Does anyone remember elevator music? The company most famous for providing innocuous string arrangements of popular tunes was Muzac®. These sleepy arrangements could be heard in doctors’ offices, banks, grocery stores, and of course elevators.
Today I continued my audition of several cassette tapes made by my late father. His hobby was recording reel-to-reel and cassette audio tapes of anything and everything. He captured music, conversations, sermons, airchecks, sound effects and spoken word diaries. He was blind so printed labels of the tapes were not a priority. You can imagine the challenge it has been weeding through his hundreds of tapes over the past 19 years following his passing. Just a moment ago I was listening to myself as a teen discuss training my 12 year old sister how to drive. My mother, panic stricken in the backseat threatened, “I’ll jump out, if you let her drive!” My dad loved to record us with our guard down a la Allen Funt and his Candid Camera approach to recording conversations.
Some of his tapes are a hodgepodge with no apparent theme or direction. A sermon on one side then on the next side a section of conversation, some things recorded off radio. He never left a moment blank on a tape. Usually he’d put some dreadful elevator music at the end of a side for no reason other than filling out the tape. It was not your usual Muzac® fare. No, these elevator gems were popular hymns and gospel songs he found on a long forgotten FM Christian radio station owned by Moody. They were apparently an automated not-profit broadcaster bent on putting listeners to sleep. My dad was a fiery Pentecostal preacher whose musical leanings were more upbeat; I will never understand why he listened to this station. Maybe he had found an insomnia cure.
Stay tuned
©2010 Neal Rhoden. The Peanut Whistle Blog. All rights reserved.
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