Note: Every so often, I write about records that belong to a category called “nonmusic.” This is part of that series. You don’t have to have read the last one to get this one, but if you want to read it, it’s here.
John F. Kennedy is our vinyl president. His administration’s nickname comes from a record—Jackie Kennedy once told an interviewer the president listened to the cast album of the musical Camelot before bed. Frank Sinatra re-recorded his hit “High Hopes” for the campaign. The Grammy award for Album of Year in 1963 went to The First Family, a comedy record by spot-on JFK impersonator Vaughn Meader. The record, and Meader, all but vanished after November 22.
Meader called the assassination “the day I died.” Soon, the space on the shelves that had belonged to Meader belonged to Kennedy himself. John Fitzgerald Kennedy: A Memorial Album sold more than six million copies in December of 1963. It’s an hourlong program that aired the night of the assassination on WMCA in New York. Ed Brown recounts the major events of the Kennedy administration between long excerpts of the former president’s speeches.
Other remembrance records followed. John Fitzgerald Kennedy: The Presidential Yearsis a collection of Kennedy’s speeches, plus Lyndon Johnson’s remarks from the day of the assassination. The United Auto Workers—whose record-pressing division issued collections of rousing speeches and worker anthems—put out Last Words to Labor, a record of Kennedy’s remarks at the AFL-CIO convention, backed with his 1961 inaugural address ("Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country”). In 1964, The Longines Symphonette Society produced a box set with two discs of Secretary of State Dean Rusk introducing Kennedy’s speeches and one of reporter Chet Huntley’s coverage of major events between 1961 and ’63. The Assassination of a President: The Four Black Daysis a mishmash that includes eyewitness accounts of the assassination, audio of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, a description of Kennedy’s funeral, and a track called “Interview with Famed Writer, Stephen Laurent, who Predicted the Assassination.” It’s on a label called Living History Records, which doesn’t seem to have issued any other albums.
Are these records cash-ins, conspiracies, or earnest memorials to a beloved president? Yes. Then, as now, there were timely hucksters who put out whatever product might make a quick dollar and conspiracy theorists who crammed every tragedy into their worldview. But there were also journalists and historians who were using the technology of their time to document the very recent past. And there were millions of Americans who were seeking solace wherever they could get it, including from their home hi-fis.
Reading about the days after the assassination, it’s surprising how fast everything happened. Oswald killed Kennedy on Friday. Ruby killed Oswald on Sunday. Kennedy’s funeral was Monday. The TV networks went back to regular programming Tuesday. Thanksgiving was Thursday.
Should I go to work? Is my dentist appointment still on? Are the grocery stores open? We ask ourselves all kinds of mundane questions after a tragedy. It’s like we can’t contemplate anything being the same as it was, or anything working like it should. Those are the signs that time is moving forward, and we just want it to stop for a minute so we can get our bearings.
But that doesn’t happen. The world changes and life goes on. In November, 1963, the radio reports and TV broadcasts floated into space. The newspapers piled up in the bins. Time passed.
Then the records showed up. They were pieces of frozen time. A person in 1963 might remember a Kennedy speech they saw on TV. They might have the words printed in a book. But there was no way to hear it again. The records offered a way to be in the past—to be with Kennedy again, in a country where he was still president. The State Democratic Executive Committee of Texas put out a record called His Last 24 Hours, which was meant for everyone who was supposed to attend a dinner with the president on the night of the 22nd. The album collects the speeches Kennedy gave in Texas, plus the 1961 inaugural address. It’s consolation. The next best thing to being there.
Soon, records appeared that featured the funeral, or at least portions of it. This isn’t as strange as it may seem. Albums of major news events were common in the old days; they were essentially the audio version of history books (we’ll get into these news records in another installment). Funeral records were their own genre, too. Before he recorded Elvis, Johnny Cash, or Roy Orbison, Sam Phillips used his equipment to make discs of funerals for grieving families.
Death inspires people to try to freeze time, and we use whatever technology is at hand. In the early years of photography, many families took pictures of their dead loved ones before they were buried. We make our memories into something tangible, something we can keep on a shelf in a place of prominence or file along with our other collections and only revisit when we’re in the mood to reminisce. The country went through this together after Kennedy’s assassination. And a growing record industry was happy to feed the public need for pieces of time.
Kennedy was our vinyl president, but he was also our most-replayed president. While the speeches repeated on records, Congressmen and conspiracy theorists watched the Zapruder film frame by frame. These two activities are both about controlling time, but they have different goals. The film watchers were trying to figure out what had happened. The mourners already knew, and they were doing what they could to stop it. On vinyl, the eulogies weren’t as popular as Kennedy’s speeches. Record after record hypes that it includes the ’61 inaugural. These records run chronologically and cover the thirty-four months from January 20, 1961, through November 21, 1963. When the needle reaches the last side of the last disc, we know what’s going to happen next, but there’s a brief moment in the near-silence of the speakers’ hum, when there’s still some hope that maybe it won’t happen at all.
