My Roots in Music

I was sort of half asleep and half awake yesterday morning and remember vaguely dreaming about things when I was a kid that got me started in music. So I think I'd like to document some of that here, starting with this little bit of trivia . . .

 

It's a wonder I ever got started in music

Some of my earliest memories were of music in the house where I grew up. My mother loved music. For a suburban housewife in the north central U. S. she had eclectic tastes. These ranged from the classics to big band music to bluegrass gospel. She was a fan of Doris Day and one of my earliest memories is hearing her in the kitchen singing Doris' signature song "Que Sera Sera (What Will Be Will Be)" as she cooked (which it seemed she was always doing). She also had a record by a fellow named "Big Tiny Little." I don't remember much about his music, but his name fascinated me.

We had a record player that was quite the rage in its time. It was a Motorola portable stereophonic. ("Stereophonic" was still a pretty big deal; only later did people commonly say "stereo.") Most people now know Motorola for making cell phones, but back in the day they were all over all aspects of consumer electronics. This thing looked like a suitcase. You could pop the top off it, and lo! The top was a speaker, which you plugged into the main console. There was another speaker in the console, and that's how you got stereo. Not all the records we had were stereo, of course. Stereophonic records only became commercially available in the late 1950s.

This thing had the capability to play up to seven vinyl records stacked on top of each other. There were three formats for records, and this player supported all three. There were 12-inch long players that played at 33 and 1/3 revolutions per minute (rpm), 7-inch singles at 45 rpm, and 10-inch discs (older style) that played at 78 rpm. I had two problems with this as youngster with sensitive ears. If a record became warped, the pitch of the music would vary. That scared me half to death!

You could stack records on top of each other and play several sides in a row. A mechanism held several records in place while others were playing. Once a side completed, a mechanism would trigger and drop the next one down. Sometimes a record that was playing on top of another one would speed up and slow down because it wasn't flat against the record below it. That scared me crazy too. To make matters worse, once my brother and sister (I think it was mostly my brother) figured this out, they would play records on the wrong speed to freak me out. It took years before I realized Alvin and the Chipmunks were supposed to sound like they did.