My parents' music

The Oregon guy has once again sent me wandering down memory lane with one little sentence: "Remember your parents' record collection? It was usually composed of one type of music; usually pretty bland and white-bread."

I thought far back to my childhood in Iowa. I might have been six years old when one of the local one-room schoolhouses either closed its doors or upgraded their music. However it happened, my parents bought their wind-up phonograph and a whole collection of 78 RPM records. The record player looked very much like the one in the above picture.

I recall some Al Jolson records, and one of American Indians doing songs in their native tongue. There was another record I loved to play when friends visited: It started out with one man laughing; then other people joined in, and before you know it there seemed to be a roomful of people laughing so hard they were crying. Even though I must have played it a hundred times, I could never keep from laughing along when I heard it. It affected everybody else the same way. Infectious laughter at its best.

The wind-up Victrola went through needles like crazy, and we bought them by the box; this was before the days of diamond needles.

My parents didn't buy a lot of records... I don't imagine they could afford to. But the ones they did buy surely have stuck with me.

There was one record album (yes, in those days they really were albums that held six two-sided records) of Little Jimmy Dickens. My favorite song on that collection was "Country Boy"; I especially loved the line where, when the preacher came for chicken dinner, all Jimmy got was "the gizzard and the north end of a chicken flying south."

div>There was a George Morgan set that I believe had several songs mentioning roses in their context. The one I remember best is "Roomful of Roses".