Happy almost New Year's Eve! 2026 can't get here quickly enough. Let's hope it's a damn sight better than 2025. As John Lennon once sang, "Can't Get No Worse".
As I like to do, when I have one available at the end of a year, I am leading off with a countdown the major offering for this week's post. More than four hours of a show called "The Dynamite Decade", hosted by the small man with the large pipes, Charlie Van Dyke, as heard on the last day of the '70's, on WRBR, South Bend, IN.
This is a unique end-of-the-year countdown, in that, as its title indicates, it's also a summary of the decade of the 1970's,. with various comments from, and songs by, the hitmakers from throughout those years, in the midst of also counting down the 100 biggest hits of 1979.
This is not the entire show, which I'm guessing was at least six hours long, but it does capture from the 80s into the high teens of the countdown. Unfortunately, whoever taped this edited out most of the commercials.
Enjoy this flashback to another, more enjoyable end-of-the-year.
Download: OPUS 1979 - The Dynamite Decade - with Charlie Van Dyke - WRBR, South Bend, 12-31-79
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Ads are always popular around here, and the older, the better (well, that's what I think, anyway). Here are eleven ads for a store called "Oliver Wright's Appliance Company" in Knoxville, Tennessee, from May of 1966.
If you look up the address, you'll see that this is now an industrial area, and that this particular address is virtually underneath a short highway - "Hall of Fame Drive" - one that was built pretty recently, according to a bit of research I did. But if you look at page three of this little high school newspaper, you'll find that Ol' Oliver was doing right by the high school, and advertising in their paper.
Download: Eleven Ads for Oliver Wright's Appliance Company, Knoxville, TN, May, 1966
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Apparently this tape was originally used for a broadcast by someone named Dr. Howard Kershner, and then later was an audition tape. A shame we'll never hear either of those.
Then again, Dr. Kershner seems to have been affiliated with Liberty University. So.... maybe not.
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And now, something I alluded to in my last post, when I shared some not terribly good family singing, and said I had something much better, in the same vein, in the pipeling.
This is a return to the Muir family. Back when this blog was new, just over ten years ago, I shared a set of recordings by the Muir family which I just loved. This is a family in which clearly, all of the members knew how to play instruments, and knew how sing in good old-timey, ragged-but-gorgeous harmony. That post came when I was typically just sharing one tape per post, and I separated out all of the individual songs, something I've not done in quite some time. You can find it here. That wholly amateur guitar/piano/trumpet version of "You Tell Me Your Dreams", in that offering, complete with lots of bum notes, still just hits me straight in the heart, and makes me wish I'd known these people.
Anyway, I have just recently discovered that I have another tape by the Muir family (along with at least one non-Muir family member or friend). In this case, there aren't a lot of different instruments heard. Instrumentally, it's all piano, including a couple of piano solos and a bunch of songs sung by the family choir, the vast majority of them Christian in nature. A man sings baritone alone on a few of the tracks, and a soprano sings another. Those don't really resonate with me, but when the children sing - I'm a sucker for children singing naturally (i.e. not stage-trained), it's pretty wonderful. And when everyone sings together, it's magical.
At times, it's clear that everyone knows their parts and that they have no doubt sung these songs countless times. The harmonies in the first song sung together, particularly from the five minute to six minute mark are sweetly gorgeous. And the song at about 15:30, "Years I Spent" (which I know from a thoroughly magical recording by someone named Joan Creary), is sung in a thick, and complicated harmony that gives me chills.
I recognize that this isn't for everyone, and plenty of people love stuff that I just can't stand, but this is the sort of thing I listen to when I want to get all those technically perfect but utterly soulless Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston records out of my brain.
Download: A Selection of (Mostly) Christian Songs, Sung and Played by the Muir Family
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Not a lot to say about this next one. I've labeled it "Audio Letter to Larry" and although the speaker does identify himself, I'm not sure I've made out his name correctly, so I'm not even going to try. The sound quality isn't awful, but it's not very good either. I tried to improve it a couple of different ways, without success.
Download: Audio Letter to Larry
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Here's a tape which features a piano player and violin player in recital. For some of this short performance, there seems to be two violists and at other points, only one. I mostly included this because of the final piece, a rendition of "Jamaican Rhumba", a tune I've known since infancy, as my family had two, very different renditions of it that we would listen to a lot - a story which is far longer than I'm going to share here. I know nothing else about this recording.
Download: A Short Piano and Violins Recital
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And finally, a "Very Short Reel". Here's an itty-bitty bit of tape explaining in detail - with auditory examples - exactly which tones - at what two combined hertz - make up the ten numbered spots on a touch tone phone. This tape is missing its beginning and runs out as the "Zero" tone is being heard. It is labeled "Touch Tones by J.I.S.", as seen below.
Download: A Telephone Company Tape - Touch Tones By J. I. S.
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