“You can’t really tell from the clips, but it’s dramatically different from his normal stuff,” Tefteller went on. “At that point in time, Paramount was basically done. They knew they were going out of business shortly. They were grasping at straws to find any hope of raising money through record sales, and so they were telling the few people who were still recording for them to experiment a little bit and try to come up with something that would sell. The clips you hear—which, again, are some of the clearest portions of the record—are of standard Blind Blake runs on the guitar and they’re good, but when you hear the whole thing, there are a couple things that stand out. I believe ‘Emma Liza’ is a reworking of a Clarence Williams jazz record, but what [Blake] does in the song is, he tries to sound like Louis Armstrong—he’s trying to do it in a jazz fashion. There’s a part on the record where he does scat singing and changes his voice to a little bit of a falsetto, and it’s quite different. What you heard on that clip is a pretty standard Blake run. But the record, it’s a bit different.”
Tefteller kept talking—“And the other side of it, ‘Dissatisfied Blues,’ is more along the lines of a traditional Blind Blake record, but again he’s using a variant in his voice and he’s actually doing a whole lot of rapping on the guitar, which he never did in any record before that . . .”—but I had stopped listening entirely by then. I was certain the record had been found at Hillsville. That King and I had been close to it.
When we finally hung up, I immediately dialed Marshall Wyatt, who confirmed what I’d figured. It had been bought at Hillsville, from Rodger Hicks, and the collector who found it wanted to remain anonymous. “What he told me is this,” Wyatt said. “ ‘If they’—they—‘know my name, they might break into my house and steal all my records.’ Typical record collector’s paranoia at work. There could be other reasons, but that’s what he actually said to me.”
Wyatt also said the guy had driven to Hillsville from Raleigh a few days before the flea market officially opened, and that was when he found it amid Hicks’s boxes. When he brought it to Wyatt, he was asking $10,000. “I made him a very serious cash offer for the disc, but he had already called Tefteller, and he knew Tefteller had more money than anybody else. He turned down my offer immediately. It was serious. But once I played the record and realized the condition problems, I was just as happy he had turned me down because it would have been a lot of money for a record that’s very important and very significant and obviously very rare, but I couldn’t enjoy sitting in my music room and playing it. The noise and the stripping would just be so aggravating. It turned out fine from my perspective, because I did at least get to hear the record and hold it and play it and announce it. And then I guess Tefteller came through town a few days later and negotiated with him and bought it.”
I felt a palpable sense of loss. I knew how hard it was to find a 78 like that; I hadn’t ever even expected to get that close. But it was still invigorating, wanting something so badly, even as I was being told (again) I couldn’t have it. I could see, then, that my sense of what music was worth (even contemporary music, even the CDs accumulating in my mailbox) was shifting. I was remembering how precious a song could be.
Later that night, I finally spoke to King. He’d sent me an e-mail earlier in the day, saying that he’d call around nine, after he put his daughter to bed. “Perfect . . . actually, pitch-perfect twist, if you ask me,” he wrote. “You were within days of witnessing something that would have been beautiful in your book, and it was done stole from you. Sort of like being on the road to witness the landing of the Hindenburg and seeing the smoke a mile away . . . Oh, the Paramounts!”
King spent most of the call laughing at me. He was being annoyingly reasonable about everything. There was no way we would have ever gotten there early enough, he insisted. “All I’m saying is there’s no way you can game this kind of system! This is beautiful,” he kept saying. “It almost fell into your hands. That would have been really beautiful. But it didn’t. This is beautiful.”
I took a deep breath. “Chris,” I said. “Shut up.”
/ / Nine / /
Now There’s a Man on His Way Down
James McKune, the Jazz Record Center, Big Joe Clauberg, Jack Whistance, the Blues Mafia, “List of American Folk Songs on Commercial Records,” a Suitcase of Pornography
There’s a pervasive, romantic notion of the Outsider as Omniscient Loner: preoccupied, brooding, mumbly. He is human—for example, he might read a paperback book that he tugs from the back pocket of his jeans, or gaze intently into a woman’s eyes for a beat too long—but he doesn’t celebrate holidays or use the toilet. He is usually leaning against a wall. This is one way of thinking about it.
Then there are the men—outsiders, also—who routinely congregated at the Jazz Record Center, a long-defunct music shop that once existed on the north side of West Forty-Seventh Street in midtown Manhattan, a touristy stretch now better known for its approximations of pizza and dubious (if well-lit) electronics shops. In the 1940s, the Jazz Record Center became the default clubhouse for a cabal of distinctive gentlemen: exiles, recluses, characters so outsize in their eccentricities that they feel invented, except better. Here there was not a sense—as with the archetypal Outsider—that a choice had been made. Here, the earliest collectors of 78 rpm records found each other.
The Jazz Record Center was operated by Big Joe Clauberg, a chunk of a man with a deeply creased face (his skin appears to fold back on itself, like the underside of a poorly reupholstered chair) and black eyes that express a deep aversion to certain kinds of nonsense. He came to New York from the southwest, had worked as a circus strongman, and stumbled into the used-record business after being offered a few truckloads of cheap records from a wholesale jukebox operator.
“He was a giant,” Pete Whelan told me. “He was very overweight. And he was a full-blooded Indian, I think, from Arizona. And very nice. He would just listen to everybody, hardly saying anything. And he was very generous in his prices. Records that were really worth ten dollars or fifteen dollars then and that would be worth hundreds or maybe thousands now, he would sell for one dollar,” Whelan said.
Clauberg settled at the Forty-Seventh Street location in 1941, bolstering his jukebox supply by selling new stock from small coastal jazz labels. (He couldn’t afford to buy records from the majors, who then refused credit to independent shops.) The store was originally called Joe’s Juke Box, then the Jazz Record Corner, then the Jazz Record Center. Its inventory was jazz heavy but eclectic, including “Everything from Bunk to Monk,” as a 1949 ad in the Record Changer, an early jazz-collecting magazine, read. (The “Bunk” in question was almost certainly Bunk Johnson, the beloved New Orleans jazzman who lost both his trumpet and his two front teeth in a bar fight in Louisiana in 1931, but it’s tempting to consider its more colloquial use—one collector’s bunk being another’s prize, after all.)
Collectors flocked to Big Joe’s—or Indian Joe’s, as it was occasionally called—with a savage servility. Although he was part deaf (and emotionally ambivalent to the bulk of his stock), Clauberg, working in conjunction with his onetime partner, the collector and dealer Bob Weinstock, helped coalesce a community that was only beginning to establish itself as such. “Collectors are invited to come up—play records—and chew the fat,” another ad read. They also received 20 percent off current releases, itself no small draw.
It’s hard to say when, exactly, record collecting got its feet as a hobby—probably the day the first Edison cylinder was packaged and sold to a person in ill-fitting trousers. 78 collecting certainly blossomed in the 1940s, in part because radio had begun to supplant home audio as the preferred method of song delivery (meaning secondhand stores were suddenly flooded with abandoned 78s, sold in bulk and for cheap), and in part because the war had required the clearing of warehouses for storage (meaning discounted back stock was suddenly omnipresent).
Collecting itself is an ancient practice, and not an exclusively human one
. Critters—squirrels, crows, rats—often hunt down and hoard shiny objects for no immediately discernible evolutionary reason. In their introduction to the anthology The Cultures of Collecting, John Elsner and Roger Cardinal place collecting in a biblical context, declaring Noah the first collector: charged with corralling, classifying, and sustaining entire species of life, Noah was comprehensive by default. “Noah, perhaps alone of all collectors, achieved the complete set, or at least the Bible would have us believe,” they wrote. The ramifications of acquiring a perfect series of Grimace drinking glasses or every last Betty Boop key chain manufactured in 1934 are considerably less urgent, perhaps, than Noah’s purported mission, but the scholars still see Noah as the embodiment of the entire enterprise: “In the myth of Noah as ur-collector resonate all the themes of collecting itself: desire and nostalgia, saving and loss, the urge to erect a permanent and complete system against the destructiveness of time . . . [Modern collectors exist] at the margin of the human adventure, that pivotal point where man finds himself rivaling God and teeters between mastery and madness.”
The crowd at Big Joe’s, at least, confirmed that bit about madness: Clauberg had courted (and indulged) a perfect outcast harem. Many of the shop’s most beloved denizens weren’t even patrons, or at least not in the traditional sense. A Greek dishwasher and janitor named Popeye helped keep the place clean, rubbing oil into the floorboards as necessary. According to the collector (and former employee) Henry Rinard, who chronicled his experience working with Big Joe for 78 Quarterly, Popeye was a short, well-muscled man with no teeth, hair, or eyebrows, prone to mumbling to himself for hours “in gibberish not even another Greek could understand.” Clauberg let Popeye crash on the floor at night, and in exchange, Popeye performed additional odd jobs, like bringing Clauberg food from the joint where he washed dishes, cutting his hair, and helping him yank a rotten tooth from his gums using a pair of pliers (that’s what friends are for). Another regular, Abbie the Agent, wore “thick-lensed eyeglasses, smoked continuously, and was seldom sober.” An outcast from a wealthy Connecticut family, Abbie fetched cigarettes and wine for Clauberg, and periodically became so inebriated himself that he passed out on the Popeye-oiled floor. (His other nickname—and I think it’s the better of the two—was Horizontal Abe.) Rinard also wrote about one of Clauberg’s old hobo friends, a guy known mostly as the Sea Captain, who wore a wool hat, raincoat, and heavy, too-big, laceless boots, even in June. The Captain was something of an enigma, even to Rinard: “He was either Swedish or Norwegian; he understood English, but never spoke,” he wrote.
The clientele was no less unique. “It was very interesting,” Whelan recalled. “It was a stop on the way. There would be these characters that would be there. Specialists. One guy who just collected European jazz, named Hal Flaxer. He’s probably still around. I think he went through three or four wives and they all looked identical. I couldn’t tell the difference. They looked like twins of each other.” In her book In Search of the Blues, the scholar Marybeth Hamilton includes what might be the single greatest description of early record collectors flourishing in their natural habitat: “Saturday afternoons they met at Indian Joe’s, where they thumbed through the bins in between swigs from the bottles of muscatel that Pete Kaufman brought along from his store, suspending their searches briefly at three, when a man called Bob turned up with a suitcase of pornographic books.”
My favorite published photo of the shop first appeared in Jazzways and was later reprinted in 78 Quarterly; it’s not even of the interior, it’s of the rickety wooden stairs leading to the door. The face of each step is painted with an incitement (RECORDS, HOT JAZZ RECORDS, RECORDS 4 SALE, STEP UP SAVE A BUCK, POPULAR BANDS, HOT JAZZ RECORDS), and I can only imagine the half-furious, half-wheezy sounds eager collectors made clomping up them, balls of cash wadded up in their pockets. Regardless of what the inside of the shop actually looked like, I like to imagine it crammed with weirdos bickering in high-pitched voices, nostrils expanding, slowly swarming Bob and his suitcase. I like to imagine myself there, with a record or two tucked under my arm.
James McKune showed up at Big Joe’s nearly every Saturday night at six and stayed until the store closed at nine, wandering off, on occasion, to eat supper at the Automat around the corner on Sixth Avenue. McKune was likely born somewhere on the East Coast in or near 1910, although no one knows precisely when or where (depending on whom you ask, he was from Baltimore, or North Carolina, or upstate New York). That McKune has no clear origin story—and that his end was equally inscrutable—only amplifies the mythic place he occupies in collecting lore. Maybe more than any other collector, James McKune was defined by his records.
McKune wasn’t the first 78 collector, but he was one of the earliest to single out rural blues records as worthy of preservation and is arguably the field’s most archetypal figure. At the very least, he established the physical standard. He was flagpole skinny and otherwise nondescript (medium height, tapering hair), prone to wearing the same outfit nearly every day (a white shirt with rolled sleeves, black pants, white socks, black shoes). He had a tough time holding a steady job, and during his time in New York, he worked briefly as a subeditor for the New York Times, a desk clerk at the YMCA, a checker at a South Brooklyn beer distributor, and a mail sorter in a Brooklyn post office. He seemed generally irritated by the necessity of employment, and in a June 1944 letter to the collector Jack Whistance, wrote: “During the day (when it doesn’t rain) I continue my quest for a suitable job in [an] essential industry. In N.Y.C., be it said—not in Newark. I am a particular guy, perhaps alas. The jobs I can have I don’t want. And those I want I can’t get.” (Ironically, US unemployment was at an all-time low in 1944, at just 1.2 percent—about as close to “full employment” as economists believe is possible.) According to all reports, he drank like a pro. In his letters to other collectors, he was exacting but not unlikable; his missives are impeccably punctuated and endlessly readable, packed with peculiar asides and unexpected jokes. Although he was constitutionally private—a loner in the most nonromantic sense possible—and wrote almost exclusively about which records he wanted or had recently acquired, McKune did seem to savor his correspondence. In a 1951 letter to Henry Rinard, he even mentioned his glee about receiving an Easter card from a pal for Christmas. “A delightful variation, which I would have copied but for the lateness of this melancholy December,” he wrote in neat, minuscule script. (He was also prone to hastily changing tone by writing NEW SUBJECT midletter, an underused literary device I aspire to someday employ.)
“Not that it means anything particularly, but he was gay, and I didn’t know that at the time,” Whelan explained to me one night. He and McKune met at Big Joe’s. “I was at the time interested in getting blues on this particular label called Gennett. There was this guy Sam Collins on Electrobeam Gennett that I liked very much—he was an impassioned tenor. So I met this guy McKune,” he continued. “I was like twenty-three or twenty-four and he was fifty. He had been collecting since probably the late thirties. Blues. One of the very few. He looked like a scarecrow. He would gesticulate when he talked, very excitedly. You’d find these elbows coming at you, and you kept backing up. I think in the late 1930s he was a reporter for the Long Island Star, and then became, I think, city editor. And then he gave it up and worked for the post office. And then he became an alcoholic.”
Unsurprisingly, McKune was also a bit of a crank. He was wildly discerning, even by collector standards, and owned just three hundred records, all tucked into cardboard boxes and stored underneath his single bed at the YMCA on Marcy Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He often referred to his listening sessions as “séances” and was required to play records at a low volume so as not to enrage unsympathetic neighbors (thin walls). He fretted endlessly about his own taste. McKune’s desires were expansive, and he didn’t just want to collect the music he loved the most, he wanted to collect the best possible permutations of sound and for those decrees to be definitive. In an Octob
er 1944 letter to Whistance, he wrote of his ongoing struggle for objective judgment, that impossible critical ideal:
“Which one of a dozen such is THE standout depends it seems to me, upon the individual likings in jazz of the rater. Hayes’s Stompers soothe me wonderfully, for instance. Yet I ought to hesitate to declare that this band, or even the best of its records, is any better than the other great hot bands or their respective best recordings. Hayes′s band is nearer to my taste than Armstrong is, or Moten, or Henderson (on 9 of 10 of H’s records, that is) or Oliver or Goldbetter or good Goodman . . . or Ellington. H’s DS records are similarly close to my taste. So are Austin’s Serenaders and some of J. R. Morton (that Trio record I own, for instance) and McKinney’s C.P.s and the Washboard Rhythm Kings. The Washboard Rhythm Kings rock me always, without exception. Yet the thrill I get out of hearing them shout the world down is different again from the thrill I get out of hearing the breathless melancholy that Hayes’s jug blowers and Washington’s Six Aces manage to put across. That is all I can say. That is all I ought dare to say—assuming that I have respect for accuracy and truth.”
It’s the exact kind of record review I’ve always wanted—but never dared—to file.
McKune supposedly never gave up more than ten bucks for a 78 (and often offered less than three dollars), and was deeply offended—outraged, even—by collectors willing to pay out large sums of money, a practice he found garish, irresponsible, and in basic opposition to what he understood as the moral foundation of the trade. He didn’t like the notion that records could generate profit for their handlers: in the fall of 1963, in another letter to Rinard, he referenced his skepticism of a fellow collector, writing, “Somehow, I distrust him. He bought some records from the Negroes in Charleston, S.C. He spent $19 or $20 and sold the records for more than $500.” For McKune, collecting was a sacred pursuit—a way of salvaging and anointing songs and artists that had been unjustly marginalized. It was about training yourself to act as a gatekeeper, a savior; in that sense, it was also very much about being better (knowing better, listening better) than everyone else. Even in the 1940s and ’50s, 78 collectors were positioning themselves as opponents of mass culture, and McKune cultivated a fantastic disdain for pop stars as well as the so-called protest singers of the era. He thought, for example, that Woody Guthrie was bullshit, although by 1950 he’d come back around on folk music as a genre, a shift he attributed to getting older. (The career of Glenn Miller, though, was a constant source of jokes.)
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