Uncle Charlie and his dog Teddy

I thought of this record recently:

Here is the album on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nHqkXrnPs7k_Vd2dNwa78EZ3KE02orHpQ

I never owned a copy but I did know about it.  (I do have a Nitty Gritty Dirt Band greatest hits CD somewhere though).  I became aware of this particular album and remember it because of this:

the S-120 had really nice audio in my opinion (we won't talk about selectivity or sensitivity or dial calibration or precision though)

Yes, I have a Hallicrafters S-120 and in addition to trying to listen to hams, I also used it to listen to AM broadcast radio AND especially to shortwave radio.  I listened to Radio Havana, Radio RSA (South Africa), the BBC, Radio Austalia and also to the Voice of America.  All of those stations share one characteristic, a good loud signal to the middle west of the USA at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s.  With an S-120 a good strong signal was needed due to the inadequacies of the radio, it was really just an All-American five tube set with a band switch and pretentions !  One thing was that it was really hard to know the actual frequency the radio was tuned to - the stations knew this and would broadcast a brief musical announcement prior to a scheduled transmission.  The VOA used Yankee Doodle, Radio RSA used a guitar song with a bird song and so on.  I was never able to reliably catch Radio Tokyo for my Mom :(  (I remember NHK was on 9.505 MHz in the 31 meter band)

The reason why I remember Uncle Charlie and his dog Teddy was because I had listened to a show about the album (must have been 1970) on the VOA.  I don't think it was the Willis Conover show because he was the jazz guy.  Whoever it was had interviews of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band about the record and they played a few of the songs.  The big hit from this album was Mr. Bojangles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Bojangles_(song)

It's interesting that there is a song on the album called Propinquity.  I wonder if the songwriter, Michael Nesmith (of The Monkees) was a Dobie Gillis watcher ?:

https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2023/09/my-room-by-maynard-g-krebs.html

Anyway a Christmas gift to you (if you haven't listened to it before) - a wonderful album.

Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm