Featured Essay: My First Records

by NancyKay Shapiro

I was born in spring 1961, in Brooklyn NY. My parents, in their early 30s, had a small assortment of records, infrequently added-to. There were some cast albums, a record of James Bond movie themes, , and some classical and jazz albums which I found ignorable when dad played them. Mom and Dad were born just a little too early for rock’n’roll generally, but there were two albums in our house that I have always seen as my primal touchstones. 

One was the soundtrack to the Beatles’ first film, A Hard Day’s Night. (Dad was ostensibly too old for rock’n’roll, nonetheless he bought each Beatles album as it came out, mainly for me, but he did listen to them.) 

The other was a compilation LP called Jocko’s Choice R’n’B Oldies. I wish I knew how this came in; did Dad buy it (somehow I’m certain it wouldn’t have been Mom), was it a gift? To my knowledge it was only played when I asked to hear it. 

Let’s take a look at Jocko and his oldies. Teeny me can’t read yet, so what I see is a smiling man in a “space suit”, pointing upwards, with a drawing of a little green man and a rocket ship shape in the background. The first track irresistibly informs 2 -or 3-year-old me that there’s a place called Kansas City, where there are crazy little women and locally-produced wine available. A little further on, a group of men with soft swelling voices tell me about ‘a Sunday kind of love’. Later on side 1, ‘Happy Happy Birthday Baby’ by the Tune Weavers hints in heart-tugging tones to little me about the unladylike emotions I might, like the singer, eventually write about to some man. Many of the other tracks feature doo-wop singing hinting of the pleasures of love, sharp dressing (‘one button low’), Cadillacs, and marrying very young. 

These songs, along with those on the Beatles LP, are my first hints about what being a grown-up might be like. (A couple years later, once I got the concept of the teenager, that lucky character took the grown-up’s place in my imagination; I thought teenagers were far more sophisticated and interesting and privileged than absolutely any adult, even my fascinating Dad.) 

I can just about grasp the very fuzzy edge of memory of hearing these songs as an illiterate toddler who spent most of my time on the floor, and knowing that they were different, and yes, somehow inherently better than anything on the soundtracks to West Side Story or The Sound of Music, or to the songs sung by Richard Dyer-Bennett or Mahaliah Jackson or Barbra Streisand (other records my parents had and played for me). ((Lemme just say that I’ve come to know Mahaliah Jackson belongs in the former category.) 

My folks had what I guess would’ve been called a hi-fi at the time: a turntable connected to a box that lit up and had vacuum tubes visible inside behind a grill; this in turn powered a single speaker about the size of a milk crate. This set-up lived in the dining room of our house in Flatbush, and was audible throughout the first floor—kitchen, dining room, living room. When I was allowed to listen to records, I’m pretty sure I had to earn the right to operate the turntable by myself; at first one of the grown-ups would have to appear at record’s end and flip it over. (Of course one or the other of them was always close by.)

When I began writing this I thought I’d discuss the individual tracks on the record in more detail, but now I find myself pondering memory. I’ve learned that the more one accesses a given memory, the flimsier it becomes. Do I truly recall my state of being as a pre-literate pre-toddler? The memories tend to be kind of static; settings rather than scenes. I often sat underneath the baby grand piano while at play with a record on; it seemed like a bespoke shelter for little me (no one played it). I was excited by music but still years away from developing taste and beginning to buy 45s myself. Still ignorant of race let alone of racial discrimination, I didn’t understand the ‘difference’ between the Jocko compilation album and that Beatles LP. There were a thousand differences and more, of course.

NancyKay Shapiro grew up on Long Island, lives in Manhattan, and is ruled by a small blonde dog and an ever leaping and bounding vinyl & book collection. She used to be a copywriter; now is a thrilled retiree.