Do Not Sell At Any Price

by Amanda Petrusich

  While I waited, I read the historical marker placed a few yards away by the village of Grafton, a tribute Alex van der Tuuk—working in conjunction with the Historic Preservation Committee—had spearheaded. For years, it was the only public mention of Paramount Records anywhere in Grafton. Mack has since worked tirelessly to preserve and commemorate the city’s musical legacy, even when its denizens have responded with apathy (or, occasionally, distaste). She moved to Grafton in 1996, but it wasn’t until 2002, when John Tefteller mailed Mack and every other citizen of Grafton a postcard with photographs of Paramount 78s plastered across the front, that she learned about the town’s odd role in blues history and became dedicated to protecting its presence here.

  It’s hard to talk about Paramount Records without talking about John Tefteller, the preeminent collector of Paramount 78s in the world. His private stash contains about five thousand records, divided between prewar and postwar blues, with Paramount blues comprising about eight hundred of those, maybe a few more. Although I was certain he would be, at fifty-three, just as feisty and maniacal as his younger counterparts (you’d have to be, to get some of the records he has), he presented an undeniable air of calmness the first few times we spoke on the telephone, and even more so when we met for lunch in Brooklyn a few months later, while he was passing through New York on a record-hunting trip from his home in Grants Pass, Oregon. I’d already heard plenty of stories about Tefteller’s collection. His competitors regarded it with a mix of envy and disgust.

  Unlike most of his peers, Tefteller made a living buying and reselling rare 78s, LPs, and 45s (his Paramounts were not for sale), meaning his collecting was as much a business as a hobby, and it could be all-encompassing. While most collectors were content to engage in passive trade (bartering with other collectors, setting up saved eBay searches, leaving their cards with junk-shop owners), Tefteller wasn’t intimidated by complicated primary research, or by getting on an airplane, or by doling out a significant amount of cash to get what he wanted. That aggression had made him a contentious figure in the community. “I like to get into the field and hunt them down in the wild, so to speak,” he said.

  While we ate lunch, Tefteller told me he believed that amassing a serious collection of prewar blues 78s was basically impossible for a newcomer—for someone like me. “I don’t know how you could do it today,” he said, waving a french fry in the air, his big white mustache twitching. “How you could wake up this morning and say, ‘Gee, I think I wanna collect prewar blues records and I wanna build a world-class collection of them.’ I don’t know how you could do that, even if you had millions of dollars to spend. There’s only a finite amount of these things available and most of the people who have them have no interest in selling them. So you have to be extremely patient—it’s a long process, and a lot of people who start the process get discouraged real quick.”

  Even for a full-time record hunter with copious cash to spend, Paramount blues are not particularly easy to locate. Tefteller, at least, was willing to put in the legwork, chasing the nominal paper trail as far as it would go. “You find, say, whoever had the Paramount distributor shift in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1930,” he explained. “You find that person’s name, and you find out where they died, who their relatives and survivors might be. And do those relatives and survivors have any of that material, or was it all discarded or given away when the person stopped being a Paramount Records distributor?”

  My eyes bugged. This was journalism, sort of—it was certainly more than just pawing through moldy records on the greasy linoleum floor of a Goodwill. Tefteller was pursuing his prey with the kind of vehemence typically employed by a PI stalking a client’s ex-wife, or a cop chasing a kingpin. It felt calculated and thorough. It also felt thankless. As any beat reporter could testify, not every investigation yields compelling results. How far can you go before you risk losing the plot entirely? How can you solve a murder without a body?

  “[78s] can come from anywhere,” Tefteller admitted. “There’s not any one particular source. Records have a way of hiding. People bought them years and years ago, they took ’em to parties, they played them at home, they beat them to death. Some got thrown away, yeah, but a lot of stuff got shuffled off into a corner, put in an attic, put in a basement, put in a garage, given to a neighbor, given to a friend.” As such, Paramount 78s “very rarely” show up at yard sales or flea markets or in thrift stores. For the most part, they’re languishing in private homes, entirely out of sight. “Most of the time now, they come from estates where somebody has died and the relatives come in and start hunting through their things and find a little stack of records buried in a house or a basement,” Tefteller continued. “The new generation comes in and says, ‘Well, we don’t need these,’ and they start to look for how they can create some money out of the situation. A lot of times the people that have these are not aware that they might have something that has not been heard since 1928 by anybody other than their family—they’re just aware that they have a stack of old records.”

  Tefteller, it turns out, has a singular knack for turning a benign tip into a jackpot. He’ll pull on a thread until the whole sweater unravels. For example: in late 2001, Tefteller got a call from a collecting pal, alerting him to a recent eBay auction of interest—a large, full-color poster of Blind Lemon Jefferson in the style of Paramount’s Chicago Defender ads (it had likely hung in a furniture shop). The auction had ended, but Tefteller e-mailed the seller, who was located in Port Washington, to see if he or she might have any more Paramount-related goodies to unload. When Tefteller finally got the guy—a local reporter named Steve Ostermann—on the phone, he learned that Ostermann and a friend had been tasked with emptying out an old newspaper building in the early 1980s and had accidentally uncovered a slew of Paramount advertising material: hundreds of old publicity posters, photographs, bits of artwork, letterhead and other ephemera, all crammed in the back of an abandoned filing cabinet. Although the reporters weren’t blues fans, exactly, they thought the stuff looked compelling enough to save and loaded a few boxes into the trunks of their cars.

  Tefteller was giddy but tried to keep his cool. As he wrote in an essay for 78 Quarterly, Ostermann “listened politely (our phone conversation was punctuated by long silences). I got the impression he thought I was a bit of a nut, and that maybe I was talking too much.” Tefteller interrogated Ostermann as gently as possible, ultimately discovering that his partner—a woman from Colorado named Janet—had a bunch of Charley Patton material, including, he thought, a photograph. At this point, only a tiny, cropped picture of Patton’s head and neck had ever been uncovered. Patton, for all we knew, could have had three arms and a peg leg. Tefteller was ecstatic.

  Ostermann promised to try to get in touch with Janet, who had left Wisconsin following a complicated divorce, to see if she still had the boxes and if she’d be willing to sell them. A few days later, he called Tefteller back. Janet still owned the Patton material, including the photograph. She was reluctant, but finally acquiesced to Tefteller’s “generous offer.” All three agreed to meet in Port Washington in May to complete the deal in person. Tefteller had promised to pay what he would only describe as “a fortune” for the material. He had to take out a small loan to cover the expense.

  The trade was settled, but Tefteller wasn’t done searching: if there was more preserved Paramount material decaying in central Wisconsin, he was going to recover it, and soon. He planned to camp out at a Best Western in Port Washington for twelve days, fully canvasing the area for remnants.

  “For years—and I mean since the sixties—people had been going to Grafton and Port Washington looking for Paramount 78s, figuring, ‘Okay, they were made there, they should be there,’ ” he said. “And they were right, but even back then and all the way up until I did it, nobody, not one single researcher or collector, was aggressive in—I guess you could use the phrase ‘shakin’ down that town,’ ” he continued. “They would wander around the junk stores
in the area, they would talk to a few people here and there, but they didn’t really go nutty like I did. If I’m gonna do something, I’m gonna do it right—I won’t just go in there and halfheartedly do it, I’ll do it as best I can. I spent a bunch of money advertising with the local newspapers, generated publicity by talking to reporters, and then mailed out flyers and postcards to every single resident within a hundred miles of where that company was back then. I created a real nice-looking flyer and postcard with pictures of Paramount labels and talked about how some of these records are worth thousands of dollars, and if you have any in your attics or your basements or if any of your relatives worked at the company, or if you have anything else related to the company, I need to talk to you. And I flooded the area with this and then I sat at the Best Western in Port Washington and fielded phone calls at the hotel for days from people who had relatives who had worked there.”

  What happened for Tefteller in Grafton is the kind of thing collectors dream about at night, their blankets pulled up to their stubbly chins, their hands curled into little fists. Shortly after he checked into his hotel, Tefteller drove to Ostermann’s house, where he and Janet were waiting with their scavenged bounty. Sorting through the material spread out on the kitchen table, Tefteller spotted a pile of rare photographs (including pictures of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, and the Norfolk Quartette), flipped through it, and pulled out the now-iconic shot of Charley Patton, seated in a wooden chair, wearing white flannel spats, shiny shoes, and a pinky ring, and holding a battered Stella guitar.

  Patton was light-skinned (he was presumed to be African-American by most of his peers, but for years, scholars have wondered whether Patton was, in fact, part Cherokee, part Mexican, part Caucasian, or some combination thereof), and his dark hair is parted on the left side and combed neatly over his forehead. He’s wearing a comically oversize suit. His head looks tiny and strange, popping up through his shirt collar as if it had been tied on with his bow tie. He stares blankly at the camera. His ears are bigger than I’d imagined, and more pronounced—I have thought, from time to time, that he resembles a darker-skinned, more serious Alfred E. Neuman—but the oddest thing about the picture is the way Patton’s left hand is situated on his guitar: his fingers almost look deformed, spread out on the fret board as if to form some kind of Vulcan hand signal, his index finger and middle finger stretching far apart and pointing straight down. Even now I find it perplexing: who holds a guitar like that?

  Although a small picture of Patton’s head, cropped from this exact shot, had been uncovered decades earlier, getting a glimpse of Patton’s whole body was still exhilarating. He likely didn’t choose the clothes he was wearing (the suit was so ill fitting it was almost certainly borrowed), but seeing that old Stella guitar balanced in his lap, seeing the way he held himself—it was like looking up from a campfire, tugging a marshmallow off a stick, and spotting Bigfoot casually leaning on a pine tree outside your tent, waiting for a s’more. It didn’t feel quite real. Ghosts and legends weren’t supposed to have pinky rings. They didn’t sit stiffly in wooden chairs.

  Tefteller was freaked out, too, although he held it together for the sake of the sale. “I just looked at it and said, ‘Oh, wow, this is great,’ ” he remembered. “I didn’t want to be like, ‘This is the Holy Grail of everything!’ ”

  But it was, in a way. Later, writing in 78 Quarterly, Tefteller admitted “I felt as if I had discovered some lost amendments to the Constitution in Thomas Jefferson’s own handwriting . . . I knew that photo would have a place in blues history.” As anticipated, he bought nearly everything the reporters had for sale, including the Patton picture.

  A few days later, Tefteller got a call from a woman who claimed that her grandmother had worked at the pressing plant in Grafton. She had inherited a trunk full of Paramount 78s and recognized the labels on his postcard. Tefteller was tired, at this point, of digging through box after box of terrible records, so he asked her if there were any blues songs in the batch, rather than the standard polkas, marches, country, and dance numbers typically stockpiled by Germanic Wisconsinites. The woman didn’t really know, she said, but there was one record with a funny-sounding name: “My Buddy Blind Papa Lemon.” Tefteller froze.

  “My Buddy Blind Papa Lemon” was recorded in 1932 by King Solomon Hill, a five-foot-three, 130-pound blues singer born in 1897 near McComb, Mississippi. “King Solomon Hill” is a colloquial name for a small neighborhood in Yellow Pine, Louisiana; Hill’s real name was likely Joe Holmes (a notion first introduced by the blues researcher and collector Gayle Dean Wardlow in the 1960s and debated, furiously, by collectors for years after). Holmes was probably recommended to Paramount by Blind Lemon Jefferson, whom Holmes had met and traveled with in 1928. In 1932, a Paramount scout named Henry Stephany accompanied Holmes to Birmingham, where they met with a few other bluesmen (Ben Curry, Marshall Owens, and the Famous Blue Jay Singers) before traveling north together to Grafton to record. When they got there, Holmes made six sides for Paramount. He returned to the South shortly thereafter and died, in 1949, in Sibley, Louisiana, likely due to complications from alcoholism. Prior to Tefteller’s arrival, only two of Holmes’s three records had been recovered and heard by modern ears—no copies of the remaining sides had ever been found.

  Tefteller, wheezing, told the woman to carefully place the record somewhere it wouldn’t be broken, and asked when he could come over to see it. She told him she preferred to meet somewhere public (I empathized with her impulse). They settled on the parking lot of the Sentry Market in Grafton, and by 10:15 the next morning, Tefteller was the proud new owner of a pristine copy of “My Buddy Blind Papa Lemon” / “Times Has Done Got Hard” (Paramount 13125), the only known copy in the world. “The hundred dollar bills came spilling out of my wallet,” he wrote of the transaction in 78 Quarterly.

  Whenever I get frustrated by collectors—by their hostility, their exclusivity, their infuriating single-mindedness—I think about “My Buddy Blind Papa Lemon” and how crazy old John Tefteller saved that wild, miraculous song from rotting away in a trunk in Wisconsin. It’s the sort of thing that makes you want to buy a man a cheeseburger, or at least tell him thanks.

  “My Buddy Blind Papa Lemon” is a remarkable record; it changes shape almost every time I hear it. The song opens, unexpectedly, with a high, sweet howl: Holmes was slight and his voice is appropriately compact, but that “Ooooowaooooh!” cuts through everything else in the room, including his somewhat spastic guitar playing.

  The song itself is a eulogy of sorts for Blind Lemon Jefferson, who died mysteriously, at age thirty-six, in Chicago on December 19, 1929. Jefferson’s death certificate, finally unearthed in 2010, lists “probably acute myocarditis” (or inflammation of the heart) as the thing that nixed him, although theories, some apocryphal, abound: Jefferson might have been mugged, or maybe a spurned lover slipped something unpleasant into his coffee, or maybe a gnashing dog attacked him in the middle of the night. Even the reigning assumption—that he became disoriented during a snowstorm and froze to death—is peculiar. But Jefferson’s name reflected his rotund, pinched shape, and since it’s likely that he wasn’t in tip-top condition at the time of his passing, almost anything could have done him in. Myocarditis can be incited by a virus or by trauma (like an allergic reaction, electric shock, or radiation), but often its root cause remains unknown. Paramount paid to have his body returned to Texas by train, and Jefferson was eventually buried in an African-American cemetery in Wortham.

  According to “My Buddy Blind Papa Lemon,” Holmes learned about his friend’s death via mailman: “I received the letter that my friend Lemon was dead,” he sings, and although at the time of its recording Jefferson had already been gone for a few years, Holmes sounds as if he just found out about it that morning. The narrative is oddly literal for a blues song: “Everybody got to go, but it’s still sad when you lose one of your best friends,” he admits. In my darker moments, it is the kind of thing that I secret
ly hope someone might sing about me after I’m gone—Holmes sounds devastated, enraged. The song ends unexpectedly, three minutes in, after a jerky, extended slide-guitar bit. I almost always start it over again immediately after it finishes, certain that I’ve missed something (I usually have). Tefteller released the track publicly in the summer of 2004 on the CD that accompanies his annual Blues Calendar, a collection of blues-related images from the 1920s that he usually sells online for twenty dollars. He later allowed Shanachie Records to include it on their Times Ain’t Like They Used to Be compilation. Today you can buy it, as I did, on iTunes for ninety-nine cents.

  There are around thirty missing Paramount race records—including Marshall Owens’s “Texas Blues Part Two” / “Seventh Street Alley Strut” and Willie Brown’s “Grandma Blues” / “Sorry Blues”—still waiting to be uncovered, which means John Tefteller’s mission hardly ended that morning in Grafton. He remains in hot pursuit of the missing shellac, and he wants everyone to know it. When I interviewed him for a New York Times story in 2008, he suggested that I print his standing offer of $25,000 for each of the missing Willie Brown records. I did, thinking that someone somewhere might see it—might climb up to the attic, might dig through some records, might make a call. We’re both still waiting to hear.

  I was thinking about records—about fresh, unplayed copies of “My Buddy Blind Papa Lemon” popping hot off a Paramount stamper, about fishing a mysteriously preserved Willie Brown 78 out of the river—when I heard someone calling my name. I looked up, and Angela Mack, wearing an electric blue top, her face beset by a cloud of blonde curls, was waving from across the street.

  Mack is the closest thing Grafton has to a local blues historian (a few months after my visit, she was part of a team of researchers who uncovered both Blind Blake’s death certificate and his unmarked grave, nearly seventy-seven years after he died of pulmonary tuberculosis, in nearby Glendale), and she had promised to lead me on the Paramount Walking Tour, a normally self-guided journey that begins at the marker and ends about half a mile down Twelfth Avenue, at a photography studio called Photography by Michael. Mack was an enthusiastic and knowledgeable guide, speaking freely and eagerly about various Paramount landmarks; as we walked, she answered every one of my oddball questions about where, say, someone might have tossed a bunch of records into the river. (“Just curious!”) From the marker, we wandered halfway over the bridge and paused, staring at a long foundational wall of the factory that’s visible only from the east side of the river. Mack pointed out the rusted power wheel that once fueled the presses, barely perceptible through the thick summer overgrowth. We doubled back, past the land where the studio was constructed and connected to the plant via viaduct (it was torn down in 1938; a yellow brick house with red shutters and a for-sale sign sits there now) and past the former home of Alfred Schultz, the chief recording engineer and pressing-plant foreman. Mack told me that his daughter Janet, upon meeting Ma Rainey, mistakenly called her Grandma.