Recently Discovered: Petey Fan Art #9
okay, so more like Petey Fan Art #0.1
(Another update in the never-ending Saga of Petey.)
While coming back from a job interview today (and becoming hopelessly lost in the process) I found myself in an old part of Eugene, full of houses fifty years old at the youngest. That's nothing to the people in the hoary and antediluvian East Coast, but here in Oregon that's pretty impressive.
Ever my father's daughter, I stopped admiring the tall trees and shady porches and screeched the Bug to an immediate halt when I saw a paper plate with an almost-invisible yellow arrow stapled to a telephone pole. The jungle drums of my ancestors beat in the back of my head - YARD SALE YARD SALE LOOT, THEN BURN YARD SALE.
I found a cluster of card tables on a driveway reclaimed by moss. Nothing too unusual at first - Avon bottles, a few bales of National Geographics, moth-eaten antimacassars jammed in cigar boxes, fondue sets. Rooting through a box of dusty magazines (again, filial piety) I came across a strangely-shaped object I thought at first must be a stray curler, sticky with the hairspray of times past.
Dragging it into the light, I realized my mistake. It was an Edison cylinder of unquestionable vintage, the only marking a hastily-scrawled "petey - pt 1" on the inner rim. I gasped, "Wonderful things!" but recovered my composure before the tables' suspicious attendant could decide to jack the price up another 50˘.
The box yielded two more cylinders and a flattened and tattered carton proclaiming them to be an original recording from the legendary yet seldom-recorded vocalist and ukulele savant Blind Mama Pelphrey, collected by an amateur folk music enthusiast during Blind Mama's declining years. I paid my $1.50 and left with my treasure, leaving parts of the Bug behind in my hurry to escape.
Hooking the recordings up to the Edison cylinder drive on my old TRS-80, I managed to rip them to mp3. Unfortunately, a freak accident caused the cylinders, the TRS-80, the box and the scanner I was scanning it on to become engulfed in flames of a surprisingly appetizing scent. After I extinguished my apartment, I found that the song had been recorded not on wax as I'd assumed but rather hardened rabbit tallow.
Thank the 3" Oregon permafrost that they'd been preserved this long, then, as you listen to:
Blind Mama Pelphrey: The Ballad of Petey (5.97 MB)
Lyric transcription forthcoming, unless a fellow enthusiast wishes to take on the project.
While coming back from a job interview today (and becoming hopelessly lost in the process) I found myself in an old part of Eugene, full of houses fifty years old at the youngest. That's nothing to the people in the hoary and antediluvian East Coast, but here in Oregon that's pretty impressive.
Ever my father's daughter, I stopped admiring the tall trees and shady porches and screeched the Bug to an immediate halt when I saw a paper plate with an almost-invisible yellow arrow stapled to a telephone pole. The jungle drums of my ancestors beat in the back of my head - YARD SALE YARD SALE LOOT, THEN BURN YARD SALE.
I found a cluster of card tables on a driveway reclaimed by moss. Nothing too unusual at first - Avon bottles, a few bales of National Geographics, moth-eaten antimacassars jammed in cigar boxes, fondue sets. Rooting through a box of dusty magazines (again, filial piety) I came across a strangely-shaped object I thought at first must be a stray curler, sticky with the hairspray of times past.
Dragging it into the light, I realized my mistake. It was an Edison cylinder of unquestionable vintage, the only marking a hastily-scrawled "petey - pt 1" on the inner rim. I gasped, "Wonderful things!" but recovered my composure before the tables' suspicious attendant could decide to jack the price up another 50˘.
The box yielded two more cylinders and a flattened and tattered carton proclaiming them to be an original recording from the legendary yet seldom-recorded vocalist and ukulele savant Blind Mama Pelphrey, collected by an amateur folk music enthusiast during Blind Mama's declining years. I paid my $1.50 and left with my treasure, leaving parts of the Bug behind in my hurry to escape.
Hooking the recordings up to the Edison cylinder drive on my old TRS-80, I managed to rip them to mp3. Unfortunately, a freak accident caused the cylinders, the TRS-80, the box and the scanner I was scanning it on to become engulfed in flames of a surprisingly appetizing scent. After I extinguished my apartment, I found that the song had been recorded not on wax as I'd assumed but rather hardened rabbit tallow.
Thank the 3" Oregon permafrost that they'd been preserved this long, then, as you listen to:
Blind Mama Pelphrey: The Ballad of Petey (5.97 MB)
Lyric transcription forthcoming, unless a fellow enthusiast wishes to take on the project.