JAY UNGAR

fiddler-mandolinist with folk duo Jay Ungar and Molly Mason

“Well, when I was a kid, albums were 78 RPM records, but I distinctly remember a collection of folk songs by Burl Ives. What’s interesting is that some of those songs -- like ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’ -- I still perform in concert these days.

“I also remember a version of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’ narrated by Eleanor Roosevelt. That one was a box set of 45 RPM records.

“But the first album that I ever bought was a folk album by U. Utah Phillips. It was his first album, and I think that he was still going by the name Bruce Phillips at the time. I’m told that if he finds it in your record collection, he destroys it. It includes a song called ‘The Ode to Yuri Gagarin’ and other really wacky things.”