The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #117458 Message #2529790
Posted By: PoppaGator
02-Jan-09 - 01:44 PM
Thread Name: Remembering Singles
Subject: RE: Remembering Singles
I'm a little younger than Jerry, and remember 78 singles as already being obsolete, as 45s quickly became the new and definitive format for "single" records.
The 78s that I do remember are the ones that came in albums. A set of several 78 rpm records (maybe about a half-dozen?) would be packaged in the form of a big book, not unlike a photo album. There'd be a few pages of text just inside the cover, usually illustrated, and then a series of brown-paper sleeves for records, bound into the album just like pages.
(78s were almost the size of the 12" vinyl LPS that came later ~ maybe 10" or 11" in diameter? ~ so those original old album covers and inside pages were roughly the size of the more recent and more familiar classic "album covers" from the 60s-70s. A good size for cover artwork, and for sizeable portions of readable text.)
This is the way an artist could market a set of more than two songs, and was also the only way to package longer pieces, including classical music and Broadway scores. The 78 format could only provide about 3 minutes of uniterrupted audio at a time, which made it difficult to present symphonies; suites such as The Nutcracker and Peter and the Wolf were more easily accommodated.
I get a laugh sometimes when current-day musicians or commentators talk on TV or radio, etc., and say "...my new album, or, oops, I suppose I should say my new CD..." It would be anachronistic to speak of a "record" or an "LP," but it's just as correct to refer to a CD as an "album" as it ever was to use that term for a 12-inch 33-1/3 rpm long-playing vinyl record
The term "album" has applied to a collection of 40-50 minutes of music ever since the days of 78s; it was already an old-fashioned or "legacy" term when an album's worth of music could be contained on a single LP disc, so the usage continues to be appropriate for today's smaller digital disc format, and indeed should still be suitable even for future media.
Sorry about the drift; let me get back to (or at least closer to) Jerry's original intended subject.
I love those "oldies by goodie" hit singles of the rock 'n' roll era. Yesterday morning I sat enthralled through an hour-long TV infomercial for one of those Time-Life collections of remastered all-original-artists, all-original recordings.
I don't need to buy a set as long as they keep advertising them. I'm OK with hearing a 20-second sample of each beloved tune, and then another, and then another, etc. I know the songs so well that it's not really necessary to listen all the way through. Many of the accomopanying visuals are familiar images of the artists, but there are many more that are new to me and very interesting.