One of my favorite past times is collecting 50's and 60's music. Hobbies come and go but this has always been a big part of my life.

I grew up in St. Ansgar, Iowa in the late 50s and early 60s. During the day I would listen to KRIB (Mason City, IA), KIOA (Des Moines) , KAUS (Austin, MN) and WDGY (Minneapolis) - all on AM back then. At night, when the lowly 250 watt radio stations would get jumbled into the noise and the skip would roll in, stations like KOMA (in Oklahoma) and WLS (with Dick Biondi, of course) would be the only stations we could get in north central Iowa.

I moved to the Chicago area in 1967 and so couldn't resist putting a morning and afternoon clip of Larry Lujack in here from the 70s. (Be patient on the audio clip links, the page takes a while load and then you may have to scroll a little before you find the audio link you will need to click on.)

Here's a few of my favorite links that will take you to sites where you can not only hear a bunch of songs from that era, but many of the disk jockeys, advertisements and promotional jingles as well.


In 1959, the music died only 20 miles from where I lived when Buddy Holly , Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper were killed in an airplane crash. That day lives in my mind as strongly as the day I was in my high school physics class when they announced Kennedy had been shot.

During '64-'66 I worked part time at the Bel-Air Drive In Theater in St. Ansgar. What made this unique, is that this was one of only a half dozen or so fly-in theaters in the US. It's listed on the Drive-In History page. I also have my recollections of the Bel-Air, along with a photo on my Bel-Air Drive-In page. In addition, I have a scanned image of the Bel-Air's monthly Movie Guide for July, 1964 (120K).

---

This page was originally written in 1995 when I was learning how to put sound up on a corporate web site. I plopped it in here for now but haven't had time to revise it and make it the page I want to it to be. So in the meantime, here are snippets from a dozen songs from my collection that represent some of the finest (in my humble opinion) examples of 50's, 60's and 70's music. That's the good news. The bad news is that these are still in .AU format and take up tons of space and download sloooowly. If I get enough visits to this page I'll convert them to MP3, add some new ones and update this page.

So, in the meantime, For your " enjoyment " , you may play any of the twelve snippets of music. Then .... try to guess the following:

The songs start out easy and get progressively difficult. Except for two, they are all from the top 30 and from 1958 to 1977. Some are really obvious but some - well, we'll see how many can be identified!! Send me email at davecxx@millenicom.com (remove the "xx" first) with your guesses and I'll let you know how close you got. Be careful - there are some tricks in here. Have fun!