Apr 26, 2025 By Brad Hundt 4 min read

JOHNSTOWN – It’s almost lunchtime on a recent Friday morning, and the front door of George’s Song Shop is open, letting in a warm breeze.

A visitor tells owner John George he’d like to find out a little more about his store.

George responds, “What do you want to know?”

George’s Song Shop actually comes with quite a bit of history for a visitor to discover. Reputed to be the oldest continually operating music emporium in the United States, George’s Song Shop in downtown Johnstown first opened in the heyday of Sophie Tucker and has stayed alive in the era of Taylor Swift. It’s endured as formats have shifted from 78s to 45s and LPs to CDs, and 8-tracks to cassettes. Given the thousands of records George has stashed in the five-story building he operates on Market Street, there’s a decent chance a record is in there that his father and uncle might have stocked when the store opened in 1932.

“I’ve always loved music,” said George, who has managed the store since 1962, following the death of his father, Eugene George. “I can’t think of anything else I would have done.”

Like many other record shops in the 1920s and 1930s, George’s Song Shop was not a stand-alone business when it first opened; instead, it was on the first floor of Johnstown’s Glosser Brothers Department Store. A devastating flood on St. Patrick’s Day in 1936 killed at least 25 people in the city, and one of the casualties was George’s Song Shop – floodwaters poured into the department store, making it necessary for Eugene and his brother, Bernie George, to pull up stakes and move to another location in Johnstown.

George’s father became the sole proprietor of George’s Song Shop after his uncle decamped to New York to work as a musician. George then became the store’s owner and manager when his father had a stroke while driving to work and died.

“I was 19 when my dad died, and I’ve been doing it ever since,” said George. “I’ve been doing it my whole life.”

The store has been at its current location, on Market Street, for close to 50 years. It’s up the street from the city’s 75-year-old arena and counts an Italian restaurant and chocolate shop among its neighbors. Its first months at the Market Street location were turbulent – first, there was a fire, and then another deluge led to yet another flood in Johnstown, taking the store out of commission for months.

Yet George’s Song Shop has carried on. George has kept tabs on all the twists and turns in the music industry over the decades, and has gathered a new generation of customers thanks to the revival of interest in vinyl albums and singles, a format that had largely been left for dead in the late 1980s as compact discs stormed into the marketplace. When you walk into George’s Song Shop, you immediately find the latest offerings from Record Store Day, the yearly extravaganza that brings collectors out to stores for exclusive vinyl releases. The bins by the front door also have new and used vinyl pressings from surefire sellers like the Beatles and Bob Dylan.

“That was a busy day,” George said of Record Store Day. “Records are what’s happening nowadays.”

There are compact discs still for sale in the store, too, and even some 8-track tapes, perhaps the least loved of all the mediums that have carried popular music. If you want a 1960s smash from Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass or an anthology of music from Africa, it’s in the store. But what George has available in overwhelming abundance are 45s – he estimates that are more than one million in stock.

George’s own interests as a collector center on 45s. He has his own trove at home, and his tastes tend toward the rhythm and blues he would hear on the radio when Pittsburgh radio legend Porky Chedwick played them in the 1960s. He once sold a tough-to-find copy of the Moonglows’ “219 Train” for $10,000, and has sold a couple of others for $5,000 apiece.

George is just a decade younger than the store, and is determined to keep it going as long as he can, though he concedes “I’m not a kid anymore.” And given his age, it’s inevitable to ask when he just might retire.

His reply? “When I drop dead.”

Additional information on George’s Song Shop can be found at https://theoriginalgeorgessongshop.com/.