Hi all,  The last mystery roll No. 49 titles are:

1. "Poor Butterfly" from "Big Show" by Hubbell, played by Andrei Kmita;

2. "The Girl Is You And The Boy Is Me" from "George White Scandals,
by Henderson, played by J. Milton Delcamp;

3. "All Alone", by Berlin, played by Corrine DeBert;

4. "You And I, Love You And Me", from "Bye Bye Bonnie" by Von Tilzer,
played by Adam Carroll.

What is the story on the rolls?  Way back in the late 1970's and early
1980's Ray Siou wanted to have a collection of nice selections for his
reproducing pianos and he thought it would be nice to have other people
have access to a lot of great tunes.

He borrowed an extensive collection of Ampico, Duo-Art and Welte rolls
and contracted with Play-Rite to produce them as long playing rolls
with between 3 to 5 selections on each roll.  He managed to do the
Ampico and the Duo-Art rolls but he never did get to produce the Welte
rolls.

He also did quite a number of other types of rolls, in particular a
vast array of nickelodeon rolls.  Ray said that the nickelodeon people
only would buy one or two rolls and basically never changed the rolls
and did not buy as many from him.

Ray is quite a nice person to know and if you went to his place in
Oakland, California, and was a good customer for his rolls, he likely
would take you out to dinner.  He was as thrifty in dining as he was
in producing rolls and usually had coupons for the meals.  He is
enjoyable to talk to and would play and demonstrate his wonderful music
machines.  He also would put extra things in your box of rolls, like
tee shirts, videos of music collections, or recipe cards that he bought
at the post office sales of dead letter mail.  Lots of fun to see what
you would get.  I always enjoyed my visits.

I suspect the three copies that you have probably were production
test samples; they may be complete and good or they may have defects
-- who knows.  In any event, in addition to the holes being small, in
some cases they also did not align with the tracker bar (at least on the
Ampico rolls).  It took me a week to adjust my tracking mechanism on my
Ampico to be able to play original Ampico rolls and to play these recut
rolls.  I still have a few where the perforations still cover two
adjacent sets of holes and they sound funny.

As Jim Heyworth says, "In my opinion, compared with today's recuts,
a rather sloppy job.  As with most of these made-up jumbo rolls, speed
has to frequently be adjusted during play.  Starting tempo 65.  Proba-
bly not worth recutting using this as a master, due to relatively poor
quality."  So, if you started, say, the Blue Danube waltz and started
dancing at a slow tempo, by the middle of the roll you would be doing
a fox-trot and by the end of the selection, you were jitterbugging.

Anyway, if you wanted some background music and did not want to get
up and change the rolls too frequently, and did not care if they were
perfect in tempo and such, they are just perfect.  As far as recutting,
it is like taking a Xerox paper and Xeroxing it again.  In the roll
case, they would not make another good copy.

I also asked a recutter one time and they declined on the basis that
there is too much paper and if the punching machine hiccuped or burped
as the last part of the last song, who would pay for the multiple
copies of thousands of feet of wasted paper?  It's just to risky and
costly to do in today's market.  I know that in a few of the rolls that
were done that is what happened and Ray simply cut the defective tune
off and issued a shorter roll.

So that is a little bit of the history of these rolls.

Musically,
Larry Norman, from the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia.
I hope that the trees will be beautiful in the fall...