Grandma's music box

Here's more or less how the music box looks when put together, except that you can't really put it together any more. Notice the plastic-like outside is peeling off.


The top, the part on which you see my hand, is where the music box is housed.

All the toiletry items are sadly cracked and broken; they were in fine shape in the 1950's, but this is how it all came to me.

This silk originally hid the wooden covering of the music box.

The way it worked was, you wound it up, and as long as the top was up, music played. If you closed the top, the music stopped. On the bottom of the music box the tunes are named: Bill Bailey (which I recognize) and Cliff thinks the other one is "Sunset Saturday Night". I wasn't so sure about the word "Sunset". Anyway, I haven't been able to google up anything about that song. Bill Bailey was written in 1902.

There was a string that made it start and stop playing when the top was raised and lowered. That string broke shortly after I got the box. The clock guy put a new string on, but you have to pull the string to get music to play, and then it stops after one song. Pull it again, you hear the other song.

Does it work properly? No. But if you knew the feeling I get when I hear those songs play, you'd know why it means so much to me.

The man who got it playing said it's probably worth a lot of money, even in the sad state it's in. It doesn't matter; as long as there's a cousin of mine who remembers standing in Grandma's bedroom listening to those songs the way I do, it is staying right in the Stevens family, where it belongs. What happens to it after all us cousins are gone is not my worry. I imagine if a person were willing to spend hundreds of dollars on it, it could be restored. All I wanted was to hear it play again. Like this: