Found Friday - Found Recordings

A couple of years ago, I stumbled on a trove of home recordings at a thrift store in Fort Wayne, Indiana which I quickly bought up for a dime a piece. Not too long ago I started trying to record them to mp3. Most of them were badly damaged and I was unable to record form the majority of them. There were a few that came out well, and a few more that came out ok. I've compiled the decent ones (the last two tracks are pretty poor quality) for you to listen to. It is a fascinating collection of short audio letters, talk about the war (WWII), home recordings of the piano and accordian, recordings from the radio, etc. All the information I have on these is that the main two people on the 1945 recordings are M. M. White and Helen. Some of the records have scrawled notes, my favorites being the black markered ones on which they wrote "bad." There were no second takes - so there's a good live, conversational feel to these recordings. I have tagged the mp3s so it should come up as one album on your mp3 player. The audio quality is very rough- covered in a thick layer of fuzz, but sometimes that's refreshing with the over-polished state of most new recordings. Here are some scans of some of the records - some were on a vinyl-coated cardboard disc, some were on vinyl (the ones that sounded better), some were on vinyl-coated aluminum (most of which had peeled off the metal). You can find the collection here, here or here. I especially like the track "Married Life for Us".

This is what most of the look like - on vinyl-coated cardboard