Obit: Joe Bussard (1936-2022)

Subject: Obit: Joe Bussard (1936-2022)
From: GUEST,Bob Coltman
Date: 06 Oct 22 - 10:40 AM

I am sad to say one of the titans of old time, blues and jazz record collecting has let us. Joe Bussard of Frederick, Maryland was unique. Beginning in the 1940s with a liking for Hank Williams, Joe went on to amass over his long life one of the finest collections of 78 rpm records in the Western Hemisphere. He was also a great friend to me and hundreds of others who loved the music. He was endlessly generous with his time and happy to sit spinning records all day and half the night.
The Washington Post did a nice obit with pictures:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/09/30/joe-bussard-record-collector-dead/

The New York Times did a good one too. They give some idea of this man’s eminence and how unforgettable he was.
I first met Joe in, I think, February 1962, when Bud Taylor of Annapolis, Maryland, met me in Frederick so he could drive me to Joe’s house—he was then living with his parents on the town green. He had already begun his one-man record label, Fonotone (the last company specializing in issuing 78 rpm recordings) and Bud and I recorded a few 5-string banjo duets.
I was lucky enough to record a great many more Fonotone sides, some solos but mostly quartets of what became our band: Joe, guitar and jug, the late Jerry Marcum, guitar, the late Oscar Myers, mouth harp, and me on banjo, guitar, mandolin, and fiddle (not all at once) under various names: Georgia Jokers, Gabriel’s Holy Testifiers and so on.
I’ve got morre to say but want to get this much posted. Though it seems Joe has never (I just searched) appeared on this board before, Mudcatters deserve to know more about him.

Bob

Subject: RE: Obit: Joe Bussard (1936-2022)
From: Thomas Stern
Date: 08 Oct 22 - 10:07 PM

A sad loss to Folk blues and old time music lovers.

An excellent portrait is available on the DVD
Desperate Man Blues: Discovering the Roots of American Music
https://www.amazon.com/Desperate-Man-Blues-Discovering-American/dp/B000JMK6IU/ref=sr_1_2

And a survey of his collection of recordings on the CD
Down In The Basement: Joe Bussard's Treasure Trove of Vintage 78s 1926-1937 with 72-page booklet.
I think the 72 pp booklet is op, but the recordings are available.
https://www.amazon.com/Down-Basement-Bussards-Treasure-1926-1937/dp/B00009MGQU/ref=sr_1_1?crid=90X3LK3B0N87&keywords=joe+bussard&qid=1665280777&qu=eyJxc2MiOiIyLjE3IiwicXNhIjoiMS4yNSIsInFzcCI6IjAuOTIifQ%3D%3D&s=movies-tv&sprefix=joe+bussard%2Cmovies-tv%2C211&sr=1-1-catcorr


A survey of the FONOTONE catalog (famous for it's recordings of
John Fahey as Blind Joe Death and other names) was released by
Revenant.
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15959-your-past-comes-back-to-haunt-you-the-fonotone-years-19581965/

https://www.thewire.co.uk/audio/tracks/listen-to-joe-bussard_an-oral-history-of-fonotone-records

RIP.

Thomas.

Subject: RE: Obit: Joe Bussard (1936-2022)
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 08 Oct 22 - 10:43 PM

I've been waiting for Mudcat to come back to share Bussard's obit also.

Joe Bussard, Obsessive Collector of Rare Records, Dies at 86
His life revolved around his massive hoard of fragile 78 r.p.m. disks of jazz, blues, country and gospel music recorded between the 1920s and ’50s.

Joe Bussard, who made it his life’s obsession to collect rare 78 r.p.m. records — some 15,000 of them, encompassing jazz, blues, country, jug band and gospel — and who spread his love for the music on radio and among visitors who joined him to listen to the fragile disks in his basement, died on Monday at his home in Frederick, Md., one floor above his hoard. He was 86.

His death, in hospice care, was confirmed by his daughter, Susannah Anderson. She said the cause was pancreatic cancer, which was diagnosed in 2019.

“He basically lived the songs, breathed the songs and passed them on to as many people as he could,” John Tefteller, a rare-records dealer and auctioneer, said in a phone interview. “It was his life from morning to night. I consider him a national treasure.”

And any fan of his treasures could come to his house and listen to his 78s.

“Anybody who got ahold of him, he’d say, ‘Come on over,’” Ms. Anderson said.

From his home near the Blue Ridge Mountains, Mr. Bussard (pronounced boo-SARD) drove the country roads of the South seeking 78s that had been languishing in people’s homes. He was selective about what he brought back to his basement. He loved jazz but detested any jazz recorded after the early 1930s. He loved country music but decreed that nothing good came after 1955. Nashville? He called it “Trashville.” Rock ’n’ roll? A cancer.

“How can you listen to Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw when you’ve listened to Jelly Roll Morton?” he said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2001. “It’s like coming out of a mansion and living in a chicken coop.”

One day, in the 1960s, Mr. Bussard was driving the streets of Tazewell, a small town in Virginia — the kind of place he often canvassed door to door, asking people if they had 78s — when he met an old man who said he had some 78s at the shotgun shack where he lived.

From a dusty box under the man’s bed, Mr. Bussard found some good country records (Uncle Dave Macon, the Carter family) and then the sort of mind-blowing discoveries he craved: a 78 on the Black Patti label, which recorded jazz, blues and spirituals in the late 1920s.

“‘Oh my Gahhd!’” he recalled thinking in the liner notes to his CD “Down in the Basement: Joe Bussard’s Treasure Trove of Vintage 78s” (2002). “It was all I could do to keep my hands from trembling.”

The rest of it is at the link, and the NY Times has durable links.

Subject: RE: Obit: Joe Bussard (1936-2022)
From: GUEST,Bob Coltman
Date: 09 Oct 22 - 08:07 AM

Addition to my earlier post: Joe is not quite unmentioned on Mudcat, after all. A Google search outside Mudcat will turn up a few early Mudcat Joe Bussard threads.

https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=35524   “vintage 78’s on npr”
https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=158444   "Joe Bussard – The Year of Jubilo”

Joe has a page on Wikipedia, which gives some more of the basic facts.

And the web, by the way, has lots of fine photos of Joe in musical connections at various stages of his life.

I should add that Joe for years produced weekly radio shows on tape for stations in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and elsewhere. They featured records from his collection with Joe’s grand and humorous radio commentary. I know of no source for details about this—maybe some of you can add more on that.

The above post by Stilly River Sage brings back memories in the final three paragraphs. I was lucky enough to be with Joe on that record collecting trip in Tazewell, Virginia the day he discovered Clarence Fross/Frost's house and we turned. up those Black Patti's, rarest of the rare. Joe just about went into a "record collector's coma" that day—dead serious and very persuasive.

Next post: more memories.

Bob

Subject: RE: Obit: Joe Bussard (1936-2022)
From: GUEST,Bob Coltman
Date: 09 Oct 22 - 08:41 AM

Some of my many memories of Joe Bussard.

Where to start. Early days. His spontaneity, his boundless energy. His love of the music was contagious; he’s stamp his foot to the rhythm. He’d imitate a trombone player, or conduct the music with an invisible baton. He turned many a diffident visitor into a passionate old time music buff.

Joe was excited to meet anybody who loved old time country music, blues or jazz, or all three, as I did. Mighty few people would welcome you in as volubly as Joe; he was strung like a high E string, and he was always, as he would say of anything particularly fine, “ready.” We hit it off right away—and so would you, if you had visited him then.

Playing records was a highlight. Joe was kind enough to let me record as he lowered the tone arm on record after record—a blast. Remember in those days, outside of Harry Smith’s6-LP collection Folkways and a few others (and the wonderful New Lost City Ramblers revivalists of course), there was very little old time music on record.

After an day and evening of solid obsession at the fount of the music we both loved, Joe and I would go upstairs from his basement record room, break out Pepsis—Joe’s nearest approach to strong drink—and watch old black-and-white movies on late, late TV.

In the morning as soon as we had the frog mostly out of our throats, we might record some numbers. Joe would Fetch Oscar Myers, Jerry Marcum would arrive, and we would get started. In some of the pix on the web you can see what Joe’s recording setup looked like: a big board shelf at one end of the record room, turntable, amplifier, tape recorder, and on the right, his record cutter.

Each of his Fonotone 78s was first recorded on tape (“Get your tunes down to three minutes,” as the Clayton McMichen would say on the fabled Skillet Lickers’ long series of 78s, “A Corn Licker Still in Georgia,”) then carefully brush the strings of cut plastic as they separated from the grooves. No mass production for Joe! He was a one-man record factory.

More to come.

Subject: RE: Obit: Joe Bussard (1936-2022)
From: GUEST,Bob Coltman
Date: 09 Oct 22 - 08:55 AM

Some of the sides our quartet made for Fonotone were reissued as LP records by small record companies. This info isn’t readily found anywhere, so here are the tracklists for the two commercial LPs.

JOLLY JOE AND HIS JUG BAND. Piedmont LP.   c. 1963
Borrow Love and Go
Jug in the Shade
Cider Time Rag
Black Cat Moan
Coal Tipple Blues
Scattin’ Rag
High Sheriff Blues
Goofus Rag
Jolly Jug Blues
Careless Love Blues
What She’s Got
Basement Blues

WEST MARYLAND HIGHBALLERS    Biograph RC-6001   c. 1965
Rockingham
Rome, Georgia Bound
Jolking Georgia Rag. (sic)
Ain’t Gonna Lay My Armor Down
See That My Grave Is Kept Green
Do Lawd Remember Me
The Death of John Kennedy
Susie
Flat Pine Waltz
All On Account of Somebody
Town Bully
Atlanta Rag
Rabbit in the Pea Patch
Sourwood Mountain

The best idea of the diversity and grand music available on Joe’s Fonotone music label was issued as a 5-CD set in a commemorative cigar box (Joe was rarely without his cigar) by the Dust-to-Digital company of Atlanta. It incorporates a 160-page booklet with valuable information about Joe, his times, his music and the songs, including the true identity of the Mash Mountain Boys, Carolina Pine Knots, Possum Holler Boys, Jackson Jug Jumpers, Back Alley Boys, Bald Knob Chicken Snatchers and others. All are reissues of Fonotone original 78 rpm recordings.

FONOTONE RECORDS: FREDERICK, MARYLAND (1956-1969) Dust to Digital issued 2005?2006?
Still available $35 see
https://dust-digital.com/products/fonotone-records-frederick-maryland-1956-1969?_pos=2&_sid=ba8ac4639&_ss=r

For the tracklist of this monumental collection that illustrates the diversity and reach of Joe’s record company, see

https://dust-digital.com/pages/fonotone-records-frederick-maryland-tracklist

Now I’ll get out of your hair. But just give a listen to those fine Fonotones. Joe would want you to.

Bob

Subject: RE: Obit: Joe Bussard (1936-2022)
From: GUEST,Bob Coltman
Date: 09 Oct 22 - 09:00 AM

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

Subject: RE: Obit: Joe Bussard (1936-2022)
From: GUEST,J_Madore
Date: 01 Mar 23 - 03:10 PM

I met Joe for the first time in July 2021, when he was a spry 85 year old and I was 28. Those who happened to see us out and about Frederick together assumed he was my grandfather so often that it became an inside joke! As a longtime record collector myself, I had heard his name mentioned in record collecting circles quite often. However, it wasn't until I rented the documentary about him, "Desperate Man Blues", that I finally understood the passion he had for 78s and Americana musical history recorded on them. Another collector I was friends with who also knew Joe was kind enough to share his contact information with me, and I knew he was the "real deal" when the very first time I spoke with him on the phone, he invited me to his home so he could play me some of his favorite records out of the 15,000 or so he had collected over the past seven decades. I flew out to see him later that month and it was a blast! I'll never forget the time we went record hunting together at his favorite record shop (the Emmitsburg Antique Mall) and he spent the entire time driving to and from complaining about all of the "damn old people on the road" who were driving too slow for him!

Like the other commenters here, I will always consider Joe a national hero for dedicating his entire life around otherwise-forgotten music, and not letting pancreatic cancer prevent him from living the kind of life he wanted. I am incredibly grateful for having met him, and my only regret is that I didn't get to meet him in person him more than once. Rest in peace Joe!