Several very dear friends have passed away way too early. Ed Spranke was one of the world's top music roll authorities, a wonderful human being and one of the most generous, sharing people you could ever hope to meet. It hurts to even have to write this so soon, Ed deserved at least another 10 or 20 years of retirement! I decide to create this page in his honor, and to honor a few other friends who I've had the pleasure to meet over the years and who have unfortunately left us.

Phil was an early BluesTone customer (that's Phil's player piano below in the photo of Charlie Booty) who kindly invited me to share the joy of his annual private boogie-woogie piano parties in Evansville, IN - that's where I got to visit with Charlie Booty the most, not to mention other great folks like Dick Mushlitz and Carl Sonny Leyland and Trebor & the Ragtimers and on and on. Phil was a boogie-woogie fan going way back, and traveled to Chicago while he was in college to visit Jimmy & Mama Yancey. He had the presence of mind to bring a (heavy!) wire recorder, and the results were issued on Document CD a few years ago. Carl posted some more information about this, along with two wonderful photos of Phil with Freddy Shayne and Jimmy Yancey. Phil also had Jimmy autograph a 78, one of very few Yancey autographs in existence; it was reproduced in the Document CD liner notes.

I will always have fond memories of Phil and Kaye's parties, and the wonderful friendships he helped foster.

Charlie Booty was just a cherub of a fellow, a terrific folky rag & blues & boogie player. I had the privalege of visiting with him at length at several piano parties over the years, and it was my pleasure to help him spread the word about his Piano Joys CDs. I received a Christmas letter from him a few weeks before he died, and I had no idea it would be my last communication with him. The world has lost another of it's finest souls. Please read Charlie's short autobiography on the Swedish Ragtime Home Page - you'll get a small taste of what a sweet man he was. See Carl's website for another great photo of Charlie!

I don't have to tell anyone what a great pianist John was. The story behind his recording of "St. Louis Blues" for my Ampico roll is a fun one to tell. John was appearing at the Scott Joplin festival in Sedalia, MO in 1990. I had been setting up a MIDI keyboard at the festival to record performances, and my friend Richard Riley told me point blank, "if you can get John to record, make sure he does his version of St. Louis Blues for you." The rest is history; after Bob Taylor coded this performance for the Ampico, we had an AMICA convention in Chicago and I had a sellout of the several dozen copies I had for sale. You can't imagine what a rare event that is, to have a horde of people in front of your table clamoring for one roll! It'll never happen again in my lifetime, and I have John to thank for recording such a clever arrangement. That was typical of the many fine performances he made, and as you probably also know he was quite prolific both on audio recordings and with a complete set of Joplin rags in MIDI format for use on your electronic player.

I have a nice photo of John that I will post here. In the mean time, you can Google him for more information; several good choices include a blog at Mississippi Rag and another one created by John's wife Mary Jane. Be sure to lote the links on the Mississippi Rag blog site for 4 Arpin performances on YouTube - they're a nice remembrance to the outstanding musicianship of this fine performer. Thank you for your friendship and all the great music, John. You will be missed.

(Left: Ed at the June 1993 ragtime festival in Sedalia, MO. The unsightly fellow to Ed's right is yours truly, wearing a hat for Don Rand's resurrected "Clark Orchestra Roll Company". Ed sent me this photo after the festival - his caption was "Hey - it's the happiness boys!".
Right: Ed in a typical position, in front of his pride & joy: a beautifully-restored Seeburg A-roll piano with violin pipes. Ed bought this at the famous Charley Smallwood auction, and paid a lot of dough to get the machine he had always wanted and have it properly restored. It was worth it, this is a beautiful piano and a great way to show off Ed's many outstanding A rolls!)
NOTE: Click on either of these pictures of Ed for a larger view

Ed was a warm, wonderful human being. You couldn't select a better friend if you had all the choices in the world. He was friendly, funny, and always incredibly generous and anxious to share everything he had with you. We met in June 1987 when I sent him a letter asking for piano roll information, and we soon were trading photocopies of goodies from our respective collections. Besides music rolls, Ed had an incredibly good eye for attractive ephemera of the era, and his music room was decorated with a most tasteful array of vintage advertisements, photos, and such. He was a consummate collector, and could find stuff that nobody else would. I've never seen an antique gear shift knob at a flea market, but Ed had a collection of dozens of them! All types of colors and styles, stuff you just never would suppose existed. He also managed to collect dozens of letters from piano roll manufacturers with marvelous old letterheads - which he would sometimes photocopy and use as his own headers, to a wonderful effect.

(First: Ed's art glass lamp with dragonfly base; picked up in the UK while on a trip with his good friend John Farrell.
Second: Ed's final 88-note recut, a terrific pair of tunes transcribed from rare National coin piano rolls.
Third: A short letter from Ed, this one using J. P. Seeburg letterhead! Fourth: another neat letterhead)

Ed LOVED great A rolls, especially all-blues Capitol rolls, and there again especially the all-black titles (as opposed to white, Tin Pan Alley stuff). He placed ads in AMICA and elsewhere to pay $100 and more for select A rolls, and was able to sniff a few out of the woodwork that way which none of the rest of us were able to find. And then he would arrange to have them recut, so we could all share in the bounty! If I were lucky enough to stumble on a great A roll that we didn't know about yet, Ed would be the first person I wanted to tell, because I knew how excited he would be to find out. The photos below are from a collection he was able to borrow, in return for which he would ID any unknown titles he could and recut anything he deemed worthy. Another example is a great roll that I discovered while visiting a collector in Georgia. I went through all of this collector's rolls, and discovered a Capitol all-blues title that was previously unknown. After informing Ed, the next thing I know Ed has arranged to borrow & recut the roll. If it weren't for Ed, that roll would probably still not have been reissued to this day.

(Left, Right: a collection of A rolls Ed pored through for potential recutting. Who else would send photos like this, so his friends could share in the excitement of another possible unknown gem? Ed had a great sense of fun and knew we would enjoy seeing a trunk crammed full of A rolls!)

Ed reissued 222 88-note rolls and another several dozen A rolls on his EchoeS label (get it? "Echoes", which is appropriate, and "E..S" his initials). He also loaned very generously to many other A roll recutting projects, including those of PlayRite, Ray Siou, yours truly, and most recently Ed Gaida. Ed's knowledge, enthusiasm, sense of humor (here's a typical joke Ed sent me) and especially his friendship will be sorely missed.

Ed's other musical interests / contributions include collecting rare blues sheet music, recording pianists at festivals, and sponsoring the release of several LP's and CD's of material he had recorded or otherwise saved from oblivion, including pianist Russ Gilman (Echoes CD), Jimmy Blythe rolls (Euphonics LP's; masters now owned by Bob Koester of Delmark label & Jazz Record Mart fame), and Lu Watters / Yerba Buena Jazz Band (issued by the San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation; you would not believe the story Ed related about how he rescued those masters from a chicken coop on Watters' farm!).

We seem to live in such a frustrating, hate-filled world these days and it's such a blessing to have had a terrific friend like Ed Sprankle. Thanks for all the good times, buddy, we love you very much and we will miss you greatly.