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Date Posted: 18:19:24 03/31/00 Fri
Author: LUXTON
Author Host/IP: spider-tr073.proxy.aol.com / 152.163.201.208
Subject: "EARLY FASCINATION" (COPYRIGHT 2000) PERSONAL USE ONLY


It’s difficult to say exactly when the fascination with music, particularly records, signed a permanent lease in my psyche. I know for certain that it was well before 1953, the year I started kindergarten at Luxton School. My mother collected seventy-eights and I was always fascinated with our old wind-up phonograph machine. She had records by Bing Crosby, Eddie Fisher, Dinah Shore, Guy Mitchell, Perry Como, The Mills Brothers, and Frankie Carle and his Honky Ton Piano. I know there were many others because she had lots of records, but these few artists spring to mind immediately without much recounting effort. My mother also played the piano, having had some lessons when her parents could afford it.
There was always music in the house. My mother would sometimes sing with my Aunt Molly and my Aunt Pat...usually “Whispering Hope” or perhaps some Christmas song...their three part harmony wasn’t half bad, and to a little kid listening around the piano right there in the dining room, it was pretty damned impressive. Molly, Pat, and my mom could all play the piano and sing...apparently so could my dad, although the one time I saw him near a piano, you would never have known it.
Suffice to say, both my parents had music in them. Melodies and structures always seemed to dance through my head very naturally and unmysteriously. Even my grandmother would occasionally stroll over to the old piano and pick out some simple melody. She was almost shy about it, yet she didn’t seem to mind having a little kid watch her. Yessirree, I grew up in a house full of music.
I was born on the last day of 1947 and the first records I actually OWNED and could call MY OWN were seventy-eights...simple mathematics lets one know that I was collecting records by the time I was eight years old. My mother bought me a 78 of Hound Dog/Don’t Be Cruel by Elvis. That record peaked in August of 1956. There you have it...by the summer months of 1956 I was already enthralled by this new energy they were calling Rock and Roll. I remember seeing Elvis on Ed Sullivan just afer we had first gotten a TV set...I was about seven or eight years old, but he GOT ME...I wanted to be just like him...one night my uncle George was over at the house and he had some blue suede shoes...he had taken them off while visiting...I remember grabbing a broom, holding it like a guitar, stepping into this huge pair of adult’s shoes and launching into “Well it’s one fo the money, two fo the show...” my mom, Uncle George and Auntie Pat thought it was hilarious...probably some of my earliest applause...
March of 1959...Brook Benton had just scored BIG BIG BIG with “It’s Just a Matter of Time” and he was going to be on Ed Sulllivan the coming Sunday night. I sat glued and enthralled through the whole show of jugglers, ventriloquists, comedians, dancers, and lame Broadway numbers ( a genre, by the way, whose validity or reason ENTIRELY ELUDES ME TO THIS VERY, MIDDLE-AGED DAY ). About fifty-seven and a half minutes into the hour, Ed brought Brook out and he managed to squeeze in most of his recent Number Three smash...1959...I guess any black singer was pretty lucky to be on network television at all in 1959...
Many folks tend to think Elvis “started the whole thing”...I think not...Screamin’ Jay Hawkins was probaably far more outrageous than Elvis would ever be...so was Litle Richard. One has to remember how America was in the fifties...WW2 and Korea were over and gasoline was about twenty cents a gallon. Advertising still said that smoking was “delicious” and “fashionable”. Kids and their parens would ALL listen to Dinah Shore and Bing Crosby...TOGETHER!
Into the midst of this Ozzie and Harriet adventure of a country bursts this “devil music”, tailored strictly for teenagers. The world had begun to change more quickly and irreversibly than ever before in history.

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