I was going through some dusty and dirty containers of old Edison cylinder records from the early 1900s when I saw a name I recognized. It surprised me because many of the tunes, singers and…
Category: Music
Readers ask about lady nutcracker, turntable & Mutoscopes
Posted in Computer/Electronics, Kitchen, Music, Reader questions, and Records
Friday at Auction Finds is readers’ questions day. I try to guide readers to resources for them to determine the value of the items that they own. I’m not able to appraise their treasures, but…
A collection of lovely old accordions
Posted in Music, and Performers
I don’t know squat about accordions – how to play them and how to really appreciate their sound. But when I stumbled onto about a half dozen at auction recently, I was taken by the artistic design of the…
Bert Williams in black face on sheet music
Posted in Black history, Broadway plays, Ephemera/Paper/Documents, Music, and Performers
I could tell there was another clear frame behind the one with a sheet-music cover of a black woman in orange kerchief lovingly holding a white child in night clothes. I wasn’t sure who was…
Janet & Sherry the auction hunters: Day 2
Posted in collectibles, Music, Personal items, and travel
My auction buddy Janet and I picked out five items at auction recently to see how well we’d do against some of the TV auction shows in picking choice items. Yesterday, I blogged about a…
Kenneth Slaughter & Wings Over Jordan
Posted in Black history, Ephemera/Paper/Documents, Music, and Religion
They were in a different CBS studio each Sunday, this group of singers with some of the best voices in spiritual music. But Wings Over Jordan couldn’t just walk through the front door of hotels to…
A Ray Charles record player that wasn’t
Posted in Music, Performers, and Records
Did you see the Ray Charles record player on the auction website? my auction buddy Janet emailed me. “I didn’t know such a thing existed.” I had not, and neither did I. So I dutifully…
Nostalgia: Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald road tours
Posted in Ephemera/Paper/Documents, Music, and Performers
The bold red colors on the booklets were transfixing. They caught my eye before I even got to the faces on the covers, some of which I soon and instantly recognized. The incomparable Nat King…
I thought you’d like those, the auction staffer said, a big smile on his face. He was feeling this mother lode of age-stained songbooks that lay on the table in front of me. I had…
Striking up a one-man band
Posted in Music
When the auctioneer pulled the instrument from its perch in the corner, a single image seemed to come to mind for all of us auction-goers: A street musician on a corner playing his heart out on…