After the Formbys had lost three daughters to early deaths, their first son, George Hoy Booth, was born in 1904. Although the boy was born unable to see owing to an obstructive caul, he gained his sight during a violent coughing fit or sneeze when he was a few months old. Over the course of 1904 Formby purchased the singing rights to 57 songs, more than his normal annual number of between 10 and 20; the average cost of his songs was around a guinea. Two years later he made his first recordings, on phonograph cylinders, for the Louis Sterling Cylinder Company, and in 1907 he signed a recording contract with Zonophone. He was one of the few performers who had no difficulties recording clearly with the primitive equipment, and he performed in a relaxed fashion for an invisible audience. He would sing his song and then talk to the listener using a variant of his normal stage patter. Some of those songs, such as "Playing the Game out West" and "Since I Parted my Hair in the Middle" have been identified by Dave Russell, the social historian, as "clever depictions of a provincial innocent let lose in the capital".