From the Canary Records Bandcamp site:
“When middle-class Americans in the 1950s found that they could get access to a tape recorder and a microphone, it then became possible for them to make recordings that they could pay to have pressed into discs. One didn’t need to go to dedicated recording studios, most of which had been for decades in the cosmopolitan centers – first New York, then Chicago, then the temporary make-shift, studios set up in hotel rooms Georgia, Texas, Tennessee and Virginia, or the independent studios in Grafton WI, Richmond IN, Los Angeles, etc. It was part of a process of decentralization of the business of making records that exploded into thousands of small labels quickly sprouting up and, more often that not, just as quickly collapsing through the 1940s, the last days of the 78rpm disc in the ’50s, and the parallel emergence of the microgroove 45 and 33rpm formats. Regional bands playing musics in an enormous number of vernacular styles seized the opportunity to include themselves in the marketplace of home entertainment for their own communities.
To get a picture of those communities and of the kinds of music being played and enjoyed in them, one has to encounter the discs themselves. Easier said than done. Of the eight discs presented on this collection, at least half have so far survived without either a trace or a whiff of the fact of the existence anywhere on the digital megamind. So, here was are, “fixing” that as if the potential of them as an experience might open a door to something for someone somewhere.
Meanwhile, if you run into any more discs by Costas Kamanis, send em on over. They’re bound to be very good. “
