M U S I C

My mom had a player piano that you put in a roll of music and pressed the pedals to play. That was the extent of my musical talent. I was always envious of someone who could play the guitar or some other musical instrument. We won't even go into my singing career. (I got kicked out of the church choir when I was in the 4th grade. I just can't believe that choral director didn't recognize a real talent when he saw one).

As a teenager growing up in a family of five kids, we had a lot of 45rpm records but I don't recall buying very many of them. I really enjoyed listening to Elvis and a lot of the 50s stuff on WKRC radio in Cincinnati and even now I prefer listening to oldies music with my mom's influence of classical thrown in.

I bought every album that Brenda Lee ever recorded along with other favorites from the 50s and 60s. By combining our records after we were married we accumulated quite a collection and had them all transferred onto 8 track and reel-to-reel tapes. At that time we traded the complete album collection to our next door neighbor for a sixty foot aluminum awning for our trailer. Don probably got the best of the deal but having the shade from the hot Arizona sun was more relaxing than having the LPs and besides we were still able to appreciate the sounds on tape.

Naturally after all our music was recorded on 8 track and reel-to-reel another development in musical recording came along...casette tapes. We spent hours and hours transferring the music of 1236 different albums with a total of 9,401 songs from 117 four hour reel to reel tapes to casette tapes. The Ventures were obviously the instrumental favorite as we had 394 different Ventures songs on reel-to-reel. Running a close second was Chet Atkins with 325 songs. Leading the Hit Parade in Male Singers was of course Elvis with 331 songs. Brenda Lee led the women with 185 songs. At this point we decided we would stick with the casettes as they could be played almost anywhere.

Little did we know that the music industry was not done with us yet. Still to come was CD music. We resisted as long as we could but as you can see from the photo below we are slowly accumulating CDs. We have no intention of duplicating our large collections on CD. They are really enjoyable on a long trip in the car but most of the time we listen to the radio. At home the TV is usually on and when we have a CD playing in the computer it's usually easy listening or instrumental for background.

Of course, we could listen and watch the thousands of music videos that we have recorded from M-TV since its inception. They are not all catalogued like the reel-to-reel tapes but all the songs are listed in alphabetical order by artist with the playing time and where the song is recorded. For example there are only five Brenda Lee songs recorded on video. Olivia Newton-John and Pat Benatar videos far outnumber Brenda. We do have quite a few Elvis but Billy Joel probably has more music videos. If we ever get bored with all the music we could always grab a good book. No, we are not going to have a BOOK page on the site. Although I could probably fill up one with all the talented writers, but I'll pass.