The Soundtrack of Tomorrow: Kaye Records and the Forgotten Vinyl of the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair.

This album cover is from Musical Memoirs: New York’s World Fair (1964-1965) but it’s really a musical selection for the Belgium Village at the New York World’s Fair. The first title is Dominque by Gisele MacKenzie. The song Dominque was used in the film For Love or Money (1993) which is in my list of top fifty movies (password required). The album was issued by Kaye Records of East Paterson, New Jersey (now Elmwood Park), operating from a commercial building constructed in 1962—just two years before the Fair opened. The soundtrack of an international exposition may have quietly passed through an ordinary office on Market Street before finding its way into the hands of visitors from around the world.

According to ChatGPT:

This isn’t Belgium in any strict sense. It’s what Americans in 1964 imagined “Continental Europe” sounded like. France dominates the selections. It’s a strange cross-section of people connected to major currents in twentieth-century entertainment: radio, cabaret, opera, television, supper clubs, and even early television itself.

This makes sense since one of the featured highlights in the village was a museum with relics from the Battle of the Bulge (plus various weapons of World War II).

Here’s audio ripped from the original vinyl. I’m using Audacity and a Behringer UCA222 with my Orbit turntable. The song is the aforementioned Dominque.

Other artists on the album include 110 Strings, Jack Searle, Hildegarde, Lucy Pierre, Roger Bourdin, and Mimi Benzell & Felix Knight.

Hildegarde (Loretta Sell) was one of the highest-paid cabaret performers in the world and she was also one of the earliest television performers. In 1936 she appeared in experimental NBC television broadcasts from the Empire State Building.

Mimi Benzell sang at the Met (1944–1952) and was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Gisele MacKenzie was a trained violinist, radio host, television star, and a variety-show performer.

By the time the World’s Fair opened, the world Hildegarde represented was already beginning to fade. The Beatles would stay at the Plaza in 1964, almost symbolically announcing the arrival of a different cultural era.

By 1964 Gisele MacKenzie was already becoming a figure from an earlier entertainment era — which makes her appearance on a World’s Fair souvenir album oddly fitting. ¹

I think Gisele and Hildegarde could have been characters in movies like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Licorice Pizza that mark transitions between eras. The movie For Love or Money is basically a love letter to a disappearing / vanishing luxury hotel culture in Manhattan and there’s a IRL complementary photo of Gisele performing at the Plaza Hotel in 1960.

This is why I love the internet—and now AI. What began as a sixty-year-old souvenir record from the Belgium Village at the New York World’s Fair led to a photograph of Hildegarde performing at the Plaza Hotel. Together they reveal fragments of a sophisticated world that once seemed permanent, but now survives only through the artifacts, photographs, recordings, and memories left behind.

One footnote about Hildegarde — she continued performing on a regular basis for Catholic charities in New York City into her eighties. ²

¹ChatGPT
²”Television Girl” (a.k.a. The Incomparable HILDEGARDE!)

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Hildegarde performs on stage at the Plaza Hotel, 1960
For Love or Money (1993) Trailer #1 (YouTube)