By the time we found Hicks’s booth, there were already a few shoppers milling about, including a collector King recognized—a soft-spoken older gentleman with a mustache and a buttoned-up shirt named Gene Anderson. After I introduced myself, Anderson let me flip through his want lists, which he’d slipped into clear plastic pages and assembled in a binder—based on the contents, he had what appeared to be a solid collection of prewar country and blues records on his shelves already. King, meanwhile, nodded hello to Hicks—a middle-aged man with thin brown hair pulled into a ponytail and a pair of tiny, oval-shaped sunglasses—leaned over a box of 78s, and began thumbing away. On a piece of cardboard, someone had written GOOD 78S BE CAREFUL, but rivulets of dew had already dripped through the tarp Hicks had strung up, saturating the sign. King snorted and pushed it aside.
Most of the tent was filled with used rock LPs, 45s, and CDs. Rodger Hicks seemed to have some passing sense that certain old 78s were worth something, although he also hadn’t really bothered to follow that thread to any logical pricing conclusions. The bulk of his 78s were marked at just a couple bucks, although a few in especially good condition were randomly priced at $100 to $300. Some negotiation was expected. Almost immediately, King nudged me and handed over a Paramount pressing of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “That Black Snake Moan,” which he already owned and wasn’t interested in—it was marked $250, which was probably about $100 more than most collectors would pay. It’s a powerful, groaning song—the black snake, in this case, being both exactly what it sounds like and a useful metaphor for Jefferson’s fear of everything he couldn’t see—but was also popular, meaning an awful lot of copies were pressed. I was tickled by the idea of having it in my clutches, but I wasn’t particularly seduced by the song or its price. I set it down.
King chatted amicably with Anderson and kept on pulling out records. I stood a few feet away, jotting impressions of the crowd in my notebook (“A woman in a visor holding an LP and yelling, ‘Jim, look, Steve Miller!’ ”) and occasionally peeking over King’s shoulder. I felt acutely aware of wanting to stay out of his way, lest I complicate a delicate acquisition process. At some point, King faux-casually asked Anderson what he’d picked up so far, then appeared relieved when Anderson showed him his selections. (Watching two collectors interrogate each other about recent—or, in this case, ongoing—purchases is a little like watching two high-achieving middle school students warily prod each other about a grade: “What’d you get?” “What? What’d you get?” “What?”)
Finally Anderson paid for his records and ambled off, and King showed me the 78s he’d pulled, which included two notable rarities: Eddie Head and His Family’s “Down on Me” / “Lord I’m the True Vine” (one of two, maybe three known copies; it was priced at two dollars) and Sylvester Weaver’s “Guitar Blues” / “Guitar Rag” (less rare, but in notable condition—an E copy, which would replace King’s E-minus copy). After a bit of gentle bargaining, King paid Hicks $100 cash for a total of nine 78s. He knelt down in the grass and gently tucked the records into his case. He was pleased. I picked up a few of King’s cast-offs, including 78s from Stick McGhee, Washboard Sam, and Blind Boy Fuller, and a stack of Victor pressings of early Carter Family tunes. I paid around forty dollars for all of it. I was beaming. King was proud.
Before we walked away, King stopped to ask Hicks what else he’d sold that morning. Although vendors weren’t technically supposed to open for business before nine A.M. on Friday (those hours would change to seven A.M. the following year), many had been camped out in Hillsville for a couple days already. With the profit margins on hocking old shit hovering somewhere between slight and undetectable, you couldn’t really blame a guy for entertaining early offers. While readjusting his shorts, Hicks, already gloriously sweaty, unpinned a grenade: he’d sold $1,600 worth of “blues records” to “someone from Raleigh” earlier in the week—probably Wednesday. He’d been in the field since Sunday. He didn’t recall the specific titles. King, I could tell, was ruffled. Not miffed, exactly, but disturbed. Hours later, when we stopped for a late lunch and several gallons of sweet tea at the Blue Ridge Restaurant in Floyd, Virginia—King ordered “country ham” and I ordered “city ham” and we both got the brown beans and fried squash—he brought it up again. “I won’t sleep for several weeks,” he sighed. I couldn’t tell if he was being serious. For now, though, the information was filed away. We trudged off, once more unto the breach.
In retrospect, it occurs to me that if one was interested in compiling the world’s most comprehensive collection of sweat-soaked T-shirts, the Hillsville VFW Flea Market and Gun Show would be an unqualified Mecca. Here, the gradual darkening of preshrunk cotton mirrors a darkening of the soul. It is unconscionably hot and crowded, and attendees are forced to contend with several miles of gently used detritus, all the bits and bobs—a thousand riffs on colored plastic—humans have designed to ease our long, slow crawl toward death. Surrender is required, or else you will crumple under the weight. When a portly man sporting strained cargo shorts and an orange GUNS SAVE LIVES sticker unleashed an epic, undulating belch a couple inches from my face—we were both digging, somewhat frantically, through a mound of state-shaped refrigerator magnets—I found myself not only not repulsed, but almost wanting to shake his hand.
Hillsville allows for (and perhaps even encourages) sudden reinvention, and you could probably outfit an entire one-bedroom apartment here for $500, particularly if you subscribe to the “odd old stuff” aesthetic (which seized Brooklyn, at least, several years ago, and to which I continue to shamefully adhere). But even if you don’t, there is copious bounty to be ravaged: hand-carved Victorian bed frames and kitschy Atomic Age knickknacks and gold-and-ivory pocketknives are plentiful, but so are dented Ikea nightstands and used Cabbage Patch dolls and Duracell batteries of unknown origin. It is a feast of accumulation, presented without judgment or categorization. I was instantly reminded of Donovan Hohn’s “A Romance of Rust: Nostalgia, Progress, and the Meaning of Tools,” a 2005 Harper’s essay in which the author visits the barn of an antique tool collector and is struck by how zoological his collection appears. “Divorced from usefulness and subjected to morphological classification, they looked like the fossils of Cenozoic mollusks or the wristbones of tyrannosaurs,” Hohn wrote of his subject’s prizes.
There is no sense of genus or species at Hillsville—everything is everything—but product, detached from both its intended use and the codified retail experience, becomes ungrounded, ill defined, and increasingly absurd: all parts and no corresponding whole. After less than an hour of browsing, the merchandise at Hillsville resembled a word I’d said too much—as if I’d accidentally subtracted all meaning via blind repetition, as if it had never had any meaning at all. Particularly upsetting were objects of recent vintage: piles of video games from 2011, hardcover installments of Harry Potter, an unopened Cuisinart panini press. Hohn, at an estate auction, remarked how an ink-jet printer, still in its original box, had “already passed into that limbo of worthlessness that exists between novelty and nostalgia,” and, looking across the fields, I recognized that vast and endless void—the terrain of the freshly outmoded, of that which is neither useful nor evocative.
Obviously, none of this slowed us down. Existential duress has no place at Hillsville; it is softened or eradicated by the consumption of deep-fried foodstuffs. Available at one tent near the entrance were deep-fried Reese’s peanut butter cups, Oreos, Twinkies, Milky Way bars, Snickers bars, Three Musketeers bars, and—for dessert—“frozen cheesecake hand-dipped in chocolate.” Near the gun section of the market (an old VFW hall overloaded with every kind of assault weapon imaginable, some in shades of pink for the lady in your life), a scrum of hunters in tank tops were selling taxidermy and assorted sundries (dustpans, bathroom scales, plastic nativity figures) from the back of a pickup truck. I paused to admire a white-tailed deer head mounted on a slab of oak, a steal at twenty dollars, and scratched it behind its ears until King gave me a
look that said, “Don’t do that.” Later, he did nod approvingly when I purchased an old puzzle, copyrighted in 1981 and called Feelings. It consisted of five wooden cutouts of a young girl in varying throes of emotion—Sad, Afraid, Angry, Happy, and Love—and required users to match her face with a corresponding title. Still, as I was paying, he couldn’t resist this: “That would be so much better if it had been made in 1975.”
We also looked for 78s—in Victrola cabinets, under piles of John Denver LPs, wrapped in sheets of yellowed newspaper, in the backseats of vendors’ cars, shoved under tables, in blue Tupperware bins labeled OLD RECORDS, stacked indiscriminately in the high, bleating sun—but despite several hours of thorough digging, little else of note emerged from the fields. There were good records there—commercial country like Hank Williams; Little Wonder discs, which are just five inches in diameter and contain a minute or so of novelty music—but nothing of immediate consequence for King. So goes junking. The Eddie Head and Sylvester Weaver records were enough to make the trip worthwhile for him.
We began hiking the five thousand miles back to King’s car. I had started to register several unsettling smells. Of particular impact was the aroma set free each time someone stumbled out of a Porta-John, freeing its cooked contents—that vile steam—into the air. I experienced an overwhelming urge to both wash my hands and to dry-heave. My hair had mostly loosed itself from its bun and was sticking to the sides of my face in new and interesting ways. The Volkswagen, when we arrived, felt like a life raft.
I collapsed inside, and we zoomed out of Hillsville and toward Floyd, where we stopped to visit King’s coworkers at the County Records store, and then, several hours later, to Charlottesville, where King deposited me at the airport, but not before making sure my records were properly packed with cardboard and bubble wrap. At the security checkpoint, I got pulled aside for extra screening—“Miss, what’re these?”—but eventually made it to my gate, where I sat doodling in my notebook and wondering if I should go back to the bathroom and toss another fistful of cold water on my face. Every few minutes, I unzipped my bag and checked on my records. I got excited just looking at them. I flew back to New York City feeling intensely satisfied, if unclean.
That feeling wouldn’t last.
/ / Four / /
A Form of Protection Against the Loss of Self
Pete Whelan, 78 Quarterly, Florida, Willie Brown, Kid Bailey, Scholarship, the Question of Context, How to Master What Masters You
Pete Whelan, one of the earliest collectors of rare blues and jazz 78s, is also the founder and editor in chief of 78 Quarterly, a magazine created in the late 1960s by and for 78 collectors. In the pre-Internet days especially, 78 Quarterly was a default bible for the trade, purchasable at small record stores or via mail order. Besides features, it ran want ads, discographies, and irate letters to the editor, and in the renegade spirit of many countercultural periodicals, it never actually appeared quarterly, as promised by its title. There was a twenty-five-year break, for example, between volumes two and three.
Although some of its articles are objectively insane—in volume six, a Paramount Records pressing is described as “Black as a nun when mint (it shines with pale moon lettering), demure as a French whore at a cocktail party wearing a tight maid’s uniform”—78 Quarterly is a tremendous resource and a surprisingly energizing read. There are in-jokes and self-deprecating asides (in volume three, a cartoon of an evil, vampiric-looking figure has a thought bubble saying, “Big overcoats with wide, large pockets are in this year!,” while a photo of Fidel Castro has been appended with a “My focus is on Autograph . . .” caption, a reference to the 1920s jazz label), and plenty of service-oriented auction announcements. Most useful, perhaps, are the alphabetical lists of “The Rarest 78s,” which, as far as I know, are the only published compendiums of who owns what, and of how many copies of certain records exist. The collector James McKune once called it “an annoying feature about records some of us will never own,” while Whelan himself referred to it as “a dredging operation.” The lists are somewhat outdated now (the last issue of 78 Quarterly came out over a decade ago), but not as outdated as you might think: rare 78s don’t move from shelf to shelf that quickly.
I got in touch with Whelan by mailing a typed letter to the address printed on the magazine’s masthead. He responded promptly with his telephone number, and I called him up a few days later. At eighty-one, Whelan had decided to officially retire 78 Quarterly, which had become less vital—if no less beloved—in the wake of online forums and e-mail listservs. By the time we spoke, he’d been involved with the 78 community on and off for seventy years, both as a collector and a de facto organizer.
Whelan was born in New York City but grew up in Pennsylvania. “Mainly a place called Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, which is outside of Philadelphia,” he explained. “That was in the 1930s, and it was farmland. Later on, of course, it became suburbia. It was starting to turn into a suburb when I was a child, even. Originally that area was composed of old, late-eighteenth-century stone farmhouses and farmland, and occasional woods.”
He didn’t have a particularly musical family. “Nobody liked blues or jazz,” he said. “My mother and stepfather pretended to like classical music. My mother liked opera because of the Italian men.” Still, the record-collecting itch hit him quickly, first with jazz records, then with blues: “[The collector] Bernie Klatzko once described rare blues like the sexual surge of a teenager,” Whelan said, laughing. “It comes out of nowhere.”
Whelan was eleven and living in Asbury Park, New Jersey, when he bought his first 78. “I was trying to find this kind of music that I liked. I didn’t know anything about it. So I went into this record store and I tried to describe the music. I said, ‘Well, it sounds kind of sweet.’ And so he brought out Glenn Miller. And I said, ‘No, no, that’s not it.’ And he kept bringing out different records until finally he said, ‘You mean race records. Those are under the counter.’ And he reached under the counter and brought out a bunch of blue-label Vocalion records from the late 1930s.” And so it began.
In 1970, Whelan decided to sell his collection to finance a move from New York to Key West, and he took a full decade off before starting up again. “I managed to get a lot of those rare ones back,” he said, almost wistfully. I asked him if it was hard—selling all his records, then methodically trying to coerce them back onto his shelves, as if they had never left, as if he had never pushed them away. The connotations were, of course, romantic. “It’s sort of like a loss,” he said, “that you don’t want to think about too much.”
Whelan had played me a few 78s over the telephone, but even I knew that was a pitiful approximation. A few months later, while I was vacationing with my parents on the Gulf Coast of Florida, I decided to drive across the Everglades and down to the southernmost tip of the continental United States, to where Pete Whelan lived in a shady wooden bungalow on Canfield Lane, surrounded by his records.
To get to Key West from Miami, motorists have to take the Seven Mile Bridge—one of the longest bridges in the world—from Knight’s Key to Little Duck Key, crossing the Moser Channel, chugging directly into the Gulf of Mexico, speeding farther offshore than might seem advisable. Although it has a reputation for wantonness, I found Key West genteel and jovial, more culturally southern than I’d anticipated. There was endless pie and sweet tea. There was a sharp saltiness to the air.
Pete Whelan had invited me over for lunch, and he answered the door in loose khaki trousers, a long-sleeved yellow shirt, and flip-flops. His gray hair was cropped close. Whelan’s home was surrounded by rare palm trees, which he had been collecting since 1975. We walked the perimeter and he pointed out different species while I spastically swatted away clouds of bugs.
“This is the second-largest palm in the world,” he said, gesturing toward a massive, rough-looking trunk. “It’s from Vietnam. A palm collector managed to get into Vietnam in the middle of the war. He went thirty miles inland to get thi
s one palm that seeds once and dies after it seeds. It takes three years, and it throws out three tons of seeds in three years, and that’s it,” he explained. “So he somehow found out about it and went in and got the seeds and sent them around.”
We circled back, Whelan still narrating the landscape, which was unlike anything I’d ever seen: lush, impenetrable, untamed. “There are some very exotic-looking palms that don’t look like palms that came out of Cuba,” he said. “Cuba underwent a severe climate-change dry spell about thirty thousand years ago, and some of the palms there, called Copernicias, became water-catching systems. They look like giant funnels with petticoats. One of them might even be semi-carnivorous because of the arrangement of spines,” he said. “You can stick your hand in, but you can’t pull it out.”
Eventually, we took refuge in his record room, a cool, dimly lit space with books and papers and records piled atop every surface. An old-fashioned-looking fan sat in a corner, permanently at rest; a seafoam-green antique safe was pressed against one wall, tall enough that I could have stood inside it if I’d hunched a little. Whelan said he’d acquired it to protect his record collection against hurricanes, but it was empty right now (“Thank goodness!”). On an adjacent wall, near a pair of glass doors, were cubes and cubes of 78s, all tucked inside unmarked paper sleeves.
We chatted about collecting for a few minutes. Almost immediately, Whelan stood up and started taking records down to spin; he was more eager to listen than to talk. He played a few jazz pieces, and then, at my request, pulled Skip James’s “Drunken Spree”—which, according to 78 Quarterly volume six, is the only known copy in the world. Before I’d left for Florida, Chris King had told me to make sure to ask Whelan to play it for me, and to lodge a gentle plea on his behalf: “Please say hello to Pete for me and remind him that my life is relatively incomplete and fraught with emptiness without a Skip James guitar 78,” he’d written. “Really it is, no shit. I have a nice copy of each of the Delta (and Hill Country) greats except for James. Pete has a beautiful copy of ‘I’m So Glad’ / ‘Special Rider Blues’ but, jeez, I’d love to have his ‘Drunken Spree.’ Do me a favor, pal, and remind him of my desperation.”
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