A Golden Shower of Records

(Well, that title should drive some search engine traffic here!).

Today's feature is an Easter two-fer from those little Golden Records of yesteryear.

These beautiful 6" yellow-vinyl children's discs played at 78 rpm. Since my current turntable doesn't have a 78 setting, I recorded these at 45 rpm and then pitch shifted them in software to get to 78 rpm. (For the mathematically inclined, the formula used was "45 is what percent of 78?". The solution is left as an exercise for the reader). An additional hour or so per side was devoted to attempting to clean up the sound, as these apparently were stored without sleeves but between sheets of 40 grit sandpaper inside a box of wood files.

Reading the fine print on the labels indicates that these were distributed by Simon and Schuster.

Side A is "Egbert The Easter Egg" and features Betty Clooney (sister of Rosemary, aunt of George), The Sandpipers, and Mitchell Miller and Orchestra.

Side B is "Bunny Bunny Bunny" and is billed only to The Sandpipers and Mitchell Miller and Orchestra, but it sure sounds like Ms. Clooney is on this one as well.

My copy has no sleeve, but I did find this image out on the intertubes:



Betty died young, and there is a foundation in her name: http://www.bettyclooneyfoundation.org/
(The Betty Clooney Foundation for Persons with Traumatic Brain Injury)

If you enjoyed these songs, maybe you could drop by and drop them a little contribution.




The Golden Records Sandpipers were consistently the same four singers — Mike Stewart, Ralph Nyland, Dick Byron and Bob Miller (as far as we know, no relation to Mitch). Other semi-regular singers included Sally Sweetland, Mary Jane Sutherland and Peter Hanley. They are not the same Sandpipers who had some easy listening hits in the 60's.