Lewis Perin wrote:
Marshall Price writes:

[...]
(Off topic: about old high-quality portable tape recorders.)
[...]
I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to record more bird songs, because
those I did were incredibly beautiful at low speed.

Billie Holiday in her prime played back at half speed sounds like
Louis Armstrong: glorious.

/Lew
---
Lew Perin /
http://www.panix.com/~perin/babelcarp.html

Shucks. I've missed a lot, focusing on only sixty subjects at a time.

But at least I saw Louis Armstrong live. It was on the site of the
1939 New York World's Fair, in an open-air theater with the stage on an
island. He was a real tape-recorder fanatic!

All we had was an old wire recorder, and when we got rid of it, we
threw away all the old home recordings.

Dad (Georgie Price) was one of the first great recording artists, now
long forgotten. He was the first non-classical singer to get a
long-term contract (5 years) with RCA Victor, after which he went over
to Vitaphone. When he was a kid, Enrico Caruso wanted to adopt him, but
Gus Edwards did so by offering the family more money -- $15 a week for
him plus $15 for them.

(After working for Edwards for more than ten years, it turned out
that the money supposedly set aside for him didn't exist, but the money
the family got was enough to support all ten of them!)

His theme song was "Bye Bye Blackbird," but I think "Barney Google"
actually sold more copies. Back then, almost every record went gold.
There were lots of phonograph players, but not many records!


--
Marshall Price of Miami
Known to Yahoo as d021317c