Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records

During the past week I ran an informal poll among collectors of 78 RPM records which thoroughly mystified many of them.  A few did guess the reason for the poll and now I will let everybody in on it.  Hang on though, because this will be a bumpy ride.You are not eligible to be considered a “78 Collector” UNLESS you do NOT own a copy of “Yes! We Have No Bananas”, and would consider it to be a personal affront that someone would even offer to give you a copy for your collection.  Thus sayeth a new book that has been widely publicized and excerpted “Do Not Sell At Any Price: the Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78 rpm Records” by Amanda Petrusich, published by Scribner.I’ve been reading excerpts, articles, and interviews about this book for many months, and I even read some of them on my radio program on YesterdayUsa.com  , and I was looking forward to this book.  But when it arrived several days after publication and I thumbed thru it I realized that the excerpts had been the tone of the whole book.  Her world had been shrunken to just a minute portion of “78 Collectors”.  My reaction was: my goodness, look at all the wonderful people and sounds she has missed.  I felt that I should send her a copy of my daughter’s video documentary “For the Record” which through interviews with about the same quantity of individuals, opens a whole world of different, exciting, important, and fascinating people and sounds that the small clique she had fallen into ignores and disdains. How could two girls from Brooklyn look at this so differently?Amanda Petrusich is not a novice to music. She has been researching and writing about music and culture for many years, but she IS new to 78s – had never even touched one. Early in the book she describes asking the director of the WFMU Record Fair for an introduction to some 78 collectors. He warned her “These 78 guys are on a different LEVEL”.Well, the ones she met might be – and right away I could see the fault. “Ironically, I would learn most 78 collectors ARE minimalists. They're far more persnickety about what records they allow into their homes and on their shelves than I've ever been.”“Approach a 78 collector,” she continues “with some mundane or particularly commonplace 78 – 'Yes! We Have No Bananas,' say – and request to store it amid his collection, and he will glower at you as if you have announced you intend to slowly disfigure his face with a fork.” In this short section of the book where she describes “78 collectors” she uses the descriptor “78 collector” a multitude of times. Over the past few days I have gotten responses from my poll about this remark from over 100 people who consider themselves to be “78 collectors.” Over half of them HAVE a copy – or several – of this song in their 78 collection. Except for a very few of these who said they have enough of them, all would gladly accept another. Of those who, like Ms. Petrusich's acquaintances, do not have a copy of this song in their 78 collection, only five said they would refuse one. Most said they would LOVE to have one, and some wondered what kind of a person would have such a visceral reaction against having a copy of this song.The clique of 78 collectors she fell in with are collectors of pre-war rural blues, records that were so far out of the mainstream when they were issued that they sold in very small quantities to the extent that some performances have not survived in even one copy. They ARE an important part of our country's music history and our culture, and the quest for these records is a worthy one. Record collectors of all genre are genuinely interested and intrigued when a formerly “lost” recording gets discovered, but to be frank many of them shake their heads in wonder when they hear it. “Some records DESERVED to be rare!” is occasionally muttered.Pre-war rural blues can be an acquired taste, but that it has become exclusionary to all other types of music is the biggest surprise that this book might disclose. As you travel through this book traveling through the world of what should really have been called the”The Expensive Pre-War Rural Blues 78 Collector” – not the world of “The 78 Collector” – you find that Ms. Petrusich has found that the life of the pre-war rural blues musician – usually poor and Black -- has injected itself into the veins of the collector – usually White and occasionally rich.There is something about the music that infects some people. She contends that there is something about the music WHEN IT IS HEARD DIRECTLY FROM THE ORIGINAL 78 that has infected at least her. She is an extremely personal writer. Her experience upon listening to an original 78 of a recording that she already has heard on an expertly transferred CD that she already owns is illuminating to the visceral change in her life that hearing that record made.“That afternoon, sitting upright on Heneghan's couch, I was playing it real cool. But fifty seconds into 'Big Leg Blues' – right around the time John Hurt coos 'I asked you, baby, to come and hold my head' in his soft honeyed voice – I felt like every single one of my internal organs had liquefied and was bubbling up into my esophagus. Even now, I am not sure there's a way to accurately recount the experience without sounding dumb and hammy. I wanted to curl up inside that record; I wanted to inhabit it. Then I wanted it to inhabit me. I wanted to crack it into bits and use them as bones. I wanted it to keep playing forever, from somewhere deep inside my skull. That is how it often begins for collectors: with a feeling that music is suddenly opening up to you. That you're getting closer to it -- the blues feeling – than you've ever gotten before.”The Blues Feeling. She had fallen in love with The Blues Feeling. In ORGASMIC LUST with the 78 playing The Blues Feeling.“I'd heard 'Big Leg Blues' before; in 1990, Yazoo Records had issued a CD of the thirteen tracks Hurt recorded for the Okeh Electric Record Company in 1928, and I'd picked up a used copy at a local record store a few years earlier. Not only was I familiar with the song, I'd experienced an expert digital rendering of an actual 78. My reaction to hearing the 78 itself played four feet in front of me felt wild and disproportionate even as it was happening. I like to think I was reacting to the song, that the record was just a conduit, a vehicle of presentation. But I suspect I was also seduced by the ritual – by the sense of being made privy to something exclusive, something rare.”Welcome to the world of Rare Exclusive 78s. Rare Exclusive Pre-War Rural Blues 78s. No others need apply. In one sentence she dismisses EVERYTHING ELSE: “Right now there are 78 collectors working to gather and preserve all other forms of pre-war music – jazz, opera, classical, gospel, country, dance, pop – but there's something seductive about the way blues music played on an acoustic guitar between 1925 and 1939 – the so-called country blues – sounds on shellac.”That's it, there ain't no more. No rock, be-bop, show music, comedy, spoken word, etc. With a short excursion over to indigenous music of 3rd world countries, no other music is appreciated here. I think the appeal for this type of ethnic music is that it also is “primitive”. Even when she travels to Germany to meet Richard Weize of Bear Family Records, it is only rural blues, not the rock he issues, the huge box sets of political protest songs, the Jewish recordings made in Germany during the Hitler years, and other far more important stuff. She gets a tour with the curator Johnathan Haim of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archive of Recorded Sound of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center (which she calls the “Performing Arts Library” to avoid having to mention the Broadway composers) and the only thing mentioned is the quest for Harry Smith's archive. She tells of her visit to the Jazz Record Bash in New Jersey, but she has come on Saturday after the excitement has gone. She finds an ethnic Croatian tamburitza record on Elliott Jackson's table so he is the only person she seems to have spoken to. He once had bought some records from (he thinks) John Fahey, so we have a two-page digression to Fahey. Then after she gets Elliott to admit that some collectors are “fairly strange” (Elliott, how COULD you!), she “spent another hour milling around, until the existential stress of spending a bright summer morning inside a New Jersey Hilton started to trouble my stomach and I retreated to the elevator. I carted my 78 home and spent some time staring at it. I admired the way it looked on my shelf. I played it relentlessly. I thought, a lot, about getting another one.” Elliott sells all his records at $4 or 3 for $10. I can't believe that while relieving her of her 78 virginity that he couldn't get her to buy two more like he does everyone else!!Her explanation about how records are made is sophomoric and full of factual errors as if she took down the old wives tales that one of the collectors told her. It obviously was not fact checked by an expert.Oh, by the way, I got a message from John Tefteller, the premiere rare blues 78 collector and dealer (you, know, the guy who bought a record a few months ago for $37,100). He had been portrayed in the book as a very single-minded blues collector: "I do indeed own a copy of the Great White Way Orchestra doing 'Yes, We Have No Bananas' It was actually the very first 78 I ever heard, when I was about six years old.....on my grandmas 1922 windup Brunswick player---which I also still have!"

The best way to read Amanda Petrusich's wonderful book Do not Sell at Any Price is with a computer or smart device at your side, open to YouTube. Without this, the experience may not be as deep or rich and most likely you might not fully understand the emotional layers involved in the arcane activity of collecting 78 rpms, those dark shellacked discs, preceding LPs and 45s, which changed forever the way that people listened to music. When I was kid, we had a wind-up Victrola and I guess more than one 78, but all I remember was "Italian Spring Song" on the first side and "Tales from Hoffman" on the flip. Even then, the recording was old and the voices scratchy but haunting, weirdly high and flat, like musical ghosts circling the room, urging attention from the living. My sister and I must have played this record a hundred times. So I was already willing to accompany Petrusich while she explored this medium, its history, its eccentric community of collectors, and above all the jazz and blues artists of the late 20s and early 30s who sang and strummed into microphones for exploitive businessmen in crude early recording studios and for earnest folklorists on their own porches.I started listening to the songs she noted in the book when she was interviewing Chris King, a 78 collector and one of her best sources of knowledge on this subject. He played Geeshie Wiley's "Last Kind Words Blues" and Blind Uncle Gaspard's "Sur le Borde de l'Eau", which the author described as "arguably two of the saddest, strangest songs ever recorded." I knew I had to listen to these songs, and although the YouTube experience is not that of a 78, I bought into Petrusich's response (and also bought both on ITunes). It took me four days to finish this rather short book, stopping to hear, among many other songs, Skip James' "Devil Got my Woman", Kid Bailey (or Willie Brown) singing "Mississippi Bottom Blue", Charley Patton's "High Water Everywhere" and "Some of These Days I'll Be Gone," and even the mournful Albanian "Lament from Epirus", the popular African song "Skotiaan", and the strange Asian sound of the cowboy throat singer.The reader follows Petrusich, a reporter and music critic, as her subjective involvement in the subject takes on an equal role with the objective. In fact, the essential pleasure of this book is her ability to balance both sides of her involvement, resulting in a self-deprecating but highly observant and often very funny narrative of the eccentric collector subculture and the important body of work they preserved and saved.In the process of meeting the collectors themselves, Petrusich tries to find some common psychological ground for their obsession with these round heavy shellacked objects, sometimes regardless of the music on them and often at the expense of their own personal relationships and physical well being. She is never judgmental, however, particularly as she increasingly shares their passion.Petrusich's peripatetic search for collectors and collections took her to the South, the Midwest, Germany, a terrifying winter ride through the mountains of Virginia, and, best of all, a course in scuba diving so she could rummage in the silt of the Milwaukee River in hopes of finding 78s dumped after the close of Paramount Records. Originally a chair company, Paramount began making wooden phonograph cabinets and subsequently produced LPs that might attract buyers to the machine. The company executive discovered that "race records" were an untapped market, so he built a ramshackle recording studio and filled it with unknown jazz and blues musicians who didn't charge much.At the end of the book, she recounts the recent resurgence in interest of LPs, including a popular DJ who performed at a New York party using 78s borrowed from the New York Library, while "young people milled about, drinking artisanal cocktails, scratching their beards, readjusting their skirts.' Petrusich finds herself "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."However, I am glad that these 78s and the music they make are back in whatever manifestation they make take. The songs on those scratchy records, played and sung by musicians who died without recognition, inspired the folk and rock musicians of the 60s to use their words and chords as background for the movements that revolutionized American political and cultural thought. As an old woman, a child of the sixties, listening to those blues once again reasserting themselves back into the present, I am hopeful that this deep and essential music will resonate once again with the young, and remind them that the expression of suffering is worth listening to for its fundamental joy, and that it can be transformative.This book is a palimpsest of layers defined by longing: the longing of collectors for objects; the longing to revive the sustaining music of raw artistry, and the terrible longing of the musicians themselves, open to the universe, without filter in their expression of pain and pleasure.I am so grateful for this book. Thanks Amanda.

If, and you already know the answer, you've ever put your CDs or LPs in alphabetical order, or, worse, in alphabetical order and sub-ordered by genre (or grouped by use of Telecasters rather than Stratocasters) then this might just be the book for you. Amanda Petrusich dives (literally) into the murky waters of collectors of 78s, getting to what it is in us that requires us to classify, rank, order and acquire things - especially those things associated with music.Hold up, don't head for the doors; this is an endlessly fascinating, entertaining and really funny book and Petrusich is a mighty fine writer too. So, we get to meet some of the main 78 collectors in the States, we get a great overview of American music from the early part of the 20th century, she flags some great things to hear (that you can do easily), introduces us to Harry Smith (think of a really odd great uncle who shows up at the holidays, drinks too much, falls asleep, scares the kids, entertains the kids, and worries outloud about UFOs, the Man and milk), and recounts her own trail of tears learning to scuba dive so that she can wade into the waters in Wisconsin searching for frisbee'd 78s.It's a riot of a read, but she takes time to let the collectors talk and takes time to tease out why certain music from certain times is deemed "important" - every generation throws a hero up the pop charts, sang Paul Simon, but collectors are really only interested in those that didn't even throw a flicker of a shadow anywhere near popularity. Is rare the same as good?Have a read of this great book, have your headphones ready, be willing to pause to rooting around on YouTube to track down certain songs and performers (believe me, it's really really worth it) and then spend the next long while trying to get to grips with I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground and Last Kind Word Blues.

Petrusich's writing style is discursive and sometimes long-winded, but she persuasively pulls the reader into the world of obsessive collectors whose entire lives are dedicated to the pursuit of impossibly rare 78s. She even learns to scuba-dive, in the hope of striking shellac gold-dust under water, to no avail … The key players she describes and encounters are without exception deeply eccentric - in some cases (John Fahey) sociopathic - and many seem to end up in penury, a price they seem willing to pay in the cause of pursuing the grail. Of these, the wonderful Joe Bussard especially shines - YouTube clips of Bussard reveal him as a loveably irrepressible individual with many a tale to tell. As a lifetime collector of obscure vinyl, I recognize so much of the emotional draw that the author describes - I can relate to the buzz of discovery, and the subsequent sharing of the music with like-minded musos: it's a bit like looking in the mirror, but thankfully I've stopped short of allowing the bug to grow to all-consuming proportions. A lovely book, one not to be rushed, my copy is currently on loan to a convalescing chum whose listening is dominated by the archives of the great Harry Smith. He's engrossed by it.

The story of how obsessive, nerdy, record collectors rescued and preserved America's musical history.... If you have any interest in record collecting or pre-war Blues in particular, then you need to read this.

great book if like me you into record collecting

Got me back to where I was decades ago searching for hidden treasure