Treasure Trove of Twang

Subject: Treasure Trove of Twang
From: Justa Picker
Date: 31 Aug 01 - 03:12 PM

A very interesting article here.

Perhaps there are some Mudcatters who know this guy???

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I think I'll copy-paste the article so the link doesn't get lost.
-Joe Offer (link sent to Sandy Paton)-

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Treasure Trove of Twang

Leon Kagarise's home brims with the fruits of his obsession: a huge, just-revealed cache of rare country music recordings that has left followers breathless.

By STEPHEN BRAUN
Times Staff Writer

August 23 2001

TOWSON, Md -- The tiny frame house is cluttered from floor to ceiling with a lifetime's leavings. Leon Kagarise buried treasure beneath his mounds of junk, guarding it with a collector's obsessive ardor. After 40 years, he finally has let the world in on his secret, an unheard, unseen trove of American cultural history.

"I never throw anything out, so I guess that makes me a pack rat," said the 64-year-old Kagarise, who must perform spelunking maneuvers just to reach the bathroom. "People been pooh-poohing me all my life about being a hoarder, but something's finally come of it."

In a living room darkened by teetering towers of records, mounds of clothes and a tangle of wires, Kagarise has assembled a rickety shrine to his beloved country and bluegrass music. From the late 1950s through the mid-1960s, the electronics whiz privately recorded and photographed country stars at the top of their game. He did not stop until he had amassed 5,000 hours of music and nearly 1,000 color slides. Then he stowed it all away.

Now, as word of his cache makes its way from collectors to record companies to archivists, the suburban Baltimore retiree has become an unlikely legend. Record executives have made offers. The Library of Congress has come courting. What makes Kagarise's stockpile such an intoxicating prize, they all say, is more than its vast breadth and its near-pristine sound quality. It provides a front-row seat on a vanished world, an era when country artists such as Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline and George Jones mingled up close with their fans like kin gathered at a mountain family reunion.

"This is a phenomenal documentation of a period that was lost to time," said Eddie Stubbs, a Nashville disc jockey and a staff announcer for the Grand Ole Opry.

The celebration of Kagarise's bounty comes as sweet revenge for a man who took years of grief for his single-minded devotion. He is a man out of time, a rec room hobbyist who never outgrew his obsession, a basement tinkerer whose electronics sorcery was so masterful he figured out a method of recording pristine sound off '50s-vintage television sets--far surpassing the dismal, tinny kinescopes of that era.

Yet it was not until others began hearing his long-hidden tapes that even Kagarise himself understood the magnitude of his home-grown accomplishments.

"I had no idea of what I had," he admitted. "I just packed it away and forgot about it."

Anything abandoned in the collector's jungle that has grown out of control in Kagarise's one-story house is something soon forgotten. What still can be seen--a dropped wrench, antique radios, stuffed animals, tossed shoes, stacks of warping records, discarded jars of peanuts--obscures older drift like layers of buried prehistoric shale.

"I haven't been in some rooms in months," he said sheepishly.

Kagarise spends most of his time near the front door, in a perch he has carved out near a brace of old reel-to-reel tape recorders and audio equipment. This is where he sits for hours, a sedentary retiree sunk deep in an armchair, punching buttons and flipping knobs, copying spools of fragile old tape onto modern-day compact discs.

He is making the discs for Joe Lee, a suburban Washington record dealer and roots music champion who first brought word of the Kagarise treasure to the outside world. Lee, the son of a former Maryland governor, went to Kagarise's house two years ago after the collector had told friends that he planned to sell some of his 140,000 records.

As Lee "crab-walked" through the narrow trails dug out of the mounds of Kagarise's private effects, he noticed a stack of tape boxes. One was marked "Johnny Cash, Maryland, 1962." A Cash fan, Lee asked to hear it.

"It comes blasting out of the speaker and I just swooned," Lee recalled. "It sounded like it was recorded yesterday, clear as a bell. I didn't believe it; it was too good to be real. But Leon's the real McCoy."

The two men agreed to work together. Lee is now the shy Kagarise's voice to strangers, overseeing the massive transfer of old tapes to disc and collating a vast archive of color slides.

They were mostly made at country music parks, makeshift institutions that long have faded from the American scene. From the 1940s through the 1960s, in rural parks such as New River Ranch in Rising Sun, Md., and Sunset Park in West Grove, Pa., homesick Southern emigres gathered by the thousands every weekend for daylong music festivals. It was a different era, a time when even the most finicky celebrities thought nothing of wandering out into the audience to chat--or allowing fans such as Kagarise to rig up tape recorders right in front of the stage.

Kagarise taped off television too, recording hundreds of hours of country variety shows. He plunged into the guts of old television sets, hooking up directly to their cathode followers. The ploy enabled him to obtain pristine sound directly from the airwaves--instead of muffled by the sets' speakers. "It's about as good as if you were sitting in the studio," he said.

Country music has been Kagarise's joy since childhood. He picked it up from live bands on radio stations that faded in and out of the airwaves from hotbeds such as Nashville, Richmond, Va., and Wheeling, W.Va. The son of a Pennsylvania farmer who took up electronics work when he moved his family to Baltimore, Kagarise shared his father's mechanical skills--learning the tricks of the trade. It was his father's diagrams of television set innards that allowed Kagarise to tape the variety shows he adored.

As he shuttled between electronics jobs in Baltimore that took him from hospital maintenance man to cable company staffer, Kagarise's music addiction outlasted his wife's tolerance and the bafflement of his son and daughter.

Now divorced, Kagarise lives alone in his temple of disarray. He sees his family now at Sunday services at the Mennonite church they all attend. But four decades ago, Sunday afternoons were reserved for Kagarise's fixation. He dragged the whole family along to the outdoor music fairs he attended as religiously as morning prayer.

At the parks, Kagarise hunched over his recorder, hemmed in among extended families of Virginians and Tennesseans who roosted all day on wooden benches. Local farmers often caught an early show, rushed home to work in the fields and returned in muddy overalls to watch the evening encores.

Volatile rising stars such as George Jones and Johnny Cash sang just inches from his perch. Country troubadours such as Ernest Tubb and Webb Pierce, acoustic legends such as Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs and the Stanley Brothers all obliged Kagarise's taping fever.

The long days had their hazards. The Stanleys had to perform through dive-bombing bees. Cash showed up drunk at one show and was led offstage until he sobered up. Jones burst into a rage in front of his audience when he learned that there were no available telephones for miles. Often, the acerbic Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass music, ordered Kagarise to turn off his machine. "Mean as a bedbug," Kagarise said, still complaining.

Alone among the home tapers, Kagarise added a sound man's expertise to his fervor. He used a 50-pound portable Ampex recorder, the best commercially available model, and a full-direction microphone.

Once his machine was running, Kagarise would wander away to meet the stars he idolized. He never worried about theft. "These were honorable country people," he said.

Veteran country performers such as the Stoneman Family still remember Kagarise as the man with a shirt pocket protector full of pencils and screwdrivers. He was the quietly smitten Northerner who always hung back behind the more aggressive autograph hounds. He blushed when they kidded him.

"Honey, I can remember that man's eyes and his face," said Roni Stoneman, a bluegrass banjo ace who was a regular on the country variety show "Hee Haw" for nearly two decades. "He was like a little child at Christmas. You never saw such awe in a man. He loved his music."

Kagarise was driven by his knowledge and dedication. But he also had perfect timing.

The late '50s and early '60s were country music's "golden years," Stubbs said. It was a moment when scores of artists came into their prime, when rockabilly swelled into rock 'n' roll and when a raw, unfiltered sound that had been a regional novelty for decades finally transformed into a national popular music. But despite thousands of studio recordings during those years, live country recordings were rare.

Kagarise's tapes and photos provide a window into that period, a vantage point so close, Lee said, "that you can hear these guys sweat and smell their after-shave."

By the mid-1960s, the spontaneity and access Kagarise thrived on began to wither. Record executives in Nashville had started experimenting with their own live recordings. Freewheeling hobbyists such as Kagarise were seen as potential rivals.

By 1967, Kagarise was returning empty-handed from the music parks. Band managers had ordered him to turn his machine off. Ernest "Pops" Stoneman, the autoharp-playing patriarch of the Stoneman Family, insisted that Kagarise could continue taping his family's sets. But with no one else to record, Kagarise stopped going to the parks. The music had changed too, he reckoned: more amplified, too slick. "The big money got in the way," he said.

So he retreated to the dim terrain of his living room, listening to the past. In time, even the warmth of nostalgia wore off and Kagarise shoved his beloved tapes deep into the piles and turned to new enthusiasms: old 78 recordings, blues, early jazz.

The tapes lay buried until Lee's prodding in 1999 spurred the retired electrician to dig his prize out. Slowly, snippets of his tapes have made their way into the world, electrifying country music industry people in Nashville, archivists in Washington, bluegrass lovers scattered across Appalachia.

"You hear the bantering on stage, the corny jokes. These are entire sets, warts and all," said Charles Wolfe, a country music historian and folklore professor at Middle Tennessee State University. When he heard Kagarise's tapes, "I was floored."

So was Library of Congress cultural historian David Taylor, who asked Kagarise to donate his collection. After hearing the growing buzz, Smithsonian cultural division curator Charlie McGovern said last week that he too is eager to hear the Kagarise trove.

There have been contacts from record firms, said Lee--among them Columbia, Rounder, Bloodshot and the Country Music Foundation. Kagarise likes the idea of "making some money."

He yearns more, he said, for a widening audience for the music he loves. The recent popularity of the top-selling soundtrack for the film "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" gives him hope, Kagarise said.

But the complicated minefield of music publishing rights, and the traditionally limited audience for unvarnished country music, makes it doubtful that the entire 5,000 hours could be released commercially. Artists, estates and music publishers all have to give their blessing and be paid. There is no way to place a value on the collection.

More likely, a few choice items from Kagarise's vast archives will surface--released by one of the firms that already have come calling, Lee said. "Someone will do it, but we've got to be realistic about what comes out."

Much of what remains could end up joining scores of other privately donated collections in the National Archives. But for the moment, the glory of Kagarise's collection plays only in his dimmed living room.

Ethereal voices and mountain twang well up as he relives concerts he has not heard since he was in his 20s. The shows are so far in the past now, so distant, that Kagarise has a hard time remembering what he was doing while the fiddles sawed and the steel guitars whined.

On tape, it was 1962 again, and a country fiddler named Scotty Stoneman was using his instrument to impersonate, in short order, a baying hound, truck gears, a hot rod and a keening police siren. "I listen to this stuff now and it hits you square in the face it's so good," Kagarise said.

Stoneman is long gone now, just a faded name from country music's past. Behind closed drapes in Kagarise's cluttered living room, he plays on as if the show never ended.

For information about reprinting this article, go to http://www.lats.com/rights/register.htm

Subject: RE: Treasure Trove of Twang
From: katlaughing
Date: 31 Aug 01 - 03:40 PM

Wow, thanks JP. What an incredible find!

Subject: RE: Treasure Trove of Twang
From: wysiwyg
Date: 31 Aug 01 - 05:17 PM

(Time to plan the invasion. We attack at dawn....)

~S~

Subject: RE: Treasure Trove of Twang
From: SINSULL
Date: 31 Aug 01 - 06:09 PM

That is an amazing find! Wonder how long it will take his ex-wife to sue for her share of the take?

Subject: RE: Treasure Trove of Twang
From: catspaw49
Date: 31 Aug 01 - 09:04 PM

can't you just see Brother Fielding crawling through this joint on his hands and knees with gleeful little ooohs and ahhhs and wows and the occasional sob, followed by a little agnostic-style prayer?

Thanks for the article JP......fascinating.

Spaw

Subject: RE: Treasure Trove of Twang
From: Justa Picker
Date: 31 Aug 01 - 09:07 PM

Yes I can 'Spaw!
(I'm wondering if maybe Sandy knows this guy? I'll refresh the thread till Sandy has a chance to see the article.)

Subject: RE: Treasure Trove of Twang
From: Sandy Paton
Date: 01 Sep 01 - 01:43 AM

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

Subject: RE: Treasure Trove of Twang
From: Justa Picker
Date: 01 Sep 01 - 03:27 PM

(refresh)

Subject: RE: Treasure Trove of Twang
From: Bill D
Date: 01 Sep 01 - 04:53 PM

???There was a Wash Post article about this a year or so ago...I think I posted about it then....the plot was even thicker, because there was another collector mentioned, with whom he had a rivalry. The Post article had LOTS more detail about what he had and how he had found it...some really rare stuff....I'll see if I can figger out where it was...(prob. in Post pay-per-view archives)

Subject: RE: Treasure Trove of Twang
From: Bill D
Date: 01 Sep 01 - 04:59 PM

yep////March 9, 2000....long article...$2.95 to read it...wish I had saved the text...

Subject: RE: Treasure Trove of Twang
From: DougR
Date: 01 Sep 01 - 07:49 PM

Terrific article. I'm sure Sandy is right though. I can't imagine it ever being produced commercially. And he 's also right about what happened to the music.

DougR

Subject: RE: Treasure Trove of Twang
From: Stewie
Date: 01 Sep 01 - 11:01 PM

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.

Subject: RE: Treasure Trove of Twang
From: katlaughing
Date: 02 Sep 01 - 12:43 AM

Thanks, Stewie, and Bill. What an incredible find. Both articles are really great!

Subject: RE: Treasure Trove of Twang
From: Armen Tanzerian
Date: 02 Sep 01 - 10:47 AM

I guess I better work on my thread titles. I posted THIS two days earlier, and it sank without a trace. But you get some visuals here, and I'm still interested in any guesses as to the Monroe personnel.

Subject: RE: Treasure Trove of Twang
From: Stewie
Date: 02 Sep 01 - 10:44 PM

Here are links to a couple of fascinating articles about another great record collector. Without the generosity of people like Joe Bussard, many pre-war blues and old-time recordings would be simply entries on a page to all but a handful of 78 collectors. Marshall Wyatt has drawn from Joe Bussard's collection for his excellent compilations on his Old Hat label. County, Yazoo, Document etc have all benefited from his generosity.

Joe Bussard I

Joe Bussard II

--Stewie.

Subject: RE: Treasure Trove of Twang
From: SINSULL
Date: 03 Sep 01 - 10:48 PM

Refresh - too soon to let this one go.

Subject: RE: Treasure Trove of Twang
From: WyoWoman
Date: 03 Sep 01 - 11:04 PM

Well, I'm in line to order the boxed set. Of course, it would reguire quite a few boxes.

But surely there will be SOME way of buying a couple of cds worth of this someday.

"Meaner'n a bedbug ..." I love that.

ww