Do Not Sell At Any Price

by Amanda Petrusich

  Blues scholars had long assumed Blind Blake was a native of Jacksonville, Florida, per the address erroneously given by Paramount, but in late 2011, after his death certificate was dug up and published by a team of collectors and researchers (Alex van der Tuuk, Bob Eagle, Rob Ford, Eric LeBlanc, and Angela Mack), it was revealed that he was actually born six hundred miles north in Newport News, Virginia, and had died in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1934, of pulmonary tuberculosis. Either way, Chapel Hill did seem like a more appropriate depository for Blake’s music, which was pivotal in the development of the Piedmont blues in the late 1920s, a regional guitar style named after the Piedmont plateau (the chunk of land between the Atlantic Ocean and the Appalachian Mountains, stretching, roughly, from Richmond to Atlanta) and marked by a complex fingerpicking style that mimics the loping syncopation of ragtime. There’s a lightness to Piedmont blues that I’ve always eschewed in favor of the Delta’s rougher, more disreputable tone, but there’s something irresistible about Blake’s soothing, dignified croon, the way his fingers skip over his guitar strings, the giddiness of the entire enterprise. Even when Blake sings about trouble (“When you see me sleeping, baby, don’t you think I’m drunk / I got one eye on my pistol, and the other on your trunk,” he promises in “Early Morning Blues”), he sounds playful, almost mischievous.

  Despite most collectors’ contentious relationship with academia and with archives in particular, many still posthumously bequeath their records to institutions rather than burdening their already strained estates with thousands of pounds of shellac. The Southern Folklife Collection’s curator, Steve Weiss, estimated that nearly 95 percent of the SFC’s holdings were sourced from private collections and not from other archival or commercial institutions. Interestingly, Weiss was grateful for collectors’ contributions, and not just to the archive he oversees but to the broader notion of folklore as a viable academic pursuit—a field that didn’t really blossom until the 1950s and ’60s. “At the time, there really wasn’t serious academic study of vernacular music,” he explained. “And I think one of the things collectors did is they brought a lot of (a) interest, and (b) legitimacy to the serious study of this work. They really have preserved the music, and they’ve promoted the music, too. They are archivists in their own way,” he said. “Maybe even more so than some professional archivists.” While there was sometimes tension between collectors and academics, there was symbiosis, too.

  Back at Bryan’s house, I babbled to her and Honig about the university’s blues holdings and everything I’d seen and heard that day. Bryan, who has long, wavy brown hair and pink cheeks, listened sympathetically. I asked her if she remembered the first time she ever heard a 78. “I remember vividly,” she replied. “Peter and I were friends at the time. I was living in northern Virginia and he was living in Charlottesville. I went down to visit him with a mutual friend. I was already into the music—playing it and listening to reissues—but Peter knew that I had never heard a 78 before. He picked one up that he knew I would like, which was ‘The NuGrape Song,’ a twenties advertising jingle from the Royal Crown Cola Company. When I came in, he immediately put it on. I was so distracted by the fun of hearing it I didn’t think that much about the tone of the record at first. And then he put on another record he knew I loved, which was ‘Diamond Joe’ by the Cofer Brothers, a rough Georgia string band from the twenties. And for that one, I had settled down enough to listen, and I was just totally knocked out by the intimacy of the sound. I had listened to LPs a lot, so it wasn’t like I only knew digital music. But just hearing it through wood and metal and the little sheaf of mica . . .” She smiled. “It was really like they were there. I still have a visual image of sitting in Peter’s living room and envisioning the Cofer Brothers in the next room. It was that much of an impression.” Honig—a man of medium build, with brown hair he combs to the side—beamed and sat up a little straighter in his chair.

  While we ate, Bryan and Honig played me selected sides by Uncle Dave Macon, Peg Leg Howell and His Gang, and the Roane County Ramblers. They alternated choosing records, grinning knowingly at each other’s selections. (Early on in their relationship, Honig bought Bryan an antique Victrola and stuffed its drawers with records he thought she’d love, which is just about the most romantic gesture I can think of for a pair of courting record nerds.) While a Washington Phillips record played, I bit into a sugar cookie and let Bryan’s square-faced cat rub its head on my ear from the top of the couch cushion. I was high on records—on all of it—and prepared to stick my toothbrush in the holder above the sink and stay for as long as they’d let me.

  Bryan, maybe sensing I was ready, pulled down one of her favorite pieces: a Zulu drinking tune called “Skokiaan,” performed by the Bulawayo Sweet Rhythms Band. She had scored the record at a flea market outside Richmond eight or nine years earlier, buying it from a dealer she and Peter had known for a while—“a very old man named Pop,” she explained. “Pop was flipping through his records, because he knew the kinds of records Peter liked, the right kinds of labels. He was putting things aside and saying, ‘He’ll like this, he won’t like this.’ And then he came [to ‘Skokiaan’] and said, ‘I don’t know what this is.’ Just for the hell of it, I looked at it and I could see from the name that it was African. And he said, ‘I’ll take a dollar for it.’ So I paid a dollar and we brought it home. It’s my favorite 78 that I’ve found.”

  Skokiaan itself is an illicit African street drink, an occasionally lethal moonshine mixed by so-called Skokiaan Queens who, according to a Time magazine brief from 1954, “know how to spike it with enough methyl alcohol to provide the jolt that thrills but does not kill.” (In a short review of the song later that year, Time loosely translated “Skokiaan” as “happy-happy.”) The record was first issued in 1954 by Gallotone, an imprint of the Gallo Record Company, Africa’s oldest independent record label. It was written by August Musarugwa, a bandleader from Southern Rhodesia (then a British colony, now Zimbabwe), who recorded it with his band, the African Dance Band of the Cold Storage Commission of Southern Rhodesia, either in the late 1940s or early 1950s. By the time it was released by Gallotone, someone had changed the group’s name to the comparably pithy Bulawayo Sweet Rhythms Band. The track reportedly sold an impressive 170,000 copies in South Africa, and eventually Bill Randle, a DJ at Cleveland’s WERE, got his hands on a cracked copy that was delivered by a friend, a “pilot on the South African run,” according to the September 1954 issue of Downbeat. Randle was tickled enough to request a clean disc from the label, which he then played on air four times. Per Downbeat, “The cannonade began. Customers, distributors, retailers all clamored for copies.” Shortly thereafter, the British label London—an international partner of Gallotone—released the record in the United States (Bryan’s copy is a London pressing, label number 1491). “Skokiaan” was a moderate hit, peaking at number seventeen on the Billboard chart that year. The song inspired a slew of covers, including two somewhat joyless iterations by Louis Armstrong, one instrumental and one with improvised vocals, recorded for Decca in August 1954.

  A couple years earlier, the Weavers’ rendition of “Wimoweh” had squirmed its way into the Billboard top ten (the original version, “Mbube,” was recorded by Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds for Gallo in 1939; Pete Seeger supposedly misheard the Zulu chorus of uyimbube as “wimoweh,” thus creating its new title), and the Brooklyn-born pop sextet the Tokens landed a number one record with a further adapted version, now called “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” in 1961. But for plenty of American kids, “Skokiaan” was their very first introduction to world music created by non-Americans, and it was revelatory.

  Here’s a simple truth: if you want to make someone’s day, play them “Skokiaan.” If they’ve never heard it before, they will never forget you. Musarugwa’s wobbly saxophone carries the melody, and its particular tone is unlike anything else I’ve ever heard. His performance isn’t frantic or even drunk—it’s sweet and effortlessly joyful, a slipped guffaw,
a good, long laugh. It’s one of the most human sounds ever committed to record.

  Bryan told me it took her a while before she could listen to it without crying.

  Although I continued to stubbornly insist that they were out there, silently compiling killer collections, Sarah Bryan was the only female 78 collector I’d managed to locate and meet. I knew there was at least one other—in 2010, a woman named Sherry Mayrent donated her collection of nearly seven thousand Yiddish and Hebrew 78s to the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Mills Music Library—but record collecting in general is a predominantly male enterprise, and 78 collecting almost exclusively so. Nearly every time I asked a collector if they knew of any women in the game, they squinted and said something vague. Someone, somewhere, maybe. I don’t know.

  Collecting anything requires a singularity of focus, but 78 collecting demands an almost-inhuman level of concentration. There is a violence to the search, a dysfunctional aggression that vacillates between repellent and endearingly quirky. It’s intimidating to outsiders, and it feeds on sacrifice. Although many collectors managed to maintain healthy, even thriving relationships, for others, the needs of friends, partners, family members, wives, girlfriends, and associates were consistently ranked below the acquisition of new records. I wondered, sometimes, if women were unable (or just less likely) to make those kinds of choices. This was certainly true in America in the 1940s and ’50s, when the first wave of collectors—men like James McKune and Harry Smith—were establishing the rules of the trade and the seeds of world-class collections.

  Given my profession, I was already accustomed to being the only girl in the room, but the gender divide in collecting had, like everything else, started to feel personal. There are so many broad, unsatisfying generalizations about gender that get trotted out to explain the different ways men and women experience music fandom: there is the idea that women, temporarily incapacitated by unmanageable waves of passion, are incapable of comprehending how guitars work (it’s hard to understand anything through constant tears). And that men, unsettled by deep connections, need to reduce the experience of music to a series of facts and figures—they need to dissect it so they can comprehend it in a practical, physical way, which in turn makes it less frightening. Obviously, these kinds of theories are reductive if not absurd.

  Trying to figure out how and why collectors collect—and how that relates, if at all, to their maleness—is a largely thankless pursuit. In most cases, if you ask a 78 collector to explain his motivations, he’ll either laugh it off with a self-deprecating remark or deliver a prepared and earnestly rendered speech about how much and how deeply he loves the music. I would say I bought the latter about 50 percent of the time. It didn’t help that, among major collectors, there was a nearly universal refusal to acknowledge that any music recorded in the last sixty-plus years was artistically valuable. This was so insane and maddening a contention (and such a preposterous way to be a fan) that I was, on occasion, rendered functionally speechless. I resisted the urge to force Clash or Prince CDs into collectors’ closed fists because I knew it would be a dead cause, and because I suspected that their repudiation of contemporary sounds was almost entirely extramusical. The blanket rejection of twelve-bar rock ’n’ roll I sorta understood—one could argue, after all, that most rock music was just a watered-down/gussied-up version of the country blues—but I found the rest of it mystifying, particularly collectors’ near-unanimous dismissal of hip-hop. I couldn’t understand why men so obsessed with weird, sexualized, obtuse music from ninety years ago wouldn’t be at least mildly interested in a contemporary analog. Was it just easier to fetishize something that no longer existed and that they couldn’t be expected to participate in? I wondered, sometimes, if a hundred years from now, a bunch of older white men wouldn’t be gathered in some hotel conference room, beaming each other MP3s of limited-release Lil B mixtapes—or of any kind of modern music that had since passed into a safe stasis, a realm that allowed for distance, voyeurism.

  Obviously, my curiosity about gender only led to other, bigger questions about obsession and love and art and race and money and power and the human brain. Both hoarding and collecting are often linked with obsessive-compulsive disorder and, on occasion, its sister condition, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. The National Institutes of Health defines the difference between the two thusly: “People with OCD have unwanted thoughts, while people with OCPD believe that their thoughts are correct.” OCPD occurs more frequently in men than women (OCD is mostly gender neutral), and at least a few of its eight diagnostic criteria (excess devotion to work, inability to throw things away even when the objects have no value, lack of flexibility, lack of generosity, not wanting to allow other people to do things, not willing to show affection, preoccupation with details, rules, and lists) falls neatly into step with the 78 collector archetype—more so than hoarding itself, which was only recently added to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders V (DSM-V) as its own diagnosable medical condition and is marked by “the accumulation of possessions that congest and clutter active living areas and substantially compromise their intended use.”

  Ultimately, an unshakable sense of what belongs and what doesn’t is what distinguishes collectors from hoarders; hoarders are often incapable of getting rid of any object that they’ve knowingly acquired and stored, whereas 78 collectors, at least, are constantly making complex value judgments. In their book Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee suggest that “distress or impairment” is what “constitutes the boundary between normal collecting and hoarding,” which makes both states impossible to define objectively. Elsewhere, the authors are optimistic about what collecting means for the collector, suggesting that the objects in question are actually just awkward conduits for human connection. “Instead of replacing people with possessions, Irene was using possessions to make connections between people and to the world at large,” they wrote of one subject after she gave them a tour of her stuff. (“The advertisement for the tires led to a story about her car, which led to a story about her daughter wanting to drive, and so on.”) Although I can see how the collector’s drive for historical information could be viewed as a way of making human “connections,” I’m not sure I’ll ever believe this behavior manifests as anything resembling sociable.

  Unlike most OCD patients, OCPD sufferers aren’t necessarily bothered by their preoccupations. In this way it’s similar to Asperger’s syndrome, a high-functioning autism-spectrum disorder that affects more men than women: a ratio as high as ten to one has been cited, and even if that statistic reflects widespread diagnostic problems, it’s still striking enough to suggest Asperger’s skews definitively male. For Retromania author Simon Reynolds and many others, obsessive record collecting appears to mimic symptoms of Asperger’s. As Reynolds explains, the disorder “combines difficulty relating to other people with an obsessive need for things to stay the same and an immersion in arcane knowledge.”

  While I’m hesitant to diagnose anyone with anything—being that my medical training consists mostly of watching reruns of House while running on a treadmill at the New York Sports Club—the symptoms did sound awfully familiar, especially the bit about the stockpiling of obscure information. According to the DSM-IV, Asperger’s is indicated by (among other things) impaired social interaction and repetitive patterns of behavior, including “encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus.” But, as with the diagnostic criteria for nearly every psychiatric disorder, and particularly the many that exist on a spectrum, Asperger’s is a vague and subjective diagnosis. In fact, the syndrome was removed entirely from the DSM-V and bundled with autism instead. Now what was once called Asperger’s is just considered a milder form of Autism Spectrum Disorder. A mark on a line.

  The links to autism and OCPD were compelling, but as far as
medically diagnosable conditions go, collecting still seemed, to me, to most closely resemble plain old addiction. Collectors were always desperate for the next hit, and their reliance on the continued acquisition of 78s was often troubling to them, if not fully debilitating.

  Intriguingly, if that addiction supposition is true, there’s scientific evidence that collectors actually might enjoy music less than noncollectors, which would also explain, to some extent, the head-heart paradox and their focus on information as a substitute for (or unnecessary supplement to) the emotional satisfaction of music. The neurobiologist Dr. David J. Linden, a professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, outlined the phenomenon in his 2011 book The Compass of Pleasure: “Do you, like many, think that drug addicts become drug addicts because they derive greater reward from getting high than others? The biology says no: they actually seem to want it more but like it less,” he writes. “Pleasure is replaced by desire; liking becomes wanting.”

  As anyone who’s ever lusted after something knows, that kind of deep, bone-tingling want can be a potent motivator. Linden recounts an experiment in Montreal in 1953 wherein two neuroscientists accidentally figured out how to stimulate the brain’s complex, interconnected reward center by misplacing electrodes originally intended to control sleeping cycles in lab rats. When given the choice of food, water, or pressing a lever that would deliver a brief shock to the implanted electrodes, thus activating the brain’s so-called pleasure circuit, the rats consistently chose the latter. (The experiment was later re-created, successfully and unethically, in humans.) “Self-stimulating male rats would ignore a female in heat and would repeatedly cross foot-shock-delivering floor grids to reach the lever,” Linden writes. “Female rats would abandon their newborn nursing pups to continually press the lever. Some rats would self-stimulate as often as two thousand times per hour for 24 hours, to the exclusion of all other activities. They had to be unhooked from the apparatus to prevent death by self-starvation. Pressing that lever became their entire world.”