[Dixielandjazz] Collecting 78 rpm records.

[Stephen G Barbone]

CAVEAT: Long article about rare blues record collecting. Not  
Dixieland. However, very interesti8ng tyo those who collect old 78s,  
and/or are looking for a place to invest money these days. (some 78s  
command $20,000 prices) Now if I could only find and possess that  
Buddy Bolden cylinder, I'd be in clover. <grin>

Delete now if uninterested.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband


NY TIMES - July 12, 2009 - by Amanda Petrusich
They’ve Got Those Old, Hard-to-Find Blues

JOHN HENEGHAN tugged a large shellac disc from its brown paper sleeve,  
placed it on a turntable and gently nudged a needle into place. Behind  
him, in the corner of his East Village apartment, sat 16 wooden  
crates, each filled with meticulously cataloged 78-r.p.m. records. The  
coarse, crackling voice of the blues singer Charley Patton, performing  
“High Water Everywhere Part 1,” his startling account of the 1927  
Mississippi River flood, rose from the speakers, raw and unruly. The  
record is worth about $8,000.

Mr. Heneghan, 41, is part of a small but fervent community of record  
collectors who for decades have hunted, compulsively and  
competitively, for 78s: the extraordinarily fragile 10-inch discs,  
introduced near the turn of the 20th century and made predominantly of  
shellac, that contain one two- to three-minute performance per side.  
At a time when music fans expect songs to be delivered instantaneously  
(and often at zero cost) online, scouring the globe for a rare record  
— and paying thousands of dollars for it — might seem ludicrous. (A  
rarer Patton record could command $15,000 to $20,000.)

But according to some, the rare-record business is booming, despite  
the recession and the devaluation of music as a physical product.  
“Prices have been rising at a phenomenal rate, as people take money  
out of the stock market and out of different real estate investments  
and look for a place to put it,” said John Tefteller, a collector who  
makes his living dealing in rare records. He noted a particular spike  
last fall, when the economy first faltered.

Others, like Mark Berresford, who edits VJM’s Jazz & Blues Mart, the  
oldest blues and jazz magazine still in print, are more cautious about  
looking to rare records for financial stability. “If one is  
considering collecting rare 78s solely as an investment, one should  
seek professional advice as to what should be purchased and from  
whom,” Mr. Berresford wrote in an e-mail message.

By any standard 78s are unwieldy, impractical and unstable. By the  
mid-1950s they had been mostly replaced by 33 1/3 r.p.m. long-playing  
albums and 45 r.p.m. singles. Collectors of 78s are enticed in part by  
the thrill of the quest, which they consider unmatched by a mouse click.

“I’m not proud of the fact that I have to chase these records down  
like a maniac,” said Mr. Heneghan, who supports himself by working as  
a video technician. (He also performs in an old-time duo, Eden and  
John’s East River String Band.) Before he became friendly with other  
collectors, he said, he felt “sleazy and weird.”

“I knew I was doing it because I liked it, but it’s strange when you  
can’t relate to one single other person,” he said. “You obviously  
start to question — like, is there something wrong with me?”

Although most collectors subspecialize by genre, whether jazz or  
classical or country, it’s early American rural blues — loose acoustic  
laments, recorded before 1935 and performed by artists who were born  
in or near the Mississippi Delta — that inspires the highest prices  
and the most fevered pursuits. “The early blues material from the ’20s  
and ’30s is the hottest material of all,” Mr. Tefteller said in a  
phone interview. He said that on average a rare jazz 78 might sell for  
$1,500 to $5,000, whereas sales for a comparable blues record would  
start at $5,000.

Blues music is in part mythological; its legend involves sweltering  
juke joints, homemade whiskey and Faustian bargains at rural  
crossroads. A furniture company in a largely white Midwestern suburb  
is rarely evoked in these reveries, but in the late 1920s and early  
1930s Paramount Records — an arm of the Wisconsin Chair Company, a  
manufacturer of wooden phonograph cabinets in Port Washington, Wis. —  
became an unlikely home for blues legends like Patton, Blind Blake,  
Blind Lemon Jefferson, Son House and Skip James. Paramount’s blues  
releases — especially its “race” records with label numbers in the  
12000s and 13000s — are among the most coveted records in the world.

“There are some people who would kill their own mother for the only  
copy of a Son House record,” Mr. Heneghan said. “And they sure as hell  
would kill your mother, and you.”

Mr. Tefteller, 50, is one of the world’s most prolific collectors of  
Paramount blues. Because these 78s are so scarce — of the thousands  
presumably pressed, many were lost, broken or melted down, and of the  
1,356 titles said to have been issued in the 12000-13000 series,  
roughly one-third or more are of other genres — his collection (500 to  
600, he said) is staggering in its comprehension. As Mr. Heneghan said  
in an e-mail message, Mr. Tefteller pursues complete runs of every  
Paramount blues artist he considers important. “This makes him  
completely insane, which alone would make me like him even if he  
weren’t such a nice guy,” Mr. Heneghan said.

Mr. Tefteller lives in rural Oregon but spends much of the year  
traversing the country for fresh stock, placing “Records Wanted”  
advertisements in antiques catalogs and The Farmer’s Almanac. (His  
Paramount 78s are not for resale.) He said he receives about a hundred  
calls a day, most yielding inconsequential results. “Records have a  
way of hiding,” he said.

These particular records, he explained, are a finite commodity. “I  
would doubt that there are a hundred total Charley Patton records left  
in the world,” he said. Other artists’ discographies are even more  
limited: only eight copies of various 78s by Son House (who recorded  
eight sides, or four records, for Paramount) and 15 copies of discs by  
Skip James (who recorded 18 sides) appear to remain.

Last month a batch of hand-labeled Paramount test pressings  
unexpectedly appeared on eBay. The seller, Patrick Cather, discovered  
the records (alternate takes by Blind Blake, Ma Rainey, Papa Charlie  
Jackson and others) at an antiques store in Birmingham, Ala. Mr.  
Tefteller, who uses software to place bids in the last few seconds of  
an auction, successfully purchased everything he was interested in.

In 2002 Mr. Tefteller mailed fliers to every resident within 100 miles  
of Paramount’s former studio site in Grafton, Wis. “I flooded the  
area, and then I sat at the Best Western in Port Washington and  
fielded phone calls at the hotel for days,” he said.

Contemporary Grafton is not a hotbed of blues appreciation. “A lot of  
the elderly people here don’t understand what the big deal is,” said  
Angela Mack, the chairwoman of the Paramount Plaza Walk of Fame there.

But his persistence paid off. One call produced the only known copy of  
King Solomon Hill’s blistering 1932 blues sides “My Buddy Blind Papa  
Lemon”/“Times Has Done Got Hard.” “I said, ‘O.K., put it back in the  
sleeve and put it somewhere where you’re not going to drop anything on  
it, and please don’t even touch it until I get there,’ ” he recalled.  
“She got a nice pile of hundred-dollar bills from me for that one.”

In 2006 Mr. Tefteller also purchased Son House’s “Clarksdale  
Moan”/“Mississippi County Farm Blues,” another long-missing Paramount  
release. “I know the name of the person I bought it from, but he’s  
very paranoid and doesn’t want anybody to talk to him,” he said. “It  
was found somewhere in the South is all he would tell me, and I think  
he got it from the person who actually found it, but I don’t know. The  
more I pressed him, the more it was clear if I didn’t shut up, I  
wasn’t getting the record. I shut up and paid him.”

Mr. Tefteller declined to specify the purchase price. “Let’s just say  
tens of thousands,” he said.

The acquisition spurred a fuss. Richard Nevins, a prominent collector  
and the president of Shanachie Entertainment, which released the  
recovered Son House sides on its Yazoo label in 2006 (on “The Stuff  
That Dreams Are Made Of,” a two-CD set of prewar rarities), said in an  
e-mail interview that the discovery was “a big, big, big, big deal.”

In many ways 78 collecting is a meritocracy: the most compelling songs  
earn the strongest responses. The Son House discovery was monumental,  
Mr. Nevins said, because “Clarksdale Moan” — a rich, rollicking ode to  
the artist’s hometown — is considered a great record.

The stakes are also high from a preservationist standpoint. If  
collectors weren’t tracking these records, the songs might be lost  
entirely, and speculation surrounding Paramount’s missing metal  
masters (the original transcriptions of a performance) has only  
amplified the significance of the remaining 78s. According to Alex van  
der Tuuk’s book “Paramount’s Rise and Fall” (Mainspring Press, 2003),  
in 1942 the bulk of the masters — by then corroded — were carted off  
by rail for reuse in World War II.

“The building where the metal masters had been stored didn’t have any  
insulation, and pigeons came into that building, and you can imagine  
what a bird does to a metal master,” Mr. van der Tuuk said by phone  
from his home in the Netherlands. Still, rumors — that they were  
hurled into the Milwaukee River by disgruntled former employees, or  
used to patch rat holes in chicken coops — persist. In 2006 the PBS  
program “The History Detectives” arranged for a team of divers to  
scour the bottom of the Milwaukee River. They came up empty-handed.

There are still records missing. Willie Brown, an enigma even by blues  
standards, cut six sides for Paramount in 1930, and while his “M&O  
Blues”/“Future Blues” has been recovered (Mr. Tefteller owns one of  
three known copies), the others have yet to emerge.

Mr. Heneghan remains optimistic. “Maybe I’m more likely to believe in  
ghosts and aliens and the missing Willie Brown,” he said with a shrug.  
Mr. Tefteller has a standing offer of $25,000 for either of the other  
two records.

While most 78 collectors are devoted, educated fans of the music they  
gather, they’re also desperate for the experience of the thing itself  
— for the colored label and inky, gleaming surface, the sizzle and  
spit of a needle slipping into groove. Even when a rare record is  
unearthed and made available digitally — as with Mr. Tefteller’s Son  
House discovery — its value does not decrease. “You would think that  
it would,” Mr. Heneghan said sheepishly. “Like, ‘Well, now I don’t  
need it.’ But obviously, although we all like to think differently,  
collecting is about possessing an object.”

In the liner notes to “The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of,” Mr. Nevins  
recounts approaching a rural cabin in North Carolina said to be the  
location of a handful of old country 78s. After being temporarily  
incapacitated by an electric fence, he stumbled to his feet, shook off  
a layer of mud and manure, and trudged on. Later that day he trotted  
off with a copy of “Daniel in the Lion’s Den” by the North Carolina  
Cooper Boys.

“I guess you could say that was a record to die for,” Mr. Nevins  
writes. “In this case almost literally.”