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Because there truly isn't anything QUITE as beautiful as an acoustic Blue Amberol...................

BLUE AMBEROL
by- MM

The distinct perfume of dust and camphor
I am entranced
To my nose I breath in its allness
With ears closed I perceive it
White lined name and phrase

A jig
A schottische
A soulful loss
A loving triste

Hawaiian military aires
A banjo conspiracy
en route to overtake the Hawaiian dictator

Lieutenant Van Epps
I am at your pick and call

A flat top
so cobalt blue
More blue than blue itself
Deeper than Picasso could ever make blueness

A gloss so divine
A weight and feel unlike
anything that could be mine

Never shall fingerprints stain its perfection

And now, we play.

Only the non-dubbed ones.

Though I will admit, the simple sight of a shining powder blue BA beckoning me from from across a room, sets my heart a-flutter.

But the powder-blue ones are always more worn & noisy, aren't they? (mine are)

Even the dubbed Damberols can be enjoyable; I was just playing "Frolic of the Coons" and noted how well the banjo sounded, second-generation and all .... then the 2-part ZAMPA Overture - a dub, but its Diamond Disc counterpart has so much surface noise that the Damberol sounds better !

ps - Ever play a BA with most of its plaster missing? Volume is greatly reduced! That plaster served an important purpose.

pps - Nice poem. Thanks for sharing

Edisone wrote:But the powder-blue ones are always more worn & noisy, aren't they? (mine are)

Even the dubbed Damberols can be enjoyable; I was just playing "Frolic of the Coons" and noted how well the banjo sounded, second-generation and all .... then the 2-part ZAMPA Overture - a dub, but its Diamond Disc counterpart has so much surface noise that the Damberol sounds better !

ps - Ever play a BA with most of its plaster missing? Volume is greatly reduced! That plaster served an important purpose.

pps - Nice poem. Thanks for sharing

Doesn't a Damberol refer to a shatter prone black wax Amberol?

MM, I consider myself fairly literate, but to be able to word-smith on your level is beyond me. No matter how rendered, praise of Blue Amberols is well-merited.

As for the question about "Damberols"--it was once convincingly explained to me that the Brits came up with that term after World War I when trans-Atlantic commerce resumed and they finally could receive copies of Edison's post-1914 dubbed Blue Amberols--which of course did not measure up at all to the directly-recorded ones of the pre-war period. Therefore, the term did not originally refer to the 1908-1912 wax Amberols--but given how those break so easily it is easy to see why people also believe that the term refers to them.

Ralph

Whatever he's drinking, I want some! Yea verily, a glistening minty cylinder is a joy to hold and behold and hear and will cause you great cheer as you wax lyrical about that cylindrical miracle whose birth was so empirical. Just don't tell regular folks or they'll have you committed. What happens in the blog, stays in the blog.