20. Delilah – Tom Jones (1968)

This record reminds me of my Grandmother as it was the only 45rpm record that she had in her collection.

When I was a boy my Grandma came to see us, catching two busses from her house near Victoria Park in Leicester to ours on Glenfield Road every Thursday night.

She always bought us some sweets and chocolates and stayed for her dinner following which we would watch ‘Top of the Pops’ and my Dad would take her home in the car. On Sundays we would go to her house where she would cook us Sunday lunch before we returned home in the evenings listening to the ‘Top 40’ on the radio as we pulled into the drive. This arrangement had been in place for years and only stopped when our Grandma eventually came to live with my parents long after I had moved away.

As a young boy in the 1970s whilst the adults talked we would often set up the record player and play her 78s. It was an old mono record player that was housed in a blue box, with a lid, a speaker on the front and two knobs – Volume and Tone and as with most record players of the time it had a spindle that allowed you to stack records which would be ‘dropped’ onto the turntable one at a time and played on top of each other. It had four speeds, 16, 33 1/3, 45 and 78 and my Grandma had two big boxes of 78rpm records.

Over the course of the years I pretty much played them all from Burl Ives ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’ through to a personal favourite ‘In 1992’ by ‘The Rocky Mountaineers’ which was song, written in the 1930s about what life would be like in 1992 and included fantastic lines such as ‘You can get to Spain in an hour and a half n 1992’ as well as ‘We’ll be in the marble orchard where the tombstones are in bloom…’ Ironically at that time 1992 was still about 15 years in the future and I note with interest you still can’t get to Spain so quickly!!!

‘Delilah’ was played every week without fail and I still love the drama of this song and the rich and deep delivery of Mr Jones. Whenever I hear it it reminds me of my Grandma and those Sundays….

Now listen to the song…..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI5LWwC-cE8