A fellow blogger and I got onto the subject of communicating today, and that led to some comments about how things have changed over the years. That in turn got me thinking about how music was first distributed, and the player piano.
Player pianos were very popular during the 1920s, when George Gershwin was doing his thing, and he recorded a lot of his music on piano rolls, which were used in those player pianos to duplicate the original playing. Here is an example, with Gershwin doing Sweet And Lowdown. A player piano was the original "home stereo", but you had to keep pumping the pedals to keep it playing. Here's George and Ira Gershwin speaking.
In this second one, the first voice we hear is Ira Gershwin talking about George, and then George is heard in a bit from a Rudy Valley radio show recorded on November 10th, 1932. I was born the next morning at 10:58 a.m. in a town in northern Ontario, so this is what technology was like back then. And back then, we listened to music like this. I still like it. I used to play this record on an old wind-up RCA Victor Victrola when I was hardly tall enough to reach the table top where it sat. That's Memory Lane....
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