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Guy's History of Recorded Music

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Guy's History of Recorded Music was a compilation of records from the early days of the phonograph, 1920s and before, mostly. They're not actual phonograph records, but computer files, many retrieved from a web site called archive.org, some played directly from youtube, and others from various on-line resources. Hundreds of thousands of 78s and cylinders are available, uploaded from private collections all over the world. Your host Guy Touquet would select recordings from the internet for a radio broadcast each week. Several broadcasts are archived at archive.org. Click on the record player to hear a sample. Formerly broadcast over the air in the coveted 3 am to 6 am Thursday time slot on WWUH radio, 91.3 FM, the program aired live from the campus of the University of Hartford in West Hartford, Connecticut.

Guy plays what he likes, an eclectic mix of early jazz, band music, classical, blues, ethnic, traditional, and novelty items that defy classification. Guy's History of Recorded Music isn't really history but entertainment. It's music your grandfather danced to, music maybe your Grandma hummed to you as you sat in her lap. Mine did.

I'm not really Guy Touquet. I made up that name to anchor myself in the last century. Y2K, that final year of the 20th century, a golden opportunity for redemption, turned out to be not a turning point but a point of precipitous decline. As bad as the last century was, this one's worse, with the third millennium shaping up to be the most violent and the least enlightened of them all. Superstition and ignorance thrive at rates that would astonish the most cynical 10th Century thinker. Warfare has been adopted as a hobby and an entertainment, in tribute to the ancient Greeks and Spartans, and the soldiers use weapons that kill with an efficacy ancient warriors could only dream of. The music and art of the new millennium are an embarassment to all of us.

To counteract these forces ever so slightly, Guy Touquet plays Fats Waller, John McCormack, Rudy Vallee, Helen Kane, George Gershwin, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and hundreds of other artists from a groundbreaking period in music. In a time of grinding poverty for most and brutal repression for some, a creative force was unleashed that produced music both original and infectious

Guy and his music collection are available for hire. Perfect entertainment for speakeasies, 85th birthday parties, ballroom dances and name-that-tune contests.
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