Besides Bussard’s clout as an eccentric—a surefire cred booster—Fonotone is significant because it was the first label to release the guitar work of John Fahey. In 1959, a then-eighteen-year-old Fahey made his way to Bussard’s basement to tape a few things from Bussard’s collection, and, like many of Bussard’s visitors, he ended up recording a track for Fonotone. Bussard dubbed Fahey “Blind Thomas” and listed his work as “Negro blues” in the Fonotone catalog despite Fahey being a young, white college student from nearby Takoma Park. Fahey would repeatedly trot this joke out over the ensuing decade—it was, of course, the origin of his whole Blind Joe Death routine. On “Blind Thomas Blues,” itself now a coveted 78, Fahey plays guitar and sings in a put-on “blues voice” that at first seems offensive in a head-cocked, are-you-serious way, but is actually pretty hilarious: “I make erry’body feel bad when I come around, haha!” he barks, a mantra I suspect many collectors are tempted to adopt as their own. Somehow, Fahey and Bussard had distilled the authenticity scramble that would become a defining neurosis for young Americans a half century later, and lampooned it just as quickly.
Today Bussard was recovering from a cold, which made his voice even gnarlier—preburnished, as it was, from decades of smoking two-dollar cigars in a minimally ventilated basement. Although he could be very sweet, he was prone to griping, especially when he was hungry. During the five-minute voyage to the Barbara Fritchie, he hollered about King’s driving, President Obama, liberals, liberal media (“Of course, you listen to liberal channels, you’re not gonna get the news—gotta go to Fox, the only one, the only one you’re gonna hear the truth on. Don’t believe me? Watch it one night, you’ll never go back to the others!”), and the various physical ailments plaguing his body, including the bug he’d apparently picked up from one of his grandchildren.
The outpouring of dissatisfaction didn’t slow down after we arrived at the restaurant, which was recognizable by its turquoise roof and the fifty-foot candy cane in the parking lot, on display year-round. Bussard liked the Barbara Fritchie in part because there was no canned music pumped in, so he didn’t have to manage his boundless ire for modern songs. The three of us sat in a vinyl booth near the back and ordered promptly. Bussard requested a cup of coffee drawn from “a fresh pot.” He and King caught up a bit on collector gossip—who was getting what, and from where. Then our eggs arrived.
“Oh, no, no, no, no,” Bussard shouted. “Somebody screwed up them eggs! No way. No way. I don’t want these damn eggs, I ain’t eating, no, no, no.”
Our waitress, a gentle-eyed woman in her mid-twenties, jogged over. “What’s the matter, hon?” she asked.
“Tell Carlos to fix my eggs for me.”
“He’s the one on the grill right now. How do you like them?”
“Every morning I come in here, he fixes ’em, don’t have any problem. I ain’t gonna eat these things. I want ’em wet.”
“You don’t want them cooked all the way?”
“You oughta know that,” he snapped. She picked up the plate, apologized, and assured him his breakfast would be prepared just how he liked it. Her ponytail bounced in place on her way back into the kitchen. I squirmed a little, shot the ponytail a sympathetic look. King, for his part, gracefully attempted to change the subject, first talking about his daughter and then about the collector Ron Brown. Bussard didn’t want to hear any of that. He had grievances to air.
“I couldn’t eat eggs like that. Horrible looking. Good God. They’re the horriblest-looking scrambled eggs I’ve seen in my life! God. Those flakes?”
We exchanged nods of solidarity: Horrible eggs! Unconscionable eggs! Finally, hoping to deflect further attention from his soured breakfast, I asked Bussard about his adolescence: how he got into records, and what he had done, or would do, to get more of them.
Bussard’s family had money, so steady employment was never a pressing concern. He began collecting as a kid (birds’ nests were his first obsession) and became interested in music via Gene Autry, whom he still calls his favorite singer. Once he was gripped by the call of 78s—and it was a Jimmie Rodgers record that finally sealed it—Bussard spent much of the 1950s and ’60s, from the moment he got his driver’s license on, combing southwest Virginia and the surrounding coal country for 78s. It’s a region that can feel culturally and geographically impenetrable, as insular as it is beautiful, but Bussard barged through anyway, knocking on doors and holding up a 78 to whomever answered, asking if there was anything that looked like that in the attic, and could he have a little peek, and what about five dollars for the whole stack? It was boots-on-the-ground grunt work, pointedly removed from the estate-sale lurking most contemporary collectors indulge in. “I’ve been in places, met people you wouldn’t even believe,” he said.
Bussard sometimes employed his boyish charisma as an acquisitions technique. I realize, given the events just described, that he maybe doesn’t sound like much of a charmer, but there was something attractively impish about him—a mischievous, glinting quality that made people do whatever work was necessary to get him to smile and start hooting. “I went to one place down below Stanley, Virginia,” he recounted. “Woman who answered said, ‘There’s been two men here buying a couple months ago, and I didn’t like them. I told them I didn’t have any. But you come on in, love.’ ” He grinned. “I have the blues in my voice.”
Although stock has diminished considerably in the last fifty years, that particular corner of Virginia remains a hotbed for 78 activity, in part because it retains its citizens, and in part because those citizens are typically descendants of farm owners or miners who collected steady paychecks and sometimes had a little extra money for records. This is true, especially, of blues records: find out where African-Americans with a bit of disposable income lived and worked in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and you’ve got a shot at finding something good. It was what drew King and me to Hillsville, and it’s what seeded Bussard’s collection. “The best two states are Virginia, West Virginia. Got more records there’n any place,” Bussard explained. He could tell just by looking at the exteriors which houses were going to have the best records inside. “Old houses,” he said. “I liked the ones with the honeysuckle growin’ over the porch. You go up to the door, get a draft of air, you can smell ’em. They oughta make a perfume outta that! Oh my God.”
“There’s no better smell,” King agreed.
“My God, I was always interested in records,” Bussard continued. “I went out every chance I got and used all the money I had. It was nothing to go out on a weekend and come back with a thousand records. Unload the car. Come down for a few days.”
“It was like that when I was in college,” King said, nodding. “You ever been to Princeton, West Virginia? There’d be a flea market every five miles—twenty or thirty tables would be set up, and inevitably somebody would have old records. And if they didn’t have old records there, they’d have old records at home, so I’d go to their house.”
The waitress redelivered Bussard’s eggs—now properly scrambled—and he laughed like a wildman. “Thank you, darlin’!” he boomed. While we ate, King and Bussard exchanged a few more junking yarns, trading grunts of respect and (from Bussard, at least) the occasional dismissive barb. At my prodding, King had started talking about a bunch of dealer stock he once found outside of Louisville, Kentucky. “They were all in thirty-count boxes—everything was in a thirty-count Columbia box. Across the top, it said ‘Columbia Records, Stay Away from Heat and Steam,’ and right below it, stamped in red ink, was ‘December 7, 1934.’ They’d stamped the boxes and sealed them up. This guy’d had them in his house for the longest time, unopened. Then he put them in a car in his backyard. Just boxes and boxes and boxes and boxes of Columbia dealer stock, nothing later than December 7, 1934, in a car in the backyard.”
Bussard noisily slurped his coffee. “Yeah, there are a few Columbias ain’t worth a shit,” he grumbled.
These days, Bussard mostly trades with other coll
ectors. “I don’t go house to house anymore, I quit that,” he said. He did periodically attend estate auctions around Maryland, but only if the auction announcement said there would be old records, and even then, he was typically disappointed, if not fully enraged, by what he encountered. “Went to an auction, drove through the whole town, walk in: LPs,” he recalled.
Bussard immediately got into it with the auctioneer. “Oh, I was pissed. I said, ‘They’re not old records!’ I said, ‘You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.’ He got snotty. I got snottier. I said, ‘Luring me out here for nothing but a damn bunch of LP records! They’re not old!’ They heard us all over the whole building. I went outside and he followed me outside and said, ‘Don’t come in here.’ I said, ‘With a dumbass like you, I don’t wanna come in there,’ ” Bussard spat. “I know I shouldn’t have done it, but I don’t care. When you get my age you don’t give a damn anymore. The hell with it, you know?”
Bussard was married for nearly half a century to a woman named Esther Bussard, who passed away a few years ago. In 1999, she confessed her feelings about her husband’s habit to the writer Eddie Dean, who was reporting a story about Bussard for the Washington City Paper. “I’ve never touched one of his records, or anything in his room, because I respect it—that’s his room,” she told Dean. “Even though I sometimes feel resentful and bitter, I still respect him for what he has done. He has a fantastic collection, and I realize this because I appreciate music, and I appreciate his saving it for history.” It was hard to discern more about Bussard’s personal life as it existed beyond his basement. Every story he had seemed to revolve, in one way or another, around his collection. He even met Esther while on the hunt for records. Bussard was on the CB radio airwaves asking around about 78s when he encountered her father, who eventually arranged for an introduction. He knew his daughter enjoyed music.
Like most collectors, Bussard can pinpoint exactly when he believes certain genres began their inevitable descent into mediocrity and, eventually, atrociousness. “Country music was over in ’fifty-five. Last gasp. Bluegrass music died, well, a couple years after. It’s crabgrass now. The guys singing now, they just don’t have it. Best bluegrass was mid-forties, late forties, early-middle fifties. Jazz was over in ’thirty-three,” he rattled off. “They lost that beautiful tone—every band had it, the most beautiful saxophones, clarinets, trombones, they just had a certain sound. I don’t know what the hell it was, but after ’thirty-three it was gone.” Bussard believed rock ’n’ roll was a terrible joke, was incensed by midcentury crooners, and even retained some special vitriol for singers like the 1920s pop-country star Vernon Dalhart, whom he called Vernon Stalefart. “People today are so starved for talent, for music,” he seethed. “Hey, listen to this computer crap!”
Eventually, we finished our eggs and coffee and headed back to Bussard’s house, his mood now noticeably brighter. He led us inside through the garage, around the kitchen, down a set of stairs, and toward a locked wooden door. The ground level of his home was in a state of mild disarray—two obese cats lounged amid piles and piles of stuff—but the basement was an impeccably appointed oasis, an homage to recorded sound. The walls were lined with memorabilia: record labels and sleeves, photographs, mementos, newspaper articles, advertisements, a signed letter from the astronaut John Glenn (“Dear Mr. Bussard, Thank you for your interest in and thoughtfulness in writing about the flight of the Friendship 7 spacecraft and for enclosing a token of appreciation”). The floor was carpeted, perhaps to preempt an accidental record-cracking should a 78 ever slip from his fingers. A couple school pictures of his granddaughters were Scotch-taped to the wood paneling above his desk. A vintage bar cart was parked in the corner, covered with cassette tapes, papers, and an open box of Honey Maid graham crackers. Nearby, a trash can was overflowing with cassette wrappers. If you call him up, Bussard will make you a tape of almost anything in his collection for a small charge, but he doesn’t mess with compact discs. To wit: “CDs are crap!”
Every one of his shelves was festooned with a little cardboard warning, typed in all caps on his Smith-Corona: PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH RECORDS. It had never even occurred to me to try. In his Washington City Paper story, Dean wrote that many consider Bussard’s collection “the most vital, historically important, privately owned collection of early 20th century American music,” and nearly all the collectors I’d spoken to agreed on its import. Bussard had things other people didn’t even know they could want. That it was privately owned seemed both vital (Bussard knew exactly what he had and why) and incidental, in part because Bussard was famously generous with allowing producers or fans to make transfers or tapes of his records. In that way, it felt more useful than an archive, where records tended to languish, unplayed. Bussard’s collection lived.
Before King and I had finished shrugging off our coats and tossing them onto his couch, Bussard was firing up his turntable and asking me what kind of music I liked.
“She likes sad songs,” King said.
Bussard pulled a disc off the shelf and pointed to a chair near a speaker.
Watching Joe Bussard listen to records is a spiritually rousing experience. He often appears incapable of physically restraining himself, as if the melody were a call to arms, an incitement it would be immoral if not impossible to ignore: he has to move. He sticks his tongue out, squeezes his eyes shut, and bounces in his seat, waving his arms around like a weather vane shaking in a windstorm, spinning one way, then another. At times it was as if he could not physically stand how beautiful music was. It set him on fire, animated every cell in his body. He only broke to check on me: did I like it? He didn’t wait to find out.
“All that for a quarter!” he shouted.
“What a beautiful tone! Oh my God!”
“It’s like they’re right there! You can hear everything!”
We went on like this for a while: Bussard scurrying over to his shelves, putting a record on the turntable, going nuts. He periodically held his hands up midsong, his palms out, like “Stop.”
“Listen to this,” he’d say. His voice was serious. “It’s taking everything.” When I tried to make a quick note in my notebook, he swatted at my hand with a record sleeve, imploring me to pay better attention. To be held in rapture.
A couple hours passed in a haze of playback. Then, during a brief break in his set, Bussard erupted into his most famous junking story, a tale he clearly relished recounting, even now. It was the one about how he uncovered a stack of fifteen near-mint Black Patti 78s in a trailer park in Tazewell, Virginia, in the summer of 1966. This was what I’d come—what everyone comes—to hear.
After J. Mayo Williams left Paramount Records in 1927, he started a Chicago-based race imprint called Black Patti, named after the African-American soprano Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones, who’d earned the nickname because of her (supposed) similarity to the Italian opera singer Adelina Patti. The Black Patti label was festooned with a big, preening peacock, printed in muted gold ink on dark purple paper. (According to 78 Quarterly, the late collector Jake Schneider once described it as “the world’s sexiest label.”) The Black Patti catalog—a total of fifty-five discs—included jazz songs, blues, religious sermons, spirituals, and hokey, vaudeville-style skits; it was designed to compete with (and, hopefully, outsell) Paramount’s race series. The performances were recorded at several different studios, then pressed into shellac and shipped from the Gennett Records plant in Richmond, Indiana. Black Patti lasted about seven months. Not much is known about why the label collapsed, although it likely proved financially unsustainable for Williams and his two partners (Dr. Edward Jenner Barrett, the son-in-law of Paramount cofounder Fred Dennett, and Fred Gennett, a manager of Gennett Records), who unceremoniously shrugged the whole enterprise off in September of 1927. According to Rick Kennedy, the author of Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy: Gennett Studios and the Birth of Recorded Jazz, it was Gennett who ultimately yanked the plug.
Now Black Pattis are w
ildly desired things, having been pressed in deliciously small quantities of one hundred or fewer each and sold in just a handful of stores in Chicago and throughout the South. After I told King I’d spent a few weeks trying to track down sales or distribution records to no avail, he tried but failed to suppress a guffaw: “They didn’t keep ledgers for this material,” he said. With a few exceptions, there are less than five extant copies of each Black Patti release, and some have never been found. In 2000, Pete Whelan dedicated an entire issue of 78 Quarterly to the Black Patti: its cover features a dark, nearly indiscernible figure with gold eyes emerging from the shadows and holding two Black Patti labels where her breasts would be. The tagline reads: “The most seductive feature ever!”
Although I’m not sure I find them quite so arousing, Black Pattis are certainly mysterious (that same issue of 78 Quarterly describes them as “historic, bizarre, and idealistic”). Most of the artists Williams recruited are now ciphers, with names like Steamboat Joe & His Laffen’ Clarinet or Tapp Ferman and His Banjo. A pipe organist named—confusingly—Ralph Waldo Emerson recorded five sides for Williams in 1927. Stylistically, the label was something of a mixed bag, but for collectors, its pull is unnerving.
In the summer of ’66, Bussard was on the road, running his usual Appalachian route in a Scout pickup. He thinks he must’ve had a buddy with him, but that bit of the legend is incidental, at least as far as Bussard is concerned. He got lost looking for a flea market. That sort of thing happened to him a lot. “So old dummy, old dumbass, I s’pose I made a right turn instead of a left turn,” he explained. There was a pause. “Best left turn I ever made.”
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