78 Collectors: Why are they so weird?

oh man early cajun music fukken rules. there are some amazing collections on Arhoolie you could check out..

http://www.amazon.com/Cajun-String-Bands-1930s-Breakdown/dp/B0000001N8/ref=sr_1_4?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1315504163&sr=1-4

http://www.amazon.com/Folksongs-Louisiana-Acadians-Various-Artists/dp/B0000001I2/ref=sr_1_9?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1315504163&sr=1-9

oh yeah - they have a lot of good stuff! that reminds me of how my college roommates refused to let me play my arhoolie cajun classics cd. they wouldn't let me play anything fun.

there's an all-78 record store in minneapolis, i keep meaning to check it out, been there forever

i heard the dude has a cat in the store and smokes a pipe and is kinda surly

it's trv kvlt tho, only 78s

speaking of dust to dig, this looks cool, if only for the spooooooooky cover
http://www.dust-digital.com/images/320/dtd20-320.jpg
I Listen to the Wind That Obliterates My Traces: Music in Vernacular Photographs 1880-1955

... i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces brings together a collection of early photographs related to music, a group of 78rpm recordings, and short excerpts from various literary sources that are contemporary with the sound and images. It is a somewhat intuitive gathering, culled from artist Steve Roden’s collection of thousands of vernacular photographs related to music, sound, and listening. The subjects range from the PT Barnum-esque Professor McRea - “Ontario’s Musical Wonder” (pictured with his complex sculptural one man band contraption) - to anonymous African-American guitar players and images of early phonographs. The images range from professional portraits to ethereal, accidental, double exposures - and include a range of photographic print processes, such as tintypes, ambrotypes, cdvs, cabinet cards, real photo postcards, albumen prints, and turn-of-the-century snapshots.

The two CDs display a variety of recordings, including one-off amateur recordings, regular commercial releases, and early sound effects records. there is no narrative structure to the book, but the collision of literary quotes (Hamsun, Lagarkvist, Wordsworth, Nabakov, etc.). Recordings and images conspire towards a consistent mood that is anchored by the book’s title, which binds such disparate things as an early recording of an American cowboy ballad, a poem by a Swedish Nobel laureate, a recording of crickets created artificially, and an image of an itinerant anonymous woman sitting in a field, playing a guitar. The book also contains an essay by Roden.

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/shookdown/2011/09/nostalgia.php

http://www.forumusic.co.uk/a_pile_of_78s.html

gorgeous.

since i've started this thread i've become a 78 guy :( buying 78s online monthly at least.

*made a lame joke; deleted it*

78-only guy who comes into our store wears microskirts in a kind of Catholic school girl plaid. He's in his late 40s at least and is either a creep or on the creep end of the autism spectrum.

i have met some totally fine 78 guys, really. dudes i would just hang with to have a beer or eat a burger.

if any of you weird 78 collectors are interested, here's a cool r crumb bbc radio series where he plays weird 78s. http://doomandgloomfromthetomb.tumblr.com/post/23609327190/sweet-shellac-and-now-for-something-completely

:D thanks

Why aren't hillbilly and the like collectible among 78 guys? I thought for sure those "Rockabilly guys" The ones who dress like greasers collect those?

Isn't Coral collectible?

rockabilly guys do buy the stuff, sure, but you can still find great records for cheap! especially since off-condition 78s of the post-war can still sound amazing. coral is collectible, i guess, along with the same guys who collect dion records and doo wop 45s on rama, but they are a dying breed.

fyi i got my copy of "i wish i was a mole in the ground" today along with a handful of other rekkerds by fate norris, fiddlin powers & family, the carter family, mainer's mountaineers, and riley puckett.

Really enjoyed reading this thread. As someone who's been into vinyl most of my life, 78 collecting has always been too intimidating.

Thanks for all the links and shop talk. Would loved to have seen/heard some of the now dead links and images.

i'm turning into one of these guys.
i actually have revised my original opinion, and i think most of the ppl i have met who collect 78s are totally cool people. there are some real weirdos out there but really i don't think there are more than in regular record collecting circles. i just encountered some freaks early on.

https://sphotos.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc7/473971_392189110829334_196923011_o.jpg
this guy!

coolest guy in america?

definitely.
i wish the guy many many many years of good health, but i look at him and i can't help thinking -- what's happening to those records when he passes away? i mean, i just hope there's something along the lines of what's happening with John Peel's collection in the works? library of congress? what?!

i don't actually find joe b. that interesting--after you get past how seminal of a collector he is etc. he doesn't have a ton interesting to say about the music.

having an encyclopedic knowledge of pre-war american 'vernacular' music is enuff for me tbh. not everyone has to be an academic with critical insight imo.

totally agree, wish more people felt that way!

that said i love reading things like calt's skip james bio & the recent book about early country music & mill workers, which are full of critical speculation and supposition and in the case of the calt especially 'outside the box.' but it's not a pre-req for me.

bussard does make a hell of a mixtape though -- the few that i ordered back when he was doing that are awesome.

i'd guess he knows the ins & outs of the music about as well as anyone.

i feel like i'm biologically wired to value artifacts over theories about the artifacts, in general. i think it's just some kind of a mental orientation?

i tend to feel the same way. that is why i had such a lousy time in college where half my classes we were thrust packets of frustrating literary criticism as tho they were as valuable as or more valuable than the o.g. object.

It's the collector mentality, I guess. I don't know that I think they're so weird, really. They're better at what they do than I am at what I do, that's for sure.

Working in a used record store for about four years, I ran into a lot of really obnoxious, anal retentive knobs. Most of them were 45 collectors. From my experience, they're the worst. Met a few 78 weirdos, but they were just kind of quirky, not outright jerks.

funny though, out of all those 78s bussard has, i wonder how many he'd say were total garbage.

i think i've already said this, but my dad is a 78 dealer and he often gets called out to guys' warehouses by the family after someone passes to assess consignment sales. It happens a lot.

got a note in my email today notifying me that i had won some records i bid on in the back of VJM -- a martin & roberts on perfect and pete pyle on bluebird

what is all this about "theories about artefacts" or whatever? you guys are reading an awful lot into my posts. i guess i just feel that for a guy who gets hella attention for having the most awesome record collection in the USA i don't find what he has to say very interesting.

ian since you watch out for these things, can you look out for piano and other 78s by a guy named "lee sims" (not frankie lee sims, just lee sims)? none of his stuff (well, save for one or two tracks) is on CD and most isn't on LP either. but he's great. i'll pay you for any of his 78s in decent condition.

funny though, out of all those 78s bussard has, i wonder how many he'd say were total garbage.

― tylerw, Friday, July 6, 2012 10:54 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

doesn't he pointedly not collect stuff (like any jazz post-1933 or whatever) that he thinks is trash? or he'll collect the valuable ones just so's he can trade them away for stuff he really wants.

When you consider that it's about two songs per record, it's not too hard to believe that he thinks all his records are cool.

I've got about a box of 78s now but I still don't have a way to play them. I play them on other people's record players sometimes. It seems like a tougher hobby than regular record collecting.

I peed my pants when I found some 78s lying around, including an entire Hank Williams set.

However, they sound like shit. I think archivists must like them for other reasons. God bless them, but they are a pain in the ass. The old stereos you can play them on are really cool though.

um, lots of 78s sound great.

and you can play them on lots of record players--was standard until the late '50s/early '60s really. not just gramaphones or whatever.

they last is the thing.

bebop 78s sound SO GOOD

tyler, thank you for that link to the r. crumb shows, i really enjoyed them, especially the last one on black string bands. i was surprised at how great most of the recs sounded (i'm used to hearing skip james 78s that are more crackle than music) - dunno if the discs had been sonically tidied up, or if crumb has enough coin to only collect the most pristine examples of such, or what. it was also amusing to me hear 'respected american cartoonist robert crumb' drawling on BBC Radio 3, which is as 'straight' an institution as you can imagine...) Could have done w/ a few more tales of rec collecting/hunting and maybe a lil less primo levi, but o/wise it was fab, so thanks again.

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everybody wants a key to my cellar