Saturday, December 24, 2005

Surprises For Christmas


It's Christmas Eve, and I think I've saved the best for last. I think you'll really like this LP. RCA liked it so much they released it twice, under two different names. The orginal release is seen above, as credited to The Ralph Hunter Choir. The second time around, RCA decided old Ralph wasn't drawing enough attention, so they called it Living Voices Sing Christmas Music, as seen below. And that release spawned a whole series of albums by any number of different groups as Living This or Living That. Many of the other Living Voices albums were the work of Anita Kerr, but not this first one. Most of my tracks were actually ripped from the one below, but some came from the original above. I just grabbed whichever one I felt sounded better. Both of them had a nasty skip in there, so I wasn't able to get a single full dub from either record. And, oddly enough, the record you see above is an Australian pressing. It used to belong to a little girl who loved Rick Springfield by the name of Annette Haessher. I only mention this because I had to spend several hours getting her name and her love notes to Rick off of the cover via Photoshop. Thanks Annette, I didn't have anything better to do the week before Christmas, anyway. So please, download and give a listen to a great LP that wraps up the Christmas Sharity here at Ernie (Not Bert), Christmas Surprises From The Ralph Hunter Choir (RCA of Australia SL10911, 1959) aka Living Voices Sing Christmas Music (RCA Camden CAS 725, 1962).

I previously shared the doodles off the flip of the original LP back during Christmas in July. That's when a helpful reader pointed out that the two records held the same music. It's always nice when readers share their info.

5 comments:

  1. Thanks, Ernie.
    I have the mono USA RCA release of the Ralph Hunter album. After listening to the stereo version I may still post it depending on how different it sounds. Great work, as usual!

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  2. Thanks for posting all these great LP's - I'm not trying to be a whiner :-) but perhaps if you bumped up the Mp3 VBR a bit more - that LP stylus up & down is even more pronouned when recorded as an mp3 (as its inherent abilty to create a smaller audio file). Again, I know it's not your fault the lP quality is poor but jst passing it along - tahnks agaian for a huge and amazing selection of fun stuff! Thanks.

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  3. I figure with the already poor production quality of my record techniques, the low bitrate is the least of the worries. Trust me, my original wave files don't sound too great either. If you hear something you really like, start looking in the backs of thrift stores. That's where all of this vinyl came from in the first place. I don't think any of it is super rare. It's just rare that any of it gets played.

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  4. Ernie - can this be reposted? Looks like I was six years too late! :-).

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  5. Look for a newer post!

    http://ernienotbert.blogspot.com/2011/11/rerun-ralph.html

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