This weeks Tune Tuesday is by Eddie De Lange and Jerry Grey, A String of Pearls.

Played by Benny Goodman and his orchestra, this Foxtrot hit number two on the US charts in 1941. Enjoy!

This weeks Tune Tuesday comes from a mysterious purple labeled Russian record.

I don’t have the slightest clue what it says or when it was produced (1950s?). In any case, enjoy!

A top tune in 1945 played by Harry James and sung by Kitty Kallen, “Waitin’ for the train to come in” is this weeks Tune Tuesday. Enjoy!

Tune Tuesday will now become a bi-weekly feature on our blog starting with this song, Skywriter, played by the Band of the Irish Guards. I don’t know when this recording was made but it appears to date back to the 40s or 50s. The group was formed in the 1900s by Queen Victoria. According to Wikipedia:

“The Irish Guards (IG), part of the Guards Division, is a Foot Guards regiment of the British Army. Along with the Royal Irish Regiment, it is one of only two purely Irish regiments remaining in the British Army. The Irish Guards recruit in Northern Ireland, the Irish neighborhoods of major British cities, and in the Republic of Ireland (which permits its citizens to enlist in the British or any other forces, but forbids active recruiting.)”

If this song doesn’t get you marching, I don’t know what will. Enjoy!

Have you ever come across a moment in life where you’ve asked yourself, “What am I getting myself into?”  One of those moments for me was last fall when I hauled back home over 1000lbs of 78rpm records.

I was immediately hooked on the mystery of  flipping through records by artists I never knew when I came across 100 78rpm records on Craigslist earlier last year. I was curious to find a few more and began looking.

One afternoon Google Reader alerted me with a seller from Gibsons, BC, who was unloading a massive collection of over 2000+ 78rpm records. I was terrified and curious to see his collection.

Of course, at this point I asked myself a few questions:

a) What does 2000 78rpm record physically look like?

b) Where am I going to put them

c) How the heck am I going to transport them back home

Instead of answering these questions, I hopped on the first ferry to Gibsons.

The records were located on a surreal beach front property on the edge of Gibsons.  The view from the property was spectacular.

The records belonged to the seller’s father who passed away. He was an absolute pack rat and acquired his collection by trading with other music aficionados. All the records were stored away in milk crates and covered in dust.

It took 40 minutes to load all of them into my truck. With every box of records I put in my truck, I wondered at how they would fit in my garage.  The entire collection lowered my truck by at least an inch.

So what sort of records did we haul away? The ones that peaked my interest were the multilingual records in French, Russian and Chinese. Most of these appeared to date back to the 1940’s with some as far back as the early 1900’s. I’m excited to listen to these recordings, some of which are nearly a century old. We’ll be sharing them with our readers on Tune Tuesdays.

Below are a few snaps of Gibsons and a windy boardwalk we checked out during our visit.

Lately, we’ve been playing a lot of American Jazz and Big Band. I thought we’d change it up today and put on this old opera record from Russia.

I love the typography on this Soviet Union made label. Unfortunately, I can’t read Russian so I wasn’t able to find much online about it. In any case enjoy!

From the other side of the Decca record we featured a few weeks ago, C’est Si Bon, is another one of my favorite songs sung by Louis Armstrong.

The English translation is, “It’s So Good.” The song was written in 1947 by Henri Betti. Enjoy!

This week’s Tune Tuesday is dedicated to my good friend Jim Rimmer, pictured above playing his cornet. His all time favorite artist was the famous cornet player, Bix Beiderbecke.

Bix was an American Jazz cornetist, pianist and composer. He was born in 1903 and often played with Louis Armstrong, who both became influential Jazz soloists during the 1920’s.

The song featured today is, “Singin’ the Blues.” According to Wikipedia, “His turns on “Singin’ the Blues” (1927) and “I’m Coming, Virginia” (1927), in particular, demonstrated an unusual purity of tone and a gift for improvisation. They helped to invent the jazz ballad style and hinted at what, in the 1950s, would become cool jazz.”

I don’t have any of Bix’s work as part of my 78rpm collection, but I’ve managed to find a great recording below. Enjoy!

If you’ve watched any period film from the 1930’s that features a toe tapping dance they were probably playing this song!

In the Mood was composed by Joe Garland and Andy Razaf. The piece was arranged by Glen Miller in 1929 and is his most well known arrangement during the big band era. Surprisingly the song was never a chart topper.  According to Wikipedia, It was the first song ever played by a computer in 1951 by a Ferranti Mark 1 computer at the University of Manchester.

This has to be one of my all time favorite songs sung by Louis Armstrong, “La Vie En rose,” French for, “Life through rose-coloured glasses.”

The lyrics were written by Edith Piaf and the melody created by Louis Gugliemi in 1946. It was granted in 1998 the “Grammy Hall of Fame Award,” a song that is at least twenty-five years old and has a qualitative or historical significance . It’s been performed by many artists such as Donna Summers to Diana Krall and has been played in dozens of feature  films. According to Wikipedia it “has also become a generic song representing the French in foreign countries, as “Rule, Britannia!” and “Stars and Stripes Forever” have for Britain and the US, respectively.” Enjoy!