By the end of his life, Fahey was spherical and angry, living in a welfare motel near Portland, Oregon. In 1994, when the writer Byron Coley visited Fahey to profile him for Spin, he was discovered “vast, white and shirtless across a queen-sized bed,” listening to a record of General Douglas MacArthur’s farewell speech with all the lights in his room flipped off. Coley believed Fahey’s situation—his obscurity—said “as much about the paucity of the public’s imagination as it does about any of his personal failings.” Fahey died in February 2001 at age sixty-one, from complications following a sextuple coronary bypass.
Jackson and I started talking about the sorts of people who frequent record fairs in suburban hotel conference rooms. “There are loads of weird people who are doing this. The majority are fairly strange,” Jackson said. There was warmth in his voice. “I occasionally have people around to the house to buy stuff. My wife will say, ‘I don’t ever remember anyone coming around who’s an ordinary person and can have a normal conversation,’ ” he said. “You have to be a little strange to be obsessed by something.”
I bought the tamburitza record from Jackson and spent another hour milling around, until the existential stress of spending a bright summer morning inside a New Jersey Hilton started to trouble my stomach and I retreated to the elevator. I carted my 78 home and spent some time staring at it. I admired the way it looked on my shelf. I played it relentlessly. I thought, a lot, about getting another one.
A few days later, I received an e-mail from Art Zimmerman, the owner of a jazz label called Zim Records, who had hosted the bash with Jim Eigo, the founder of a publicity company called Jazz Promo Services. Its tone was unusual in its precision—almost poetic. I would eventually come to recognize this as the collectors’ voice, an exacting, thorough, and thoughtful mode, unconcerned, perhaps, with elegance, but always useful, and sometimes even kind:
“This message is intended for those who attended the Jazz Record Collectors’ Bash this past weekend. Many of you who did not attend are receiving this message simply because it is less labor intensive to send this to the entire Bash customer list than to filter the contact information for only the attendees. Several items (summarily described below) were left in the vendor room at the Bash. If any belong to you, please contact me by return email or by phone. 1. A volume of one of the Rust discographies with much wear to the binding. 2. Sunglasses 3. A small quantity of 78s purchased from Lloyd Rauch, mainly popular vocal items, but possibly including a disc by Pasquale Amato.”
The sunglasses might have been mine.
/ / Three / /
This Is One of the Things I Would Say Is Inexplicable
Christopher King, Geeshie Wiley, Blind Uncle Gaspard, Matchsticks, Facebook, the Hillsville VFW Flea Market and Gun Show, Death
I first met the collector Christopher King on the same afternoon Hurricane Irene came whipping through central Virginia. I spent most of the drive to his home dodging cracked branches and other tree-borne detritus, eventually parking my rental car in a giant puddle and booking it to his doorstep. King, then forty-one, had short dark hair that he combed back and to the side, and a pale, round face that suggested a certain kind of old-fashioned innocence, although in actuality he was sharp and acerbic, quick with an eye roll and unlikely to let anyone get away with saying anything stupid. He had a tattoo of Betty Boop on his right bicep, which he acquired while working as a janitor, in an everlasting bid at solidarity with his colleagues. He smoked stubby cigarettes he rolled himself from a baggie of tobacco he kept in his front pants pocket. King was precise but open-minded, which was good, because he would eventually end up spending a terrifying amount of time walking me through the nuances of various recorded phenomena. I was grateful for that. If I wanted to learn about records—where they were, how they got there, why it mattered—I knew I would need a tolerant sensei, a patient guide.
King worked as a production coordinator at Rebel Records, a blue-grass label, and County Records, an old-time label, both based in Charlottesville; he was also the owner of Long Gone Sound Productions, a sound-engineering and historical music production company. On his office desk, alongside a supplementary-seeming desktop computer—in my memory it was an archaic, Commodore 64–looking behemoth, although in actuality it was likely a contemporary PC—sat a green Remington typewriter. His eyeglasses were of another era. He didn’t own a mobile phone, and referred to mine as a “smart-thing.” His house in rural Faber, which he shares with his wife, Charmagne, his daughter, Riley, and a bug-eyed Boston terrier named Betty, was outfitted with an assortment of carefully vetted antiques and oddities. Like many collectors, King had insulated himself from the facets of modernity he found most distasteful. At one point he asked me if Lady Gaga was, indeed, “a lady.” He was not being coy or funny.
King was flummoxed by my interest in collecting, which he insisted was a mundane if not static hobby, and he answered my questions with barely contained bemusement. What he was compelled by was listening, and the myriad ways people required and employed sound: “The question that never gets answered, or maybe that doesn’t even get asked, is what is it about being human that makes us desire this thing that is so ephemeral?”
Music, he pointed out, was a universally recognized salve, and it was worth considering the mechanics of that exchange, because understanding it was the only way anyone could ever begin to explain why he collected 78s. “There’s some sound or some group of sounds or some line of sounds that evokes something cathartic. I think every single human being has that, from one end of the spectrum to the other,” he said.
Accordingly, King insisted he wasn’t collecting records so much as performances. He liked the things, but he needed the songs, the catharsis—the records were a vehicle. I would eventually hear a version of this speech get recited by dozens of different collectors, and it usually felt like bullshit, but I believed King when he insisted that listening to a 78 (rather than an LP or a digital reissue) proffered him a more thorough and transformative experience. He didn’t try to define it any further. “It’s a fidelity thing and it’s also an aura, an intangible. I’m one of those people who don’t think there’s much that is inexplicable, but this is one of the things that I would say is inexplicable,” he said.
King was born and raised in Bath County, Virginia, and he’s never lived outside the state, save a brief, errant stint in Steubenville, Ohio, during which he completed three days of a PhD program in philosophy at Franciscan University. He’d previously studied philosophy and religion as an undergraduate at Radford University and learned the practice of collecting from his dad, Les King, a local teacher and musician who steadily accrued upright music boxes, antique books, Victrolas, 16-millimeter films, records, and other curiosities. His father, who passed away in the winter of 2001, remained a considerable presence in his life, and King mentioned him frequently, with a mix of devastation and approbation.
As a kid, King was often toted along to yard sales and flea markets, but his own collecting began when he serendipitously encountered a stack of 78s in an abandoned shack on his grandparents’ land. It’s a good story, cinematic: “My grandmother had died, so my grandfather wanted me to come there and help clean out the sharecropper’s shed. I remember opening the door to this tar-paper shack, and there was a dilapidated Victrola in the room. I knew what a 78 was and I knew how to play them, but I had never had a profound attraction to them. Maybe what Dad was playing didn’t tug at the strings in the right way. So I opened the lid and I’m going through records and there’s Blind Willie Johnson, ‘God Don’t Never Change.’ Then there’s Washington Phillips’s ‘Denomination Blues.’ Then there’s ‘Aimer et Perdre’ by Joe and Cleoma Falcon, a Cajun lost-love song. Dad helped me wash them. I was in eighth grade and became obsessed with going in people’s basements and looking under their porches. I can’t tell you the stacks of 78s people would put under their porches back then.”
King started out looking for hillbilly records, which bled into blues,
which splintered into a profound affinity for the raw and rural sounding. “If there’s any one continuous thread through everything that I have, it’s deeply, deeply rural and backwoodsy. It’s almost like it turns its back to the city. There’s something about that,” he admitted. King was also preternaturally drawn to narratives of longing and discontent, to performances that sounded unhinged and uncontrollable. It was a preference, unfortunately, that I recognized in myself—a base, possibly shameful desire to hear someone so overcome by emotion that they could no longer maintain any guise of dignity or restraint. I suppose the idea was that it made us feel less alone, hearing someone else unravel. Or maybe it was a yardstick by which we could measure our relative damage. Or maybe it just sounded good and liberating—a kind of proxy wilding. King was listening for it, constantly.
He was also a guy who thought frequently about dying (he worked, briefly, as an undertaker) and was prone to saying things like “I prepare for death every day. I’m obsessed with it.” It made sense that King, a collector, would be fixated on the passage of time, and his preoccupation with his legacy—as a curator, a producer, a father—fueled much of his work. “Look at all the blatantly transient things that, ultimately, are never going to last, like Facebook postings,” he complained to me one day on the telephone. “I’m definitely obsessed with the notion that it could end just like that. What’s going to be left behind?”
In actuality, the question of what will endure has never been more complicated to answer. Although King would have scoffed at the notion, it’s possible to argue that our digital legacies (all those dopey Facebook posts) will ultimately prove infinitely more enduring than our material legacies. They are, after all, replicated and indissoluble—such is the way of the Web. These days, there are even services to help with the posthumous management of a digital legacy; now, when people draft wills and name executors, they can also make arrangements with companies like Legacy Locker, “a safe, secure repository for your vital digital property that lets you grant access to online assets for friends and loved ones in the event of loss, death, or disability.” It’s hard not to assume that this is how future generations will engage with and be edified by the past—that this is the way they’ll come to understand how humans used to live.
But I knew what King meant about endurance, about capturing something true. Maybe what he was actually looking for on all those records—what I was actually looking for—were songs that somehow captured the tenuousness of even being alive in the first place. Songs that recognized, either explicitly or implicitly, the threat of swift and complete termination that all living creatures are forced to contend with. And it’s not just that our existence is friable. Our happiness is, too. Anything can fall apart.
King had been involved, in one way or another, in many of my favorite reissue collections, but the one that seemed closest to his heart (and that best encapsulates his particular worldview) is Aimer et Perdre: To Love & to Lose, Songs, 1917–1934, which was released in 2012 on the Tompkins Square label. King produced and remastered and fussed it into being; all the 78s were sourced from his private collection, and his introductory essay is an earnest paean to what he refers to as “our inexplicable mulishness in seeking out relationships that we know will ultimately both enrich us and devastate us, more often at the same time.” I think King found solace in the idea that bad love was an ancient human pastime, and that our desperate search for (and epic bungling of) intimate relationships was somehow hardwired into our DNA—that heartache was a kind of biological inevitability. In any case, he had assembled a record collection that seemed to very clearly say as much. Or, as he wrote in the same notes: “Many of the songs in this collection convey the deep despair of abandonment and loss as if the only precondition of our being is our ability to suffer, to hold multitudes of contradictions such as regretting having done and not done the same thing at different times and under different conditions.” It was dark, but it was true: we suffer, therefore we sing.
King’s records are neatly contained on squat, custom-built shelves lining the north wall of his music room, itself a dark and mystical spot—a small, cooled space packed with vintage audio equipment, instruments, artwork, and books. (If you are prone to romanticizing such things, a gasp upon entry is inevitable.) King controlled one of the best assortments of prewar Cajun 78s (his friend, the collector Ron Brown, had the other), and his stock of Albanian folk records, a newer preoccupation, was inimitable. Now that most of the coveted prewar blues records had been discovered or at least named, many collectors had moved on to more “exotic” fare, although the musical through line running through all of it remained clear: these were outlier records, frenzied and raw.
More important—to me, at least—was that King is also the keeper of one of three known copies of Geeshie Wiley’s “Last Kind Words Blues” and one of three known copies of Blind Uncle Gaspard’s “Sur le Borde de l’Eau,” arguably two of the saddest, strangest songs ever recorded, a fact he summarized thusly: “So, I have two of the world’s most rare and most depressing 78s ever . . . if I were to be swallowed up, would all the sadness disappear with me?”
King was joking, and I had not yet sunk so far as to believe that the whole well of human despair—that eternally flush reservoir—was somehow being sustained or directed by two old records, but they did feel imbued with a certain otherworldly import. I first heard “Last Kind Words Blues” on a 2005 Revenant Records compilation called American Primitive, Vol. II: Pre-War Revenants (1897–1939) (King, incidentally, had remastered that collection). By then, collectors and researchers had figured out the song was recorded in Paramount Records’ Grafton studio in March 1930, but nobody knew how its creator, Geeshie Wiley, had gotten to Wisconsin, or where she came from (she might have spent time in Natchez, Mississippi, or at a medicine show farther north in Jackson, or—as King suggested after noting the particular way she pronounced “depot”—been born and reared somewhere along the Texas-Louisiana border), or even what her real name was (“Geeshie” was likely a nickname, indicating she had Gullah roots, or was a descendant of West African slaves brought to South Carolina and Georgia via Charleston and Savannah). Wiley played with a guitarist named Elvie Thomas, and they recorded six sides for Paramount between 1930 and 1931. Beyond that, there wasn’t even significant conjecture about her life—who she loved, what she looked like, how she died. Wiley was a specter, fiercely incorporeal, a spirit suggested if not contained by shellac. King thought that was part of her appeal—that we could project whatever we needed onto her—but “Last Kind Words Blues” is also so odd and chilling an accomplishment that it effectively transcends its own mythology. Or at least renders it mostly subordinate.
Wiley’s lyrics and phrasing aren’t idiosyncratic, exactly, but they’re rhythmically baffling in a way that makes her performance feel singular if not entirely unreproducible—to the extent that it almost makes sense that the record itself is so rare. In his essay “Unknown Bards,” John Jeremiah Sullivan called the song “an essential work of American art, sans qualifiers, a blues that isn’t a blues, that is something other, but is at the same time a perfect blues, a pinnacle,” and the confusion Sullivan references—the psychic disorientation stirred up by Wiley’s performance—is maybe the only quantifiable thing about it. King chided me about my inability to articulate precisely what it was about “Last Kind Words Blues” that I found so undeniable—why it worked on me; why, by the time she arrived at the “What you do to me, baby / It never gets out of me” bit, I was half-breathing and glassy-eyed—but that mystery was a fundamental part of its allure. In “O Black and Unknown Bards,” the James Weldon Johnson poem that gave Sullivan’s piece its title, Johnson wrote of his own bewilderment regarding the composition of certain spirituals, presenting the only useful question one can really ask of Wiley: “How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?”
“Last Kind Words Blues” was the first record I ever asked King to play for me, and I suspect it’s the one most people
request if they ever make it past his front door and get a chance to start demanding things. There’s even an online video—shot by the 78 Project, a pair of Brooklyn-based filmmakers who traveled around recording new artists to blank lacquer discs on a 1930s Presto Direct-to-Disc recorder—titled “Christopher King Plays Geeshie Wiley,” which is, incredibly, just that: three and a half minutes of King spinning “Last Kind Words Blues” on a turntable and looking uncomfortable. At one point he scratches his nose.
If Wiley is an enigma, Blind Uncle Gaspard is a wisp. The guitarist and curator Nathan Salsburg sent me an MP3 of “Sur le Borde de l’Eau” one October, after I told him I’d never heard it; to his credit, he included fair warning (“The end of [the] side sounds completely like he’s choking up and can’t go on and thank God the record’s over. He’s probably just got a frog in his throat . . . But it sure as shit doesn’t sound like it, reaching through the years and kicking you in the face.”). Gaspard was born in 1880 in Avoyelles Parish in Dupont, Louisiana, recorded a handful of Cajun ballads and string-band songs for Vocalion Records in two sessions in the winter of 1929 (one in Chicago, one in New Orleans), and died in 1937. I’d heard “La Danseuse,” the Gaspard and Delma Lachney track the collector and producer Harry Smith included on The Anthology of American Folk Music, and I thought it was a very sweet guitar and fiddle tune, but “Sur le Borde de l’Eau” is something else entirely. I don’t know what Gaspard is going on about (I don’t speak enough French), but I’m certain the payoff isn’t narrative. His voice is so saturated with longing that it seems to hover midair, a helium balloon that’s lost too much gas. It is tenuous and malfunctioning and then it disintegrates entirely, like the best/worst relationship you’ve ever had, like a ghost disappearing into the mist.
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