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A bit of music trivia for you today…today in 1949, RCA Victor introduced the 45rpm single record. The first single, ever, was a country record by Eddy Arnold called ‘Texarkana Baby’, released on green vinyl. Records were colour coded to represent genres:

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• Light Green - Country & Western
• Yellow - Children’s Music
• Black - New, Popular Releases
• Red - Classic Music
• Florescent Orange (awesome!) - Rhythm n’ Blues
• Light Blue - International
• Dark Blue - Popular Classics

The 45 wasn’t the first 7” record though. Before that, at the turn of the century, wax cylinders had given way to wax discs and then 20 years later, to a more durable material called Shellac. The first vinyl record emerged in 1933, but was too expensive to make available to the public. However, during WW2, the US War Department found that the shellac records they were sending to soldiers overseas were often arriving broken, and shellac was increasingly hard to come by. In answer to this, Columbia began manufacturing the more expensive, but less fragile, 33 1/3 RPM vinyl and wanted it to become the industry standard. Rather than partner up, RCA Victor began a top secret development project (code-named Madame X) which eventually resulted in the creation of the 45 RPM 7” vinyl record!

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1949 RCA Victor magazine ad, explaining “Project Madame X”. (From the Classic Urban Harmony Archives)

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There’s some nice articles out there for recorded music history nerds (fairly specialist…) so if you’re interested, make sure you check out these sites:

- Classic Urban Harmony

- 78 RPM Collectors’ Community

- Global Dog Productions

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KS