Lettie Keyes - yes that was her real name! - was christened Mary Letitia Josephine Keyes. She was one of the five children of Dr. Keyes and was born in Nathalia, near Shepparton in the north east of Victoria. Their father was the local doctor and their mother the matron of the local hospital. The Keyes family was well connected in Ireland, coming from gentility in the county of Mayo. Lettie also often spoke of her cousins, who were Cross and Blackwell, the jam manufacturers. The family enjoyed a very genteel life in Nathalia and Lettie and her sister Nina, being Roman Catholics, were educated at the local convent.

On many evenings, Lettie and her mother or Nina played duets on the large upright piano, which later, Lettie had transported from Victoria to her flat in Elizabeth Bay. This helped make Lettie a great musician. One of her greatest skills was to quickly and accurately sight read, and the other skill was her ability to turn music into duets or duo pianoforte.

Lettie was afforded a finishing school education in Europe and when this was completed in the early 1910s, she was allowed the luxury of a walking holiday through Europe and England.

At some stage, and we're not sure when or how this occurred, she became the accompanist for the British stage star and composer Ivor Novello. Her father thought this a very unseemly arrangement - a young unmarried lady travelling with a gentleman - and ordered her to come home to Nathalia. Very soon after her return, she married and became Mrs. L.M. Thomson.

She did not have a happy marriage and soon left her husband, who took the parting badly. She came to Sydney where music rolls were just coming into fashion and in 1923 she went to work for George Horton, who considered her to be a catch amongst the Australian artists he employed. Lettie, because of her sight-reading skills, was able to perform many kinds of music. When the A.B.C. was setting up state orchestras, they were seeking in-house pianists who would play with them. Various people were auditioned and Lettie won the appointment with the Sydney orchestra and Eileen Joyce with the Melbourne Orchestra. Unfortunately, the Sydney appointment was abandoned, which Lettie regretted to her dying day.

Lettie began to produce a great repertoire of operas at Mastertouch, opera being her great love. She was also responsible for the hundreds of ballads which were popular at that time. She was a great friend of the baritone Peter Dawson, who on one of his visits to Sydney was coaxed to the City Road factory to sing 84 songs like The Floral Dance and Mandalay while Lettie recorded. These rolls then are the factual copies of Peter Dawson's interpretation of these songs. Lettie and George Horton did not always see eye to eye. She was of the opinion that the artists - the backbone of the business - should be paid a performing right on the rolls they recorded. As this would have had to come out of his profits, Horton did not agrees and in 1929, Lettie left Mastertouch.

At first, she worked as a theatre accompanist at The Globe and then, with a good friend, Eileen Foley, went to perform on the two flag ships of the Mcllwraith and McKecarin Line, the Kanimbla and Westralia which were then the millionaires' holiday boats prior to the Second World War, and often sailed away for up to twelve months.

Once on the Westralia when it put into Perth, she was contacted by Musgroves Music Store, who were still selling her rolls. They asked her to head a promotion for their customers. A promotion picture shows her seated at the player, but does not show the garlands of flowers at her feet, which were sent by an adoring public, to thank her for making their home parties such wonderful events. The time on these ships was cut short by the war, as the shipping line could no longer guarantee the safety of the passengers.

Coming ashore, Lettie decided to make her permanent home in Sydney. She and Eileen set up the Keynote Music College in the Palings Building on Ash Street. The college specialized in a simplified music instruction method, similar to Shefte, based on chord structures which were learned by the student, who then read the melody line from the music, together with the chord symbols, allowing the music to be played quicker and easier.

• After Lettie left, George Horton quickly came to realize that he had lost the linchpin of the Mastertouch repertoire. He gave orders that none of Lettie's roll masters were to be destroyed. This was not the case with Edith and Laurel's, which he knew could be re-recorded if necessary, as these artists stall worked for him. When Lettie came back to work for me at Mastertouch in 1961, we were still issuing some of her pre-1929 rolls. Her reappearance as a recording artist caused some customers to write "Who is this Lettie Keyes, she must be a hundred!" She was around for “Showboat'' and still there when the hit was “painted Tainted rose”. I gave Lettie the pleasure of replying to these letters herself. I don't know what she said, but she was very sensitive about her age, (so much so that when she died, the funeral notices were amended so that her friends would not be offended, and her real age not revealed!

Lettie died suddenly and unexpectedly on August 2, 1972, and was buried in South Head Cemetery, Sydney. It is reported by Mastertouch workers that her ghost was sighted in the Mastertouch factory until her gravestone was unveiled a year later.

This information was sourced from the Mastertouch Piano Roll Company.