I had driven down to Virginia the day before and spent the night with Bret’s parents in nearby Barboursville. I woke early on the morning of our meet-up. It was mid-February, equal parts frigid and damp. I got dressed by putting on every item of clothing I could find in my suitcase. On the hour-long drive toward Afton, I curled my mitten-clad hands around the steering wheel and cranked both the heater and a CD-R of Five Days Married & Other Laments, a compilation of Epirotic laments and dance songs culled from a stack of battered Greek and Albanian folk 78s King had junked on a family vacation to Istanbul a few years prior. It was King’s latest release for Long Gone Sound, and, like all of his collections, it was deeply personal. It comprised exclusively rural folk songs—“the song and dance of the volk and the village,” he explained in the notes, which existed “largely as a rustic, primal counterpart to laîki or urban popular music, such as rembetika.” Before I left for Virginia, King had reluctantly e-mailed me the MP3s along with a PDF of the liner notes. “I’ve already been accused of being a cultural fascist but could I also be an aesthetic one by suggesting that you read the notes to Five Days Married & Other Laments while listening to it . . . at least one time through?” he’d asked. “You know how I am about context.”
I eventually burned the files to a CD for my drive. I suppose if it hadn’t felt dangerous (and crazy), I would have taped the notes to my dashboard.
Although I first met King as a collector and producer, I was beginning to know him as a writer, too. Most week nights, after he’d put his daughter to bed and retreated to his music room, he drank red wine and worked diligently on short fiction or on the notes to his sets, which, in addition to the standard annotations, always contained some essayistic screed probing the nature of sound itself. As someone already overinvested in the question of why certain records made me feel certain things, I read them hungrily. King was acutely compelled by a variety of sonically dissimilar genres, and I frequently bugged him to clarify the overlap, to isolate the precise emotional center, the draw—the thing that made him pursue certain 78s with heart-stopping fervency but remain unmoved by others. Rarity meant something to him, whether he admitted it or not, but I was curious about what else he was listening for. His notes, I knew, were where he worked that shit out: posed the unanswerable questions, tried to understand his role in the exchange.
Reading the introduction that accompanies Five Days Married . . . , I could tell he’d been probing those desires, questioning why he needed what he needed. “That the tunes captured on these old 78s are conterminous with other equally intense musical expressions . . . the doomed pleas of Amédé Ardoin, the confident desolation of Geeshie Wiley, the unharnessed exuberance of Michael Thomasa, is significant,” he wrote. “Exactly what is the significance? What is the pit in our bellies that hollows out this epistemic hunger and, consequentially, what would sate this apparently irrational drive for a reasonable narrative? Can something in words explain that which must come before vocalization?”
Thinking about it on the drive toward Afton, the question almost made me queasy. Was King right to wonder if the “that” which came before vocalization—the specific rapture or agony that inspired a song—was inherently prelinguistic, inexpressible? Maybe the alchemical or spiritual flash that powered the art-making impulse was too raw and unimaginable to be parsed; maybe the question itself was naïve. But it felt particularly germane to this release. Even for fans of scratchy old blues records, the songs on Five Days Married . . . are aurally challenging (the modal structure is “implied,” the duets “asymmetric”), marked by wild, keeling melodies that sound a lot like wet, airless sobs.
The precise sound of the Albanian folk tradition is hard to describe: it is mournful and plaintive, focused on unholy-sounding violins and endlessly circling melodies. King rolled his eyes every time it got called “droning,” but there was a mesmerizing rhythm to it, a hypnotic, repetitive whir. Perhaps because the meters and instrumentation were so fundamentally unfamiliar, I couldn’t ever get past the sorrow and yearning they contained. It was all I could hear. I was, as King suggested, seized by an irrational drive for a reasonable narrative. It made for dizzying listening, and that morning, I was having a weird go of it in the Honda.
The weather didn’t help. Afton Mountain is a harrowing drive even on a clear day, and when fog consumes its summit, it’s a little like steering through a storm cloud with a blindfold on. Several years ago, the Virginia Department of Transportation installed a stretch of terrifically expensive runway lights—834 LED bulbs in total—along the highway edge, illuminating the width of the road but otherwise doing very little to aid with general visibility. Considering the elevation (it’s a 1,900-foot tumble down into the Shenandoah Valley), it’s not the kind of place you’d want to casually drift off course—and yet, as VDOT’s regional manager Dean Gustafson once explained in a press conference, “The lights can’t help you see cars in front of you.” I like to imagine there was a bit of foreboding in Gustafson’s voice. That his eyes darkened. When the visibility dips below fifty feet, you’re taking the presence of empty road in front of you on faith.
Having briefly lived in Charlottesville, I was vaguely cognizant of the fog situation, and I figured I would leave early, drive slowly, and wait patiently for King at the appointed location. What I didn’t quite realize was that it would be impossible to locate the appointed location. I couldn’t see anything at all: not the road, not the front end of my car, not other cars, not an abandoned hotel parking lot populated by drug-addicted miscreants. I crept up the mountain, leaning so close to the windshield that the tip of my nose left little prints on the glass. I periodically peered out the driver’s-side window, hoping for a break in the fog. Then, suddenly, I was rolling downhill. All I knew from King’s e-mail was that the lot would be on my left, and that if I reached the summit and started to descend, I’d gone too far. This went on for a while: me inching up the mountain, figuring out I was angling downward again, making an inadvisable U-turn, repeating the process. Eventually, on one of my re-ascents, I spotted a turnoff point and flicked on a blinker—an excessively civil gesture—before pulling into what I thought might be a parking lot, but in reality could have been someone’s front yard or merely an expanse of air. A few seconds later, I saw remnants of a crumbling stone foundation in my headlights. I put my car in park and slowly unwound the rest of my fingers from the steering wheel. A grinning truck driver pulled up alongside my car, flashed his lights, and motioned for me to roll down my window. I made a barf face at him. Because King didn’t have a cell phone, I wasn’t sure how to tell him that I was here or to find out if he was even still coming. It wouldn’t have been unreasonable for him (or for anyone) to turn around. I sat there, idly drinking coffee, turning Five Days Married . . . off and then back on again. I didn’t know if King would see me in my car, or my car in the lot, or the lot itself, but I figured I’d wait until the fog cleared a bit before giving up entirely.
I finally spotted a sliver of his blue Volkswagen, peeking through the whiteness. It eased up alongside the Honda. I could see King’s face—which looked particularly pale—through the passenger-side window. I felt a weird mixture of horror (it occurred to me in that moment, and not undramatically, that I’d inadvertently endangered his life to get to some records) and relief that he’d not only made it to our meeting point, but appeared physically unscathed. I unlocked my doors and lunged blindly toward his car, finding a handle and collapsing into the passenger seat. I wanted to embrace him. Instead we exchanged looks of incredulity. King removed his eyeglasses and wiped them clean. He handed me a paper sack full of ham biscuits. “Breakfast,” he said.
While I pulled off my mittens and unwound my scarf, King explained that Bussard had called him earlier that morning and said he wasn’t feeling well and that maybe we should come up some other time. King had somehow anticipated Bussard’s antipathy and preemptively prepared a retort (“This lady came all the way from New York City with her notebook and pens!
” I imagined him saying), which was enough to get Bussard to temporarily half agree, telling King we should call him when we were getting close and he’d decide if he could see us. I was grateful for King’s insistence, if slightly nervous about being unwelcome. We rolled out of the lot and toward the highway.
In the months since Hillsville, King and I had developed an unexpected but hearty bond, marked by a shared appreciation for the transformative possibilities of music: we were becoming friends. Our relationship was enacted mostly over the telephone. I would call him and whine about various existential ailments, he would play me curative 78s, and then we’d talk about records until one or both of us got tired. Our drive to Frederick progressed much in the same way. I chewed a biscuit and filled him in on my life in New York. King was working on a compilation of folk songs by the Epirotic violinist Alexis Zoumbas, and he played me a few tracks while we sliced through the fog, which was finally beginning to dissipate, fading into a cold, clear mist. Zoumbas’s violin fluttered, cried. Maybe it was the stress of the morning’s journey or the anticipation of breaking into Bussard’s basement, but after a few minutes, we both had tears in our eyes.
“What do you hear there?” King asked. He wiped his cheek with a handkerchief.
“Longing,” I said. I looked at him and then out the window. It was the same question, followed by the same response: what spurred people to need songs, what spurred people to make songs, how overwhelming it was to hear those motivations (the familiar ones, especially) reflected back at us now, in this car, a century after their initial airing, clear through the crackle, all those unchanging human needs. First, it reminded me of something the writer George Saunders once described as a “powerful thing to know: that one’s own desires are mappable onto strangers.” Then, it reminded me of a piece of paper Nathan Salsburg had shown me, found amid Don Wahle’s things: a letter from the collector John Edwards with the words CHIEF WANTS written in all capital letters. Here we were, still wanting. “Longing, yearning, regret, unspecified hunger,” I ticked off to the side-view mirror.
“Yeah,” he sighed.
Eventually, King would tell me the little he knew about Zoumbas. Through a collector friend, King had found a short promotional biography written in Greek and, after translating it, had enough information to contact a few bureaucratic offices and hunt down some relatives. He was able to piece a narrative together. Or, as he put it: “I have a fairly decent dossier now.” Zoumbas was born in 1880 in Epirus, a contentious chunk of land between the Pindus Mountains and the Ionian Sea. In 1913, toward the end of the second Baltic War, during an uprising in his village, he and another man tied stones to “a porcine Turkish landlord named Iakoub” and threw him down a well, killing him. “It’s one thing to kill a man, it’s another thing to tie him up with fucking stones while he’s still alive and throw him down a well,” King said. Zoumbas left Epirus and immigrated to the United States in 1914. By 1923, he was accompanying the popular Greek singers Marika Papagkika and Amalia Baka. In the latter part of the 1920s, he recorded several dozen violin solos; those were the records King was interested in. One essential bit of his story was missing, though. Zoumbas had disappeared mysteriously in 1930. “Perhaps he was swallowed up by the same abyss that he threw Iakoub into,” King said.
Weeks after our trip to Maryland, when I ran the scarce details of Zoumbas’s life back by King for factual confirmation, he explained how the arc had been complicated. “Curiously, what we are certain that we know has become more qualified by unanticipated and perhaps unwelcome ambiguities,” he wrote. “There appear to be two narratives associated with Zoumbas . . . a Greek and an American one. Your summary of the Greek narrative is correct. The American narrative, based on a 1930 Census, some passenger lists, a naturalization record and a draft card (???!!!) suggests a slightly different story. The Census gives his birth year as 1885 but his draft card gives 1883. The Census also gives his naturalization as 1910, not 1914. Both of these [discrepancies] can simply be explained as Zoumbas giving incorrect information to both appear younger (which I admire) but also to mess up the system if he indeed committed a crime,” he continued. “Perhaps the most curious US document is a passenger manifest from July of 1928. According to this list, Zoumbas sailed back to Greece in February of 1928. This would have been very expensive for an immigrant musician but also extremely risky if his killing of Iakoub was still regarded as murder.”
King was about to travel to Corfu and Ioannina in northern Greece, near the Albanian border, with his family in tow. He was anxious to resolve all biographical incongruities in advance of the new set’s release. He’d been making appointments, doing the legwork. “All of these additional narrative details will be reconciled (or not!) . . . I’ve arranged meetings with some relations as well as the local historian,” he said.
Before King left for Europe, I received a package in the mail containing a vinyl test pressing of Five Days Married & Other Laments and another CD-R in a clear plastic case. There was a blue index card Scotch-taped to the front of it. King had used his Remington to type me a short note: “Amanda, which one of these pulls at the human thread more?” The CD contained two of Zoumbas’s most mournful performances, “Lament from Epirus” and “Albanian Nightingale.” Both tracks were unlistenable to me after a while, containing, as they did, a kind of unfathomable sadness. Although Zoumbas recorded many 78s in his lifetime, working often as a backing musician, these two sounded like someone being turned inside out, with every single one of his organs suddenly exposed to cold air. “They’re completely unlike anything else he ever did,” King said when I called him that night. I don’t know if Zoumbas had been splayed by guilt, or just further subsumed by whatever led him to commit murder in the first place. It all sounded so human, sourced from some dark recess of the soul. I thought of Shakespeare: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.”
And I understood, for a moment, what collectors meant when they moaned about what was lacking in contemporary music: that pure communion, that unself-consciousness, that sense that art could still save us, absolve us of our sins. We know better than to expect that now.
King preferred to consume a special kind of chicory coffee roasted and ground by hand in Louisiana, but on this trip, a Dunkin’ Donuts iteration, acquired at a gas-station annex, was going to have to suffice. While we waited at the counter, I offered to pay for his cup. It seemed like a small gesture, given the morning’s circumstances. “Okay,” King agreed. “Because I only have five thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills.” King had his sights on a couple of Bussard’s rare Cajun records. He was “actively lusting”—his words—after two upgrades: Dennis McGee and Sady Courville’s “Mon Chere Bebe Creole,” Vocalion 5319, and Blind Uncle Gaspard and Delma Lachney’s “La Danseuse,” Vocalion 5303. King had them both in E-minus condition. Bussard had them in E-plus.
After a couple hours on the road, we were finally approaching Bussard’s suburban neighborhood. It was my job to call and see if he would concede to answering the door. Despite years of reporting, I still find making ordinary phone calls harrowing if not full-on terrifying, and knowing that the recipient might be unwilling was only aggravating my latent dread. I dialed, frowning at King. Bussard answered with an earsplitting hello. I stammered some kind of introduction. His voice crinkled and shifted, like a sheet of newsprint being balled up and then smoothed out. I’d been warned he was a loud speaker, and I held the phone a few inches away from my ear. I laughed a lot, at nothing, and kept thanking him for having us; this seemed like a better approach than actually asking him if we could still come over. He eventually conceded. I think what he said was: “Come get me and buy me lunch.”
King had filled me in on the lunch routine. Bussard frequented a diner called the Barbara Fritchie. (It was named after a local Civil War heroine who, at age ninety-five, purportedly ran into the street and waved a Union flag at Stonewall Jackson’s men in an effort to distract or reroute them; it is likely an apoc
ryphal tale, although that seems to bother no one.) He often insisted his visitors drive him there for a meal before he let them into his basement. At this point, he’d been eating at the Barbara Fritchie for over thirty years, sometimes three times a day. King had escorted him many times. “I would suggest the ‘Wedge’ as it is likely the healthiest item there and it is loam green,” King said of the menu. “I don’t really recommend it,” he added. “I just suggest it.”
We pulled off the highway and into Frederick, a midsize, mostly working-class city frequented by Civil War buffs. (In addition to the Fritchie mythology, Abraham Lincoln delivered a speech there, on his way to see General George McClellan following the Battle of Antietam; there is also a Museum of Civil War Medicine and a cornucopia of brass plaques commemorating war-related events.) Bussard’s brick house, which he shares with his daughter and grandchildren, is on a quiet residential block. He came loping outside as soon as the Volkswagen eased into the driveway. He was tall and gray-haired, and so thin that he bent a bit in the middle, like a stalk of wheat waving in the breeze. That morning, his hair was sticking every which way. A gold medallion hung from a thick rope chain around his neck, visible in flashes at the collar of his plaid flannel shirt. I climbed out and shook his hand, and then immediately crawled into the backseat. That was the pose I instinctively assumed: a kind of weird, nervous deference.
I’d heard a lot about Bussard’s collection, which consisted of around twenty-five thousand country, blues, Cajun, jazz, and gospel 78s, nearly all from the 1920s and ’30s, impeccably and mysteriously filed on floor-to-ceiling shelves in an order Bussard knew but wasn’t sharing. (“Oh, it’s in my head,” is all he’d say about it.) Between 1956 and 1970, Bussard operated a record label called Fonotone out of his basement, possibly the last 78 label to ever exist. He recorded new material and old-time songs using a fifty-dollar ribbon microphone slung over a pipe and a cutting machine he bought for thirty dollars from a local college. In the decades since its dissolution, Fonotone has earned its own cult following, and in 2005, Dust-to-Digital issued a boxed set containing five CDs of the label’s material, housed in a cardboard cigar box and packaged with a nickel-plated bottle opener imprinted with the Fonotone logo.
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