Kids! You're all just kids!

When I bought my first records, LPs and 45s hadn't come out yet. It was all 78s.

When I was in my very early teens, I went regularly to Saturday matinee movies, usually with my sister (good way for mom to get us out of the house). The second feature of the double bill was often a western (maybe Hopalong Cassidy) or a crime drama (i.e., "film noir"), but frequently the main feature was one of the musical movies that were coming out of Hollywood at the time. Some of them were 90% fictional "Hollywoodized" bio-pics of some musician or composer. I got to liking some of the music that I heard in these movies, and after seeing "A Song to Remember" (1945 - Cornel Wilde as Chopin), I bought Jose Iturbi's recording of Chopin's Polonaise in Ab, which actually made the pop-charts shortly after the movie came out (Itubi did the piano playing in the movie while Cornel Wilde "finger-synced"). I think that was the first record I bought with my own money.

I bought a lot of classical music, mostly stuff I had heard first in movies like the aforementioned, and opera recordings (weird kid, I suppose - but I also had an album of "Sons of the Pioneers"). But when I first got interested in folk music and bought my first guitar ($9.95 Regal), I went to Campus Music and Gallery in Seattle's University District and bought Walt Robertson's two 78s, and one 10" LP each by Burl Ives, Richard Dyer-Bennet, Susan Reed, and Cynthia Gooding. Some of the first songs I learned were from those records. Still got 'em.

Don Firth