Selby.

Dave Bulmer wasn't sold a pig in a poke. My memories, and I'm willing to stand corrected if I'm wrong, are that Leader was put out of business by the oil crisis of 1973. IE., he couldn't get any records pressed because you need oil to make vinyl.

At that time there was a considerable market for folk records,and one might have presumed that once the oil crisis had subsided, things would have returned to normal.

Thus, I assume, Bulmer bought the Leader and Trailer catalogues, intending to re-market at least part of Leader's output once it became profitable to do so. Alas, it never happened.

I went to live in Northern Ireland shortly after the said crisi and returned to find that the bottom had dropped out of folk records. Quite simply nobody was buying anything. Hence, the recordings have lain undisturbed and unissued ever since.

Oggie.

I do not know what sort of state the original masters are in. However, I find it hard to believe that DB, having shelled all that money out, wouldn't have taken good care of them. From his point of view, the market for folk records might have been dead, but who could tell what the future would hold.

In any event, as I've said before, the quality of the master tapes isn't that much of a problem. First of all Musical Traditions has already re-issued one of those recordings - the Cecilia Costello. Personally, I can't hear much wrong with the sound quality. So if that one could be salvaged, no doubt others can.

Secondly, I don't know whether all contributors to this thread are aware of it, but small record companies have been re-issuing pre-war 78s of blues, jazz, country, Cajun and various forms of ethnic music for decades now.

The process usually involves locating copies of the original 78s, transferring them to computer and then re-mastering the results. Not all said companies have been very scrupulous about the re-mastering stage, particularly in the early days. But where labels have done a proper job of restoring the sound, and I'm thinking particularly of Revenant, Frog, Old Hat and Dust-to-Digital, the results can be nothing short of remarkable.

So if they can do that from bunches of scratched and battered 78s, I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult to remove a few scuffs and clicks from a set of reasonably well preserved Leaders.

In fact, having said all that, I was some years ago involved in a project to reissue some 50 year old LPs of Ewan MacColl singing Child ballads. That was for Topic, and the re-issued material was taken from the original LPs. I can tell you, the difference between the sound quality of the LPs and that of the finished CDs was like the difference between night and day.

If you don't beieve me, go and buy a set.