Pete Whelan Interview

Pete Whelan is a legendary figure among country blues record collectors. His first collection which he sold many years ago was among the best in the world and his new collection is fast approaching it in stature. In 1960, after many years of collecting, Pete started his Origin Jazz Library label, the first label devoted to reissuing country blues 78s on long playing vinyl. Much credit is due Pete for bringing early blues to a wider audience.

A few years later he began publishing 78 Quarterly, a magazine primarily devoted to early blues and jazz and the collecting of such records. Issues 1 and 2 came out around 1967, and, after a hiatus of twenty-five years, issue 3 appeared. Since then, issues 1 and 2 have been reissued in a single volume, and issues 4 through 9 have appeared at one year intervals. The appearance of a new 78 Quarterly is always welcome news in the world of jazz and blues. Some of the most eminant authorities in the field publish their work in it.

Pete Whelan is a thoughtful and serious man yet welcomed me most affably, proudly gave me a tour of his collection of exotic palm trees, and played me several records after the interview and expounded on each. Sadly it was all I had time for.

I'd like to ask you first about the genesis of OJL.

Oh yeah. That began in 1960 and I decided I wanted to start resissuing quote the real country blues. Sam Charters had brought out on RBF records called The Country Blues.

What was not real about that?

It was real, but not real enough. At that time, although I hadn't identified them as such, I was more interested in the delta singers and Mississippi in general. Not that I wanted to get into a competition. Oddly enough, our first album was going to be Robert Johnson because, not that I thought that he was any better than say Charlie Patton or Tommy Johnson or Son House, but that it would get us on our feet. Even though he was unknown his singing was so spectacular... So I scheduled all this and Columbia got wind of it. Frank Driggs had just been hired by Columbia to bring out a Robert Johnson album. So that was it. Frank Driggs very politely asked us not to do it. My partner at the time was a guy I'd gone to boarding school with named Bill Givens.

What school was it?

Solebury School in New Hope,PA, the same school Fred Ramsey went to, oddly enough. I used to see him peddling around on his bicycle at that time, this was long after he'd graduated when I was there. Fred Ramsey was about six feet two and he rode this great big high bicycle and he was tall and skinny and the headmaster at Solebury was also tall and skinny with a short beard and had this big adams apple and he kept saying to me "I said "that's Fred Ramsey, the author of "Jazzmen," which was the first book on jazz and a little bit on blues, to come out. So, anyway, "Doc" Washburn as we called him, said he was very disappointed with Fred. "Doc" said he was a wonderful student and he had such promise and he wound up in the "dead end of jazz."

Getting back to OJL, I was going to bring Bernie Klatzko in as a partner, and Bernie was very nice, but at that time we were competing ferociously for rare country blues. I had started a little bit earlier. I started collecting when I was twelve years old.

What got you started?

Just hearing the music. I was interested in jazz also at the same time. It was more reputable because it had a collegiate air about it. I got interested in blues collecting around 1952. And it was thanks primarily to the influence of James McKune, who was a pioneer blues collector, one of the very few. He was collecting in the thirties and nobody knew about him but he was brilliant. He worked for the post office and was a great writer. He had been a New York Times rewrite man. And then he worked in the Brooklyn office of the New York Times, he sort of had this slow descent in his life and he wound up working in the Post Office and, ultimately, he became an alchoholic. He never drank (before). Sometime in the fifties it was like a magnet between him and alchohol and he became a derelict and was, I don't know if this should be mentioned, but he was like a closet homosexual. I didn't know but Bill Givens spotted it right away. And one day, it was 1971, I got a call from Bernie Klatzko, I was down in Key West by then, saying that McKune had been murdered, found in a hotel room, sort of like a skid row hotel on East 4th St., but this homicide detective had found a letter from Bernie with his address on it and he contacted him. He was found sitting in a chair, bound and gagged, and had been murdered by a serial killer who had murdered seven or eight other people in New York and I don't think he was ever caught to this day.

How did you fall under McKune's influence?

I met him one afternoon in 1954 at Big Joe's Jazz Record Center. He lived in one room in the Y.M.C.A. and he had all his records in cardboard boxes under his bed. And he would pull out one and say "here's the greatest blues singer in the world" I'd say, "Oh yeah?" 'cause I had just discovered this guy, Sam Collins, who was great, and I was intrigued by the label, Electrobeam Gennett and Black Patti. Jim pulls out this Paramount by Charlie Patton. I said "Oh yeah, sure," and, of course, he was right! So being like the avid collector that I was, McKune introduced me to a friend of his named Pete Kaufman who ran a bunch of liquor stores in New York, a very mild-mannered guy who was a pioneer blues collector in the sense that he was collecting country blues at around the same time that the Ertegun brothers were, they dropped out or something, went into the record business, big time. Pete Kaufman was about to sell some of his records. So I bought these incredible rarities, as it turned out later. I knew they were rarities, like I paid a hundred dollars in the early, around 1959, '60 for a mint copy of Skip James' "Devil Got My Woman." You know it would later turn out that that record in that condition would start at $3000 today. I was picking up these things from various collectors. From Jake Schneider. I'd go to Jake Schneider's every Saturday and spend most of the day there going through his list and not knowing...he had everything, just about, and not knowing who was what, I'd ask McKune, and some of the ones he didn't know either, nobody knew. So I'd try to get to play them, only for a few seconds and I'd take 'em off and buy 'em if they were good. If they were bad, I'd let them play through. Not that Jake could have told the difference. Henry Renard, Jake's assistant at the time (1954), had been collecting blues since 1950. Anyway, that's how I started.

There were some European collectors who were buying, for the most part, urban blues, especially people from England, and ordering them, so I was sort of competing with them and I missed a lot of records that way. Another collector of European jazz records, named Hal Flaxer, would buy records from Jake to trade, blues records, going by want lists that English and French collectors wanted. A lot of them went overseas and dissapeared. The fifties was primarily a time of ferocious collecting at rather low prices, and it was like hit or miss. If I got a chance to hear the records, it was great. Luck was with me at that time and I would pick up things that nobody knew about like Kid Bailey on Brunswick. I got a rare Son House "Preaching The Blues" from Dick Spottswood who didn't like it. And another one, a Patton "Gonna Move To Alabama" and "Moon Going Down." I picked them up here and there. A guy named Bob Travis who had just come into New York from Washington had found a whole collection of mint Deccas in a record store in Washington, D.C. and in amongst all those Deccas was a mint copy of Son House's "My Black Mama" on Paramount. The deal was that I would come over and bring records every week, and actually it was a lot of fun, Bob Travis gave me the record in exchange for letting him tape all these records. And this all added up into starting a record company. For a while, Bob Travis was our recording engineer. There was something exciting about letting people hear this music. And that's why Bill Givens and I called our second album "Really! The Country Blues" although I think he and Sam Charters had a bit of competititon.

Givens was also a collector?

No. He wasnt a collector. I was afraid to get a collector as a partner. We'd be competing for the same... Basically he handled the business and production end, and then after...we brought out five issues...after about five years we had the whole thing "cornered" at that time. There was nobody else doing specifically that kind of thing. But the problem was there was never enough money and I was having marital problems at the time, then I was working at this job long hours, it was too much for me 'cause I could never get any sleep. Bill Givens wanted the company so I gave it to him. He moved out to California. So then I started up 78 Quarterly in the late sixties. That of course didn't make any money. But I enjoyed doing it for two issues and then I came down to Key West, having sold a lot of records along the way, most of my great collection The collection I have now is almost as good but it will never be as good as it was.

What made you start 78 Quarterly back up again?

I don't know. I just thought...I kept getting letters about the first two issues. After so many years...I thought, "now I can do it, I don't have a full time job," but it still turned out to be very time consuming. 'Cause most magazines have these great staffs of reporters and typesetters and photographers and others. It's like a ten man job.

Believe me, I know that. I'm a one man shop myself.

Thank God I'm starting to use this OCR program where the computer reads the typefaces and translates it into..it goes right into Microsoft Word and once it gets in there I can bring it into Pagemaker and just do everything with it. So I'm trying that out now for the first time in the coming issue.

Getting back to when I was twelve years old, once in a while I'd hear this music and I didn't know what it was. There was nothing about it. I'd hear it on the radio and they'd say "this is by somebody or other" and I'd hear this great music and that would be it. I'd ask people about it and at the time....so I went into a record store in Asbury Park, New Jersey, this was of course in the era of 78s. I asked the proprietor behind the counter "I'm looking for a certain kind of music." I didn't have the nerve to say you know like "black people." I said "It sounds kind of sweet." He said "Can you describe it?" I said "It sounds sweet." To a twelve year old it did sound that way. So finally he got around to...I kept trying to describe it and I said "Maybe it's like blues or something," but I was hardly familiar with the word. So then he reached down under the counter and brought out these stacks of records and he said "You mean race records." It brought a flash to my face. That was the first time I'd ever heard that term used. That there were actually were race records specifically for black people. So I went into this booth like in these 1940s movies, people brought records into a booth and played them on this phonograph, and I picked out certain ones. But these were all like the very last of the race records to come out on very late blue-label Vocalion. Nothing really old there, unfortunately in retrospect.

Good enough to whet your appetite.

Yes. So I picked out things like Yas Yas Girl, (Merline Johnson), Lil Johnson, and then there was a group, a regional jazz band from Memphis, James DeBerry and his Memphis Playboys, I still have the record. But, anyway, that's what started me off.

Then, when I was living in Philadelphia by the time I was thirteen or fourteen I used to go down to South Street, the only white boy on the street. And I'd go into all kinds of shops, appliance stores, record stores, I found a Ma Rainey in a garbage can and it was the shiniest, most mint Paramount I'd ever seen in my life. Like the glaze wasn't gold, it was light gold it was so new looking. I went all the way along a twenty block area of South Street. I hit it. One summer I'd spend like four hours going. Once in a while a black person would ask me what I was looking for and I'd say "old records" and I'd go up into their house and they'd show me what they had and I'd buy what I could afford. There was a guy that had a record store, apparently for collecors, but on the other hand, were there that many collectors? He would write on the labels in black crayon the prices, and nothing was more than seventy five cents. The only things that were, were the records that were under the counter for the big time collectors that would come in and they would be like the Armstrong items. Which at the time I felt I should have been interested in but wasn't that much interested in, along with the Beiderbecke stuff. So I was satisfied to get blues records and the jazz stuff that wasn't sought after like Clarence Williams on Okeh. So I kept doing that and doing that, went through college, and then I started subscribing to the Record Changer when I was thirteen in boarding school, which was the pioneer, great jazz magazine.

Who did that?

That was, different owners, when I subscribed it was run by a printer named Gordon Gullickson who lived in Washington, D.C. Then it was taken over by, there was an interim ownership by I've forgotten who. I think the Ertegun brothers played a role in it. Then Bill Grauer and Orin Keepnews took it over and unfortunately the circulation which was incredibly high to begin with, it was like 14,000, 'cause there were a lot of dixieland collectors coming out of World War II, going to college, getting out of college. But it declined by the 1950s to about 3000. They just couldn't make a go of it. It came out monthly. At the very end I think, 1957 it came out once that year.

How important do you think it was in shaping the direction and scope of record collecting.

I think it was the main shaper of record collecting. But at that time it was almost like a propaganda machine, that jazz was what really counted and was meaningful, and blues was just a fringe except for Leadbelly. Everybody thought Leadbelly was great. And in a way he was, as a singer recreating folk songs, but he didn't have that emotional appeal to me.

Did you set out to change that by starting OJL?

Exactly. Of course later on ...a great thing for me that was really exciting was the beginning of rock and roll in the mid fifties. Everybody downgraded it. I thought it was tremendous but nothing I would collect. You could really hear some great things on the radio. Anyway, the blues went from being a fringe thing..now they're kind of like a mainstream thing. Unfortunately, jazz was like twenty years ahead of the blues in terms of acceptance. It seemed like the old time New Orleans jazz musicians were at least twenty to forty years older than the pioneer blues singers, at least those that recorded. And jazz collectors were also twenty years older than blues collectors.

And I've always been very interested in the origin of "hot music." Not necessarily blues, 'cause that's sort of documented in terms of it's getting it's name. That's all been done. Like Steve Calt is really good at that. The introduction of the Spanish guitar had a lot to do with country blues just after the turn of the century, when blues became self-accompanied. Before that "field hollers" and stuff, except for the banjo, existed. But I, they're about ten records that I can think of that would be the equivalent of, not blues exactly...

Pre-blues?

Pre-blues. Frank Stokes. The one picture that never shows up, and I managed to get a copy, one side is "Old Sometime Blues" I'll play it for you. The other side is even better: "I'm Going Away Blues" And another is one that's in a way not very good but it's sort of fascinating, because it probably goes back at least to the Civil War and maybe before, and it's by "Beans" Hambone El Morrow and he plays a cigar box with strings and he opens up by saying "I've been singing this song since the generation before the Revolution, the Revolution being the Revolutionary War, and the guy really sounds old. It was recorded by Victor in North Carolina in '31 or '32. And then there's just about any record by, another Victor, Andrew and Jim Baxter, you don't know them? I'll have to play that. But these are like really early ones. And Charlie Patton's "Elder Green Blues," and I could come up with some more if I really thought about it. 'Cause some of them, like Sam Collins, were really old when they recorded, although he doesn't sound particularly old. But the great tragedy is that the blues and jazz collector, there were only a few blues collectors, but this vast army of jazz collectors got together with the blues collectors, 'cause for one thing, I went into this record store called The Jazz Record Center run by an American Indian from Arizona named Big Joe Klauberg, off of Sixth Ave. and there was Jelly Roll Morton's former manager, Harrison Smith, holding forth and I was asking him questions about the legendary Freddy Keppard. Along with Perry Bradford who was also there. They both thought Keppard was the greatest trumpet player they ever heard, but by the time he recorded, they said, he had declined. But they said, Perry Bradford said, he was so loud you could hear him playing from 125th St. and Lennox Ave. all the way down here to 47th St. The typical exageration they had made about Buddy Bolden. Perry Bradford said he was in New Orleans before World War I, and had never heard anyone mention Buddy Bolden. Harrison Smith turned out to be Sam Collins' manager and that was never picked up on any of the jazz interviews that he had done. He said " Yeah, Sam Collins..." I didn't know enough, I should have asked...I wasn't doing research then. You know what he was like, how old he was, all this stuff, and at the time he said "I found him in Kentucky" not that he was from Kentucky, he said "that's where I found him and I brought him up with some other fellows" being like the Booker Orchestra and Taylor's Dixie Serenaders up to the Gennett studios in Richmond, 'cause he was a Gennett talent scout at the time, and recorded them. But anyway. The problem was, the blues were just a fringe thing to jazz collectors.

You mention the origins of "hot jazz." What did you discover about that?

Very little actualy. I still don't know. I think the origins had to do with sanctified singing which goes way, way back, even before the Civil War, or acapella as it was sometimes called when it was unaccompanied. It was always there. In fact Sam Charters wrote a description of acapella black singing, off rhythm, in the 1840s it was noted, a southern woman writing about church music noticed that about black singing. Apparently she was enthralled by it. So it was very early. In fact, I think, there's a portrait, a painting of a black man with a banjo during the Revolutionary War. Or a banjo-like instrument. Of course they decried the fact that black musicians abandoned the banjo, leaving it to white country musicians, for the smoother sounding guitar, but the blacks have always been ahead musically. The odd thing too is that black country music sounded a lot like white country music in the 1800s, the violin, which country black musicians abandoned. The last great one to play it, the most under-rated violinist is Henry Sims who played with a screaching tone which he abandoned for a smoother style when he recorded with Muddy Waters in 1942.

I'm very curious about Buddy Bolden 'cause I haven't abandoned jazz. I still have a jazz collection, although I've had to sacrifice.. I had to sacrifice a Freddy Keppard Paramount to get some other records, to get a Tommy Johnson Paramount. But I've always been curious about Buddy Bolden and when I interviewed Fred Ramsey (78 Quarterly #4) it was disappointing because he wouldn't venture even a guess at what Bolden sounded like. "Not for me to imagine what he sounded like." But I can imagine it. I think the earliest jazz had a lot to do with repetition. Repeat a phrase often enough it suddenly becomes hot. I could demonstrate it on the piano. By itself it doesn't sound like much, but when you keep repeating it all of a sudden it takes on a new life, for example, Jimmy Blythe's Ragamuffins' "Adam's Apple" on Paramount, with Keppard repeating the same 6-note phrase over and over again.

Like a tribal chant?

Which I find hard to relate to though, because the rhythm is not syncopated. Syncopated is a tricky word too though. Perhaps what I really mean is an implied double timing in regular timing. Maybe it doesn't come out, but that makes it all the more exciting.

Now Patton was great that way, much more than any of his contemporaries. He had this wonderful quality of aniticipation like he was going to continue but he would hold back just enough. I can't really think of anybody that does that. I'm sure there are, that recorded. A good example of that would be his version of "Spoonful" He'd talk about "a spoonful" but then he'd say "all I really want is another.." and then he'd play "Spoonful" on the guitar. He built this thing up. The more a thing is repeated the subtler you can get. The simpler the margins the more complex they can be, it's the same as in writing. You can't start with the whole horizon. You have to narrow things down to their simplest elements. Like Hemingway, his genius was recognizing that instinctively. A lot of the great modern writers, like Flannery O'Connor, knew exactly that. Simplicity gives detail meaning. Like in "A Good Man Is Hard To FInd" I'll never forget her description of the killer's tie. The tie had little peacocks in it. There was something really deadly about that.

I think a lot of jazz had to do in general with church music. I seem to recall hearing that Buddy Bolden may have played trumpet in church. I don't know if the Organization of Sanctified Singing existed but it existed before it was named.

Two of the things I've read lately are Oliver's "Savannah Syncopaters" and John Storm Roberts' "Black Music of Two Worlds" Roberts has made it his business to look not only at jazz and blues but at tribal music in the Carribean, South America and Africa.

Now Bahamian music I can relate to. I remember seeing a movie many years ago and they had church sanctified singing. Obviously I don't think it was influenced by sanctified singing in this country but it was the same.

From Oliver and Storm Roberts, I think it's summed up in the word "communal." Group music, most often for a task or a ceremony. In my mind that makes sense for the roots of jazz.

It's interesting. Another example I know of, and Bernie Klatzko pointed this out, speaking of repetition, there was an album that came out in 1940 recorded in New Orleans by Heywood Hale Braun Jr. on "Delta." This was before the discovery of Bunk Johnson, and it was done with Kid Rena on cornet. These were like really old timers and Alphonse Picou on clarinet and another creole clarinetist, Lorenzo Tio, Jr.

Other members of the band?

The only one that I think was at all familiar later on was the trombonist, Jim Robinson, but there was one song in there which really must have sounded like Bolden and it's basically repeating the chord over and over, it was called "Get It Right." If you ever come across the album, it was recorded on a label called Delta, then it was reissued by some other label. And I have it around somewhere, I don't know if I can find it. It's called "Get It Right" and the trumpet who was out of practice, as they all were later on, it was called Kid Rena's Jazz Band, but I think that's probably the way they sounded.

Kip Lornell asks me to ask you whether the Dixieland Revival of the late thirties and forties affected the scope and interest in collecting 78s.

Yeah, it did. The late thirties--there weren't that many collectors, in the late thirties they could pick up records in the basements of record stores pretty easily. But it was all jazz, the interest was in jazz, which reminds me, there was this pioneer collector, died a couple of years ago in his eighties, named Bill Love, and he wrote me...I asked him about country blues, how often did he come across it....he said that he had found three mint stocks of Paramounts from beginning to end all the way up to Mississippi Shieks last record, the L master series and he said that he just went through the records, probably got 'em for like two cents apiece, picked out all the jazz and left the blues behind...three times! And he was living in Tennessee, a great state to be in in the 1930s. These were Paramount remainder stocks that Paramount was dumping to anybody that wanted 'em. Three stocks wound up in New York. I think Jake Schneider got quite a few of them. He found his at the Apollo Music Shop at 125th and Lennox in the basement. The Paramounts were a dollar apiece, all new, and the Victors, all new, were fifty cents apiece. They recognized something I guess in Paramounts. There was a remainder stock in Bloomingdale's basement in the East 60s and Lexington Avenue that Bill Russell came across and he picked up everything, I think, that was there. It was only there a short time. Then there was another store which I used to walk by all the time later on, and McKune pointed out where John Hammond got his Paramounts from. It was called the Polish Music Store. It had another name but he called it The Polish Music Store. It was on 3rd Ave. and 14th. It was either 2nd or 3rd Avenue on 14th St. So of course, at the time, obviously that happened like twenty years before or more.

What year would that have been?

When they picked those up? I think probably 1938, '39, maybe into the early forties. I think Bill Love, one of his Paramount finds, he picked up some blues which wound up with Jake Schneider. But they were few and far between. It was benign neglect.

What about the folk boom of the sixties in terms of it's impact?

It seemed to have begun with a combination of three elements, the rock and roll which was a good part of it, the white folk singers from the fifties. This woman singer had an antique store in Greenwich Village and I bought a dulceola which is what Washington Phillips played, I don't know if you're familiar with him. I should play you one of his records. But unfortunately when I got divorced I had to leave the dulceola. It didn't work but it could have been restringed. It was a keyboard dulcimer. I think that's the only recording by anybody, black or white, of a dulceola. Doug Seroff sent me some ads for a dulceola from back around 1914 with photographs of it, and Roger Misciewisz calls up my ex-wife every year at around Christmas time to ask her about the dulceola and she threatens to call the police so....

The other element was of course country blues. They're sort of almost vying with each other in a way. It's the same thing with white recreations of black-inspired music and all the juice goes out of it. It's all repetitious, like they learn it note for note. And like some of them are like really facile guitar players.

I'm in complete agreement on the point and I don't think we need to belabor it. Rediscovering Hurt and James and House.

That was a big thing.

It's impact on the "collecting hobby?"

It certainly sparked it. I was of course collecting blues way before that. It sort of brought a new generations of...

Yeah. Right. Unfortunately, the rarest records always come through as the highest priced ones. Unfortunately it happens that, at least in the case of Paramounts and some other labels that the rarest happen to be the best, so it's a deadly combination financially.

Kip's questions are quite interesting. Why is there such a dearth of blacks collecting black music?

I think they're slightly embarassed by the music as something, a tinge of something that their grandparents liked which they found kind of embarassing. The only part of that music that isn't embarassing is the original source, sanctified singing. Except in places like New Orleans, and, oddly enough in Key West, the marching brass band tradition continued, but generally the new generations of black musicians kept shunning the old time music that embarassed them. And I think there'll probably be a turning point at which time they'll rediscover it. I am really out of touch with current blues, but I understand that Frank Stokes' grandson is singing in Memphis and is sort of proud of his grandfather.

I think that the factor you're discussing is beginning to change now. I'm not sure that it isn't too late to acquire an important group of pre-war blues records. But to at least have an appreciation of that history on the part of black people.

It would be interesting for record companies like Shanachie to take out ads in certain black magazines just to see, to test the waters to see if there'd be any interest. The advertising direction would be a lot different. Strictly from the standpoint of black history. I think that would win over some....but the black people that would buy that kind of stuff probably you wouldn't recognize...they'd be like upper middle class professionals that are interested in black history.

I manage a black singer, her name is Clara McDaniel...

Any relation to Hattie McDaniel?

I don't think so. Her influences are along the lines of Albert King, B.B. King, Bobby Bland, that generation of singers and players, and I'm anxious to put pre-war, and particularly St. Louis pre-war women in front of her.

Bessie Mae Smith. I've got to play you a Bessie Mae Smith with Wesley Wallace. I don't know if you know that record. It's really a fantastic record.

But I want to see if she will comprehend these precursers to the music she learned as being blues.

Yeah, wouldn't that be interesting. The early Memphis Minnie would be perfect. Her greatest record, and nobody mentions it, it's such a great record, is "Frankie Jean." Do you know that record?

No, I don't. But I've been searching for Memphis Minnie's best record to have Clara learn the song, so I'm happy to know that one.

As Rich Nevins aptly pointed out, it's like one of the earliest "rap" songs if you look at it from that point of view. It talks along with the music, but it does more than that. I don't like rap of course because I'm mystified.

There's much that I don't like about it, but at the same time I feel like it really is the blues of the modern era in the black community.

Why do you find, this is another of Kip's questions, why do you find the Paramount/Gennett complex of companies so fascinating?

Small companies were willing to take a chance. There was equally great stuff on Victor and Vocalion almost, but the small companies wouldn't reappear again until the beginnings of rock and roll in the fifties, which lent a certain air of excitement about it. These companies were small and they'd record anybody. Gennett, anybody that walked in the studio with an instrument they recorded and more likely than not they issued the record. Paid 'em on the spot, like fifteen bucks. But no contracts. Paramount sort of operated the same way but they were a little more organized in terms of talent scouts. I have this one guy, a one man band, which is so bizarre and wierd that nobody would have recorded it except Paramount and Gennett, and remind me to play it, this guy, his name is Tommy Settlers and His Blues Moaner a record I traded Wardlow out of. He stops in the middle, he's playing like garbage can lids, and then he stops and hums and does something else with a stovepipe, it's that kind of thing. That no other company except those two would ever record I don't think. Of course Vocalion recorded Henry Thomas who was a nineteenth century singer. Better than, much better than Leadbelly. See, the problem with Leadbelly is that he was re-creating. In retrospect I get the feeling, so the spark has gone out of it, with a few exceptions. If they bring a guy in a studio once or twice and he's doing the same things he's doing out on the street threre's a difference there that a slavishly devoted white audience might not feel or comprehend.

Another Lornell question, and I think quite a good one: what do you see as the role of large institutions in terms of record collecting?

I see them as the enemy because with libraries in general the records just get filed away for all time. They are hopefully available to reissue companies but as far as collecting, they're gone, out of circulation and they might as well not exist. They just make them more rare again. It's like breaking up records.

Would a novice such as myself stand a better chance to hear this record if Library of Congress had it, or if you have it and I approach you as a stranger and a novice?

If I have it, and most collectors are willing to either send tapes to reissue companies without going through a lot of red tape for nothing or, in the case of like Shanachie, I'll send the original record 'cause I know Rich Nevins is like ultra-careful and we send them express mail.

It was Mike Stewart that first expressed that hatred of the Library to me, and as you discuss it, I have to see your point.

I mean, once it gets into either the government or private foundations, there's probably not that much difference. It automatically gets tied up. If you were a record company and you went in and approached them, sure, maybe they'd let you reissue them but probably not if you were going to take the records physically out of there, and that's true of, I think, every single one of them. I think all record collectors feel that way.

My thinking when Firk told me this was "well you just want 'em for yourself." I thought in an institution they'll be preserved better for all time and people can access them, but now I see the other side of the question.

I mean if it were a visual thing it would be different. In the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, at least when I was there in the late sixties they had this great array of beautiful...the most impressive thing there were the manor houses, miniature manor houses, that a serf would devote his life to building. I think they're in glass cases and you can go by and see them by the hundreds. They're incredible. But, you know, again, maybe somebody there decides they're not going to show that, what they really want to do is highlight the Rembrandts that they've got. It's a visual thing and they do belong in museums and they do take care of them. But records are things, you can look at the labels and they're wonderful, that's part of the charm, art deco twenties labels, but the main thing is the music and there's just no way you can get to play them or hear them except through reissues and it'd be impossible for a small reissue company to request certain 78s and they don't have the time, they're too busy filing them when they get around to it.

One last Lornell question, the effect of price guides on record collecting?

They keep changing. The values of records...most people that put out price guides, they get their priorities mixed up. There are rare records and not so rare records. You need the combination of the right music and the rarity to make them valuable, and certain labels have a value all of their own. Like even an organist, there was a guy in the twenties named Ralph Waldo Emerson, the same name as the poet, who made like two or three organ solos on Black Patti. I think the guy was white even. Like, that's collectable just because it's on Black Patti which is a Mayo WIlliams brainstorm. He and the son-in-law of Harry Gennett formed Black Patti so they used Gennett masters. Theoretically it was an all-black label, but much better than say Black Swan was earlier 'cause that was very urban stuff. People like Sam Collins, Long Cleve Reed, and Jaybird Coleman got on it, but Black Patti only lasted fifty three issues then it went out of business, they couldn't make any money. But the label itself is so incredible looking, you know the gold peacock and the purple background.

Price guides are not focused enough. One guy who caught on now is Docks. The latest edition now is fairly accurate. Still, he wouldn't know that the Patton that Kip Lornell has, Jim Lee Number One, I'd offer $5000. But it would be listed in Docks as....

Two fifty to five hundred.

Right. Something like that. And the same with Son House on Paramount, Willie Brown are worth five times as much at least as what they're listed at.

Is condition....

Condition is less important on Paramounts, especially on the L master number series because they were peculiar. Late Paramounts don't sound that different from new minus to G plus. They were pressed on asphalt-like surfaces, yet they held up incredibly well to wear, they can have incredible numbers of scratches and be beat up and be graded as G to G+, and the sound comes through like it wouldn't on a Victor or a Vocalion, so that's less important on those Paramounts. When you get into other labels then it's really very important of course, and more so in jazz.

On the internet where I publish there are a great many newcomers to record collecting and to blues, people that are coming in through the Eric Clapton/Stevie Ray Vaughan door. What do you have to say from your years of experience to people who are newcomers to the music and the collecting of it?

Yeah. I hate to be critical, but there's this publication called Good Rockin' Tonight, it's like the blind leading the blind, they mean well and they're trying to get as much money...and they're focusing on Robert Johnson and getting incredible prices for records that aren't that rare.

They had in their current issue a Blind Lemon Jefferson Paramount described as "this is the newest looking Paramount we've ever seen and it's like incredible that it would be in this condition" and right there is the label, it's not Paramount 12000 series or 13000 series, it's the John Steiner reissue label from the late 1940s on 14000 series. So you know about that. They should really take it off the market cause they have a $300 minimum bid and it's worth about two dollars. It's a dub of a pretty badly recorded record to begin with.

This recalls a point I think Bob Groom made in The Blues Revival, that you would not reissue a Blind Lemon Jefferson record on OJL...

Right. Except there's only one I really like by him. I don't know why. He just turns me off. I can't...it's like he doesn't have enough swing...there's something missing there. Of course the jazz collectors thought that he was the epitome of country blues along with Ma Rainey who I actually like better. Part of it has to do with the really bad recordings that Marsh Labs made for Paramount. He apparently recorded at Marsh Labs and they were almost acoustic during an electrical era, but even so, there are a few acoustic blues singers, I mean on acoustic records, that sound good. But the only one I like by him is one called "Hot Dogs." It's a ragtime number and he really gets into that and he taps his feet and all that stuff and it's great. I wish I could say the same thing....I guess there are one or two other sides by him that I like, "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" and a couple of others but that's about it. Blind Blake I like a lot though.

The rare records section in 78 Quarterly gets accused, I think you sometimes print the letters, of being this elitest top-of-the line collectors club, and perhaps there are more copies out there than what you and your ten best collecting buddies know about.

That's very true of the jazz, there are a lot more copies. Not of the rarest blues though. They'd show up, like a couple of months ago for the first time. The Buster Johnson black-label Champion showed up in a flea market, but that's not in any kind of a collectors niche. They are showing up here and there but time is running out. And some of them I think are never going to show up like the missing Willie Brown, the missing Son House, it doesn't seem that they'll show up. The missing Henry Townsend on Paramount showed up. It wound up in yours truly collection.

So I heard. through Seroff.

Doug Seroff. I think a friend of his found it in Tennessee.

Has it been issued on CD or vinyl?

I hope so, 'cause Doug Seroff made tapes and sent them...[re-issued on Document DOCD 5411 "Too Late Too Late Volume 5] it's not in great shape, but one side is really good, the one side, apparently, Henry Townsend didn't remember making, which was "Jack Of Diamonds Georgia Rub," but he remembered the other side, "Oh Doctor, Oh Doctor." It's amazing he's still alive.

I see him with some regularity. He's really quite a sharp guy.

Pete's Picks, five or six items that don't generally get talked about, the obscurities that you think people overlook...

The only trouble with that question, the obscurities are only obscure for a short time. Then they come to the surface and of course everybody realizes they're great. I think one that's overlooked a lot is Patton's "Elder Green Blues." Everybody says "Green River," the other side, but I think Elder Green Blues is just a great Patton 'cause it's like one of the earliest things he ever did and it's to the tune of a song that was published in, I think, 1902, "Alabama Bound" so it goes way back to the last century, and another is Andrew and Jim Baxter's "Do The Georgia 'Poss") which is a nineteeth century dance, in fact in the coming issue of 78 Quarterly Doug Seroff goes into that in his article.

There is this fascination, it's like anthropology or cultural anthropology, with what pre-dates what was recorded and that we know about. It seems like that guy that came before, that guy must have really been "the guy," that guy must have had a sound that surpassed what we're able to hear. We know, in Patton's case 'cause he did get recorded, that he surpassed darn near anything that came after, and the same must be true in jazz, that there must have been an early giant who escaped recording.

Well, Freddy Keppard was the one, but by the time he recorded his skills had diminished. Of course the great clarinetist Johnny Dodds was so incredibly good. Like Louis Armstrong was good in his very earliest years but he kept doing the same thing. I don't like to criticize, but whereas Dodds kept inventing new things in the same old frame.

Want me to play you a few records before you go?