Much has been written in the last couple of years about the “vinyl revival” and the enduring nature of the format, now in its seventh decade and still going strong. There is, however, a format which pre-dates the vinyl record which is also still going strong – albeit with no new units being produced – and that is the shellac 78. Sure, it’s a much smaller market but there are millions of 78s still out there, and lots of great music to discover on them.
There are a number of different types of 78 collector: those who seek out US blues records from the 20s and 30s, some of which only exist in single figures and can sell for thousands of pounds, the 50s rock’n’roll collectors, those who seek world music released on 78s decades before the term “world music” was even coined (check outexcavatedshellac.com if you haven’t already). Then there are the collectors of 20s and 30s novelty tunes from the UK by the likes of Leslie Sarony, Albert Whelan and Jack Hodges (The Raspberry King). There’s a thriving market for classical recordings on 78 – in fact some of the most expensive recent sales of 78s on eBay are of very early (pre-1910) classical works on obscure labels. Then there’s spoken word recordings (comedy sketches, political speeches, and religious sermons), jazz, film soundtracks, crooners, and military bands. And that’s all just for starters!
While CD and vinyl reissues of classic or obscure albums have steadily increased over the last 30 years, a lot of early music released on 78 has still not been reissued, and can only be heard on its original format, because master tapes for the majority of 78s don’t exist. This is because they were recorded onto wax discs before the invention of magnetic tape in the 40s. But even later records that are widely available in other formats can be worth seeking out – rock’n’roll for instance: a 78rpm copy of Jerry Lee Lewis’ Great Balls Of Fire in good condition, and played on a decent system, will sound better than any other way you’ve heard it before.
What I particularly like about 78s is that they’re like a window into the past; listening to the very first 78s from the 1900s is like listening to ghosts of the people who were the same age as my great, great grandparents. Songs from the 1910s give us an aural experience of what life was like before and during World War I. Or significant recordings, like Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit, a song which changed the way people saw the world, remain important historical artefacts. Sure, you can buy the track on CD or download it, but to actually hold an original 78 of it on Commodore (Holiday’s regular company Columbia refused to release it because of its subject matter) is amazing (though of course playing it is even better).
So, if you wanted to collect 78s today, where should you start? I’ve been collecting them on and off for 40 years, since I was a schoolboy in fact. Back then it was easy to find shellac gems; junk shops, market stalls and jumble sales (remember them?) were groaning under the weight of 78s going for as little as 5p apiece. Nowadays, some charity shops will sell them (more often in the more specialist music charity shops), they turn up at car boot sales, and there’s a thriving eBay market. Elderly relatives can also be a source of free 78s!
Of course, you also need something to play them on. Wind-up gramophones are still fairly common, especially the little portable ones which can be had for less than £50 and are great fun. Even the steel needles which have to be changed every second or third record are easier to come by now than they were 30 years ago, with the advent of the internet.
Some 78 enthusiasts frown upon those who still play their records with steel needles, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for that copy of Eddie Cochran’s C’mon Everybody you’ve just paid £185 for on eBay. But that’s how 78s were played for decades, and that 1917 copy of Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty by Florrie Forde on the Zonophone label will have survived two world wars (maybe even being played in the trenches by a WWI soldier – as many reputedly took their portable gramophones with them) and, at the very least has spent a hundred years being played on all sorts of equipment.
There are also plenty of second-hand Dansette-style record players around, and the flipover 33/78 needles required for these can still be bought today (78s have a wider groove than vinyl records so need to be played with a special 78 stylus). For the hi-fi buffs, separate turntables with three speeds (33/45/78) were still being made into the 70s and beyond, and today there are still a couple of turntables being produced which can play shellac. Rega produce the RP78 turntable which only plays 78s, and usually costs around £300. There’s also the Audio Technica AT-LP 120 which is slightly cheaper and plays all three speeds. (You would need to change the stylus to play 78s on this if you used it as your main turntable).
Just like collectors of vinyl, 78 aficionados have different likes and tastes. So, what is worth keeping an eye out for when you come across that dusty box of 78s on the floor at the car boot sale? It’s unlikely you’re going to come across one of those aforementioned US blues 78s worth thousands of dollars, but just in case; keep an eye out for anything on the Paramount label, or anything by Robert Johnson (in a recent Bay Tripper, a copy of I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom sold for £3,288). In the real world though, you’ll probably see lots of records by the likes of Jimmy Young (the Radio 2 DJ had a fairly lengthy career as a singer in the 50s), Ruby Murray (a HUGE star back then, now only remembered as rhyming slang for our national dish) and Mantovani. You can safely ignore these unless 50s easy listening is your thing (and it does have its fans – look at recently completed eBay listings and you’ll see records by all three going for between £1 and £6).
Rock and pop from the 50s, however, appears to be of more interest for most collectors. Of the big stars of the era, Eddie Cochran seems to command the highest prices, the aforementioned C’mon Everybody regularly fetching £150 plus in decent nick with his other hits not far behind. Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, Little Richard and Elvis can command prices between £10 and £35 for their standard releases, with rarities such as the Elvis Sun singles or his final RCA 78s released in 1960 going for much more (as 78s were dying out at the time, they were, obviously, pressed in fewer and fewer numbers). The last UK Elvis 78 was A Mess Of Blues. A copy of Stuck On You, the single before that, recently sold for £350. Surrender was only released in the UK on 7” but a 78 was released in South Africa, a copy of which recently sold for £91. Much like with vinyl, it’s sometimes the more obscure recordings that sold few copies which now command higher prices, so it’s worth keeping an eye out for the likes of Dance Me To Death by The Hi-Liters or Wendy by Johnny Gentle.
If, on the other hand, the records in that box contain a mixture of different sized discs (between 7” and 10”) on labels like Broadcast, Edison Bell Winner/Radio, Victory and Imperial, you could be looking at novelty discs from the late 20s or early 30s. Lots of these were covered more than three decades later by The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band – songs such as Jollity Farm, Hunting Tigers Out In Indiah, Ali Baba’s Camel, and I’m Going To Bring A Watermelon To My Gal Tonight. However, there are hundreds of other songs of this ilk which haven’t benefited from zany 60s cover versions which are worth investigating – how could you not want to hear songs with titles such as Put Your Worries Through The Mangle, Mrs Rush And Her Scrubbing Brush, Let Me Carry Your Bag To Baghdad Dad and There’s A Song They Sing At A Sing-Song In Sing Sing? Morrissey would kill for some of those titles. Anything with the name of Leslie Sarony, Leslie Holmes, Randolph Sutton, Albert Whelan or The Two Gilberts as either the artist or songwriter is worth investigating, and most of these can be picked up for less than a fiver.
Classical 78s pop up a lot in car boot sales and charity shops, and for the most part will be sold as a set of 12” records in a booklet which is the origin of the word “album” in a musical sense (and you can bet your life not all parts will be there). The classical records to look out for are very early acoustically recorded 78s on obscure labels. Two 78s by the Russian opera singer Ivan Vasiliyevitch Yershov on the Gramophone Monarch Record label from circa 1909 recently sold on eBay for over £500 each. A Greek pressing of Maria Callas performing Bellini’s Norma fetched £281, while a UK pressing of Nellie Melba performing Boucher’s Le Temps des Lilas made £225. Enrico Caruso’s recordings are fairly common as they have been re-issued on numerous occasions but one of his earliest records on the Gramophone Concert Record label from around 1902, sold for £200. Even later, more common classical records (often on His Master’s Voice for UK pressings) can go for anything between £3 and £15.
Even Beatles fans are well served by 78s. India carried on pressing 78s well into the 60s and there are at least 20 known Indian Beatles 78s, right up to We Can Work It Out/Day Tripper – as well as the regular UK couplings, there were also Indian 78s of If I Fell/And I Love Her, Yesterday/Act Naturally and Norwegian Wood/Drive My Car, among others. You’re unlikely to stumble across any of these in your local Oxfam shop (but if you do, snap ’em up!) but there are lots of other Beatles-related 78s. The story of a young John Lennon being transfixed by the lyrics of Bing Crosby’s 1932 recording of Please with its double meaning (“Oh Please, lend your little ear to my pleas”) is well known, and this became the inspiration for the double meaning in Please Please Me.
As well as Bing’s version, there are many other versions of the song from the era. Similarly there are dozens of versions of Ain’t She Sweet, Besame Mucho, The Sheik Of Araby, The Saints, Falling In Love Again and Red Sails In The Sunset, all of which The Beatles covered in Hamburg and which they’d grown up hearing, in fact pretty much every rock’n’roll song they covered had been originally released in the 50s on both 78 and 45, and the teenage Beatles all had both 78s and 45s in their collections.
There’s also George Martin’s pre-Beatles productions for Parlophone during the 50s, the majority of which were released on 78. True, there’s scant evidence of the innovations he would make during his 60s heyday but there’s some good comedy releases by the likes of Charlie Drake and Peter Sellers, a few skiffle records (The Vipers Skiffle Group were one of Martin’s biggest pre-Beatles successes), another Beatles connection with his productions for Dick James (who went on to become their music publisher), and some recordings with future Carry On star Jim Dale. Oh, and traditional Scottish music. Lots of traditional Scottish music.
Of course, the collectable Beatles 78 is their acetate of That’ll Be The Day/In Spite Of All The Danger, their first studio recording, when they were still known as The Quarrymen. Again, you’re not going to stumble across a copy of this anywhere, because Paul McCartney owns the only copy (though he did have some replicas pressed up for friends). There have been rumours of a second Quarrymen recording session and acetate which has been lost, and the records Brian Epstein had made of the Decca tapes were pressed on 78, so you never know what might be out there!
Other hits of the 60s and 70s have their origins decades earlier on 78 – Elvis had a hit with Are You Lonesome Tonight? in 1960 but it was first recorded in 1927 and there were many different versions released. Bryan Ferry covered These Foolish Things (written in 1936 and recorded by Billie Holiday in the same year) on his first solo album, and Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (written in 1933) on his second, while his album As Time Goes By consisted entirely of songs written during the 20s and 30s.
There are some great versions of September Song, including a 1984 cover by Echo & The Bunnymen frontman Ian McCulloch, which he released on 78. If you thought Mike Berry’s 1980 hit The Sunshine Of Your Smile was contemporary, check out Miss Jessie Broughton’s version of it, released on the Scala label in 1916. Emile Ford & The Checkmates’ 1959 No 1 What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For? may sound like the epitome of late 50s pop but it was written in 1916 and I recently picked up an instrumental ukulele version by Juan Akoni, released on Zonophone in 1918 – and very good it is too! Freddy Cannon’s hit Way Down Yonder In New Orleans, also from 1959, was actually written in 1922 and later recorded by, among others, Al Jolson.
Like vinyl records, many 78s had white label demos/test pressings or acetates which can be very collectable. An acetate by the composer and pianist Percy Grainger, which was probably the only copy in existence, recently sold for £300, while a test pressing of an unreleased song by Ambrose & His Orchestra (not someone you would normally think of as collectable!) went for £260. Al Bowlly is also one to look out for – his stock releases generally go for between £5 and £40, though an unissued test pressing of The Very Thought Of You was recently sold for £82.
Private pressings also crop up on 78s. I recently found a series of privately pressed 12” 78s of the trial scene from Shakespeare’s The Merchant Of Venice (typically, with one of the four records missing). Sadly there’s little information on the labels so I don’t know if it’s an amateur production which had its own recordings made, or a lost recording by a famous actor (I don’t recognise any voices though).
This leads us on nicely to the subject of spoken word records, the most common of which were comedy records. In the days before TV, when few people had access to radio, apart from seeing them live, the only way to hear comedy sketches and monologues was through buying records. In 1913 Joe Hayman recorded Cohen On The Telephone which went on to become a million seller in the US, making him the first really big comedy star on record. There are lots of forgotten comedy performers of this period – Michael Casey, Jack Lane (“The Yorkshire Rustic”) and Hal Jones are just three in my collection whose records are still amusing 90-odd years later. Comedy records remained popular throughout the 30s, making stars of Sandy Powell (who made dozens of records all titled Sandy The… Goalkeeper, Tram driver, Mountaineer, Solicitor, Jockey, etc), Arthur Askey and Fred Beck and George Buck, who produced a series of Mrs ’Iggins records which are good fun. Future Upstairs, Downstairs actress Angela Baddeley made a comedy 78 in 1928 called Motoring Without Tears in which she is completely unrecognisable as the future Mrs Bridges! But it’s not only comedy released as spoken word records – there were broadcasts by the Royal Family released on 78, starting with the first ever broadcast by King George V and Queen Mary in 1923 for Empire Day.
Christmas messages became regular releases after being broadcast on radio. In 1940 the then Princess Elizabeth broadcast a wartime message to children about evacuation which was released as a single-sided 78. Political speeches were also released on record, with then-Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin releasing a tribute to the recently deceased King George V in January 1936. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was Churchill’s speeches that proved the most popular. Major news stories also became the subject for spoken word records. Worls War One had seen the advent of factual releases such as The Landing Of The British Army In France on the Winner label, while during World War Two Decca released an eye-witness account by Charles Gardner of an air battle over the English Channel. In 1930, Amy Johnson released The Story Of My Flight, in which she described her record-breaking solo flight to Australia, while Edith Evans released a series of 78s of poetry readings. There are even 78s of Linguaphone language courses, and sound effect records.
Those wartime spoken word records didn’t sell as well as the popular vocalists of the time, and you’d expect that records which sold in huge numbers at the time wouldn’t be worth much anymore, but The Forces’ Sweetheart Vera Lynn is, perhaps surprisingly, still very popular. Her two biggest hits, We’ll Meet Again and The White Cliffs Of Dover regularly sell for between £30 and £60, while her lesser-known records fetch up to £20.
George Formby doesn’t command such high prices but his Decca and Regal Zonophone releases sell for between £5 and £20, with earlier releases on Edison Bell Winner and Dominion reaching more in good condition. If you find a George Formby 78 on the Zonophone or Jumbo label, it’s his father (now known as George Formby Sr). While his releases are not as sought-after generally, copies in really good condition can fetch up to £50, simply because they’re older and harder to find in really decent nick. The other big star of this period, Gracie Fields, is much less collectable and rarely commands more than £10.
Obviously an article of this length can’t do justice to the vast subject of 78rpm recordings. I haven’t touched on jazz, the classic 30s dance band era, film soundtracks (Marilyn Monroe, for one, commands decent prices) or the joys of accordion music or military marches. 78s were the dominant format for recorded music for over five decades, with millions produced all over the world, and despite their fragility and the sheer number of 78s that must have been simply thrown out over the years, there are still plenty out there to discover and enjoy (I recently went to a sale in Cambridgeshire with over 100,000 78s on offer!) There are picture disc 78s, coloured 78s, cardboard 78s, multi-groove 78s which play different songs depending on where you place the needle, four-track 78 EPs, and 78s which play from the label outwards. Many of music’s advances during the 20th century were made on 78, from the beginnings of jazz music near the end of WWI, to the dance crazes of the 20s, the advent of crooners in the 30s, and R&B and rock’n’roll in the 40s and 50s respectively.
If you’re just starting to collect, it can be daunting but, as with vinyl, trial and error can be deeply rewarding. Once you get the bug, you won’t stop spinning shellac! Dave Dixey has a monthly podcast, 78Man Presents: https://78manblog.wordpress.com
COVER STORY
Few 78s came in picture sleeves – most were in plain brown sleeves or company logo sleeves. A lot of record shops in the UK had their own sleeves madem which can be a useful tool for researching where old record shops were, though few of them remain today. This sleeve advertises J W Wells in Woodgate, Leicester. Another Leicester shop, Cowlings, had their own sleeves made to commemorate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The sheer number of these different sleeves shows how many record shops were around in the 30s and 40s, and some of the more attractive shop sleeves are collectable in their own right.
BUYING 78S THROUGH THE POST
Many people are wary of buying 78s by mail order due to their fragile nature. I’ve bought dozens over the years, and have only ever had one breakage, from an eBay seller who didn’t know the difference between shellac and vinyl (and insisted there was no difference). There are many regular eBay sellers who are easy to identify because of the amount of 78s they sell – if I’m not already aware of a seller I check their feedback. Three of my most trusted sellers are Greg’s Greats, Philip Hutchinson and icantbelieveitsnotclutter.
I’m always wary of sellers whose postage for 78s is the same as for vinyl – if they haven’t got higher postage it means your precious shellac is going to arrive broken in an album mailer. The way to post 78s is to encase the record(s) in thick, sturdy cardboard, package it in bubble wrap, inside a larger box with polystyrene chip packing. If an eBay seller doesn’t have feedback for selling 78s, it’s easy enough to ask them how they intend to post it. Plus, of course, if you’re buying on eBay, pay with PayPal and if the record arrives broken you can claim your money back. When buying on eBay it’s also worthwhile narrowing the search to sellers within your area – that way you can pick the item up yourself and not risk damage in the post.
CONDITION
As with collecting vinyl, condition is everything. It’s no use buying a vinyl album with a big scratch on it because you don’t want annoying clicks throughout the record. With 78s though, especially the older ones, you expect them to have surface noise. While it would be nice to find a Mint shellac record from 1920 it really is unlikely to happen, but condition is still important to a certain extent. Older 78s which have had excessive play on steel-needled gramophones will show signs of wear, with the grooves often turning grey, and they’re not going to sound great, no matter what you play them on. On the other hand, 78s from the 50s can have remarkably little or no surface noise if in good condition.
Towards the end of the 50s some labels, like Pye, started pressing 78s on vinyl. These can sound better than 45s if in good condition, due to the faster speed of the record and wider grooves. 78s are also prone to cracking and breakage. I’ve played cracked 78s with no problem, though I’d be wary of playing them on a decent system as you could cause stylus damage. Rim chips are another thing to look out for when buying 78s – it’s OK as long as the chip doesn’t extend onto the playing surface. Just be careful as you lower the needle onto the record!