Oops. Meant to post this sooner.   ...

A few more memories.

Not all of our performances were old time music, blues or jug band music. At one point Joe, Jerry and I cut a (fairly amateurish) sequel to the famous “Crepitation Contest”, the original made, the story had it, as an underground gem by staffers somewhere in the Canadian broadcast network.

Record collecting. On the same record trip of the Clarence Frost find (see my last post above), we had one very memorable moment. Crossing over from North Carolina into Tennessee on a rugged dirt-and-gravel road, we slowed, then stopped, for Joe to ask an oncoming car’s driver if he knew any place that had old time 78 rpm records.

Well, first, the man introduced himself as a relative of Earl Scruggs; then he kindly told us about an auto supply store (to the best of my memory it was in or around Knoxville, Tennessee that had an awful lot of old records just lying around the place, or words to that effect. We went there and hit what Joe called a “store stock”—thousands of records left unsold when a record store went out of business.

Talk about wallowing in records in mint condition! We spent most of the afternoon there, and Joe came home with a substantial addition to his collection, together with numerous records which he would auction by mail to other record collectors.

Joe was an avid coin collector, mostly I think for to help make money for his record collecting habit, but also to get out and around in the vicinity of Frederick. Armed with metal detector and earphones, he would locate and dig out sometimes rare old coins from parade grounds, the Frederick green, or anywhere else people had frequented in numbers.

Now I’ll stop bending your ear (or eye). Just wanted you to meet a fast friend and point you to his music. I miss him more than I can say.

Bob