I've been acquiring vinyl records over the last year from thrift stores and garage sales and found some pretty good stuff. Lately, I've become interested in Roger Miller's first few albums. (I show how to play the bass lick to his "King of the Road" song on my other blog.) I found out his early albums are not available on cd for some strange reason. I've seen other lesser known artists' albums get reissued on cd which is puzzling. I'm a Roger Miller fan, especially after having purchased the 3-cd collection, "King of the Road: The Genius of Roger Miller." I enjoy his unique style of country/folk/pop.
That 3-cd boxed set is obviously not comprehensive and I wanted to hear the other songs on the albums which did not make it to the boxed set. So I started looking around on blogs--which are a great source for sharing music--but no luck. Funny thing is, I was also looking around recently for some shared Sonny James albums on blogs but to no avail either. Seems there's no one out there blogging & sharing classic country music artists' music for some reason. I have my suspicions why but I will not get into it here.
So after having no luck on various blogs, I started looking on eBay for those original albums. Plenty of them there but I specifically wanted to find stereo versions. There were far fewer stereo editions than mono editions available. Oh, and the boxed set mentioned above features all the early cuts in pure mono. I've heard some of his songs in stereo and always liked those versions better. I saved the best ones I could find so I could decide whether or not to buy them later.
I had another idea; why not check out the records at a thrift store I had not been to in a while? That's what I did and guess what? I found a stereo copy in very good condition of "The Return of Roger Miller," his second album from 1965. For like a dollar or less!
I have a small stack of records I've been buying at various thrift stores over the last year and a half. I just recently checked them out and found out that I have 2 more Roger Miller albums there! I don't even remember buying them. But one of them is "The 3rd Time Around" from 1965 and one titled "The Tunes That Launched the Career of Roger Miller" from 1964 on Camden Records. The first 2 albums mentioned are on Smash Records.
Unfortunately, it's a mono copy of "The 3rd Time Around." So I have to keep looking around for a stereo edition of it as well as the next few that were released after this album.
The other album I discovered I already had was this one:
The sleeve has a copyright date of 1964 but after I recorded the album into my computer, created the individual tracks, burned them onto cd and then prepared to import them into my iTunes library, the year displayed as 1972. I can't find any info online about the precise year of this record. But it does have some of his earlier songs. Probably singles. I can't really say. But the songs are all in stereo and there are some on there that I was already familiar with because they happen to be on the boxed set. And a few others really stood out as some really good cuts.
Once I learn how to upload these LP's to a file sharing host I will make them available for downloading here. In the meantime I will keep looking out for more cool old records and digitizing the ones I already have.
