Do Not Sell At Any Price

by Amanda Petrusich

  A few weeks later, on a trip through Virginia, I stopped by King’s studio to hear the comparison for myself. He made a braised pork shoulder in veal sauce, and after supper we carried cups of red wine into his music room. He played me the CD transfer; I noted its particular crackles. He played me the LP; I noted its particular crackles. I looked up and nodded. As far as I could tell, King’s assessment was sound. I knew, at least, where one of Smith’s records was.

  I still can’t quite explain why the Anthology has endured in the way it has, why it matters so much to people, why it matters so much to me. New musicians still routinely find their way to it; in the last decade, I’ve interviewed scads of emerging bands, folksy and not, who vehemently cite it as an influence, to the point where I’m suspicious of their intentions and nervous about the Anthology’s sudden muscle, its ability to indicate a certain kind of cool. Between 1999 and 2001, Hal Willner, working with the gloomy Australian rock musician Nick Cave, staged a series of tribute concerts to Smith and the Anthology in London, New York, and Los Angeles. A slew of contemporary artists—Steve Earle, Wilco, Beck, Sonic Youth, Lou Reed, Van Dyke Parks, Elvis Costello, Philip Glass, and plenty more—signed on to pay homage to Smith’s work. The results were collected as The Harry Smith Project: The Anthology of American Folk Music Revisited, a two-CD, two-DVD boxed set that’s a perfectly passable tribute, if low on surprises.

  When I asked her about the Anthology’s continued vigor, Singh told me flatly that she thought it was magic. “He was a magician, he was interested in magic,” she said. “As you said before, [it’s in] the juxtaposition of songs—one song next to another, they rub up next to each other and they create this frisson that’s almost a third thing. You know you’re in the company of really true, good art when there’s just something else that’s there. There’s this spark that you remember afterwards that’s unexplainable in a way. And the Anthology is that for me and so many people. It’s so many undiscovered worlds,” she continued. “And it’s the weirdest thing, every time you listen to it—and I’ve listened to it hundreds and hundreds of times—you think, Wait, was that song there before? Were they next to one another? How could that be?”

  Singh believes Smith’s vision—his philosophy, his narrative, his fingerprints—was paramount to the set’s survival. “Anybody can make a mix tape, for God’s sake,” she snorted. “Everybody does. Every old boyfriend makes a mix tape and thinks it’s a perfect expression of their love.”

  For years, rumors circulated that, following Smith’s cremation, a handful of his acolytes blended his ashes with wine and chugged him down. Even if this is untrue—and his longtime companion and so-called spiritual wife, Rosebud Feliu Pettet, told me it was nonsense—I can still understand the desire to internalize a guy who believed so deeply in internalization. The Anthology works best when you consume it whole. Marcus called it a lingua franca—a password that grants access to a mystical folk brotherhood, a shibboleth—but I like to think of it as more personal and self-actualizing, like the EAT ME cake in Alice in Wonderland.

  Smith received a Chairman’s Merit Award at the Grammys in 1991, just nine months before he died. He was honored for his work on the Anthology and “his ongoing insight into the relationship between artistry and society, his deep commitment to presenting folk music as a vehicle for social change.” It took two adult men to help Smith onstage to accept his certificate. At one point his foot swung for a stair and missed, like a dog’s leg thrashing at some phantom, unreachable itch.

  “I have arthritis, so I had to have this young man help me up here,” he said when he arrived at the podium. He smiled, happy and calm in a tiny tuxedo, no tie. His long white hair was pulled into a ponytail. “I’m glad to say that my dreams came true,” he declared.

  “I saw America changed through music.”

  / / Eleven / /

  There Will Be No Service

  Nathan Salsburg, Don Wahle, Gene Autry, a Throat-Singing Cowboy, a Palimpsestuous Experience, “You’d Holler Too Like That if You Was to Get Left”

  In March 2010, Nathan Salsburg, a guitarist and the curator of the Alan Lomax Archive, lugged a gaggle of discarded folk and country 78s out of an overflowing Dumpster in Louisville, Kentucky. Salsburg was following a tip—he’s the kind of guy who receives such calls—from a pal hired to evacuate the split-level home of a recently deceased collector named Don Wahle. Everything inside was being junked; Wahle’s family, presumably estranged, had ordered a blind and unconditional purge, which included the excavation and removal of things like cases of Heinz ketchup and many Magnum condoms. Before they left the site, Salsburg’s buddies grabbed eight cardboard boxes stuffed with 78s and lugged them to relative safety in somebody’s garage. Later that night, Salsburg drove over and started riffling through the contents. “Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers. Cool, but those aren’t rare. Then I kept going,” he recalled. “I remember seeing a Carolina Tar Heels record and then there was a John Hurt record. I started to freak out. I was excited and startled and as my friend Glen tells it, he saw the blood drain from my face. For sure I had never seen a John Hurt record in my life.”

  I was introduced to Salsburg by our mutual pal Mike McGonigal, a music writer who collects obscure gospel 45s and runs the excellent literary magazine Yeti. McGonigal called him a “sweet and smart dude,” which is as apt a description as any, but it also discounts the almost disconcerting purposefulness with which Salsburg conducts his life: if all of my stuff were indiscriminately pitched into a Dumpster before my body went cold, I’d want Nathan Salsburg to find it. He is a person who knows what to do with things.

  Salsburg was in Brooklyn screening unseen footage from American Patchwork, a documentary series born of Alan Lomax’s travels through the southeast, when we agreed to meet for lunch. It was deliriously hot—New York had been subsumed, momentarily, by the sort of deep, otherworldly swelter that almost makes you shiver—but I somehow still figured it was a great idea for us to split a fried-chicken sandwich and several beers in an un-air-conditioned restaurant a few blocks from my apartment. Salsburg was forgiving, still game to talk records despite my frequently vocalized suspicion that the entire universe was about to return to ooze. I wanted to hear more about what he’d found in Kentucky. The heat lent our conversation a feverish tinge.

  The John Hurt 78 Salsburg’s friends unknowingly heaved out of Wahle’s house that day—“Stack O’Lee Blues” / “Candy Man Blues”—was recorded for Okeh Records in New York City on December 28, 1928. It’s one of only six 78s Hurt made (and saw issued—a total of twenty sides were recorded) before retiring to his hometown of Avalon, Mississippi, and resuming work as a sharecropper. In 1963, following the success of Harry Smith’s Anthology (which included two of those twenty songs), he was “rediscovered” by the collector Dick Spottswood and the musicologist Tom Hoskins, and eventually recorded more material for Piedmont, Vanguard, and other small labels. “Stack O’Lee Blues” is about a nasty guy—“That bad man, that cruel Stack O’Lee”—who nonchalantly slaughters another guy for his Stetson hat. Hurt’s performance of the song is empathetic and delicate, but it’s the flip side I’ve always found galvanic. “Candy Man Blues” is a hilariously dirty song about a guy with “a stick of candy just nine inch long.” Girls, as you’d imagine, can’t get enough of it: “If you try his candy, good friend of mine / You sure will want it for a long, long time / His stick candy don’t melt away / It just gets better, so the ladies say,” Hurt sings. His sweet, almost chaste voice infuses the raunchy lyrics with an impishness that’s hard to replicate or to shake. While “Stack O’Lee Blues” / “Candy Man Blues” isn’t astoundingly valuable by rare 78 standards (in 2008, a copy in not-great condition sold on eBay for $375), it’s still precious. I could see why Salsburg was spooked by its appearance atop a heap of trash.

  After he’d taken quick stock of the boxes in the garage, Salsburg, then thirty-one, motored back to the Dumpster with his buddies in tow. It was the middle of the night, full moon.
“I was shaking the whole time. It was by far one of the most exciting moments of my life,” he said. “We jump in the Dumpster and find box after box. My friend Joe goes down, he’s being held by his belt, he comes up with a Blind Boy Fuller record. We got a great big box of LPs, which included all three volumes of the original Anthology.” They took whatever they could find, hauling it to Salsburg’s car. The next morning, Salsburg dutifully contacted the Dumpster company and got permission to see what was left inside the house. “I slept for like three hours and called the guy and he said, ‘Anything you can get out of the house is going to be a favor to us.’ ”

  Wahle’s domestic situation, Salsburg learned, was grim. There was a toilet “petrified in shit” and a mound of dirty newspapers spread atop “a waxy camp mattress, government-issue, springs across a frame,” which Wahle may or may not have been using as a bed. (As far as Salsburg could tell, Wahle probably slept in the same room as his records.) Salsburg stuffed his Tacoma with 78s, LPs, and other potentially useful ephemera: Wahle’s correspondence, his songbooks, decades of receipts, catalogs, and bank statements, and a cobbled-together, fast-action Smith and Wesson revolver Salsburg eventually had to have destroyed because it was so unstable. (When he found it, it was in a shoe box, wrapped in two paper towels, and loaded with rubber bullets.) “I took all the records I could get except the bottom two boxes in the back lower right corner, which were encased in mold. I picked them up and they started crumbling. I imagine there were some records in the middle of those boxes that I could have gotten, but my truck was so full and I was so crazy that I was just like, Fuck it.” He paused for a few seconds before adding, inevitably, and with resignation: “I’m nervous about what was there that I didn’t get.”

  It seems worth noting that Wahle had died only one week before—he’d lived, happily or not, with all that decomposition.

  Wahle’s 78 collection contained around 3,500 records, most by hillbilly artists, many in pristine condition. “I don’t think he even listened to them,” Salsburg said. “A lot of the LPs were sealed, but he attached notes to them with his remarks about which stylus to use. In some cases there were four copies of a single Jimmie Rodgers record, lots of triplicates of Uncle Dave Macon records. He just got them,” he continued. “There were a few boxes and mailers that weren’t even opened.”

  Salsburg, who was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, but reared in Kentucky, had purchased and cherished many LPs in his lifetime, but hadn’t yet been ensnared by the lure of 78s, in part because he knew how expensive the good ones had become and how engulfing the hobby could be. Still, he admitted that the tactile experience of playing a 78 for the first time was singular, even for him. “There was an intimacy about it that was different from other intimate musical moments that I’ve had with stuff of this era,” he said. “Because first of all, it wasn’t a palimpsestuous experience. It wasn’t listening to a 78 put on an LP or on a CD, or a 78 put on an LP put on a CD. It was the 78 itself. As I was listening, I didn’t know what was going to happen, and then it ended and I had to flip the record over,” he explained. “That’s the experience of 78s that people talk about.”

  When we first spoke, Salsburg was still trying to clean and catalog his haul. “There are records where I’ve never heard of these people, I have no idea what this music is,” he said. “It’s a total revelation and it’s exciting. But you also realize how much of this stuff is just mediocre. I feel like part of the problem is that it’s so easy to fetishize them because of their age and because of their rarity. The rarest record I think I’ve found so far is a late-period Earl Johnson record, with the Clodhoppers or whoever it was, doing a song that a lot of folks were doing at the time called ‘When the Roses Bloom for the Bootlegger,’ which is a parody of ‘When the Roses Bloom Again’—a pop song. It’s not a very good song. But I’ve been told that it’s maybe the second or third known copy, and it’s probably the cleanest. It catches light every which way, and it might be [worth] two grand to three grand. But it’s not great. There are great Earl Johnson records, but I found myself treasuring this one more than I do the others. And I don’t like that feeling.”

  Fortunately, there were better things tucked into Wahle’s cardboard boxes: records that were both unusual and great. “I did find a copy of that Arthur Miles record. The throat-singing cowboy. That was in there,” Salsburg said.

  I scrunched up my face at him. I’d never heard of Arthur Miles, or of a throat-singing cowboy.

  “Oh my God, you’ve gotta hear it.” Salsburg started grinning; the way he spoke about the music he loved was irresistible, catching. “It was this dude who recorded in Dallas in 1929. He did two sides, “The Lonely Cowboy,” parts one and two. It’s just the story of him being lonesome on the plain, and in the middle of the song he throat-sings. In the ledger it says ‘Vocal Effects,’ but it’s throat singing. Or something like it. He’s creating overtones. It might be humming and whistling at once. But he just came up with this thing, in place of the standard-issue yodel of the day. It’s so ingenious.”

  When I finally heard Miles go (Salsburg sent me a clip a few days later), I was equal parts flummoxed and delighted: sporadic yodeling was common for country and western singers in the 1920s, and they occasionally imitated the throbbing twang of a Jew’s harp, but what Miles does sounds more like sygyt, a form of throat singing native to the Tuvan region of Siberia—a kind of overtone vocalization that resembles the wavering call of a loon, as filtered through a dozen down pillows, and, well, throatier. It was, to pinch one of Lomax’s categorizations, remarkable. In a 2008 interview with Eli Smith, the producer and host of The Down Home Radio Show, the collector Pat Conte said he found Miles’s technique unambiguous. “He’s a throat singer, that’s for sure,” Conte said.

  “What knocked me out about it is that I had been listening to a lot of these throat singers from central Asia—Siberia, Mongolia, places like that—and here was another example of this music, but right here at home. And Miles, it’s the damnedest thing, he’s just absolutely one of the very best,” Conte declared. “You can explain it any way you want. There are certain Native American singing styles that have some elements of that—harmonic singing where the partials are kind of choked off. Arthur Miles, I think he’s worked it to the very highest level of the art. He’s a total master of the style.” Conte did note one other recorded instance of a rural American singer employing the technique. In the late 1950s, the collector Eugene Earle had gone to visit Dick Burnett, of the once-popular banjo-and-fiddle duo Burnett and Rutherford. Burnett was blind in one eye from a robbery gone awry and nearly eighty years old, but still working, somewhat miraculously, as a small-appliance repairman in his native Kentucky. Using a reel-to-reel recorder, Earle taped Burnett performing in his home, and according to Conte, toward the end of their session, Burnett said: “I used to cut a lot of monkeyshines with this one! I’m gonna sing you a song, but the song is in my throat!” And then, Conte explained, “He sings ‘My Old Kentucky Home,’ and does a perfect rendition of this old harmonic singing.” Conte paused. “And then the tape runs out.”

  Nathan Salsburg was just beginning to indulge the idea of turning Wahle’s collection into a boxed set of several CDs or LPs. He’d devised a unifying theme (three discs, titled Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard) and hooked an interested label, the San Francisco–based Tompkins Square. He already had a few favorite records, songs that couldn’t easily be heard anywhere else, like Red Gay and Jack Wellman’s two-part “Flat Wheel Train Blues,” a train-imitation piece recorded for Brunswick in Atlanta in 1930. It’s the only thing Gay and Wellman ever made together, and that’s about all anyone knows about it; there are fewer than a dozen extant copies. Salsburg had uploaded both sides, which had previously been undigitized, to YouTube. I listened to the song—basically a rote narration of a train trip, complete with coal shoveling and spirited pep talking—approximately 175 times before I made myself walk away from my computer. Gay’s fiddle, craggy and loud, succes
sfully approximates a steam whistle; Wellman giddily bangs away on a guitar. They take turns on the vocals, which are more spoken than sung, and affectless in a flat, Appalachian way that can sound almost lifeless to modern ears.

  Salsburg had warned me about a particularly devastating bit toward the end of part two, about a minute and forty seconds in. As the ramshackle train approaches a crossing, a mule scampers up and tries to outrun it. The train passes, the mule cries, and someone, likely Wellman, pauses to mutter: “You’d holler too like that if you was to get left.” It is one of the oddest, kindest bits in the whole of American music, a moment of extraordinary empathy, and it shatters my heart every single time I hear it. Over lunch, Salsburg called the song “hilarious and beautiful and melancholy”—the mule, he said, reminded him of Au Hasard Balthazar, the 1966 French film directed by Robert Bresson about the parallel sagas of a farm girl and her mule—and it was all those things, all at once.