before lawrence welk's musical spoons...

if you are around my age and grew up in southern california and watched cartoons and wonderama on sunday mornings you surely saw the commercials for lawrence welk's musical spoons; and if you ever wandered over to thrifty's, you encountered on a toy rack, a pair of thin metal spoons joined in a blue plastic handle, that when "played" made a pretty strange percussive clicking sound (very good perhaps for making "clip clop" horse walking sounds...).

i've been collecting music photographs for a long while now, and one of the exciting things about these images, beyond their aesthetic pleasure and wonder, is that there are many instruments i have yet to encounter. one such recent discovery was this first photograph i have ever seen of someone playing a form of "musical spoons", and i must say the fact that he is actually playing them makes it quite special.

addendum: an astute and musicologically inclined airforms regular, jeremey, pointed out that these are indeed "bones", with a link posted in the comments for this post towards a wikipedia article, which also led me to a pretty wonderful video of someone playing bones along with a banjo that you might want to check out here.