78 Collectors: Why are they so weird?

Any recommendations on the best-sounding JSPs? I'm pretty much open to anything.

I just want to chime in and needlessly add my opinion that I've never heard a better 78 comp than the BLACK MIRROR comp that Ian Nagoski did. That thing is remarkable, and I love his notes in the booklet, as well.

that's a good one.

the victrola favorites collection is also interesting. not sure what i think about the deluxxxe fetishizing scrapbook of 78-related ephemera that it comes packaged in. the whole "we're going to present this stuff to you in a way that seeks to simulate not of experience listening to them in their original context, but rather the wonderment of the collector's encounter with the strange and unfamiliar" meme is intriguing but i think it's ultimately a dead-end. anyway the MO in that comp seemed to be to master the 78s in a way that the full materiality of the 78-as-object is apparent, with all the non-musical sounds that implies -- as well, they seemed interested in capturing the sounds of the 78s as played on certain machines. this is an interesting approach, i admit.

best-sounding JSPs? hmmm. look for anything that says john r.t. davies was involved in the mastering. but those are just a few of the earlier sets (jelly roll morton, louis armstrong) when they were still bothering to reissue jazz.

the best recent JSP comp is definitely "jook joint blues: that's what they want," a collection of mostly k-obscure postwar electrified country blues. it represents a species of electric blues that's not far removed from the idiosyncrasies of prewar country blues that people so cherish, in fact it seems the logical extension of that sound plus amplification. totally recommended.

the "a richer tradition," which focus on the african-american string-band tradition, sounds pretty good and is super interesting.

in general most of the country comps on JSP seem compromised by poor source material and/or indifferent mastering. though they are still essential just because... where else will you get all of roy acuff's early sides? without paying bear family prices?

that reminds me -- bear family's CDs almost always sound great, at least for the past 15 years or so. but good luck affording them. (the "west indian rhythm" calypso box set, an amazing document, sounds almost as good as the aforementioned "roots of rumba rock" thing.)

wish this thread had more activity, the whole field seems to be thriving

Compilations of early recordings of World Music - 1920's-50's

I second amateurist's recommendation of the JSP edition of Armstrong's Hot Fives and Sevens.

yeah? are they markedly better than the columbia/legacy set?

Apparently the mastering job on the Columbia set is inferior to the JSP. The JSP is about half the price too.

Tylerw: here's a representative review from Amazon:

1.0 out of 5 stars Sloppy production, horrid sound (but a nice book), November 13, 2000
By Allan Sutton (Denver, CO USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings (Audio CD)
The reprocessing on this (...) compilation is among the worst in years: thin, harsh, and (on the first two CDs) with nearly overwhelming surface noise. Take it from a collector who owns original copies of many of these sides: The originals do NOT sound this bad! Some selections on the first CD were obviously taken from old tapes (a telltale "pre-echo" is clearly audible) rather than being freshly remastered. The noise problem abates somewhat on CDs 3 and 4, but the transfers remain curiously thin and harsh with an inexplicably weak bass compared to the brilliantly recorded originals. Incidentally, all four CDs had glue on the playing surfaces (removable with alcohol; but why should one have to clean a $ set?). The accompanying hardcover book is visually stunning if you can overlook the warped binding boards, and it's not without some sloppy discographical errors. (Among other gaffs, Sony apparently is trying to rewrite record-industry history, making the ludicrous claim that they -- rather than Columbia and Okeh -- produced the original issues!) A far better alternative, at half the price, is JSP's Hot Five/Hot Seven set, masterfully reprocessed by John R.T. Davies. You won't get a book, but you'll get clean, richly detailed transfers that do justice to these historic sides in a way that this set does not.

http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Hot-Five-Seven-Recordings/dp/B000GRTQP2/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1243461024&sr=8-2

huh! didn't know that, i'll have to track down the JSP stuff. helps that it is so bargain-priced, too.

I've mentioned this before on different threads, but my dad deals 78s for a living and I've been soaking in the thread title since the cradle.
From the blog from awhile back:

My Pops had been a Metro bus driver in Nashville for some time and it didn't suit him well. While visiting family in New York City, he passed by the now-venerable House of Oldies and spied a record in the window selling for a hundred dollars. Earlier that year he had picked up a copy of the same disc for two bits. He hadn't been aware that there was a market for such stuff, a coterie of vinyl and shellac obsessives willing to pay far beyond top dollar for rare and historically important recordings. A light went off. Pops, a Yankee expat living South of the Mason/Dixon, saw the potential for a potentially lucrative hustle that played well off a lifetime of fascination with music. In 1975, the year I was born, my father decided to buy and sell antique records for a living.

In those pre-bay times, Tennessee was a collector's paradise; over a half century of music and radio industry unique to the area produced literally hundreds of thousands of undervalued records left unused or forgotten in garages, parlors, basements. A curious crate digger could find warehouses filled with untrammeled pickings. Initially, Pops would cart bulk piles of 45's and 78's into the city to sell but he quickly adopted a business model that would require less hauling and a different sort of focus.

Once a year, he would print and mail a thick pamphlet of the thousands of meticulously graded records and musical memorabilia he had acquired (or, as eventually became more common, that he was selling on consignment) to an international community of several hundred select buyers. Those buyers would send their lists of requests along with a price they were willing to pay for each of their picks. A month or so later, Pops would pull all the high bids and write the winners to confirm purchase. They would send checks. He would clean and pack the records then drive vanloads, many vanloads, of boxes to the local post office. Everybody at the post office knew him by name. In the background, while he's working, he's always playing an eclectic mix of music; sometimes favorite albums but more often whatever it is that he's just found to sell. Seventy-five percent of my childhood had an ever-changing soundtrack.

Pops has run this mail-order auction for over thirty years in pretty much the same fashion I've detailed above. It fills six to eight months of his year, every year, with packing and cleaning and grading and acquiring and mailing. I've watched him do it; it's a numbing sort of grind that often left him frazzled and irritable; hands cracked from the rubbing alcohol he used to clean the records, shut up in a home office walled by cardboard and vinyl, burning early morning hours appraising disc after disc. He has always done all this work by himself and continues to do so. His main mechanical aide well into the late nineties was a typewriter. He has a computer now but he uses it solely as a word processor. To the best of my knowledge, he has never opened Excel; all his financial mathematics are done on paper or with a calculator. He does not have an internet connection.

There is an urban legend about my father discovering a crate of impossibly rare 78s buried in our backyard under a cow shed that I have seen referenced on the internet. I spent entire summers driving around neighborhoods in Nashville and Alabama and running in to Five and Dimes and garage sales and asking "Got any old phonograph records?" and then running out to tell dad to park the van if it was a yes. He got to know R. Crumb and Chris Ware by selling them discs.

Ian, let me know if you want me to get you on Dad's mailing list; he's really loathe to take on new clients but he'll take occasional addresses from me.

I'd be interested in it Forks, though I'm not a very high-end purchaser. I'll e-mail you my address, I'm outta here for now...

Long NY Times article today:

They’ve Got Those Old, Hard-to-Find Blues

Yeah, tefteller in the lights.

mpls 78 folks in effect:

VINTAGE MUSIC and Pepper Patriot present:

THE FIRST ANNUAL 78 SUMMIT.

A FESTIVAL OF RECORDED MUSIC ON 78 RPM DISCS.
Video by John Akre.
Brion Gysons psycho-acoustic dreamachine.

Saturday Oct. 24th, 2009.
Polish National Catholic School.
607 22nd ave N.E.
Mpls. 55418.

PARTICIPANTS INCLUDE:
pepper patriot - turkish sanat and halk turkusu, clarinets.
mr.gosh - japanese pop, burlesque.
doc rock - hobo and cowboy songs.
dj otomox - mexican conjuntos, raymond scott.
scott(vintage music) - ernest tubb 16" transcription records.
mike(vintage music) - obscure female vocalists.
drew miller - sex, drinking, and violence @ 78 rpm.
dreamland faces.

looks awesome.

ernest tubb 16" transcription records

what a funny thing to specialize in!

so what's up with the weirdo 78 revival? seems to have reached some kind of critical mass.

someone needs a good think piece on this pronto.

is it just a sort of hyper-sophisticated outgrowth of the (itself quite limited) "vinyl revival" (that is, trying to distinguish itself from yet part of a larger phenomenon)? can both be said to result from the loss in aura of recorded music thanks to digitalization, and consequent desire to fetishize the specificity of 78s as individual objects? the fact that they are the result of mass production is sometimes obscure by the way the revival presents them. ok gotta go.

http://www.collectorsfrenzy.com/Details.aspx?id=300384753383

PARAMOUNT 12730--JOHN BERTRAND & MILTON PITRE NICE VG

VOCALION 5280 -- BLIND UNCLE GASPARD FLIP SIDE DELMA LACHNEY VG

VOCALION 5319-- DENNIS McGEE ONE SIDE HAS LABEL SCRATCHED OUT VG

VOCALION 5348--DENNIS McGEE ONE SIDE HAS LABEL SCRATCHED OUT VG

COLUMBIA 15325--JOSEPH FALCON & CLEMO BREAUX BETTER THAN VG A COUPLE HAVE A MINOR DISH.

THESE ARE "NOT" MINT RECORDS, BUT ARE BETTER THAN THE AVERAGE ONES YOU FIND. NO DEEP SCRATCHES , DIGS. NORMAL WEAR.

THESE ARE FOR SALE LOCALLY AND I RESERVE THE RIGHT TO END THE AUCTION "ANYTIME". THEY ARE ON CONSIGNMENT.

DO NOT BID ON THESE IF YOU ARE A WHINER , NIC PICKER,CRY BABY, OR IF YOU ARE ON SOME SORT OF BUDGET. I DO NOT NEED TO

HEAR YOU ONLY WANT ONE OR TWO, OR THAT YOU ALREADY HAVE THEM BUT COULD USE A SECOND COPY, OR THEY ARE REALLY

COMMON, OR YOU NEED TO SELL A FEW THINGS BEFORE YOU PAY. ASK QUESTIONS BEFORE YOU BID--STUDY PICTURES CLOSE.

SHIPPING WILL BE $40 PRIORITY INSURED. NO OVERSEAS SHIPPING ! AGAIN ASK QUESTIONS BEFORE YOU BID !! GOOD LUCK !!

um, if i'm laying down $1,500 or more i'm sure as hell going to be "nitpicky."

NIC PICKER

i'm scared that i am going to get addicted to buying 78s. got some really nice hawaiian stuff in. sooooo cool. edison cylinders too! and some country stuff, which is less high quality but still really cool & plenty of stuff i want to own.

really nice sol hoopii & kalama's quartet 78s

heh
http://m.post-gazette.com/Article.aspx?itemid=1046759

http://www.bluesworld.com/Auc40preview1.html

drool
i decided i'm gonna collect 78s but only ones i'll actually listen to & enjoy. ugh, i despise my life choices.

i have all those.

only going to collect, btw:
-hot hawaiian geetar
-old-timey ballads & fiddle breakdowns
-brother duos (shelton bros, delmore bros, blue sky boys, monroe bros etc etc.)

but i intend to be very discerning within these categories.

of course if i saw a calypso 78 i just had to have...

also entertaining the idea of specializing in quebecois reels & jigs.

Old guy across the street who always got his newspaper at noon while wearing a smoking jacket went into the nursing home. Tag sale last weekend. He bought everything he ever liked on CD in the 90s, but it doesn't look like he played it. $5000 stereo. Hundreds of Rat Pack related CDs. The vinyl was picked over before I got there. But there was a two foot row 78s. Every single one was Glenn Miller, and ever single on was sub-captioned "Foxtrot".

Was "Foxtrot" some sort of catch-all phrase for jazzy dancing? I think of it as a 20s thing, so I'm trying to figure out what it meant at the end of the 30s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-47z3RQRQ1w

^^ have a nice copy of this one as of a few days ago..

foxtrot means music for kinda mellow dancing as opposed to something described on a label as a 'stomp' or 'hot dance' which tend to be more uptempo & rhythmically driving. many many many many many records were listed as fox trot. i am not a historian of dancing so i don't know if the dance came before or after the label designation. the ones that are usually really boring is anything described as a 'waltz' tbh unless it's a string band record imo.

Found this blog today, might be of interest to y'all: http://excavatedshellac.com

damn ian, should i sell off a shitload of my CDs and LPs are start buying some 78s?

this seems like a very bad moment in history to be acquiring this habit.

don't start. it is a bad time. i should not have started.

tbh though, i did win two alfred karnes 78s on ebay over the weekend and hopefully they play as well as they were described. i love that fuckin guy. i also got a gamelan 78.

i was at a flea market last weekend and there was a victrola player selling for $400 ... is that insanely expensive, or is that standard pricing ...?

i have no idea how much victrolas generally sell for... it probably varies widely by condition, vintage, make/model etc.

whoa a gamelan 78!

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/11/nashville-musician-shingles-roof-with-records.php
not 78s exactly but you get it

Got a pretty great 3CD collection on Dust to Digital in today's mail - Baby, How Can It Be?: Songs of Love, Lust and Contempt from the 1920s and 1930s. Liner notes by Nick Tosches, but they're easily avoided.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/11/23/arts/music/20101128-arhoolie-ss-slide-0S5F/20101128-arhoolie-ss-slide-0S5F-slide.jpg

Arhoolie at 50

One thing I have always wondered about re 78 collectors: Are they just collecting them because they are rare, or are they heavily into the Great American Songbook and pre-rock music?

they're heavily into american music of the twenties & early thirties, usually.

there was a record shop that only sold 78's a block or two away from where i was staying in edinburgh last summer. it was run by these two old cranks who claim to have been against vinyl from the beginning and wanted nothing to do with it or any the music on it

Of course it was the evil vinyl that corrupted the younger generation and got them into overtly erotic and noisy music with screaming singers. :)

I wish I was a 78 collector - they're cool dudes imo

Of course it was the evil vinyl that corrupted the younger generation and got them into overtly erotic and noisy music with screaming singers. :)

― You're Twistin' My Melody Man! (Geir Hongro), Monday, November 29, 2010 9:29 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

Funny those guys sound to you what you like to use ;)

What a beautiful thread...you know if you were a serious collector you wouldn't miss the old music. The artwork on the labels is high quality, I am saving every photo!

I am not a collector (don't have any others), but I bought some today. Re-purposed from the Buy That For $1 thread:

$2, total, at an Austin garage sale today for 40 78-RPM records -- mostly looks like square dance music on local Texas labels like Blue Star and Longhorn, but one is Red Foley "Milk Bucket Boogie"/"Salty Dog Rag" on Decca; another (sadly slightly chipped -- the only one I've seen that is) is unfortunately named Western Swing guy Adolph Hofner and the San Antonians "Cotton Eyed Joe"/"Put Your Little Foot" on Columbia. There's also a "Cotton Pickin' Polka" by Lester Woytek, and at least one other version of "Cotton Eyed Joe." There seem to be a few each by the Sundowners and by Red Warrick, whoever they are. Also included in the box were file dividers for all the records, and -- weirder -- lots and lots of lyric (square dance call) sheets and/or dance instructions for individual songs, some of which look like they were officially issued by the record companies with the records, but others of which are either typed out or written out longhand. Also, an 80-page pamphlet/mini-book called It's Fun To Square Dance: Six Easy Lessons By Louie Ratliff, one Elks Club card, and two cards apparently allowing dancers free "goofs". All for $2.

Now all I need is to get a 78 needle.

was just listening to r crumb on this wfmu show: http://wfmu.org/playlists/AP
i don't collect but for some reason i like hearing collectors gab about it.