When I was a little kid, I received on my birthday a cheap hard plastic all-in-one General Electric portable record player, the kind that I had to tape a nickel on the arm so it wouldn't skip on records. I thought it was WAY cool, nobody else in the neighborhood had their own record player, as because it was portable, I could take it over to friends and we could listen to music outside as long as there was an outlet.
Apparently it was so cheap that none survived to the digital photo age, I can't find a photo of one online anywhere. And mine is long, long gone.
Anyways, after I received the record player, the word got out to relatives that for gifts, 45 records were the thing to get me. Imagine the fun of receiving 45 records in 1969 from family members that have lived their whole lives in Indiana, and are in their 40s at the time. Was it possible that any of them could give me something timely, current, of the times?
Not really. But a relative (who shall go nameless) actually gave me this 45, which at least was from the time.
Of course, I hated it. I was not then, and not now, "into country". And it was 1969/1970. What was I listening to at the time? At 10, I was tuned to the top 100 played on WERK AM radio in Muncie. The Archies, Tommy Roe (Dizzy was a favorite 45 of mine in the neighborhood), Creedence Clearwater Revival, Zager and Evans...
Remember those Archie records you could cut off the back of cereal boxes? Oh yeah, those sounded great...
Anyways, I probably hadn't listened to that Henson Cargill's "Skip a Rope" for almost 40 years before I did this morning. And after listening to it, I gotta wonder - what kind of gift is that to give to a 10 year old?