I saaw an article some time ago about this fellow, but I don't remember "O Brother" being mentioned in it, although it may have been. It reminds me of a story told about another fanatic collector of old records and instruments. He lived at his parents' home in a room so cluttered with his collectanea that there was barely room to walk. One day his mother put her foot down. "You MUST clear some space in this room!" A few days later, she opened the door and looked in to see what he had accomplished. "Why, honey," she said, your room looks great! Wait a minute. WHERE'S THE BED??!!" He had achieved the appearance of additional space by simply throwing the bed out of the window. The collections were all intact. First things first.

The can of worms that would be opened by any commercial use of the material Kagarise has privately recorded would give even a large outfit like Columbia, or even Rounder, some reason to pause. Permissions, with proper royalties, might be worked out with a few of the artists involved, but I'd sure hate to be assigned the job of obtaining them. Even if they are finally donated to the archives at the Library of Congress or the Country Music Foundation, the chance of our seeing them commercially released would seem to me to be almost nil. That, my friends, is what happens when art is turned into a commodity, which is precisely what has happened over the centuries.

Sandy