I’m not sure what McKune was looking for, exactly. Maybe the same thing we all look for in music: some flawlessly articulated truth. But I know for sure when he found it.
In the 1940s, 78 collecting meant jazz collecting, and specifically Dixieland or hot jazz, which developed in New Orleans around the turn of the twentieth century and was defined by its warm, deeply playful polyphony (typically, the front line—a trumpet, trombone, or clarinet—took the melody, while the rhythm section—banjo, guitar, drums, upright bass, piano, and maybe a tuba—supported or improvised around it). Because of its origins, collecting rare Dixieland records in 1942 was not entirely unlike collecting Robert Johnson records in 1968, or, incidentally, now: deifying indigent, local music was a political act, a passive protest against its sudden co-optation by popular white artists. As Hamilton wrote, “it meant training the spotlight on a distinctly black, definitely proletarian art form in an era when, as they saw it, jazz had been tamed, sweetened, and commodified, with white performers like Benny Goodman and Paul Whiteman praised as its consummate practitioners.” But for whatever reason, blues records weren’t of any particular interest to early collectors. “The original 78 collectors despised country blues. They just liked jazz, and there were few exceptions,” Whelan explained. “It was a sharp divide. They thought it was less artistic. They were intellectuals.”
According to Hamilton, in January 1944 McKune took a routine trip to Big Joe’s and began pawing through a crate labeled “Miscellany,” where he found a record with “a sleeve so tattered he almost flicked past it.” It was a battered, nearly unplayable copy of Paramount 13110, Charley Patton’s “Some These Days I’ll Be Gone.” Patton had recorded the track in Grafton fifteen years earlier, and he’d been dead for less than ten when McKune first picked it up. Patton was almost entirely unknown to modern listeners; certainly McKune had never heard him before. He tossed a buck at a snoozing Clauberg and carted the record back to Brooklyn. As Hamilton wrote, “even before he replaced the tonearm and turned up the volume and his neighbor began to pound on the walls, he realized that he had found it, the voice he’d been searching for all along.”
“Some These Days I’ll Be Gone” is one of Charley Patton’s more staid tracks, in both rhythm and narrative. According to Gayle Dean Wardlow and Stephen Calt’s King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charley Patton, “Some These Days I’ll Be Gone” was “likely conceived for white presentation: it used diatonic intervals and featured the keynote as its lowest vocal tone, a technique Patton usually avoided in singing blues and gospel material.” Wardlow and Calt suspect the tune was conceived for “white square dances and sociables,” where Patton was likely accompanied by a fiddler who’d been tasked with playing lead over his strums. Lyrically, it’s a sweet imploration: Don’t take me for granted, Patton warns. “Some these days, I’m going to be leaving / Some these days, I’ll be going away,” he slurs, strumming a faint, bouncing guitar line. For once, he sounds more bemused than angry. You’ll see, he seems to grin. Just wait.
McKune wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with blues music before he brought “Some These Days I’ll Be Gone” home. As Hamilton tells it, McKune had worked at a record store in a black neighborhood the summer after he graduated from high school, where he sold copy after copy of popular 78s by Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith and developed a “gut-level aversion” to race records, which he considered cheap and tawdry. For years, he eschewed any record with “blues” in the title, although he did come around eventually. (In May 1944, in another letter to Whistance, he wrote: “Please play ‘Downhearted Blues,’ first by Bessie Smith, then by Eva Taylor, then by Alberta Hunter. Don’t let the difference in recording fidelity fool you, though; Bessie Smith has much more melancholy in her voice than any of her contemporaries. They had melancholy, too, but in lesser degree.”) According to Hamilton, in 1942 McKune was contacted by the owner of the Central General Store on Long Island and offered two unopened boxes of mint-condition Paramount blues 78s, which the proprietor had recently discovered buried in the back of his store and was hoping to unload for a buck apiece. McKune, the legend goes, passed without pause.
It was Charley Patton who changed everything for McKune. I can run an assortment of scenarios—recounting all the fireworks-type stuff I imagine happened when he first dropped a needle to “Some These Days I’ll Be Gone”—but those particular moments of catharsis are too weird and too personal to translate. What’s important is that McKune’s discovery of Patton set off an avalanche of cultural events, a revolution that’s still in progress: blues records became coveted by collectors, who then fought to preserve and disseminate them. In the liner notes to The Return of the Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of, a collection of 78 rarities released by Yazoo in 2012, Richard Nevins called McKune “ ‘the man’ who set it all in motion, who led blues collectors away from the errors of their wayward tastes . . . a fantastic, brilliant young man . . . [his] perspectives had profound influence and resound even today.” In the same notes, Dick Spottswood—in conversation with Nevins and Whelan—spoke about how McKune raised the stakes for everyone, about how things changed: “All I’m saying is that the records themselves as collectible artifacts were not buy or die [before]. They were desirable records but they weren’t life or death. You know, the way they have since turned into.” After McKune, collectors became invested in rural blues. They sought those records with fury, the music was preserved and reissued, and the entire trajectory of popular music shifted to reflect the genre’s influence.
While it seems egregious to suggest that someone wouldn’t have eventually taken a chance on a Patton record (or, say, one by Son House) and absurd to discount the faith of the performers themselves (who believed fiercely in their own work), McKune was the first collector to realize how powerful these artists could be outside of their original contexts, inadvertently spurring the creation of what would later be called the Blues Mafia—a coterie of frantic, competitive blues collectors (McKune, Whelan, Spottswood, Wardlow, Nevins, Bernie Klatzko, Pete Kaufman, Nick Perls, Stephen Calt, Max Vreede, and others) who, as Hamilton explained, “set up record labels, issued LP anthologies, and wrote liner notes, articles, and books of blues history that framed the blues as we now know it, a music of pain and alienation, a cry of African-American despair.”
Hamilton boldly charged the Blues Mafia with creating that specific narrative of the blues, which she understood as a collectively conjured fantasy that cast underappreciated outcasts as heroes—a portrayal that, unsurprisingly, appealed to 78 collectors. (She also accused them of feeding on a “faintly colonialist romance with black suffering.”) I believe prewar acoustic blues music was coveted by these men for a variety of reasons—its rareness, its artistic worth—but the notion that collectors might empathize with its creators, or have some vested, self-aggrandizing interest in reconfiguring them as stars, is compelling. Hamilton even went so far as to compare McKune’s arc to Robert Johnson’s, noting that both men were “homeless, friendless” wanderers.
Although I think the average 78 collector lives the sort of life—quiet, studious, steady—a country blues singer circa 1929 would find unrecognizable, it’s still easy to linger on the parallel. The performers most revered by early collectors did tend to be unpopular, alienated interlopers with a penchant for cheap liquor; men like McKune seized upon outsider records, not the high-selling sides peddled by more palatable artists like Lonnie Johnson and purchased with abandon by early black blues fans. It is undeniably strange that an idiosyncratic, outcast performer like Skip James would ever come to represent prewar blues, because no one was buying Skip James records in 1931; it is the equivalent of plucking some obscure, small-label psych-folk act from the late 1960s and declaring it the epitome of rock ’n’ roll. There is a severe and startling time-place disconnect. What concerned me, though, was Hamilton’s veiled assertion that collectors projected their own sorrow onto these records: few things are more obvious to me than the devastation of early country
blues songs. Collectors may have been responding to that anguish, but they did not invent it.
Since 1944, collectors have managed to amass a complete discography of Patton, and there aren’t any known recorded sides that haven’t been resurrected, although that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t exist. The Blues Mafia eventually turned its collective attention to other marginalized performers. By the mid-1940s, collectors had discovered a nineteen-page Library of Congress monograph, first published in Report of the Committee of the Conference on Inter-American Relations in the Field of Music and called “List of American Folk Songs on Commercial Records.” The document eventually became a kind of buyers’ guide for 78 fanatics and a default seed for the folk and blues canon as we understand it today.
The annotated list was created by the musicologist Alan Lomax in September 1940, with help from his sister Bess and the musician Pete Seeger, who was then just nineteen years old and working as Lomax’s assistant for fifteen dollars a week. In the document’s introduction, Lomax explains how he listened to “three thousand odd commercial records of white and negro songs and tunes from the South” and compiled a list of 350 representative titles “in order that the interested musician or student of American society may explore this unknown body of Americana with readiness. The choices have been personal and have been made for all sorts of reasons.” The list covered a dozen labels (Gennett was noticeably absent) and could be acquired by writing to the Library of Congress and requesting a copy. It’s a strange and captivating read, in part because Lomax was not yet besmirched by all the blues mythologizing that would come later; in 1940, this was uncharted terrain. His notes are riddled with abbreviations (a key, titled “Code used in condensation,” is included: NB for Negro Ballad, WPS for White Prison Song, Pa for Paramount Records, f for fine, vf for very fine, imp for important, r for remarkable, et cetera), and Lomax especially enjoyed calling things “authentic” or “typical,” terms which now feel frustratingly vague. Still, he knew, upon hearing Robert Johnson’s “Hell Hound on My Trail” (“unusual m[elody], traces of voodoo, beautiful g[uitar]”) or Blind Boy Fuller’s “Careless Love” (“brilliant folk g[uitar], v[ery] f[ine] ver[sion], one of the earliest blues”) that American folk music was “in a healthier condition” than the “folklore specialists [who] have been mourning its decline” believed.
Regardless of what drew James McKune to these types of songs or what sustained his interest, I still believe he’s an underheralded figure in the history of American popular music. This may seem like a naïve if not silly contention; it’s hard, after all, to visualize a bronzed McKune guarding the entrance to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, curved at the midsection, clutching a 78 and a bottle of something brown, squinting nervously at passersby. But while collecting is inherently passive—McKune didn’t make anything; these songs weren’t his; he didn’t do anything except listen well, and besides, early fans (if not collectors) were buying and playing at least some of these blues records in the 1930s—I also can’t conceive of the American pop canon without the music he so purposefully sought and lionized. A guy from no place, saving music from the same.
James McKune’s naked, strangled body was found, bound and gagged, in a grimy welfare hotel—the Broadway Central—on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in September 1971. Detectives concluded that he had likely been murdered by a man he had solicited for sex; Whelan later called the perpetrator a “homosexual serial killer” with, he thought, five or six other homicides on his record. By then McKune had moved out of the YMCA and was living primarily on the streets of the Bowery, among prostitutes and thieves. For those on the lookout for such parallels, McKune’s death did ultimately mirror Robert Johnson’s—who, as Hamilton pointed out, also died under “violent, mysterious, and sexually charged” circumstances. (The itinerant Johnson supposedly keeled over after taking a slug of poisoned whiskey, provided by a man whose wife he’d been eyeing or maybe worse.) Nobody knows for sure what happened to McKune’s record collection, although rumors still flutter up from time to time. It was likely sold, or stolen, or maybe given away bit by bit.
By the late 1960s, things hadn’t been looking particularly rosy for McKune. Work was scarce and drinks were plentiful, that ancient, odious pairing. “I remember [the collector] Bernie [Klatzko], who was an accountant and was doing this accounting for this business guy who was an old-time New York type, with the old-time New York accent, and he said to Bernie, ‘Now there’s a man on his way down,’ ” Whelan recalled.
The bulk of what I know about McKune’s life—and it’s not a whole lot—I learned from his letters to the jazz and blues collector Jack Whistance, who died in 2007. In 2011, Pete Whelan put me in touch with Whistance’s daughter-in-law, Gail; she was still sorting through his papers the morning I called. She told me Whistance and McKune likely met at Big Joe’s. “He talked about this McKune a lot,” she said. “He had this cache of postcards and letters from him, and he always thought they were important enough to save,” she continued. “[McKune] would often send postcards because they were cheap. He had tiny, tiny writing that would go upside down at the bottom and over different angles, even on the front a little bit if he ran out of room.”
Although McKune’s relationship with Whistance was clearly affectionate—McKune was cowed, at times, by Whistance’s considerable knowledge of hot jazz, and his valedictions grew more colloquial as the years passed, from “Sincerely, James P. McKune” to “Yours Ever, Jim,” to, my favorite, “Hasta la Vista”—it’s clear he didn’t have the same yearning for face-to-face communication. He often left records he wanted Whistance to hear with one of Whistance’s neighbors, avoiding corporeal interaction altogether. In December 1944, McKune wrote: “Couldn’t make it out to your place with the records all week. Knew that last Sunday aft, and so, taking a long chance, I hied me then to Jamaica. But you and MaryEllen were out, or sleeping and so I came away again. I purposely rang the bell only once so that, if you were sleeping, you wouldn’t be roused needlessly. On top of that Saturday night jamboree, thought I, sleep might be the only Sunday desideratum. Well, I’ll try again on Friday of the coming week. All I want to do is leave the records (by the N.O. Five and the N.O. Blue Nine) for you to assay. So if either of you is home (or if a trustworthy neighbor is home), my trip will not be in vain. This is not a visit I contemplate, mind you . . . but only a record-bringing.” Then, a few months later, in February: “You will have to assure MaryEllen that it is not lack of affability that keeps me from frequenting you . . . but my so-so health (whenever I don’t get enough sleep in the winter-time, lo! a day or two later I fall prey to another cold). And your long-houred job . . . and my innate considerations where my friends’ best interests are concerned.”
Gail told me MaryEllen—Whistance’s wife, then ninety-two—didn’t recall ever meeting McKune. “She does remember visiting the record shops—[she was] one of the very few women who ever set foot in those places. She was a good sport about it,” she said.
A few days later, Gail e-mailed me a scan of a grainy black-and-white photo of Big Joe standing at the counter of the Jazz Record Center, giving side eye to the camera. It’s a look that seems to say, “Settle down.” He’s squeezing a lit cigar between two thick fingers and wearing a striped button-down shirt. His black hair is slicked back; it looks hard and grooved, like the surface of a 78. MaryEllen is standing nearby, smiling gamely, her purse tucked tightly under her arm. In the background, a pair of hunched men in trench coats and fedoras—collectors, presumably—are gesturing at each other. The far wall is lined with crates of records. I bit down on my lower lip. It looked almost exactly like I’d hoped it would.
/ / Ten / /
I Saw America Changed Through Music
Harry Smith, The Anthology of American Folk Music, Tinctures, the Celestial Monochord, “Anything Shaped Like a Hamburger,” Allen Ginsberg, the New York Public Library, 50 MILES ELBOW ROOM
In 1952, eight years after James McKune ferried “Some These
Days I’ll Be Gone” back to the Brooklyn YMCA, a twenty-nine-year-old collector named Harry Everett Smith squirreled himself away in a two-room office at 111 West Forty-Seventh Street, chewing on peyote buttons and compiling a six-LP compendium for Folkways Records. The Anthology of American Folk Music, which was released by Folkways in 1952 and reissued on CD by the Smithsonian in 1997, was culled exclusively from Smith’s 78 collection and contains only songs issued between 1927 and 1932, that fruitful five-year span between the advent of electrical recording and the apex of the Great Depression. Despite its self-imposed parameters, Smith’s anthology is generous in its definition of folk music: child ballads, spirituals, Alabamans playing Hawaiian steel guitar, fiddlers, Charley Patton as the Masked Marvel, Appalachian coal miners, Cajun accordionists, the Carter Family, jug stompers, string bands, church congregations, and Uncle Dave Macon—mouth open, banjo wedged behind his knee, hollering “Kill yourself!”—all appear. Taken as a whole (and that’s the entire point), the Anthology is a wild and instructive portrait of a young country working itself out via song.
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