Your dad would have loved this. I'm sure he had a copy. So did my mum — in fact this is hers, but she doesn't have a record player any more, so she was clearing out the entire collection and gave me first refusal before shipping off what was left to a charity shop or dump. So if you want Mary O'Hara, that's where to look.
In the early '70s our house had fewer than 30 records, and none of them were cherished much. My dad might get out Christmas Carols from King's College Cambridge once a year, but that was it for him. My mum was more enthusiastic and had a great Harry Belafonte record that Hilary and I loved — sadly I couldn't find that in the collection. Quite possibly I scratched it beyond repair on some careless whim. Certainly I remember taking one or more of my mum's old Elvis Presley 78 rpm shellac records, and throwing it on the floor, or bending it until it shattered, just so I could exclaim, inspired by Roy Castle, "Mum, I'm a record breaker!" I don't think she was even that bothered, though I wince at the memory. I thought the 78 of Elvis's Jailhouse Rock b/w Treat Me Nice was among the casualties, but I see I still have a copy of that. I thought it might be worthy of Antiques Roadshow or at least Record Collector by now, but a check on eBay suggests the going rate is only around £10-12. Evidently there are still a lot of them about in the attics of England, and eBay is keeping the price down by connecting sellers and buyers. Overall, a Good Thing.
So New Orleans to London was among the haul that I thought salvaging from my mum. At the moment, someone's asking £21 for a copy in decent nick. My copy won't be worth anything like that since Yours Truly, aged about five, scrawled over the cover in ballpoint pen. Aside from my defacement, there are markings showing that my mum only got the record second-hand: "Richard Wallace, 1956" is written on the inside cover, with a line through it, and then my mum's maiden name.
I wasn't even sure it the record would play. "This record must be played with a pick-up designed for long playing records," it says in italics on the back. Well, I know mine was designed for long playing records, but I thought the standards for LPs might have changed since 1953. Once I established that it plays fine, I recorded the whole thing onto mini-disc to avoid the need to play it again. The record in itself is in good shape, allowing for a small amount of charming 'period' crackle, aside from a little distortion on the first track.
I can't pretend to have known any of this until Google found it for me just now, but it turns out to be quite a historic recording. Chris Barber's website has a mass of historical context to mark the 50th anniversary of the original release in 2003, which was accompanied by a CD re-issue. The sleeve notes on the back of the record refer to Tony Donegan on banjo, but I hadn't realised that Tony Donegan and Lonnie Donegan are one and the same, making this an ancestor of my more recent Lonnie Donegan and Chris Barber album.
I'm looking forward to listening to this some more. Thanks, mum! Happily there's more like this still to come.
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