All shook up by donation
A museum-worthy find was almost thrown away, writes Catherine Groenestein.
Elvis may have left the building but somehow, one of his extremely rare, 64-year-old records ended up in a South Island secondhand shop.
And the original New Zealand-pressed E-Z Country Programming No2LP from 1955 was discovered by none other than a travelling church organ tuner.
Oamaru musicologist
Dr Ron Newton, who has a PhD in New Zealand organ history and a museum of pipe and reed organs, was tempted to throw the valuable piece of vinyl away until he did some research.
‘‘Then I looked it up and discovered it was sought after by collectors all around the world, and I thought, ‘This record needs to go to a museum,’ ’’ he said.
It is a copy of the first 12-inch vinyl LP recording of Elvis’ music ever made and is sought after because of two featured tracks: Mystery Train and I Forgot To Mention To Forget.
The E-Z Country Programme was the second of three pop albums released by HMV in New Zealand and included songs from artists such as Chet Atkins, Eddie Fisher and Dinah Shore.
Newton expected that he’d be posting it to Memphis in the United States before he discovered New Zealand has its very own Elvis Presley museum in Ha¯ wera, South Taranaki.
It so happened that Newton, who tunes and services church organs all around New Zealand, was heading in that direction this past week to tune pipe organs ahead of Easter church services.
The museum, which is run by 70-year-old Kevin David ‘‘KD’’ Wasley, houses thousands of items of memorabilia. Wasley said he was thrilled when Newton arrived with the record as it was one he had never seen before.
‘‘It’s new to me. It didn’t come up on the computer but that’s made it more unique.’’
Wasley wasn’t sure how much this album was worth but he had another pair of rare New Zealandmade Elvis records valued at $3500.
However, he took pleasure in the uniqueness of his vast collection and said: ‘‘It has nothing to do with the money.’’
Mark Thomas, who owns Vinyl Countdown in New Plymouth, had not heard of the record either and could not put a value on it because that would depend on its condition.
He said memorabilia and records from Presley and other artists, including Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, were popular with collectors worldwide.
But not everyone with a fondness for vinyl was a collector – there had been a resurgence in vinyl records in recent years, with younger people buying turntables so they could play records.
‘‘I find a lot of people are using streaming apps like Spotify or YouTube to find out what they like before coming and buying it on vinyl,’’ Thomas said.
Meanwhile, Newton, who was all shook up about his find, was hitting the road again in search of his next pile of old records.