone like to mention a Crosby 78 that you've found personly important and tell why?
 

Last edited by Steve Fay (04/2/2015 5:02 pm)

 

04/2/2015 6:14 pm  #2


Re: It's time to play my Crosby 78s again! Anybody else doing that?

Whenever I visited my Grandmother I would always ask if I could play Bing. There were a stack of 78's. One favourite was 'down upon the farm' (non Bing) but the Bing was Black moonlight/Thanks. That record was so worn that I had to slow it down to about 65 or something to have it sound like Bing. It is amazing how these records lasted as long as they did what with a heavy arm and steel needle grinding its way round and round and round through those grooves. Of course later on the arms and needles became much lighter but the speed control was a lot different too.

 

05/2/2015 9:45 am  #3


Re: It's time to play my Crosby 78s again! Anybody else doing that?

What interesting recollections about playing 78s. My own first aquaintance with a record player was when someone - I forget now just who, cast out their old wind up acoustic player in favour of something electrical. I acquired the cast off player and possibly six or so records that were also being cast out with it - all light opera as I remember. Problem is that the spring did not last, so I managed to "play" the records by placing my forefinger on the record label and steadily manually revolving it. I was probably playing at rates varying from 50 rpm to 100 rpm and the sounds must have been very un-musical, but I think I was more interested in the novelty and the ability to create sound in this way. I don't remember ever changing needles (and almost certainly had no knowledge of the need to do so).  This would have been shortly after the end of WW2. The novelty soon wore off and it was not until I was earning that I managed to acquire a proper player - by which time LP and 45 rpm records had taken over. By that time also I had become acquainted with Bing over the radio and my first purchase of Bing's records was the then newish  "Musical Autobiogaphy" . 

I do not recall many of my immediate family and friends having players, apart from one - a very large acoustic player looking like an expensive item of furniture, in polished oak, with the horn being tucked in to the lower part behind two doors which controlled the volume. The volume when the doors were open was quite considerable, whilst closing to doors reduced things to a whisper. 
 
 

 

05/2/2015 2:59 pm  #4


Re: It's time to play my Crosby 78s again! Anybody else doing that?

Ron, "Black Moonlight" sounds very intersting.  If I'm remembering what I just looked up in the discog book correctly, that's 1933 and on the Brunswick label.  So far as I know, my earliest Crosby 78 is a Decca from '36. 

Richard and Ron, the packages of steel needles I used to buy said to replace the needle after playing 25 sides; I don't know if needles came with that labeling in the 1930s, however.  Then, of course, who really keeps track of something like that, and when you're playing a record the 26th side being played really doesn't sound any different from the 25th.  I recall looking at the needles with a magnifying glass and discovering they got kind of chisel shaped when used too long.  That's a bit scary.  Still, despite the heavy weight of tone arm assembly on accoustic players, when the needles WERE replaced, I don't think they did as much damage as one might expect.  Probably a lot of records from my collection were played on early electronic players before I got them, which still might have had tracking weights of perhaps 6-10 grams and probably had a sapphire needle, good for a few hundred sides...but probably never changed by most people.

Richard, the Musical Biography set certainly would have been a remarkable collection to start with!
 

     Thread Starter
 

05/2/2015 3:06 pm  #5


Re: It's time to play my Crosby 78s again! Anybody else doing that?

As always Steve, very well written.

As many of you know, I got into 78rpms and the music of Bing's era because of My Grandfather. He had about 3000 78rpms and we would go down in his basement and listen to music for hours on end. I called his basement "Record Heaven". Well I would go to flea markets with him and pick up 78rpms. I was up to a few hundred myself before I sold them in 2000ish. Big mistake!

Over the past year I have been starting to collect them again. I don't activelly buy them unless it is something by Bing or something really rare. What is funny is most of my Bing Crosby is on CD now, but if a song comes on that my Grandfather used to have on a 78, I can remember where the skips or the scratches were!

78rpms will always have a fond place in my heart and memories!

 

05/2/2015 3:27 pm  #6


Re: It's time to play my Crosby 78s again! Anybody else doing that?

Steve Fay wrote:

 Richard, the Musical Biography set certainly would have been a remarkable collection to start with!
 

I was very lucky. I discovered a shop just off London's Charing Cross Road (London's "tin pan alley" district), which sold reviewers' copies of recently issued records. I picked up the five record set only lightly marked "Review sample: not to be resold" (!) at a price which equated to not much more than one new LP. That store contributed enormously to my early record collecting days, at a time when record purchases might otherwise have been financially impossible for me.  

The review copies were all more or less thrown into some card boxes whilst the dominant displays were of old, used, but sought after collector's items, all neatly marked up.
 
Besides, who could possibly resist that lovely shiny green box with five LPs for the price of one? 

 

09/2/2015 2:29 pm  #7


Re: It's time to play my Crosby 78s again! Anybody else doing that?

David,

I can't get that image of the basement 78 "Record Heaven" out of my head.  There may be some kind of link between basements and 78s--for one thing, they're heavy, and, if you collect very many of them, you almost need a concrete floor under the racks or shelves you're storing them on!  Personally, my first many hours of playing my family's initial couple of dozen 78s was in a basement, and I later restored my Victrola in a basement.

What sort of record player did your Grandfather play them on?  I'm trying to get more of the picture and sense of the sound.  The feel of the records, the smell of old 78 albums, that all comes back to me, of course.

Lobosco wrote:

As always Steve, very well written.

As many of you know, I got into 78rpms and the music of Bing's era because of My Grandfather. He had about 3000 78rpms and we would go down in his basement and listen to music for hours on end. I called his basement "Record Heaven". Well I would go to flea markets with him and pick up 78rpms. I was up to a few hundred myself before I sold them in 2000ish. Big mistake!

Over the past year I have been starting to collect them again. I don't activelly buy them unless it is something by Bing or something really rare. What is funny is most of my Bing Crosby is on CD now, but if a song comes on that my Grandfather used to have on a 78, I can remember where the skips or the scratches were!

78rpms will always have a fond place in my heart and memories!

 

     Thread Starter
 

09/2/2015 9:27 pm  #8


Re: It's time to play my Crosby 78s again! Anybody else doing that?

In 1949, my first working year at 15, I was a messenger boy for The Newcastle Morning Herald in Sydney. They had blokes there that would re-write stories from The Sydney Morning Herald and Daily Telegraph. One of those blokes went on to become a sports  write for the SMH and another to the Daily Mirror.
Anyway, after stories had been rewritten I had to go to the GPO to telegraph the stories to country newspapers. A bloke at the GPO was also a Bing fan. He said that he had Bing's 'Deep Purple' and I asked if I could borrow it. Oh, the drama of him having to travel to work on public transport then I too had to travel on a train. The record survived those journeys. Today folk are fortunate that they don't have to nurse a 78 whilst traveling.

 

10/2/2015 2:46 pm  #9


Re: It's time to play my Crosby 78s again! Anybody else doing that?

Ron, if you had one of those metal record cases with a handle on top, you could have borrowed 30-40 78s all at one time quite safely.  It would have only been very heavy.

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