These recordings were first recorded by Angie Adams in the early 40’s.
The recorder was a Sears “Silvertone” home record transcriber. It was a device that looked like a regular turntable, but it had two tone arms located on either side of the platter.
The tone arm on the left was a rather heavy on used to cut the grooves on the disk, and the tone arm on the right was the playback tone arm.
The media was several sizes, 6”,6 1/2” and 8” dia. metal records, coated with acetate or a vinyl like material. The record grooves were cut into the coating.
Twenty-seven recordings have survived and are in my possession. They are showing the signs of time. Some of the recordings are taken from the radio and I included some of them for a sense of time. I don’t know how many recordings were made, or why Angie stopped recording. Perhaps the recorder broke, or she tired of the novelty.
Most of the piano playing probably was Katherine Chris.
The track titles were taken from the record labels.
I tried to clean the recordings as much as I could with my limited equipment and skill. They (the original disks) are in really bad shape.
I will be adding a few more selections in the future.
Here are additional notes by Kay Adams
Most of the Silvertone recordings were done prior to 1944.
Aunt Helen thinks she made one recording with Mom in WG singing a song with her but doesn’t remember the song, but she was not part of the “gang” in Philly – she was only 24 in 1944.
The gang consisted of uncles George and Jim, Angelo Kangas, JNimmy and Nick Lullias, Great Aunt Helen and Great Uncle George, Henry Wong, who was Chinese and called Ding Ding, Betty Abramides (the nurse) and her brother George Abramides and from time to time other persons such as Helen Kar.
Johnny was not part of the gang.
Jimmy Lullias played the piano. Helen Kar played the mandolin – she was part of the GAPPA along with our Helen, Jean Pappas and her sister Katherine. Helen played the mandolin and Jean played the guitar and of course Katherine played the piano.
I didn’t realize that Helen and Jean knew how to play those instruments!
The music: (hold your ears) 😉