José Iturbi playing Chopin's Polonaise in Am, following seeing the 1945 movie A Song to Remember, a Hollywoodized, romanticized, and pretty inaccurate biography of Frederic Chopin, starring Cornel Wilde, with Merle Oberon as George Sand. Iturbi did bravura performances playing piano on the sound track while Wilde did a good job of faking it. Single 12" 78 rpm (this was back when music was carved into a stone disk with a chisel, rotated on a potter's wheel, and played with a saber-toothed tiger tusk for a needle).

The first LPs (33 1/3 rpm) I bought were a two record set: the full-length recording of Rigoletto by Guiseppe Verdi, with Jan Peerce singing the Duke, Erna Berger as Gilda, and Leonard Warren as Rigoletto. The first full-length opera recorded in a studio, it's now a collectors item. Still got it. Still sounds great!

How square is that!??

First folk records I bought were a Burl Ives and a Richard Dyer-Bennet (yup, still square), both 10" LPs, and two 10" 78 rpm records that Walt Robertson did on Linden Records, a local company, bought one afternoon early in 1952 (just to put things into historical perspective, Joan Baez would have been about eleven years old at the time). I bought my first guitar a few months later. It was a Regal: $9.95 for the guitar, and with fiberboard case and a copy of Nick Manoloff's "How to Play the Guitar," the total price was $15.00. It sounded a bit like it was made of apple-crate wood (and probably was), but the fretting was accurate and the action was fairly soft. Easy to learn on. I was very lucky.

Don Firth