![]() A 45 by a vocal group called the Hornets recently sold for $18,000. Used records is now a $20-million to $30-million business. #Little golden records 78 rpm movieThere are auction houses that cater to record buyers in Japan and Germany-not to mention movie soundtracks and TV commercials strip-mining the music.Īlong with the dolls, toys and muscle cars of the baby boomers, records from the golden age of recorded music, roughly from 1945 to 1964, are commanding exorbitant prices on the auction block. Now, 40 years later, there are magazines and record companies that specialize in old blues, R & B and vocal groups. It was a passion, a hobby, but nobody thought it should be more than that until Slim came along. Hunting records had been a solitary pursuit down the disinfectant-drenched aisles of Goodwills. “Stormy Weather” didn’t just kick off an enduring mystery, it helped turn pop record collecting into a profession. They set out to learn everything they could about the music, and ended up rescuing the Five Sharps and dozens of others from obscurity. Across time, though, the voices of black teenagers reached the ears of the white teenagers who hung out at Slim’s and the Capitol swap meet in Los Angeles. There were black collectors and women collectors as well, just as there were good white vocal groups. Mostly white, often graceless, bordering on geeky, they came along a few years later and rediscovered the music. The beat changed with every record, pushing the limits of what the audience would accept, teasing the cell that would divide and divide again, until the music got a new name-rock ‘n’ roll.īut the legend of “Stormy Weather” is also about another group of young men. There were the Larks, the Wrens, the Royals, the Five Crowns, the Cardinals, the Robins, the Counts, the Cadillacs, the Falcons, the Flamingos, the El Dorados. 5104 was among 80 destroyed in a fire several years earlier. (The master is the disc from which records are made.) Jubilee reported that the master for release No. Slim went to the Jubilee warehouse on 10th Avenue and asked the company to dig the master out of its files. Slim raised the offer, then raised it again, until it seemed the whole country was looking for it. He put up a sign offering $25 in store credit for a 78-rpm copy and $50 for a 45. Slim assured his angry customer that he would replace the record. Whatever happened, the outcome was the same: The record shattered like a water glass. According to one version of the story, his pet raccoon Teddy plopped down on the 78. Everyone agrees that Slim flipped for the record and asked to play it on his show. Here’s where history begins to lose its way in the thickets of legend. Others declared it the greatest vocal performance ever recorded. Some who heard the record thought it was god-awful. Cruder, rawer, it moved at a dirge-like pace, accompanied by thunderclaps and the sound of falling rain. But the Five Sharps’ rendition was something special. Everyone from Frank Sinatra to Ethel Waters has interpreted it Lena Horne’s 1942 version remains the most famous. The Ted Koehler-Harold Arlen composition is one of the most recorded songs in pop history. ![]()
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