Do Not Sell At Any Price

by Amanda Petrusich

  Bussard was getting into the story now, his blue eyes flashing like two synchronized traffic lights. “So I got down the road about a mile and thought, There’s no flea market down here. There’s an old man walking up the road, and so I ask him, and he says, ‘Yeah, it’s up there up the road.’ I said, ‘You goin’ up? Hop in!’ And I had a tape playing, some strange stuff. He says, ‘You getting that on the radio?’ I said, ‘No, it’s a tape.’ He said, ‘That figures,’ because, you know, he knew damn well there wasn’t anything on the radio any good. And we went up there and walked around and I didn’t find anything, of course. Then I told him what I was looking for.” Bussard was doing all the voices now: his, the old man’s. “ ‘I got a gang of them back at the house.’ ”

  Bussard drove the man the twenty-five miles or so to his house, a little shotgun shack behind a trailer park. “Sloppiest-looking place you’d ever seen—looked like a flood had hit it. And we went into this shack, and he goes down a hall, turns left, pulls a box out from under the bed,” he continued. Bussard felt that familiar churn of anticipation in his gut, but he knew deals like this could curdle quickly. The records might be garbage, or the man might decide at the last minute—when confronted with a stranger’s barely contained eagerness—that he didn’t want to sell after all.

  “[The box] had so much dust on it—like snow, like a blizzard.” Bussard leaned in and mimed blowing the dust off the surface. His cheeks puffed up and deflated, like a cartoon’s. Bussard’s whole life would be changed—nearly defined—by the next five minutes, but he didn’t know that yet. “First record I hit was an Uncle Dave Macon. Average. Carter Family. Charlie Poole. And then the first Black Patti. I went down a little further. Three more! Phew! Finally I got to the bottom of the box, and there were fifteen of ’em. I said, ‘Where’d you get these records from?’ He said, ‘Oh, some guy gave them to my sister in 1927, we didn’t like ’em so we put ’em in the box under the bed.’ I said, ‘What do you want for them?’ and he said, ‘Ten dollars.’ And I said, ‘Ten dollars.’ ”

  Bussard paid the man and booked it to his truck. Almost immediately after he got back to Frederick, word got out about his find and offers started accumulating. First, Bussard said, was the collector Bernie Klatzko, who drove down from New York City and offered him $10,000 for Black Patti 8030, “Original Stack O’Lee Blues,” performed by Long Cleve Reed and Little Harvey Hull, the Down Home Boys. Although some Black Patti masters were also issued by other labels, like Champion or Gennett, and often with the performer using a different name, “Original Stack O’Lee Blues” was released by Black Patti exclusively. And in 1966, Bussard’s was the only known copy in the world. “So then after that happened, Don Kent called, he came down, offered me more. I had other offers. Went up to twenty thousand dollars, then twenty five, then thirty, then thirty-five, then up to fifty thousand dollars.” Bussard darted over to the shelves. “Don’t look at where I keep it!” he said, pulling the record down and trotting back to his desk. He held it out to me in a way that suggested, “Take a nice long look, drink it in, but don’t you dare touch.” A mammoth grin spread across his face.

  After Bussard felt I’d been sufficiently wowed by the sight of it, he pulled the 78 from its paper sleeve, laid it on his turntable, and wiped the surface with a record-cleaning brush that resembled a blackboard eraser. Although Bussard repeatedly told me his was, in fact, still the only surviving copy of “Original Stack O’Lee Blues” on earth, King later whispered that he’d heard another had been uncovered and was in the possession of an unnamed collector in California.

  All anyone knows about Black Patti 8030 is that this particular performance was recorded in a Chicago studio in May 1927. The song itself (also known as “Stagger Lee,” “Stagolee,” “Stack-A-Lee,” and other phonetically similar variants) is a tremendously popular, oft-adapted American murder ballad, first published in 1911—after the folklorist John Lomax acquired a partial transcription from a Texas woman, and the historian Howard Odum submitted it to the Journal of American Folklore—and first recorded in 1923 by Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians. It was likely written sometime in the very late nineteenth century. “Stack O’Lee” tells the story of the Christmas murder of a twenty-five-year-old levee hand named Billy Lyons, who was shot by a St. Louis pimp named Lee Shelton, who also went by the nickname “Stack” or “Stag.” According to Cecil Brown’s Stagolee Shot Billy, Lee was part of a gang of “exotic pimps” called the Macks who “presented themselves as objects to be observed.” They wore specially cut suits made from imported fabric—a nod to Parisian style—and wide-brimmed Stetson hats. The hat was important. As Brown wrote of it, “In that era it was a mark of highest status for blacks, coming to represent black St. Louis itself . . . To hurt a man symbolically, one could do no worse than cut his Stetson.” Brown also points out that Freud believed that in dreams, at least, a hat was a symbol of “the genital organ, most frequently the male,” and that knocking someone’s hat off his head functioned as a kind of proxy castration.

  That night, Shelton and Lyons were drinking in the Bill Curtis Saloon, a local bar and meetinghouse owned and operated by its namesake. It was also the default headquarters of the Four Hundred Club, a social and political organization composed of influential black men; Shelton was its captain. An 1896 story in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat described Curtis and his operation like this: “Though the Morgue and the City Hospital are regularly supplied with subjects from his headquarters, his popularity never declines, for it is generally conceded that he is acting as a public benefactor in allowing undesirable members of colored society to be dispatched in his place of business.”

  Shelton and Lyons were seated at the bar, imbibing, exchanging thoughts. They were colleagues of sorts, if not necessarily pals. The conversation shifted, as it sometimes does, to a contentious topic—politics, maybe—and to augment or possibly accelerate the skirmish, Lyons decided to swipe Shelton’s prized Stetson from his head. Just reached up and swatted it off. It was a power move: childish but humiliating, nearly inconceivable in its hubris. Shelton demanded its return. There is no transcription of this exchange, but I imagine it was heavy. Lyons wouldn’t give it up. So Shelton whipped out his revolver, unloaded a few bullets into Lyons’s stomach, and—rather coolly, and with no outward indication of distress—reached down to collect and reposition his hat. Then he strolled out.

  Lyons ultimately died from the wound, and Shelton was tried, convicted, and jailed in 1897. (Curiously, he was pardoned and released in 1909, but was reincarcerated just two years later for robbery and assault, and died in prison, reportedly of tuberculosis.) There is a Tarantino-esque brutality to the story, which has to do with pride, vengefulness, and retribution, and all the accompanying lines in the sand, and if you were to maybe drink a whiskey and think about it for a bit, you know, what else was Shelton gonna do? Play keep-away with a petulant twenty-five-year-old? In his home bar, with his peers looking on? The narrative was swiftly adapted as a folk song, and, as with almost any story, the details change depending on who’s telling it. Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and the Grateful Dead have all recorded notable takes; the Dead’s is set in 1940 and told from the point of view of Billy Lyons’s girl, Delia, who hunted down Stagger Lee on the night of Lyons’s murder and “shot him in the balls.” Beck’s 1996 single “Devil’s Haircut” was also an adapted version of the myth: “I had this idea to write a song based on the Stagger Lee myth. The chorus is like a blues lyric. You can imagine it being sung to a country-blues guitar riff,” he told Rolling Stone’s Mark Kemp in 1997.

  There is nothing particularly interesting, from a contextual standpoint, about “Original Stack O’Lee Blues”—it’s just another take on a song everyone was already singing, performed by two people who don’t appear to have had much of a commercial career beyond it, although they did record a few other songs for Gennett, likely in the same session. Bussard’s interest in it was partially because of its scarcity, but had more (according to h
im, at least) to do with its aesthetic superiority. He thinks everything about it is perfect. King doesn’t quite agree, although he acknowledges the enduring lure of a Black Patti. “I don’t think that the label’s cachet has diminished too much in the last twenty or thirty years,” he told me later. “Probably the only thing that has diminished are those collectors willing to shell out obscene money just for a rare-label disc that may or may not have much musical interest or power.”

  Bussard spent a few minutes making sure he had the needle he wanted, and then lowered it onto the record. His face went slack. He winced. His shoulders started scrunching up and down. It is, indeed, a lovely performance—particularly when Reed and Hull lean in to harmonize on the chorus, their voices entangled in just the right way. There is something sweet and melancholy in the guitar, a sense that violence is sometimes inevitable, that Billy Lyons and Lee Shelton were destined to destroy each other, like lovers or enemies, like we sometimes do. As soon as it was over, I thanked Bussard for playing it for me, and I meant it. He was still riled up, shaking his head back and forth.

  It was getting late, and I could tell King was ready to get back on the road. He didn’t like driving at night. He started rolling a cigarette. Bussard, who had finally quit smoking a few years back, turned to me. “We gotta get him off that shit.”

  “You wanna hold him down and I’ll steal the tobacco?” I offered.

  “For a certain record I’d do it,” King said. “I’d quit.” Bussard guffawed. He knew what King wanted—those Cajun upgrades. There was something else, too. While Bussard had been pulling records, King had spotted a file copy of the accordionist Angelas LeJeune’s “Perrodin Two Step” / “Valse de la Louisiane,” and now he didn’t want to leave without it. For most collectors, spotting a record you need is not unlike getting your hands on someone who means a tremendous amount to you, pressing your face into their neck, and letting whatever incalculable combination of pheromones and memory do its thing on you: that first inhalation, that impossible relief. It’s an overwhelming, unshakable feeling of need. Still, King kept his cool, as he does. He is a patient, thoughtful negotiator, unafraid of waiting it out, always capable of managing his pining. (Externally, at least.)

  Bussard now owned so many rare records that he had become nearly impossible to trade with. Anything you might think to offer him he probably already had, so the game was mostly in upgrades these days. He had told us earlier that he was looking to bump his copy of Frank Hutchison’s “K.C. Blues” to at least an E-plus. “Yeah, some son of a bitch had to strip that,” he said, holding out the record and pointing to damage imparted by a Victrola and its weighty tone arm. “Damn windup.”

  Frank Hutchison was a white guitar player and West Virginia coal miner who recorded forty-one sides for Okeh Records between 1926 and 1929 (Bussard’s sweet spot, chronologically speaking); his spritely, harmonica-bolstered version of “Stackalee,” which sees Billy Lyons begging for mercy, was included on the Anthology. Hutchison died in 1945 from complications likely due to alcoholism. King owned “K.C. Blues”—an instrumental guitar rag with a memorable spoken interlude, during which Hutchison declares he’s “just getting right on good red liquor”—but his copy wasn’t in any better shape.

  “I don’t think there’s a clean copy of this, Joe,” King said.

  “Somewhere!” Bussard howled.

  King was going to have to try cash for the LeJeune.

  “I don’t want to get rid of it unless you got a lot of bucks you wanna throw away,” Bussard said.

  “I only brought a lot of bucks to throw away.”

  “I’m thinking.”

  King opened up his wallet and pulled out a little piece of worn-out white paper. He slowly unfolded it. “Last time I visited you, and you let me actually go through your Cajun records—this was the list of them. You didn’t let me know you had the LeJeune. You didn’t tell me you had the LeJeune or it would have been on that list. And as you can see, right here, I have this one and I have this one, but I don’t have the one you have,” he said, holding up the paper. “So you’re breaking my heart.”

  “Well,” Bussard said. He went back to his shelves and started pulling down more 78s to play for us. This went on for a while: Bussard requesting absurd amounts of money, King emitting a string of increasingly exasperated sighs. King finally decided to let it go for today. He’d call Bussard in a few days and try to work something reasonable out. (His plan would succeed: a few months later, King would get the record for the price he wanted. “Visited Joe today and picked up the file copy of the LeJeune, which I will send an image of via WeTransfer,” he e-mailed. “I Am Happy Now.”) Tonight, though, we had to get back to Virginia.

  Leaving Joe Bussard’s basement is about as hard as getting in. It’s possible there is nothing Bussard likes more than playing music for people. Since 1956, when he started a pirate station out of his home, he’s been an avid radio producer; he presently cohosts a show called Country Classics, which airs every Friday night on Atlanta’s WREK. As we were putting our coats on, he grabbed an acoustic guitar, laid it across his lap, and started playing a blues riff using a screwdriver as a slide. Then he began telling me about the various phonographs set up around his basement. Then he ran over to a filing cabinet, opened a drawer, pulled out a maroon-and-gold-patterned tie, and told me it was the tie Hank Williams was wearing the day he died. “The undertaker took the knot out of it,” he said. “Hank never unknotted a tie. He’d just throw it away. He only wore ’em once.” I got the sense that one could stay in Bussard’s basement for days and miraculous things would never stop happening. But it was late and starting to snow. King and I said our good-byes and thank-yous and retreated to the Volkswagen.

  The drive back was menacing: the snow gave way to rain, which gave way to sticky clumps of ice, which fused to the pavement. We stopped for Indian food in Harrisonburg and debriefed. King thought Bussard was overinflating the price of the LeJeune for my benefit (and he was right), but he agreed that I’d gotten a fairly authentic basement experience: a bit of sass, a bit of playfulness, access to a whole lot of priceless records. We spent the rest of the drive to Afton talking about love and death in song, in part because it seemed like we might not actually make it back up and down the mountain, given the deteriorating weather conditions. When we finally got back to my car, it took fifteen minutes of scraping to clear the ice from its windshield, which did not portend particularly well for the state of the road, no longer visible through the ever-prodigal fog.

  King and I exchanged ominous farewells and white-knuckled it out of the parking lot. It was a slow and terrifying drive back to Barboursville. Bret’s parents greeted me with a cup of bourbon, which I consumed in one desperate gulp. When I finally checked my phone, there was a new e-mail from King. He’d made it home. No new records, but at least he was alive. It was something.

  / / Fourteen / /

  An Obsessive Need for Things to Stay the Same and an Immersion in Arcane Knowledge

  Sarah Bryan, “Skokiaan,” Girls, OCD, David Linden, Autism, the Pleasure Circuit, Neurobiology, “Pleasure Is Replaced by Desire; Liking Becomes Wanting”

  Sarah Bryan and I admired the coral-red armpits of the three-inch African stick bug cowering in her small, outstretched palm. I am not a bug person, exactly, but this particular creature possessed uncommon corporeal charms—chief among them that it looked more like a stick than an insect, and I like sticks just fine. It spoke to Bryan’s intuitiveness—and, perhaps, her mercy—that she didn’t attempt to cajole me into cradling it; these were her stick bugs and I was an interloper with a notebook and a hotel pen, ill equipped to contain or embrace such things. The bug remained motionless in her hand. I wondered, for a moment, if it was gearing up to lunge at my face. Bryan looked at me with pity and laughed. The stick bug was lowered back into its habitat and we retreated to the kitchen, filled our plates with cold salads and fresh fruit, and settled on her living room couch to talk.

  Bryan,
who edits a bimonthly music magazine called the Old-Time Herald—a lively and vital read for collectors and fans of old-time music—is a vegetarian and an animal enthusiast, and, in addition to the aforementioned terrarium, her Durham, North Carolina, home contained two sweet calico cats, a big yellow dog, and an aging parrot. It also contained shelves and shelves of 78s culled by Bryan and her husband, Peter Honig, who had invited me over on a balmy spring night. I was so riled up about hearing some of their records—I’d already spotted a Charley Patton 78 hanging on the wall over their Victrola—that I could barely keep my hands still through supper.

  I’d spent most of the day in the archives of the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where a patient young archivist named Aaron Smithers had played me a stack of Blind Blake 78s—all Paramount pressings—in the archive’s cool, dark recording studio while I made goony faces, scribbled notes (“Holy shit!”) in my notebook, and tried my best not to think about what Chris King and I had lost at Hillsville. In 1983, the university had acquired the John Edwards Collection, an assemblage of around ten thousand vernacular 78s culled by the Australian-born collector John Edwards, who died in California in 1958. Edwards’s good pal and contemporary, the collector Eugene Earle, managed the donation of his records first to UCLA and then, twenty-one years later, to the University of North Carolina, after it was determined that the materials would be “more effective” if housed in the region where this music was born. (Earle eventually handed over his own collection of nearly eighty thousand 78s, 45s, LPs, and transcription discs to the SFC, too.)