45 RECORDS
Remembering The .45 Record: Music From The 60s To Now
Daily Magic 3 September 2024
I Miss My .45 Records
By Bruce White
Hey, can you hear me with those earbuds in? If you take them out for a second, I could tell you how we used to listen to music.
Long, long ago there was something called the .45 record. The .45 record was 7 inches in diameter, had a 1 ½ inch hole in the center for the spindle and had two sides. One side was called the A side which typically had the hit song on it. The other side was called the B side which typically had a throwaway song that no one listened to. Most people played .45 records on a small portable record player made by RCA. The player’s spindle could support a stack of up to ten records which would drop when the previous record was finished. The speaker had a small monaural speaker.
My first experience with the .45 record came at about age 3. My parents must have bought me an RCA 45 player and the record “Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.” I remember sitting in the living room at the bottom of the stairs listening to Fess Parker sing that over and over again. I played it so many times in a row that the record player began to smoke and died.
