That night, while I sat in on Salsburg’s lecture and screening (it was presented as part of the Brooklyn Folk Festival and held in a crowded gallery near the waterfront in Red Hook), I couldn’t stop thinking about Wahle’s records, stacked willy-nilly in a Dumpster, coated in ketchup and trash. He was a middling collector (“I wouldn’t make too big a deal out of Wahle,” Sherwin Dunner warned me when I inquired about his general standing) with a dubious affinity for cornball country songs sung by smooth-voiced goons like Gene Autry or Roy Rogers (Wahle had five copies of Autry’s 1949 rendition of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”). But he also seemed like a useful object lesson for any aspiring gatherer: records won’t love you back. They won’t pack up your house or pay for your funeral. Even collectors as esteemed and celebrated as Harry Smith—or as seminal as James McKune—can’t account for their stuff after they’re gone. “This guy, he had no contingency plan for them,” Salsburg said. “He had nothing. He just lived among them. Like T. S. Eliot said, ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins,’ or whatever the line was.” (That was it.)
The four sentence obituary that ran in the Louisville Courier-Journal that spring was appropriately dismal: “WAHLE, DONALD PICKETT, 75, passed away March 23, 2010. He is survived by his brother, Robert J. Wahle; two nephews, Robin and Charles Banks; and one niece, Shannon Miller. Cremation was chosen. There will be no service.”
Shortly after I pulled up alongside Salsburg’s yellow, shotgun-style house in the Clifton neighborhood of Louisville, about a mile east of the Ohio River, he began snickering at my rental car, which I was only able to identify as a “Dodge Whatever,” a designation he found hilarious. The important thing, apparently, was that it had a spoiler, and possibly a racing stripe, and was white. I’ll admit there was something humiliating about even standing near it. It lent all peripheral proceedings an undignified air.
Salsburg had agreed to let me rummage through Don Wahle’s papers, which were then stored in deteriorating cardboard boxes in his laundry room. I could tell Salsburg still had a complicated relationship with the material, which at one point he half jokingly called “a two-ton albatross.” I saw how it might be disconcerting to become the default material warden of a man you’d never met and whom no one could tell you anything about (although Salsburg would have happily received them, no family members ever emerged; when I tried to contact them myself, my letters were not returned). Salsburg was also in the unique position of knowing, via his work with the Lomax Archive and his own self-edification, how precious some of this material was. Although there was eventually some (limited) money and (limited) glory involved, I’m also not sure he could have ever walked away in good conscience.
By now, Salsburg was deep into the prep work for Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard, the set culled from Don Wahle’s collection. The rubric itself had originally been conceived to organize discs recorded under the auspices of (and held by) the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, which, since 1976, had collected “images, sounds, written accounts, and a myriad more items of cultural documentation” to “facilitate folklife projects and study.” The AFC eventually swallowed up the Archive of Folk Culture, which had been established by the Library of Congress in 1928, and it now billed itself as one of the largest collections of ethnographic material from the United States and around the world. Even before he found Wahle’s records, Salsburg had an organizing principle and access to raw material. But it turned out Wahle’s collection made better fodder.
“The idea was to do work songs—songs about occupation or songs about hard times or songs about being broke or whatever—and then novelty songs and dance tunes, and then sacred material,” Salsburg said. “I was interested in that rubric initially because the stuff at the American Folklife Center was recorded ‘in the field’—it’s music that accompanied folks’ lives, songs that were sung at religious observances, ritual events, songs that were sung in church; then songs that accompanied work, songs that were directly related to people’s livelihoods or lack thereof; and then songs people entertained themselves by,” he explained. “That’s a bit of a specious distinction—plenty of people made commercial recordings of very local and occasional material—but I thought it would be interesting to do something that was a little more concrete: expressions of real people’s lives in their contexts.”
Most 78 collectors deal exclusively with commercial recordings: 78s that were made and pressed by a label, then sold to whomever could afford them. With field recordings, there’s often no artifact—collectors can’t, for example, attempt to collect all of Alan Lomax’s master tapes. But some collectors also maintain an aesthetic distinction between the two forms—they’ll argue that field-recorded artists were often coerced or manipulated into performing, or will point out that the equipment used by a folklorist in the field was inherently shoddier than whatever a label would have had at its disposal. There’s also the question of curating—of imposing an outside narrative on random forms, which, in some ways, is the folklorist or song collector’s chief prerogative.
When I asked Chris King about the metatextual difference between a field recording and a commercial record, he broke it down this way: “The distinction is that commercial recording studios would give a full master or even two full masters to an artist that could perform solidly whatever material they brought to the studio, whereas the folklorist in the field was seeking to flesh out their particular interest, narrative, vision, or imposition, and that guided their taste when they selected both the subject and the expression that they wished to convey,” he offered. “The collector as recorder, in the field, was the arbiter of taste and selection, whereas the studio engineer or A&R guy would only reject artists that couldn’t hold it together for three and a half minutes. The filter was one person’s taste or curiosity versus another person’s cold call (can they even tune the fucking guitar).”
For Salsburg, though, it was more about stakes. When he came upon Wahle’s records, he realized he could digitize and distribute that material using the same categories he had in mind for the AFC holdings. And unlike those field recordings, some of the commercial records Wahle spent his life amassing were in danger of being lost. “The experience of finding the records, of seeing where they had come from—the whole thing is an object lesson in how rare, how fragile, how forgotten, how underappreciated . . .” He stopped. “Not to further fetishize 78s, but think about how many records were just thrown away, where someone was like, ‘The fuck is this old thing? It’s heavy and I can’t play it, I’ll throw it away.’ I feel like this project wouldn’t be nearly as fun and rewarding and important to do if these records didn’t come from whom and where they came from.”
The limits of Wahle’s collection were also part of what made it so usable; there was a smallness to it that felt germane to Salsburg’s entire concept. It was real: “My idea was that it would exist as a kind of counterbalance to the Harry Smith set, because it wasn’t wrapped up in all that mystical shit,” he said. “The idea was that I would be applying categories to something that made sense in everyday life: work and play and religious experience. Granted, Harry Smith makes Songs and Ballads and Social Music make sense as discrete categories. But they’re all bound together by this occult ontology, which I think is a needlessly complicating factor. It calls a bunch of people to it who wouldn’t otherwise be interested because of its presentation as this purported mystical document.” Instead, Salsburg’s model was fiercely proletariat, both in content and in presentation, and as much as I loved the Anthology, his point felt valid—Salsburg’s categories were accessible, almost intrinsic. It was a life cycle every American would understand.
Salsburg had promised to take me to see Wahle’s house, but in the meantime, I wanted to nose around Wahle’s things for a little while. I figured I could employ all of my dubious investigative reporting skills to conjure a fully formed portrait of his life—his loves and devastations and whatnot.
Reader, I failed. If Don
Wahle’s correspondence were a meal, it would be boiled potatoes. He saved everything (receipts, bank statements, brochures, catalogs, shopping lists), but it was all so fiercely banal it was hard to keep going after a while. Digging through it felt like watching a never-ending marathon of a low-budget reality show called Paperwork. Here is what I know: he saved old scraps of paper with different-colored scribbles on them, as if he were endlessly testing out his pen collection. He wrote in a thick, slanted script; his words looked as if they were being blown to the right by some unseen gust of wind. His best and most amusing quality was his periodic cantankerousness. Don Wahle was fond of a harshly worded letter. He had a lot of complaints, and he aired them freely. One of his bank statements included a letter of apology from the bank’s manager, an E. R. Spelger: “Dear Mr. Wahle: Thank you for calling to our attention the fact that you did not receive a receipt for your deposit of November 19th, which you dropped in our night depository.”
Using only his rescued papers, it was tricky to ascertain exactly what Wahle did for cash. According to a November 14, 1958, statement—typed on thick yellow paper and issued by the Citizens Fidelity Bank and Trust Company of Louisville—he had a respectable $135.15 in his bank account. But by 1970, it seemed he was out of work entirely: he received a letter from the Department of Economic Security’s Division of Unemployment Insurance stating that there was work available for him at something called “Protective Services, 141 East Woodlawn, Louisville, Kentucky,” and that he should report to that employer immediately.
His collecting, however, continued apace. In 1958, Wahle was invited to be included in Burke’s Register of Record Collectors, a kind of Who’s Who organized by a man named Vincent Burke, who lived at 172 Thompson Street in Greenwich Village. The enclosed letter requested additional nominations. “The forwarding of lists of active collectors is most important in our efforts to make record collecting the greatest hobby of all,” Burke wrote.
Wahle kept endless want lists and corresponded frequently with other collectors, although those conversations were usually restricted—almost aggressively—to the task at hand, and personal asides were limited, if not nonexistent. My favorite set of correspondence began in April of 1959. It was with a record dealer named Victor Dozewiecki of Saginaw, Michigan, who must have responded to Wahle’s request for Gene Autry records for sale or trade. Dozewiecki was on the hunt for Autry, too, although he was more interested in the objects than what they might contain and didn’t feel any need to pretend otherwise, writing, on May 23, 1959, “I don’t care in what condition the Autry records are which you may have to trade, just so I don’t already have them.”
Mostly, Dozewiecki got mad at Wahle for not responding promptly to his letters and requests for information. On September 12, 1959, in green pen, he wrote: “Dear Don: Some time ago, I requested of you to send me listings of Gene Autry records you wish for me to pick up for you. You stated that you would send lists. I have been waiting for a long time now and still no lists from you. I can’t wait any longer for you to send me your lists. Everyone I’m connected with will be sore at me if I don’t locate some of their wanted records soon. I can’t put off record-hunting any longer while waiting for your ‘Wants Lists.’ I’m sorry but the record collectors will have to cooperate if they want any further assistance from me. As far as I’m concerned there will not be any further business transactions between you and I. Any letters from you will not be accepted. I must have cooperation if people want any of my help in reference to their record wants.”
But by early November—after, I presume, Wahle had finally sent off his want list—they seemed to have reconciled. Dozewiecki agreed to help, but added, “However, when I send you letters I would appreciate a reply without too much delay. When you find it impossible to answer my letter without delay, please send me a postcard so that I’ll know you received my letter.” You can practically see his face getting red, flushed with indignation and rage. Over the next dozen or so letters, Dozewiecki found new and compelling ways to complain about Wahle’s lack of promptness. Then, in December, he suddenly told Wahle he was giving up the hunt altogether and selling his entire collection. It included “nearly every different song Gene Autry has recorded from 1929 to 1944.”
“I have a lack of space in my apartment, so the records must be sold,” he wrote. “It’s too difficult for me to try to relocate due to the present day conditions of the labor situation, also too many personal belongings.” When Wahle didn’t respond quickly enough, he got agitated again. “I wish to move to a different part of the country, and this matter of records you want to purchase from me is keeping me from doing so.” He started bullying: “I honestly don’t believe the price I stated for the Autry records of interest to you is too high. I know of people who have paid $1,000 per one record, same people have purchased quite a few records for the same stated price. Many people have paid hundreds of dollars for one record. I have never let prices stop me when I wanted certain records.” They eventually made a deal, or what appeared to be a deal, but Wahle—of course—waited too long to answer. In March 1960, Dozewiecki wrote: “Is there some particular reason you will not send me a reply??????? I just can’t keep writing letters to you and not receive any answers. I have too many problems on my mind, too many things to take care of.” This one ends with “Please do so now, please, please.” In a different letter from the same month, he blamed Wahle for derailing his entire life: “I can’t wait much longer, I wanted to move months ago but decided to delay the trip for a short time so that you could secure the Autry records of interest to you.”
By the next month, Dozewiecki was through with Wahle entirely, or so he claimed. “I’m not waiting for a reply from you after the stated date [April 16] so help me God. I’ve lost too much time thru this business of records.”
That evening, Salsburg and I sat down to dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant, and over steaming bowls of pho, I told him how hard it had been to pinpoint Wahle, to isolate the man amid his stuff. His smile was sympathetic: he’d tried, too. I asked if he felt like he knew Wahle at all, if he could discern some portrait, some narrative. “He was religious, apparently, or at least later in life. There was some Bible stuff, there were Billy Graham materials, there were some 45s of banal, white Texas preachers. Nothing good.” He shrugged. “He had a bunch of random Christmas shit. I think he was big into Christmas.”
Don Wahle was already making me doubt my mulishly clung-to belief that a collection always represented something about its keeper—that it functioned as an omniscient mirror. For Salsburg, Wahle’s records told a confounding if not infuriating story. “The best part of the collection seems to have been accumulated in spite of Don Wahle,” he said. “Part of me is sometimes like, ‘Don, you are a fucking idiot.’ Because there are times when I know that he had the opportunity to get awesome records and didn’t, because he was too busy tracking down a Gene Autry record. So there were moments when I swore at him to myself, just purely for reasons of my own taste. But I also think there’s something to be said about the records that were really peculiar in their context. A lot of these records are really weird. The late-twenties and early-thirties really rural string-band stuff—that’s when that sound was totally falling out of style. Here’s this genre in its only real commercial iteration—at least for the decades till the folk revival, when it was rerecorded or reissued on small-batch LPs—and they’re capturing these highly localized traditions, performance styles, repertoires. Before the onslaught of the industrial Nashville sound that smoothed out so many of the edges. Those records are often rare because there wasn’t much taste for them then outside of their communities; not in the marketplace. And those are the ones that are the most exciting in this collection.” They’re the same ones that Salsburg believed Wahle acquired by accident, as part of wholesale lots or through some other inadvertent means.
We talked more about the various hazards of collecting: what it can do to you, how a person might end up like Wahle. How, if
mismanaged, the urge can manifest as a kind of egomania, a macho possessiveness. “Well, it all has to do with the territory, right? You’re the one who controls this body of work,” he said. “That seems very male to me.”
Strangely, I hadn’t thought about collecting explicitly as a means of control, although it was true: collectors might be generous about lending or digitizing their stock as a rule, but they did get to decide how and why and when that would happen, if at all. Everyone else had to go through a middleman, a label, an archive. Collectors had not only the glee of direct access but also got to experience the giddy, near-nefarious delight of discovery, of cramming their personal flag into a piece of exclusive shellac. “It’s a different kind of personality that doesn’t want that mediation,” Salsburg said. “They want to be the one who discovers it. Look at the people—the dudes—who went looking for the Northwest Passage, or Columbus, or whoever else.”
After dinner, we took Salsburg’s redbone coonhound, Ruby, on a long walk around his neighborhood. One thing Salsburg was fairly certain about was that he thought of Wahle’s records as things to be passed on and shared, in one way or another—via the release of Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard or by selling or loaning them to interested parties. I chidingly pointed out how that didn’t sound like something a real collector would say: to be so cavalier and fluid regarding ownership. He laughed. “I’m not a real 78 collector. That’s the thing. Collectors are really particular about the curatorial aspect of their collection. This isn’t curation. Don wasn’t a curator. He just found all the records he could find and brought them in. For me, I feel like it’s an inheritance.” He shrugged. “I don’t really feel a great sense of possessiveness over them.”
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