First Albums

This was the first album I purchased. Bought it and the accompanying instruction book at the same time at a local music store after Dad brought a 5-string banjo home one evening. I think he saw my interest sparked by the likes of Earl Scruggs, Roy Clark, and Larry McNeely performing on TV variety shows at night after supper. He paid more attention to his childrens' interests than I thought at the time, always aware of what might hold our attention for extended periods of time.

I then took control of the banjo and spent most every free moment of time at home up in my room with the door closed so I wouldn't drive everyone nuts trying to learn to play the thing. I'd put the LP on the turn table of our little portable record player and work through all the lessons.

Then a friend turned me onto the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and poor Pete Seager took a back seat to my 5-string banjo playing goals. John McEuen's playing blew my mind so I somehow scrimped and saved until I could buy the album, spending my last cent getting my hands on it, and listening to it every day for months on end.

Then another friend gave me a copy of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band ALIVE! album which had a rendition of Foggy Mountain Breakdown on it. Blew my mind. But I didn't buy that album, so the next one I saved up for and purchased was Three Dog Night's album titled It Ain't Easy after becoming enthralled with the track Momma Told Me (not to come). It wreaked of strangeness my blossoming teenage spirit craved.

So that was album number three, and it was a long time before I spent money on another.

The fourth album was Bob Dylan, although I wasn't so enthralled by any of the tracks on it. I was eager to explore the folk music realm as opposition to the Viet Nam War swelled to fever pitch in the nation. So these five albums, along with Mom and Dad's Peter Paul & Mary, Kingston Trio, Dave Clark Five, Glen Campbell, and Marty Robbins albums, as well as a tourist trap album they bought at the Flying W Ranch in Colorado Springs during a vacation journey we made there were my early vinyl musical fare.

After that, it was a blur. Folk and rock and folk/rock dominated but there were plenty of bluegrass albums in the mix too. By the time punk and metal became the thing for a lot of people, I was throughly rooted in the 60s-70s music scene, very rarely hearing anything of interest to me since then. Contemporary pop music makes me yawn uncontrollably.

All my music books, sheet music, hand-scribed scores, cassets, CDs and vinyl collection burned in the wildfire, so now reconstruction of collections from era of youth is a fun activity.