Born in Belfast in August 1945, George Ivan "Van" Morrison picked up his first guitar at eleven. He then proceeded to teach himself pretty much everything else — harmonica, piano, saxophone — before joining a band called Them in '64. They had a little hit called "Gloria," toured America, and then, as bands do, broke up in '66.
Morrison, naturally, went solo. His debut, Blowin' Your Mind! (1967), gave us "Brown Eyed Girl." The rest, as they say, is seven decades of Grammy-winning, genre-bending history. But before all that, before the hits and the accolades, there was a kid, a dad, and a truly epic record collection.
While most of us got our musical education from older siblings' mixtapes or questionable radio stations, young Van had a different tutor: his father, George Sr. George Sr. was an electrician by trade, but his real passion was music. He'd lived in Detroit in the 1950s, and somehow, managed to amass one of the largest record collections in Northern Ireland. Let that satisfying number sink in.
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Start Your News DetoxThe Saturday Pilgrimage
This wasn't just a passive collection; it was a weekend ritual. Every single Saturday, George Sr. would take his son to a local record store. Van Morrison himself reminisced about these trips in a 2015 Guardian interview, recalling the specific magic of Atlantic Records on High Street in Belfast.
The owner, Solly Lipsitz, had a sister in New York who would send over imported records. Which, if you think about it, is a pretty solid business model, especially for a music-hungry kid in 1950s Belfast. During these weekly pilgrimages, Van was exposed to a masterclass in American music.
He name-checked legends like blues and jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton, the soul/blues duo Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, the incomparable Ray Charles, country titans Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers, and the folk blues icon Lead Belly. It was less a record store, more a portal to another world — a world his father unlocked, one vinyl at a time.
And that, friends, is how a shipyard electrician and his Saturday ritual helped sculpt a musical legend. Because sometimes, all it takes is a dad with impeccable taste and a willingness to share it.
