Do Not Sell At Any Price

by Amanda Petrusich

  Heneghan explained that he had recently scored an extremely rare 78 of Parker’s “Davey Crockett” on eBay. Parker was one of the first performers to be featured regularly on Chicago’s National Barn Dance, itself a precursor to The Grand Ole Opry, but his legacy was middling at best, and he is mostly known, when he is known at all, for chirping goofy folk songs like “Nickety Nackety Now Now Now.” As was often the case, Heneghan was the only serious bidder. “When I first saw it on eBay, I had a weird panicky feeling,” he said. “This was it, this was the day I’d been waiting for. But you just don’t know. All it takes is one other person. I have my archenemies on eBay—I don’t know who they are, but their monikers haunt me. When I saw ‘Davey Crockett,’ I didn’t sleep that well for a week. I knew this was it—I was never gonna see it again. All my crazy friends saw it and knew that I wanted to get it and valiantly stayed away, and then they congratulated me when I got it.” He smiled.

  Until Heneghan manages to locate a copy of Skip James’s “Devil Got My Woman”—his Holy Grail—he placates himself with smaller victories like “Davey Crockett.” That may be all he ever gets. There are only three or four known copies of “Devil Got My Woman” remaining, two of which are so damaged as to be inconsequential. The song was recorded in February 1931 in Grafton, Wisconsin, for a small record label called Paramount Records. James created eighteen sides (or nine double-sided 78s) in Wisconsin that winter, but they were commercial nonstarters, and soon after, he quit playing blues music and became a choir director in his father’s church. James wouldn’t record again until the 1960s, when he was “rediscovered” in a county hospital in Tunica, Mississippi, by an enterprising trio of blues enthusiasts who persuaded him to come out of retirement. (“Well, that might be a good idea. Might be. But right now Skip is awful tired,” he was quoted as saying.) In 1964, a sixty-two-year-old James appeared at the Newport Folk Festival, and he continued to perform sporadically until his death in 1969. Because his records weren’t especially popular or very widely sold, few copies were made, and now, more than eighty years later, collectors have a slim-to-improbable shot at finding one in playable condition.

  Still, “Devil Got My Woman” exists in infinite quantities in a remastered digital format and can be purchased instantly on iTunes for ninety-nine cents, thanks to the collector Richard Nevins, who possesses an original copy. As Nevins explained to me in an e-mail, almost any time anyone listens to “Devil Got My Woman,” regardless of the individual source, chances are good that the recording they’re hearing originated from his personal 78: “ ‘Devil Got My Woman’ was first reissued on LP in the 60s, and, like for almost all old 78s of backcountry music, no masters have survived,” he wrote. “I’d say that all reissues of this came from my copy, which is close to new and which previously belonged to [late Yazoo founder] Nick Perls. Many of the European labels that reissued this just dubbed it off the Yazoo release [1994’s The Complete Early Recordings of Skip James].”

  “Devil Got My Woman” is meandering and almost structureless, composed of little more than a three-bar vocal phrase and variations on two guitar chords, which are embellished and augmented by vocal and instrumental flourishes. That’s the technical description. I can’t really explain the rest. His falsetto careens, soaring and plummeting as if it were powered by some unseen, disreputable force. “Aw, nothin’ but the devil changed my baby’s mind,” James whimpers over a bit of nefarious-sounding guitar. My favorite part of the 2001 film Ghost World—directed and adapted by the 78 devotee Terry Zwigoff—is when Enid, a recent high school graduate played by Thora Birch, asks Seymour, a 78 collector played by Steve Buscemi, if he has any more records like “Devil Got My Woman,” and Seymour looks back at her, duly appalled: “There are no other records like that!” he yelps. When Bob Dylan featured the track on his Theme Time Radio Hour, he introduced it by declaring, “Skip had a style that was celestially divine, sounded like it was coming from beyond the rail, magic in the grooves . . . rare and unusual, mysterious and vague, you won’t believe it when you hear.” “Devil Got My Woman” is so strange, so volatile and wraithlike, I can understand why James’s biographer Stephen Calt called the song “one of the most extraordinary feats of vocalizing found in blues song.” I can see why Heneghan has been consumed by it.

  While we waited for the rest of his guests to arrive, Heneghan and I dipped crackers in the small tub of hummus he’d set out on his coffee table. I admired his walls, which were covered with framed pieces of sheet music, hung just inches apart to ensure maximum capacity. Heneghan was self-effacing about his collecting habit; he recognized the practice as maniacal and his interests as outmoded. Still, he fancied himself an amateur historian of sorts—which was not entirely unreasonable—and was also convinced that, on some level, having interesting stuff around made him a more interesting person. Ironically, it was a very twenty-first-century approach to identity: broadcasting in lieu of communicating.

  “When people come to my apartment, some walk in and get really silent, and I can tell they think it’s creepy,” he said. “And I think, Okay, your house is like the Ikea catalog, and so my stuff seems really strange. But I’m a little uncomfortable when I go to someone’s house and it looks like the Ikea catalog. This is the most thought you could put into the stuff you want to be around?” he asked, his voice rising. “Give me that, give me A, B, C, and D, because they’re on the same page? To me, that’s why George Bush was president. That’s why everyone eats at McDonald’s.”

  Even though he rarely framed it as such, collecting had clearly become, for Heneghan, a functional way of rebelling against mainstream culture. Like getting a tattoo or jamming a titanium post through your septum, packing your apartment with old records and sheet music was a semipublic way of establishing a countercultural identity, of rejecting a society that felt homogenized and unforgiving. Heneghan frequently spoke of collecting as a form of submission, as a way of giving in to basic urges and desires that other people stifled, and when he did, it wasn’t without a certain amount of pride.

  Heneghan earned his cash as a freelance video technician, setting up cameras for television shows and concerts; when pressed, he gently grumbled about the artless nature of the gig. He was particularly disgusted by the extent to which backing tracks were employed by pop stars paid mounds of cash to sing their songs live. He considered the entire enterprise an epic charade: “It sounds like the album because you’re listening to the album,” he’d spit. When he wasn’t working, Heneghan was performing with Eden; together they comprised John and Eden’s East River String Band, a beguiling old-time outfit featuring John on guitar and Eden on ukulele and vocals. When they played, they sported period-appropriate garb and strummed antique instruments. (Heneghan collected old guitars, too.) Each time I saw them perform—at bars and small clubs downtown or in Brooklyn, mostly—they enthralled the room with their charmingly antiquated odd-couple rapport. That afternoon, Heneghan told me he’d been endeavoring to get their newest self-released album, Some Cold Rainy Day, issued on 180-gram vinyl with a gatefold cover, a cardboard sleeve that opens like a book. He ran into a snag when the kid who answered the phone at the pressing plant didn’t understand what “gatefold” meant. “I finally had to ask, How old are you? I told him to find the oldest person who worked there and to ask them.”

  We ate some green grapes. A few minutes later, Heneghan buzzed in Sherwin Dunner, a jazz and blues collector who worked with Richard Nevins at Yazoo. He sat in a chair. “I notice that your Starkist lamp has a different shade than mine,” he said, surveying a Starkist tuna–brand promotional lamp perched on Heneghan’s bookshelf. He and Heneghan had identical carrying cases for their 78s, each marked with a little plaque that read MUSIC APPRECIATION RECORDS. Dunner set his box of records on the floor. The handle had been reinforced with duct tape. He had been amassing 78s for years, and, like Heneghan, understood collecting as a way of insulating oneself from a culture that was not always especially welcoming. “It’s the way you cop
e with feeling like an outsider, feeling alienated from pop or mainstream culture, which has gotten more and more controlled and oppressive and dehumanized. So you create your own world, using whatever you think has meaning or aesthetic value. It’s a world that can save you from the modern world,” Dunner told me later.

  Both Dunner and Heneghan were fervent, focused music fans with comprehensive knowledge of the various subgenres of early American music, and, accordingly, their collections were more functional than decorative. These records were not squirreled away in Plexiglas cases or sitting silent in locked boxes. They were handled with care, but they were handled—frequently and with enthusiasm, spun for friends and in private. Consequently, Heneghan had little interest in 78s that were so severely worn they no longer played properly. Both men also expressed deep vitriol for anyone who didn’t share a similar keenness for the music, like some of the more investment-minded 78 collectors who procured records because of their potential for financial appreciation. For Heneghan and Dunner, such fetishistic thinking failed to acknowledge the wealth inherent in the songs themselves.

  “That’s a level of collecting that I despise,” Heneghan said. “The guys who just buy [a record] because it’s worth something and they’re speculating that it’s going to be worth more. But with something like 78s, there’s so few of them available in the first place, and if [Sherwin] gets a good record, I may be envious or whatever, but I don’t feel like, Oh, that’s so horrible. There are other people who get a record and it’s like, Well, that’ll just sit on a shelf. No one’s enjoying it, it’s out of circulation, no one can hear it. With some of these records, there are so few copies [remaining] that really, no one can hear it,” Heneghan seethed. “There’s just something really despicable about that mentality. Those people tend to be the most, you know, ‘That’s mine now, I got that before you could get it.’ ”

  Heneghan, accordingly, is generous with his records. He is periodically approached about loaning songs to documentary films—he had just given Cleoma Breaux and Joseph Falcon’s “Fe Fe Ponchaux,” a Cajun song from 1929 of which he has one of the better known copies, to the BBC—and routinely posts requested tracks on his Facebook or MySpace page. If you manage to land an invitation to his home, he will play you anything you want to hear.

  Three more guests arrived and settled into chairs. Dunner and Heneghan realized they owned two different 78s festooned with identical stickers foreswearing future commerce. In careful, handwritten block letters, someone had printed DO NOT SELL AT ANY PRICE and affixed it to each record’s label. Considering that both 78s were purchased (in separate transactions) with the stipulation already in place, only two scenarios made sense: the author had changed his mind, or—the more likely option—he was long gone, and his estate hadn’t been terribly concerned with his posthumous wishes for his precious discs.

  I was subsumed by a strange gratitude, just then, for that faceless person and his little white stickers, for his vehemence, for his commitment to music as a thing to work for and revere and treasure and save, till death do you part. And even then, a desperate posthumous incantation, a plea: DO NOT SELL AT ANY PRICE. It felt poetic. It felt certain.

  In some ways, the parameters of the collector’s search—looking for one specific, tangible thing—made for an infinitely easier passage, a more satisfying arc, than blindly stumbling through life, trying to figure out what else would make you happy. These guys knew what would make them happy. Whether that happiness actually manifested itself at the end of the quest didn’t necessarily matter—I believed in all those old, insipid chestnuts about the journey trumping the destination, about the process being more important than the product.

  I realized then it was about the knowing, and the wanting.

  / / Two / /

  An Obnoxious, Bitter, Hateful Old Creep

  The Jazz Record Collectors’ Bash, John Fahey, the VJM Record Grading System, Blind Joe Death, Sunglasses

  The Jazz Record Collectors’ Bash is held annually on the third weekend in June, and has been (almost) every summer since 1975. The venue is typically a monolithic-looking, extra-gray Hilton directly adjacent to the Garden State Parkway in Iselin, New Jersey. Admittedly, it’s a somewhat grim locale.

  I had already made the rookie gaffe of showing up on Saturday morning instead of Thursday night. According to Gregory Winter, a record dealer I knew who was selling LPs at a booth by the door, all the serious buying and trading happened then. By the time I’d navigated the parking lot, accidentally entered something called Spats Steakhouse, ridden the elevator to the second floor, and shuffled down a carpeted hallway toward a large conference room, about twenty-five older white men were already milling about, chuckling and fondling records. In one corner, someone had set up a turntable where consumers could sample wares, and it had become a de facto meeting point—the sweating keg at a house party. I paused at the door. An older woman was seated at a folding table near the entrance, eating baked beans directly from a tin can. She asked me for my name and I gave it to her, spelling it out carefully even though I hadn’t preregistered for anything. She told me there was a ten-dollar entry fee. I dug some bills out of my skirt pocket. While I counted them out, she cheerfully admonished me for my late arrival: “You missed the gala,” she clucked. “They had a lot of fun last night.”

  Record fairs—including this one, which is small but still relatively esteemed among collectors—are not particularly monumental occasions within the 78 community. All the major sales and trades are conducted privately, beyond the callous glare of fluorescent lights. But a record fair is also not a terrible place for a newcomer to seed a collection. Vendors, knowing their audience, have usually brought out their best, most coveted merchandise. Gone are the faded Best of Bread LPs; present, suddenly, are the psych rarities, the aberrant soul 45s, the 78s. After meeting with Heneghan, I was curious about the acquisition of rare records, where they came from, how they moved. I wandered from table to table, eavesdropping on conversations. The spirit was genial, but I felt unmoored, unsure of what to do with my hands and convinced everyone was giving me side eye. There was only one other woman on the floor.

  Collectors shopping for records spend a lot of time assessing the condition of potential purchases, and at any moment I could see one or three or five of them holding a platter toward the light, carefully tilting it back and forth, like a mischievous fourth grader incinerating a line of ants. Collectors and vendors assign letter grades to records using a schematic known as the VJM Record Grading System, so named because it was refined by an editor of Vintage Jazz Mart (the world’s oldest ongoing jazz and blues magazine) in the early 1950s. It is readily available on VJM’s website and hasn’t changed in half a century. For 78s, the scale technically ranges from N (for new or unplayed, an improbable grade for a 78) to P (for unplayable), although most collectors are only interested in records that fall between V (“moderate, even wear throughout, but still very playable; surface noise and scratches audible but not intrusive”) and E (“still very shiny, near new looking, with no visible signs of wear, but a few inaudible scuffs and scratches”). Some collectors will determine a grade just by eyeballing the surface, but a 78 should be played before a decree is announced; because the composition of the shellac varied so wildly between labels, some records look significantly better (or worse) than they sound.

  I stopped at a table of 78s and picked up a record featuring the tamburitza, a stringed, mandolin-like instrument that my father, the son of Croatian immigrants, has kept hung near his bed for as long as I can remember. The dealer standing behind it was in his early sixties, with curly, dark gray hair and a paper name tag stuck to his T-shirt: Elliot Jackson. He had come to the Hilton from New Hope, Pennsylvania, and to America from England before that. Jackson had gotten into 78s as a teenager. Blues records, mostly. “I remember buying some records at auction from the States, and unless I’m completely mistaken, I believe the person selling them was John Fahey—that John Fahey,” he sa
id.

  Born in Washington, DC, in 1939 and raised in Takoma Park, Maryland, John Fahey is frequently invoked by 78 collectors as a kind of rogue idol. In pictures of him from his young adulthood, he has a confrontational slant to his face, blue eyes so sharp it almost smarts to look at them. He would later become feted for his instrumental acoustic guitar figures—rich, distantly tortured compositions that were idolized by rock musicians with avant-garde leanings, like Sonic Youth and the producer Jim O’Rourke, who heard something ghostly and eternal in them. There is a sense, in his work, of deep heartache and vexation. (“Fahey and myself are playing frustrated little symphonies on guitar,” his friend and colleague Robbie Basho once said.)

  Before he was a guitarist with a name worth dropping downtown, Fahey was a 78 rpm record collector; the two practices were acutely intertwined. He started canvasing for 78s under the tutelage of the musicologist and collector Dick Spottswood, scouring the South first for country and bluegrass records, then for primitive country blues 78s by the likes of Skip James and Charley Patton. In 1964, Fahey was part of the team (along with Henry Vestine of Canned Heat and Bill Barth of the Insect Trust) that found James convalescing in a Mississippi hospital. James and Fahey did not become fast friends. (“I didn’t like him, and he didn’t like me,” Fahey later told the writer Eddie Dean, and confirmed his virulence in his part-autobiographical, part-fictionalized book How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life, in which he calls James an “obnoxious, bitter, hateful old creep.”)

  Fahey eventually wrote a master’s thesis on Patton (A Textual and Musicological Analysis of the Repertoire of Charley Patton) for UCLA’s folklore program. He already had a sense of the ways in which white blues fans were unduly aroused by the supreme otherness of black, prewar blues musicians. Years earlier, in 1959, he’d thought up a performance moniker for himself: Blind Joe Death. It was a vicious send-up. He would totter onstage wearing dark sunglasses, someone helping him to his chair by the elbow. Blind Joe Death, it was written, played a guitar made from a baby’s coffin.