Bill D., I copied the WP article at the time:

Record-Setting Cache

By Peter Carlson Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday , March 9, 2000 ; A01 TOWSON, Md.

–– Leon Kagarise has so much love that his little house can't hold it all.

Kagarise loves music, American music--blues, jazz, gospel and especially old-time country music. His house is filled with it. Well, not completely filled. There's still a little bit of space left to live in.

He's got so many records stacked in the kitchen that he can't get to the stove, but he can use the microwave. He can squeeze his portly 62-year-old body down the narrow canyon that winds through the mountains of records in his living room, and he can plop down into his comfy armchair, the only chair that can fit in the room. Sitting there, he's got about as much space as a passenger in a Volkswagen. But that's all the room he needs. Without moving out of his chair, he can pick up one of the hundreds of tapes he recorded at country music shows 40 years ago--performances by Johnny Cash, George Jones, Tammy Wynette and Patsy Cline, among many others--and load it onto a big old reel-to-reel machine. Then, with the flick of a couple switches, he can record that music onto a CD and make, as he puts it, "a perfect clone."

Which is good, because a lot of people want to hear Kagarise's music. The Country Music Hall of Fame is interested. So is the Library of Congress, along with a slew of historians and disc jockeys and collectors. A record company is eager to put the stuff out. And all these folks are salivating over the hundreds of candid color photographs of country stars that Kagarise shot backstage in the days when you could just sidle up to the stars between shows and shoot the breeze.
This Kagarise collection could be the country equivalent of legendary jazz performances recorded live by buffs and released decades later--Dean Benedetti's nightclub recordings of Charlie Parker's saxophone solos or audio engineer Jerry Newman's recordings of bebop being born at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem in the early '40s, recordings that filled in gaps in jazz history.
Kagarise's stuff could do the same for country music. And he keeps finding more. A couple of weeks ago he discovered another 60 reels of tape that he'd socked away in his ex-wife's basement.

"It's sort of an endless supply," he says. Suddenly the world is interested in this stuff and Kagarise is thrilled. When a man fills his three-bedroom ranch house in suburban Baltimore with more than 100,000 records and God only knows how many tapes, people tend to rib him about being a pack rat and a junk collector. "As it turns out," he says, sitting in his armchair, hidden in a Himalaya of records, "some of the junk turned out to be gold."

The Hillbilly Circuit
Kagarise is a shy man with short gray hair and a tiny screwdriver that peeks out of the pocket of his plaid sports shirt.

The screwdriver is for fiddling with electronic gizmos. Kagarise is an audiovisual wizard, now retired after decades of working with tape recorders and video cameras. That's why his old concert tapes sound as though they were recorded yesterday in some fancy studio.
When he was a kid, his family moved from the mountains of Pennsylvania to Baltimore, where his father took a job at Bendix Radio. Dad was a techie, too, and he taught Leon how to make a crystal radio set. In high school in the late '50s, Leon built a hi-fi record player. He has a picture of himself standing next to it, smiling proudly, a skinny AV nerd in a polka-dot shirt and a string tie. After graduation he got a job repairing recording equipment and taping church choirs and concerts. He loved it. He also loved country music--the old-fashioned kind with fiddles and mandolins and singing so high-pitched it makes your teeth hurt.

In those days--the '50s and early '60s--the Baltimore-Washington area was a hotbed of country music, home to thousands of folks who'd migrated from Appalachia to work in factories and government offices. On weekends they flocked to country music parks--the New River Ranch in Rising Sun, Md., and Sunset Park in southern Pennsylvania, among others. There, sitting on crude plank benches under the trees, they listened to what was then called hillbilly music.

Kagarise went, too, lugging his suitcase-size tape recorder. This was before the advent of bootleg records, so nobody cared when he set up his equipment and recorded the shows. The atmosphere was loose--the stars wandered among the picnickers between shows--but the music was intense.

"That brand of music had a real rough edge to it," recalls Ric Nelson, a backup musician who played dobro with Patsy Cline in those days. "You came out blasting." When the Nashville stars came to these country parks, they dropped the fancy studio tricks and sang their hits straight up. Kagarise caught them all on tape--Loretta Lynn, Flatt and Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers, Ernest Tubb and countless others.

He recorded hundreds of hours of live performances and then he stashed the tapes away, buried among the thousands of records he was collecting. And there they sat, unheard, for the next 35 years, until Joe Lee came along.

Bluegrass From the Trees
Lee squeezed through the canyon in Kagarise's living room and then traversed the main hallway, which is so crammed with records that you've got to lean your back against the one wall that's visible and move sideways, like a crab.
This was two years ago, when Kagarise was looking to sell some of his 145,000 records. Lee's a used-record dealer who runs a Rockville store called Joe's Record Paradise. Poring through piles of old vinyl, Lee spotted a tape labeled "Johnny Cash, Maryland 1962." When he asked what it was, Kagarise put it on the reel-to-reel. Out of the speakers came the sound of a crowd cheering and then the strum of a guitar and the unmistakable Cash voice singing, "Country boy, ain't got no shoes . . . ." The music was hard-driving rockabilly. The sound quality was superb.
"It took my breath away," he recalls. "Nobody has a recording of Cash in that period of that quality." "He went bananas," Kagarise says. "He said, 'Got any more?' and I said, 'Yeah, I got a few more.' And the rest is history. Old Joe Lee hasn't been the same since. I ruined him."

Kagarise bursts out laughing, but he's not kidding. It's true: Lee really hasn't been the same since. Lee was 50 then, an aging hipster who loved rock and blues and jazz. When his son was born a couple decades earlier, Lee wanted to name him Thelonious Monk Lee, after the great bebop pianist. But his wife refused so they named the kid Robert Johnson Lee, after the Delta bluesman.

Lee had never paid much attention to country music, until he listened to Kagarise's tapes. The music was soulful and the musicians were amazing. He gets all worked up when he starts talking about the Stoneman Family, an old-time bluegrass band that Kagarise recorded repeatedly. "I'm listening to this stuff for the first time and I'm hearing Donna Stoneman and it sounds like [jazz pianist] Art Tatum on harpsichord!" he gushes. "What she's doing on mandolin is insane!"

For about a year, Lee pretty much stopped going to work. He let his employees run the store and he sat on his front porch in Mount Airy with Kagarise, playing tape after tape.

"It was great," Kagarise says. "The bluegrass was emanating from the trees."

And Kagarise kept bringing more tapes. Not only did he have hundreds of hours of concert recordings but he also had hundreds of hours that he taped from long-gone country music TV shows--"The Jimmy Dean Show," "The Porter Wagoner Show," the "Don Owens Jamboree"--all sounding just about perfect.

One day he told Lee that somewhere he had some photographs he'd shot of the stars performing at the country music parks, or relaxing under the trees. He spent a few days digging around, and then called Lee to say he'd found about 500 color slides.

"They were six feet from my bed in a big slide box," he says. "I stayed up till 2 or 3 in the morning looking at them with a flashlight, 'cause I was so ecstatic." So was Lee. He's as outgoing as Kagarise is shy, and he started promoting the collection with the zeal of a boardwalk pitchman. He recorded three CDs--a sort of Kagarise Greatest Hits sampler--and sent them to country music experts, along with a selection of the photographs. "This is a great treasure," says Eddie Stubbs, staff announcer at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville and a country deejay on Washington's WAMU. "There are very few concert recordings of country music from that era. . . . These live performances have a lot more spirit to them than studio recordings."

"As interesting as the music is, the photos are better," says Charles Wolfe, author of many books of country music history.
Word of the Kagarise collection spread quickly. Paul Kingsbury, deputy director of the Country Music Hall of Fame, called to say he was interested in the photos. Judith McCulloh, a member of the board of trustees of the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center, wrote begging for the original tapes. And Rob Miller, owner of Bloodshot Records, a Chicago-based country music label, wants to start releasing the music as soon as he can work through all the copyright hassles.

Kagarise stands to make some money out of all this but he's not likely to get rich. Vintage country music just isn't that commercial. He doesn't care.
"I wake up in the morning," he says, "and I think, 'Is this really happening?' "

Irresistible Yard Sales
Leon Kagarise takes two steps into the back bedroom of his house. He stops. He has to. He can't go any farther. The room is completely filled with records and stereo equipment.

He calls this "the record room," but every room in the house is packed with records, even the bathroom. This used to be his daughter's bedroom. "I hope she doesn't move back in," he says, grinning. "She'll have to sleep standing up."

He's been collecting records since his high school days--mostly country, but also blues, rock and vintage jazz. By the '80s, he had accumulated tens of thousands. In those days, his wife, who did not share his fondness for vinyl, made sure he confined his collection to the basement. But in the early '90s they divorced, their two grown children moved away, and Kagarise, alone and unchecked, began filling the whole house with the music he loves. "It wasn't till the dear wife left and the kids moved out that it really became an obsession," he says.

At its peak, his collection contained 145,000 records, but that was two years ago. He sold his 45s, which filled a truck, and his 30,000 78s. Somehow the house is still packed, though, perhaps because he just can't resist hitting the yard sales, buying more records.

"I'm ashamed of it," he says. "I'm trying to reverse it, but it's hard to do."

Now, he squeezes sideways down the hallway, which is lined floor to ceiling with more records, takes the canyon path into his living room and eases himself into his armchair. He picks up a tape. He's been recording them on CDs, laboriously noting all the artists and the song titles. There's a blast of country fiddling and then Bobby Lord sings, "I keep my eye wide open and my gas buggy ready to go."

"Some days I spend six or eight hours doing this," Kagarise says. "I'll stay up till midnight just cutting CDs."

He's gazing toward a mountain of records, which is topped with a framed picture of Jesus and a poster advertising a "Strawberry and Ice Cream Festival" on June 16, 1956. The poster has sentimental value for Kagarise. The festival was sponsored by his church and the music was provided by "Happy Johnny and Family."

"I ran the sound system," he says proudly. He starts talking about his religion. "I'm a rather avid Christian," he says. "I belong to the Church of the Brethren. One of the things the Brethren believe in is living the simple life. Anything that takes time away from Jesus is not good."

He gazes at the thousands of records piled around him, and smiles mischievously.

"I'm a sinner," he confesses.

Cheers, Stewie.