The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

1908: (early spring) The first notes of spring are always the birds and the hurdy-gurdy or street piano man, so early this spring we heard Signor Grinderino, down on the street, grinding out his tunes, and, as an experiment, we thought we would get Signor Grinderino to bring his hurdy-gurdy up on the elevator to the laboratory and have him grind out a couple of tunes for us in order that we could record same.

These records turned out to be so unusual that they were put on sale and made quite a hit, and so did we with Signor Grinderino because we gave him two dollars for his work and that was a lot of money for him.

After this date, we found it a task to get rid of him as every morning regularly he came around, stood in front of the laboratory and ground out his tunes until we had to chase him away in order to keep him from spoiling the other records which we were recording.