Paxton said he collected 78s so that he could be edified by them—could learn songs, discover how to be a better musician. He wasn’t particularly swayed by the notion of collecting as a form of historical preservation. “The hell with my children, I don’t care, I want this for me—this is my stuff,” he said. “To quote the New Testament, as they say in Corinthians: ‘When I was a boy I thought as a child and spoke as a child and learned as a child. When I became a man, I put away childish things.’ I want to become better! I learn from these things. That’s why I collect sheet music—to know that Reverend Gary Davis did not write ‘Candy Man,’ to know that Blind Blake did not write whatever that song is he gets credit for,” he said.
Although he likely wouldn’t frame it as such, Paxton was a virtuosic acoustic guitar player. Before a pal e-mailed me a YouTube clip of one of his performances (subject: “He’s fucking unbelievable”), I’d never heard a contemporary musician play the country blues with quite as much fervor or skill. That, coupled with his affectations, made for an engrossing, almost overwhelming display, and I was reminded again of the half-drunk East Ville Des Folies patrons lurching toward Cumella and his windup phonograph: “Is that real?”
Back at J&R Music World, Cumella and I were discussing the Tex Avery cartoon “SH-H-H-H-H-H . . . ,” which features a scene soundtracked by the Okeh Laughing Record. “What a weird record, I remember thinking,” Cumella said. “Where did that come from?” Cumella, now fifty, started buying records at yard sales and eventually began working as a DJ, first using LPs and 45s. “I had some interest in the pop music of my youth, but then I was thinking about earlier pop,” he said. “Schmaltzy fifties stuff, then the hits of the forties, big-band stuff—Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, those people. Then I wanted to go further back, to the thirties, but there wasn’t much reissued. And where were the twenties compilations?”
He bought a Victrola, and his interest in early music developed alongside an interest in the early players. “I took it home, started playing records with it. I didn’t know anything about it. I had to go to the library to do research.” As I’d witnessed at Webster Hall, people were often flummoxed by his DJ routine. Cumella told me about a recent gig where a guy came up to him and said, “What are these, xylophones?”
“I always have to explain it to people. ‘What are these?’ ‘Is that real?’ ” he laughed. “I’m getting tons of wedding bookings. I did an event at the performing arts library at Lincoln Center, using records from their collection.” Cumella attributed some of the sudden interest in his service to “the Gatsby thing. If anything, it’s a lightning bolt to a culture. Now everyone is conscious of it, romanticizing it,” he said. “Sometimes you realize, now is the time for this project. I don’t know where it’s going, but I can’t believe how far it’s come.”
I didn’t think 78s were about to supplant LPs as the accessory of choice for fashionable youth, but it did seem like the medium was immutable, in its way, and that allowed for some timeless appeal—there would always be something profoundly tactile and enigmatic about a 78 and the sounds it contained. Those qualities had allowed the format to endure because they were everlasting and true: humans want to hold things. We want to learn and be changed.
Nowadays, people like Paxton and Cumella are outliers, maybe, but they aren’t pariahs; ironically, a subculture that developed in opposition to the mainstream is presently being co-opted by it, as subcultures almost always are. Noted oddballs like Tom Waits have long heralded the format (in 2010, Waits, in collaboration with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, released two early Mardi Gras Indian chants on 78, simultaneously selling a limited-edition 78 rpm turntable to accompany the record), but now figures like Jack White (of the White Stripes, the Raconteurs, and his own label, Third Man Records) are aggressively lionizing it.
In late 2013, Third Man, in conjunction with Revenant Records, the reissue label cofounded by John Fahey and now run by his former partner, Dean Blackwood, released the first volume of The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, a collection of six LPs, two perfect-bound books, and eight hundred MP3s preloaded onto a flash drive hidden inside “sculpted metal housing” that resembles an old phonograph reproducer. The whole set is housed in a beautiful oak suitcase stamped with the Wisconsin Chair Company’s logo; it weighs 22 pounds and retails for $400. That fall, Third Man threw a release party for the collection at Freeman’s Restaurant, a so-called “rugged clandestine Colonial American tavern” in a dark alley off the Bowery in New York, and I showed up with Chris King, who’d worked on the transfers and taken a bus up from Virginia. The whole scene was disorienting. Michael Cumella had been hired to DJ and was using 78s borrowed from the New York Public Library’s collection, gathered and delivered by Jonathan Hiam. Greil Marcus wore a black sweater. Young people milled about, drinking artisanal cocktails, scratching their beards, readjusting their skirts.
I felt suddenly and fiercely protective of a subculture I had no real claim to. I wanted 78s to continue offering me—and all the people I’d met—a private antidote to an accelerated, carnivorous world. I didn’t want them to become another part of that world. I wanted them to stay ours.
I was reminded, then, of a scene near the end of Stefan Fatsis’s Word Freak, a book about a cabal of competitive Scrabble players, wherein Fatsis swiftly realizes he’s “gone native.” “There are days when I’m sure they’ve forgotten that I’m a reporter,” Fatsis writes of his subjects. “There are days when I know I have.”
There was a lot I had forgotten.
In 1969, the Swedish folklorist Bengt Olsson and his partner, Peter Mahlin, spent a summer loitering around Beale Street in Memphis, interviewing and recording blues musicians. I’m certain it was hot, thankless work. In 1970, Olsson compiled some of those interviews into a short, now long-out-of-print book called Memphis Blues. In it, Olsson recounts a conversation with the guitarist Furry Lewis, who was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1893 and came up playing blues with the Memphis legend W. C. Handy. Olsson never did much editorializing on the page—he just presented the material he’d collected—but there’s a quote toward the end of the Lewis chapter that’s become lodged permanently in my cortex, repeating endlessly like a koan: “The people I used to play around with, they all done died out,” Lewis tells Olsson. “And sometimes I get scared myself, ’cause it look like to me it gonna be mine next. You know, it’s a funny thing, but you can do a thing for a-many years, and all of them die out and you still here,” he continued. “You know, that’s more than a notion if you come up and just think about it.”
I had thought about it. And I knew they were all still here, together, etched into shellac, tucked into sleeves.
I could hear them.
The collector John Heneghan with his 78s in 2009. Photo by Theo Morrison.
An early advertisement for Edison’s phonograph Tone Tests, printed circa 1906.
78 Quarterly, volume 11, published in 2000 and featuring a story on the elusive Black Patti label. Courtesy of Pete Whelan.
The collector Chris King in 2012. Photo by Dave Anderson, dbanderson.com.
Portrait of Les and Anne Andrews King, Chris King’s parents, among Les King’s phonograph collection in Bath County, Virginia, in 1957. Courtesy of Chris King.
Blind Uncle Gaspard’s “Sur le Borde de l’Eau,” Vocalion Records, 1929. From the collection of Chris King.
Geeshie Wiley’s “Last Kind Words Blues,” Paramount Records, 1930. From the collection of Chris King.
The Paramount talent scout H. C. Speir in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1966. Photo by Marina Bokelman, courtesy of David Evans.
A promotional portrait and the only extant photo of the blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, taken circa 1926.
A promotional portrait and the only extant photo of the blues singer Charley Patton, taken circa 1929. Photo copyright © 2003 by John Tefteller and Blues Images, www.bluesimages.com. Used with full permission.
To promote the release of Charley Patton’s secon
d release, “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues,” Paramount Records devised a contest wherein readers of the Chicago Defender were invited to guess the identity of the artist, named in advertisements like this one as “The Masked Marvel.”
The former Paramount Records pressing plant in Grafton, Wisconsin, likely taken in the mid-1930s. From the collection of Edward Rappold, courtesy of Angela Mack Reilly and Alex van der Tuuk.
Postcard view of the Wisconsin Chair Company factory from the Milwaukee River. Courtesy of Angela Mack Reilly and Alex van der Tuuk.
The collector Harry Smith, compiler of The Anthology of American Folk Music, “transforming milk into milk” in New York City in 1985. Photo by Allen Ginsberg, courtesy of the Allen Ginsberg Trust.
Big Joe Clauberg, behind the counter at the Jazz Record Mart in New York City, circa 1945. Photo by Jack Whistance, courtesy of Bruce Whistance.
An assortment of letters from the collector James McKune to the collector Jack Whistance in the mid-1940s. Courtesy of Bruce Whistance.
A rough draft of one of Don Wahle’s “Records Wanted” advertisements, possibly for publication in Disc Collector magazine, composed circa 1960. Courtesy of Nathan Salsburg.
The collector Jonathan Ward of Excavated Shellac in 2011. Photo by Chris Casilli, courtesy of Jonathan Ward.
The collectors Chris King and Joe Bussard in Bussard’s basement in Frederick, Maryland. Photo by Amanda Petrusich.
Long Cleve Reed and Little Harvey Hull, the Down Home Boys, “Original Stack O’Lee Blues,” Black Patti, 1927. From the collection of Joe Bussard.
11 1/2“etched Algerian Pathé disc, circa 1907. From the collection of Jonathan Ward.
An advertisement for the Red Fox Chasers new release on Gennett Electrobeam Records, specially commissioned by the banjoist Paul Miles after the group’s April 1928 recording session (when they recorded “The Arkansaw Traveler,” pictured). This piece was likely printed and displayed in a furniture shop window. From the collection of Chris King.
An advertisement for the Vocalion Records catalog, printed in April 1930 and sent to record wholesalers and furniture stores. From the collection of Chris King.
An image of a man amid 78s, likely part of a set included with a stereoscopic viewer purchased from Sears, Roebuck & Co., which also operated a handful of record labels (like Silvertone, Supertone, Superior, Champion, and Challenge). From the collection of Chris King.
A 1981 advertisement for a monthly 78 swap meet in El Cerrito, California.
Acknowledgments
Ron Brown, Sarah Bryan, Joe Bussard, Michael Cumella, Sherwin Dunner, John Heneghan, Peter Honig, Robert Millis, Ian Nagoski, Richard Nevins, Jerron Paxton, John Tefteller, Jonathan Ward, Richard Weize, Pete Whelan, and Marshall Wyatt let me into their lives and collections, and this book would not have been possible without them. I owe the largest debt of gratitude to Chris King, a source who became a friend, and who was so generous with his time, knowledge, and records that I could spend the next half century thanking him and still not feel like I’ve said it enough.
Many have written very smart and thoughtful things about 78 rpm records and American vernacular music, and I’m particularly grateful for the work of Stephen Calt, Samuel Charters, Eddie Dean, Sarah Filzen, Kurt Gegenhuber, Peter Guralnick, Marybeth Hamilton, Alan Lomax, Greg Milner, Robert Palmer, Simon Reynolds, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Alex van der Tuuk, Elijah Wald, and Gayle Dean Wardlow.
Additional thanks to the following folks and institutions: the Anthology Film Archives, Susan Archie, Cary Baker, Andy Beta, David Bevan, Clarke Boehling, Delaney Britt Brewer, the Brooklyn Writers Space, Eden Brower, Donna Burrows-Hite, Daphne Carr, Guy Cimbalo, Aaron Cohen, John Cohen, Colonial Pines Resort, Columbia University, Kate DellaFera, Andy Downing, Charmagne Dutton, Chris Estey, David Evans, Will Georgantas, John Glynn, Brendan Greaves, Stuart Gunter, Jason Heuer, Jonathan Hiam, Karen Hibbert, Grant Hunnicutt, Charles Hutchinson, Elliot Jackson, the Jalopy Theatre and School of Music, John Kim, Fiana Kwasnik, Lance and April Ledbetter, David Linden, Angela Mack Reilly, Rachael Maddux, Luke McCormick, Mike McGonigal, Tom Moran, the New York Public Library, Patty O’Toole, Jonathan Pace, Jeff Place, Jill Plevan, Jesse Poe, Sam Polcer, Kevin Rooney, Josh Rosenthal, Jeff Roth, Steve Sand, Doree Shafrir, Jennifer Shotz, Rani Singh, Kae and Joe Slocum, Alexia Smith, Aaron Smithers, the Southern Folklife Collection, Dan and Mary Lou Stetka, Elissa Stolman, Neil Sweeney, Mike Taylor, Ashford Tucker, Steve Weiss, Bruce and Gail Whistance, Gregory Winter, and Rebecca Winters.
Thanks to all the editors who have strengthened and challenged my writing over the years, including David DeWitt, Stephanie Goodman, Sia Michael, and Mary Jo Murphy at the New York Times, Roger Hodge at the Oxford American, Steve Kandell at BuzzFeed, Charles Aaron and Caryn Ganz at Spin, and Ryan Dombal, Mark Richardson, and Brandon Stousy at Pitchfork. Thanks, also, to Gregory Erickson, June Foley, and everyone at New York University for their empathy and support, and to my students, who require me to think harder and better about music and writing. Extra appreciation to Ryan Leas, who fielded many panicked missives, and August Thompson, who poured me a whiskey the day I finished writing and then massacred me at air hockey.
Some sections of this book originally appeared in the Oxford American and the UK music journal Loops. I am deeply grateful to those editors and publishers.
Mark Sussman helped with transcriptions and on more than one occasion, offered sage editorial advice. Richard Lucyshyn gave crucial early edits and, a week before my deadline, successfully convinced me to stop working and collaborate on a collection of prose poems “about wieners.” For those reasons, among others, he remains one of my most cherished allies. Michael Washburn was the first person to read this manuscript in full; besides being a tremendous writer and reader, he is also a world-class drinking partner and I owe him endless rounds of Eagle Rare. John O’Connor entertained many early chapters, oversaw many revisions, and split many pepperoni pizzas with me at many crucial junctures. Nathan Salsburg was a constant and essential source of support, both in this work and far beyond it, and I am so endlessly grateful for his friendship and guidance.
Copious thanks to my agent, Chris Parris-Lamb, who shepherded this idea into being, and to everyone at the Gernert Company for their help and encouragement.
One of the best things about this project was getting to collaborate with the inimitable Brant Rumble and all the exceptionally kind and erudite folks at Scribner. Thank you.
My parents, John and Linda Petrusich, and my sister, Alexandria, are the best people in the world, and I can’t thank them enough for everything they’ve done for me.
And thank you, finally, to Bret Stetka, who I love very much.
© BRET STETKA
AMANDA PETRUSICH is the author of It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music and Pink Moon, an installment in Continuum’s acclaimed 331/3 series. She is a contributing writer for Pitchfork and a contributing editor at the Oxford American, and her music and culture writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Spin, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University and teaches music criticism at NYU’s Gallatin School. She lives in Brooklyn.
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Selected Discography
On 78 rpm
Kid Bailey, “Mississipp
i Bottom Blues” / “Rowdy Blues,” Brunswick 7114, 1929.
Blind Blake, “Miss Emma Liza” / “Dissatisfied Blues,” Paramount 13115, 1932.
Willie Brown, “M&O Blues” / “Future Blues,” Paramount 13090, 1930.
Bulawayo Sweet Rhythms Band, “Skokiaan” / “In the Mood,” London 1491, 1954.
Cincinnati Jug Band, “Newport Blues” / “George St. Stomp,” Paramount 12743, 1929.
Blind Uncle Gaspard, “Sur le Borde de l’Eau” / “Natchitocheo,” Vocalion 5333, 1929.
Red Gay and Jack Wellman, “Flat Wheel Train Blues Part 1” / “Flat Wheel Train Blues Part 2,” Brunswick 523, 1930.
King Solomon Hill, “My Buddy Blind Papa Lemon” / “Times Has Done Got Hard,” Paramount 13125, 1932.
Mississippi John Hurt, “Big Leg Blues,” Okeh (unissued, matrix 401474-A), 1928.
Mississippi John Hurt, “Blue Harvest Blues” / “Spike Driver Blues,” Okeh 8692, 1928.
Mississippi John Hurt, “Stack O’Lee Blues” / “Candy Man Blues,” Okeh 8654, 1928.
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