There was, though, the smallest bit of satisfaction in giving Wahle’s life’s work a flash of validation, especially when it had come so close to unceremonious annihilation. Salsburg admitted it felt nice. “To be like, ‘All right, you crazy old codger. Here we are. You have a legacy. You have your legacy.’ ”
Late the following morning, I met back up with Salsburg at his home, and after a breakfast of kale and scrambled eggs, he drove me to Wahle’s two known Louisville residencies, as discerned by the addresses on his correspondence. We rolled past gentlemen’s clubs with blacked-out windows (HIRING ALL POSITIONS!) and several strip malls, past fast-food huts and the Magic Sparkle Car Wash. The first house (on Keller Avenue, just a few yards from Interstate 65) had been razed, likely to make room for a proposed airport expansion; while we crept past the empty grass lot, I half expected to see 78s poking out of the soggy ground, like little black crocuses sprouting through the snow. The windows of the second house—the one where Wahle was living when he died—were still boarded up with plywood when we parked alongside it and got out. It was a two-story redbrick house with white clapboard shutters. A few scrawny, misplaced-looking columns awkwardly beset a poured-concrete porch. Salsburg was quiet.
I dug the tips of my boots into the mud of Wahle’s front yard—I felt self-conscious, nervous, like I should have been able to understand more about Wahle from his choice of porch light (it was standard issue). My failure to arrive at any insightful new conclusions, I worried, indicated a broader crisis in reporting. I wanted to kick a loose stone in the foundation and suddenly discover a lost journal, a trove of love letters, a statement of purpose, a clue that I could triumphantly rush back to the lab. What did it mean, Wahle’s records getting tossed like that? What did they mean to him? What comfort did they proffer? Instead we walked the perimeter. A dog barked. It was cold. I told Salsburg I thought I’d seen enough.
/ / Twelve / /
But There’s Another Part of Me That Finds It Kind of Disgusting
Jonathan Ward and Excavated Shellac, Victrola Favorites, How to Curate, Ian Nagoski, Richard Weize and Bear Family Records, Elijah Wald, The King of the Delta Blues Singers, “They’re Looking at the World and Seeing It as Untenable”
Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard was released in the fall of 2012 to effusive reviews. NPR called it “exemplary”; the New York Times cited it as one of the best boxed sets of 2012. Salsburg had asked me to contribute a short essay—along with Sarah Bryan and John Jeremiah Sullivan—to the accompanying notes, and I’d happily written about some of the bracing work songs he’d culled and presented from Wahle’s collection. In late 2013, Salsburg’s notes were nominated for a Grammy.
After the Anthology, compilations sourced from the holdings of 78 collectors weren’t rare birds, exactly—Richard Nevins and the late Nick Perls had been putting them out on Yazoo for years, as had the collector Chris Strachwitz, who runs Arhoolie Records, and Marshall Wyatt, who runs Old Hat Records, among others—but in late 2012, music that people liked to call “authentic” (which was often used as a stand-in for “old” or “rural”) was enjoying a mysterious but fervent renaissance. A younger generation of collectors and producers—Salsburg, Ian Nagoski, Jonathan Ward, Robert Millis, and Frank Fairfield, to start—were assembling compelling, thematically organized compilations of previously unheard material from the 78 era for newer reissue labels like Tompkins Square and Dust-to-Digital. The folks involved didn’t necessarily hew to conventional wisdom regarding how a set should be constructed and what it should include. There was both an embrace and a rejection of Harry Smith’s template, of what collectors were expected to do, of what curation entailed.
In the late 1990s, the Seattle-based collectors Robert Millis and Jeffrey Taylor hung a condenser microphone in front of a Victrola VV-210 “Lowboy” phonograph and started recording 78s from their collections directly to cassette. The pair produced ten thirty-minute tapes (all long-out-of-print now) for their label, Fire Breathing Turtle; those tapes eventually became the basis for a two-CD set released by Dust-to-Digital in 2008 and titled Victrola Favorites. The Village Voice called it “a bewildering array of exotica, religious chanting, and barroom bawls from an equally bewildering array of countries,” but what’s most remarkable about the collection isn’t necessarily the material (the collector Pat Conte’s multivolume The Secret Museum of Mankind, which first appeared on CD in 1995, covers comparable musical ground) but the accompanying book, a 144-page collection of related images (labels, advertising, sleeves, Victrolas, needle tins, and more). The songs themselves are presented without discographical information, save the title, artist, and country and date of origin, and Victrola Favorites is more of an exercise in evocation—in the thoughts and feelings music induces—than a traditionally educational text. It seems to purposefully avoid the imposition of any narrative at all, beyond whatever the listener might write for herself. Even the images—like a photograph of a dark-haired woman in a long white dress, her arms hanging flatly at her sides, singing into a microphone at what appears to be a midcentury Tiki bar—are more suggestive than explicitly didactic.
“We knew right away that we wanted to make a compilation that was about the experience of listening and discovering these old records. We were not so concerned with historical context,” Millis told me later. “For us they were still living, breathing, potential-filled objects that could be approached like a new song heard on the radio or at a show.” He considered the images and music to be “two separate but equal” stories, and believed there were a variety of valuable ways for collectors and researchers to frame and present the contents of their collections. “I think historical narratives, be they about music or records or politics or whatever, always deserve to be reexamined and recontextualized,” Millis explained. “And personal narratives can be very interesting, revealing a lot about the person doing the narrating as well as what he or she is narrating about.”
The original cassette series “both inspired and befuddled people,” Millis said. I find them transporting. I understood there were a lot of different ways for collectors to introduce old songs to new ears.
“What I worry about is the fact that the more visible it is, and the more it’s regarded as something in the public domain, people want a piece of it,” Nathan Salsburg said. I was back in Brooklyn; we were talking on the telephone, and I’d asked about the reissue boom. “They want to curate it. Because it seems to be totally democratic if not anarchic: it belongs to us, there’s this not necessarily misguided sense of it as our collective inheritance. So everyone is a curator now. I don’t have a problem with that in and of itself, but personally I feel a responsibility to do right by it and not merely use it as a vehicle for my own aesthetic or, you know, my own goofy ideas about the blues.”
When I pestered him to define it, Salsburg said he thought of a curator as “the mediator between the observer and the observed,” which struck me as an extraordinarily humane and graceful way of thinking about a complicated process. “The role is to reveal and not obscure. Fundamentally, it’s to impart something true to someone. Not in a didactic way—not to bang you over the head with ‘Here is folk, here is what it is!’ ” He paused. “This stuff is underheard, it’s made by people who are either undervisible or invisible, and it’s about ways of life that are either gone or have been neglected by culture and society. They deserve—and not out of romanticism—our respect.”
The urge to romanticize lost cultures, particularly in an era in which our grasp on the tactile and the “authentic” seems particularly tenuous, is strong if not overpowering. I told Salsburg that it felt like a hard thing to do—to keep your eyes from glazing over with nostalgia or wild, chimerical visions. Old records can be so peculiar and thrilling—it’s a challenge to keep all those tropes from infecting their analysis and presentation. Salsburg was careful to differentiate romanticism from enthusiasm. “Enthusiasm, even if it’s a romantic enthusiasm, feels like a respectful approach to the stuff,
” he said. “But I distrust myself as a romantic,” he added. “When it comes time to represent it, all of this effusiveness about songs being emanations or some music of the spheres is just dumb. It’s silly—it’s taking it too far. But I’d never put a song on something that I didn’t like because I thought it was an edifying text. It should always be good first.”
He worried, sometimes, about his own prejudices, all the biases that come with being a human being alive in the world. “I misunderstand records and lyrics and contexts and genres all the time,” he said, “because my first approach to them is subjective, as opposed to understanding them in the kind of greater historical or musicological or cultural context that an anthropologist or musicologist would. But that’s where the joy is.”
I nodded. I was no longer sure if there was any honest way to tell any story.
The collector Jonathan Ward runs a website called Excavated Shellac, which is “dedicated to 78 rpm recordings of folkloric and vernacular music from around the world.” In late 2011, Dust-to-Digital asked Ward to compile and edit Opika Pende: Africa at 78 rpm, a four-disc collection of one hundred never-before-reissued African recordings from 1909 through the 1960s. When I found out Ward had plans to visit New York from his home in Los Angeles, I asked him to dinner in Brooklyn. I was getting more and more interested in the idea of subjective curation: how it worked, what it could or should accomplish, what it might have already wrought.
Ward was bright and articulate, with rectangular eyeglasses and traces of gray hair at his temples. Excavated Shellac is updated a couple times a month, when Ward posts a transfer of an ethnic record generally unavailable elsewhere. “Ethnic records”: that’s what collectors call most foreign recordings. Ward, for his part, wasn’t into the appellation. “ ‘Ethnic records’ is a complex term that needs to be trashed, in my opinion. ‘Ethnic records’—come on. That’s jive,” is what he said about it. The posted MP3 was usually accompanied by a short essay in which Ward would give a bit of historical or musical context and then talk briefly about why he liked it. The sharing part—that visitors could download the MP3 and be on their way with it—was essential to the entire enterprise. As Ward wrote on his “About” page: “Record collectors are eccentric people. I don’t even like the term ‘record collector.’ They’ve been parodied far too many times. Accurately, I might add. But I could not live with myself as a ‘collector’ without at least one person I could share sounds with. So this blog is for my friends, and for you, stranger.”
Ward was immediately adamant about his limited role in the dissemination of old sounds. “The attention should be about the research and the music and not on the collector and his personality,” he said. “I have no desire for that at all. The story is in the grooves. It’s not in the basements. I don’t think my whole name is on that website at all. I’m ‘JW.’ I don’t list my name because there’s part of me that feels the more you deify the collector, the further you are from the music,” he continued. “And collectors love attention. I can understand that. It’s great when you find someone who says, ‘Wow, you’re into that, too?’ That’s awesome. But there’s another part of me that finds it kind of disgusting.”
Over spinach salads and tomato soup, I inquired about the origins of Ward’s collection. He’d grown up on Martha’s Vineyard. “I was a hyperactive kid, and my parents were like, ‘We’ve got to give this kid something to do.’ And my mother said, ‘Why don’t you collect something?’ I was three or four, no older than five. So I said, ‘Like what?’ And she said bottle caps. And I said, ‘Good idea.’ I just remember, as a kid in my little winter jacket, picking bottle caps out of the gutter and putting them in my little winter jacket. And I did that for another year and a half—just accumulating any bottle cap that was around.” Eventually, Ward got into records via his mom’s old Beatles LPs, then Captain Beefheart, and then finally, in the early nineties, he started buying 78s at flea markets.
“I walked into [the now-defunct New York record shop] Records Revisited and asked for the rarest blues. ‘Yeah, do you have anything by . . . ?’ I was like twenty-four or something. And the guy was like, ‘Not today!’ And then I quickly realized that what I was asking was ludicrous,” he laughed. “But the guy was nice enough, and this is how you figure it out. You make errors and you figure it out on your own, and I’m glad I did that rather than consult the ninety-eight other collectors to figure out what to like and what not to like. That’s one of the reasons why I collect in the sphere that I collect in—because I don’t have anybody telling me what’s good and what’s not,” he said. Ethnic records hadn’t yet been surveyed and ranked in the way rare blues 78s had. There was no established hierarchy or sense of weight.
During our conversation, Ward was frank about how he believed certain visions may have dictated specific narratives about American music—particularly, how the blues had been codified as the rarest, the most hard-sought genre, in part because of who it attracted and what they heard in it. “Oh, there’s music all over the world that’s equally as rare,” Ward said. “Let’s not say more rare, because those [blues] records are incredible, they’re rare, and they represent a very interesting piece of Americana in a very finite period of time. But that same thing exists in many other places. It’s just: does it captivate white dudes?”
It was the same subjectivity that Salsburg had been wary of, and the question felt paramount to something. If we understand 78 collecting as a partisan act with extraordinary consequences—the music from the 78 rpm era that gets collected is also, by default, the music that is preserved and endures—then it’s possible we’re all inadvertently conflating personal stories with objective ones. The music we have, the music we know best, might be the product of a few individual, even aberrant visions.
In his book Escaping the Delta, the musician and author Elijah Wald tackles all the “romantic foolishness” written about the blues by collectors and fans: “As white urbanites discovered the ‘race records’ of the 1920s and 1930s, they reshaped the music to fit their own tastes and desires, creating a rich mythology that often bears little resemblance to the reality of the musicians they admired,” Wald writes. It’s a grand delusion that was perpetuated, perhaps, by the Blues Mafia, but probably had much earlier origins; as Wald points out, there was a good chance “it was part of the blues legend from the beginning, a colorful way of marketing a new style.” Regardless, the collector’s preoccupation with outsiderism had curious consequences. “By emphasizing obscurity as a virtue unto itself, they essentially turned the hierarchy of blues stardom upside down: the more records an artist had sold in 1928, the less he or she was valued in 1958,” Wald explained.
The prior summer, I’d become particularly engrossed by a new collection released by Tompkins Square called To What Strange Place: The Music of the Ottoman-American Diaspora, 1916–1929, which collected the work of musicians from Anatolia, the eastern Mediterranean, and the Levant region of the Middle East who lived in the United States and recorded 78s in New York City between World War I and the Depression. It was assembled and produced by a then-thirty-five-year-old collector and writer named Ian Nagoski, who had stumbled upon the whole box of source records in Baltimore and paid five dollars for it. Nagoski and I had e-mailed a few times; he had strong and cogent ideas about why people collected rare records, and what the consequences of those impulses were.
Nagoski was familiar with Wald’s theories, and he agreed with the basic premise of his book. “Skip James does not represent prewar blues. Barbecue Bob does. Barbecue Bob and Tampa Red, they sold like crazy,” Nagoski said when I finally got him on the telephone. “Skip James is a weirdo. He’s a freak. He doesn’t really fit in, and the fact that he’s such a big part of the blues canon is a direct result of the blues canon having been written by white men.”
Another danger of the canon having been engineered—accidentally or on purpose—by collectors is that scads of things were excluded, either because they didn’t conform to a collecto
r’s particular taste or because there just wasn’t enough time or space for anyone to properly process them. “When I began collecting seriously and contacting other 78 collectors and going to their houses, they’d see this kid come in, and I’d say, ‘Yeah, you got any records for sale?’ And they’d say, ‘Yeah, all those over there. Those are the ones I don’t want from this big buy that I did in New Jersey or New York. You can go through those and see if there’s anything you want,’ ” he explained. “So I’d go through ’em and [the pile] would be full of gospel. Full of incredible jubilee quartets and preachers and stuff. [Older collectors] weren’t the slightest bit interested because it didn’t fit into their vision of this quasi-demonic, earthy, raw folk-music thing. It was too middle-class, or too aspiring middle-class.”
Those sorts of omissions were inevitable: collecting is a hobby, not a responsibility. “Everybody does the sixteen-second test, where you drop the needle, you listen to the first verse, and you go, Okay, I know where this is going. I’m not going to be needing this in my life,” Nagoski said. “Everybody has this established sense of what is good. And life is short and you can’t listen to everything.”
I decided to drive down to Frostburg, Maryland—a small mountain town about two and half hours west of Baltimore, wedged in the little strip of Maryland between West Virginia and Pennsylvania—where Ian Nagoski had recently moved. I booked a room at a place called Failinger’s Hotel Gunter, which opened on New Year’s Day in 1897 and had a storied, if perplexing, history outlined in one very long paragraph on its website. (“The basement of the hotel had unique features of its own including a jail and a game cock fighting arena.”) I found both its price (seventy-five dollars a night) and its tagline (“Nothing Like It Anywhere Else”) irresistible. When I arrived, the place appeared to be populated mostly by stuffed animals and dolls. There was a mannequin museum in the basement, alongside a scale replica of a coal mine and a massive taxidermy display, which included a red fox eating a whole squirrel. On the way up to my room, I couldn’t stop myself from taking a picture of two teddy bears posed, midsip, at a miniature, doily-covered tea table. It was that kind of vibe.
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