Harry Gottlieb

You come across a lot of crazy things record hunting, and this one is definitely up there for me. For a couple years, my grandma has been telling me to look through her records for anything I might want to take. Last January, I finally got around to it. She had collected a lot of classical music, but she also had a bunch of unique records, with some with no notes on them at all, others written on by hand. All of them were recorded live onto the record, and most of them were made out of stock paper with the recordings cut into a plastic coating. Most were recordings of family members from the forties, some singing and playing music and some recording messages to each other to send across the country by mail. There were a lot from a great uncle reporting to the family from an army hospital in St. Louis. He would make comedy records of newscasts about his life in the hospital there. We found a few records of my grandma and grandpa, including one from when they had just moved to LA from New York. The one I'm uploading today is a recording of my great grandpa, Harry Gottlieb. We think it was recorded in the late 40's, because that's when he followed my grandma and another daughter of his out west, and the record was cut at Rainbo Records, which is still operating in the LA area today. Around that time, my great aunt was involved with the USO as a singer, so we're guessing he got the recording connection through her. Back in New York, my great grandpa had been a piano player in silent movie theaters and even after the industry went under, he kept playing piano for the rest of his life. You can hear how comfortable and fluid his playing sounds on these recordings. My mom said that the song on the A side was one he used to play a lot. I had given up hope of ever hearing his music a long time ago, so finding this record was a big treat for me. The sound quality is pretty rough, but some of the other discs we found were a lot more damaged.

Harry Lionel Gottlieb Piano Side A by Easy Jams