(a project created by Craig Bididman – educator, blogger, music fan)
During the month of September I am going to be taking a trip down music memory lane. Doing some remembering on a collection of music that has long since departed my ownership. Everyone who knows me knows that I have a massive love of music. And that love began a very long time ago with my father. My father, who would have been 64 this year had a massive Vinyl collection. Thousands of albums that he had collected as a child to adulthood. He had them thoughtfully arranged by genre, artist, and feeling so when he was in the mood for a certain artist, kind of sound, or memory he can easily access them. I often felt that was how his brain worked. I spent hundreds of hours looking at, sifting through, and listening to his massive collection. He has this great Pioneer turn table and these huge Sony speakers that made every album sound perfect.
His collection made me want to collect records and I did at places like 4,000 Holes Records in Spokane, Washington, Flea Markets in South Florida, and First Amendment Records in Greenville, North Carolina. While I never amassed his volume of Vinyl I did have somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 albums. Here is where it gets sad. When I enrolled in graduate school in 1995 I did not have room in my car to take my albums with me to grad school at Southern Illinois University. So I left them with my father at his home in Pinetops, NC. I stored them in our barn with all of the rest of my stuff. I think you can figure out the next issue. In 1997 as I was moving between grad school and my new job in Texas a tropical storm hit Eastern North Carolina and it collapsed the roof of the barn. All of my albums were ruined. By time I got to them they were covered in mold, warped, and gone. It was devastating. I never collected Vinyl again.
Fast forward 20 years later and Craig Bididman posts a photo on Instagram with a 30 day Vinyl challenge. I knew right away this was the time to reintroduce myself to my Vinyl collection from 20 years ago and to look into the confines of my memories to recollect those albums all over again. So, why you will not see any photos of me holding a vinyl album know that each album I will post and write about I did own at some time and I think I might try to find again. Music has been the core of my personal survival and it always will be. For the next 30 days, I get to revisit so many of those important albums. Thanks Craig and I hope you too will enjoy this walk down amnesia lane.
Here is a screenshot of Craig’s Instagram Post for those who want to join in.
Considering Outloud 