You all need to stop everything you’re doing. We have to go back and get the rest of those records out of that dumpster.
So said my friend Nathan Salsburg at a beer drinking session in the spring of 2010 as he flipped, wide-eyed and increasingly pale, through several stacks of pre-war 78 records saved from the landfill that day by our buddy Chris. Working as a day laborer for a dumpster company, Chris’ job was to clear out the contents of a foreclosure house in the South End, and indiscriminately toss every thing owned by one Don Wahle, late of Templewood Drive, into a giant dumpster.
“This is all I could get,” Chris told us, pointing at the stack of records. “I had to work all day taking stuff out to the dumpster and there wasn’t any time to sort through anything. This is as many as I could save. I must have thrown away 50 boxes like this and there are twice as many still in the house that’ll get thrown out tomorrow. ”
The short version of a very long story is that we did get all of those records. Uninvited, under the dimming twilit skies of a South End suburb, we crawled onto the dumpster and burrowed into the collected belongings of a man who, it seemed, spent a great deal of his life alone, collecting and listening to and selling records, receiving guests rarely and communicating infrequently with folks outside of the tightly knit community of 78 record collectors.
We passed innumerable boxes down, bucket brigade style, filling up the bed of a late model Ford F-150 and a Honda Accord hatchback to capacity. That evening’s haul, and the remainder that were retrieved the next day totaled 2,500 pre-war country, hillbilly, cowboy, and old time string band records, with a smattering of early blues recordings in what will be known as the Don Wahle Collection. The ¾ of a ton of American music history that we saved from the landfill is as close as any of us is likely to come to finding buried treasure.
The collection is now under the direction and curation of Salsburg and, thankfully, will not lie fallow, as it did for 50 years in Wahle’s musty basement. On the contrary, Salsburg, who is a professional folklorist, producer, and archivist for the Alan Lomax archives, has teamed up with the vernacular music label Dust to Digital to digitize the entire Wahle collection and make it available to the public on a searchable database of vernacular music that is currently under construction.
I sat down with Salsburg recently to talk about the Don Wahle collection, and about the importance of preservation in general. I asked him to tell me why we six grown men went under cover of darkness to jump into a dumpster.
Because records from this era, the 1920’s 30’s early 40’s, what they call the ‘pre-war era’ are rare and only getting rarer. Especially records that were pressed up for specific communities, such as hillbilly records and race records. They are rare records because they were played on Victrola machines and people didn’t change the needles often, so the needles mashed the records into pulp. Also the records broke easily. And, the records that were still in the market place [at the beginning of the war] were melted down for the war effort because shellac was rationed material. To find any of these records, to get through this many generations of errors without being thrown away is a pretty rare occurrence, and to find this many records, this many rare records is nearly unheard of. To find them on the way to the dump puts into pretty stark relief that this material was on the verge of extinction, of demolition. To have [an] opportunity like we did doesn’t happen, ever. All these older collectors that I’ve talked to who’ve been collecting records for years said, “I have dreamed of that for years.” You know, finding a collection. I worry that the people who care about [78’s] will just disappear, or get into something else. These are actual documents of cultural activity, live music recorded to a piece of media. These are vessels of an important expression of an era of our cultural and national history.
The Don Wahle Collection provides a unique look at the expressions of that era, and the winding movements of early country music. Sorting through the piles, listening and cataloging, Salsburg says, one could trace country’s evolution from its vernacular roots into a genre that was quickly taken up as an industry. This evolution first highlighted then paved over the regional differences that were laid down as its foundations.
The reason this stuff is really exiting for people is because of the variations that can be seen. From Arkansas to Tennessee, to Texas to Alabama, every county had a different sound, they had different bands, and they all played a version of, say, ‘Old Joe Clark’ or ‘Turkey in the Straw’ but there were variations one county to next, because the pieces were learned in the oral tradition. For instance, the Weems String Band from rural Tennessee made one record, one of the best records ever recorded in pre-war country music. They have two fiddles, a banjo, and a bowed cello holding down the bottom end …that’s the sound of really old world dance music. Violincello was used for dance music before a guitar that provided a bottom for dance music. That’s something that just doesn’t exist anymore. It disappeared come the 1930’s, so this band from Tennessee are an example of that type of music that was not only eclipsed by technological and instrumental developments, but the consolidation of country music as a genre.”
There’s sort of 3 tiers of performance styles in the collection; You have the stars- Dave Macon, Jimmie Rodgers, The Carter Family, etcetera. These are awesome records, some of the best country records ever made, cool, but not very rare. They were stars who had a national audience…their sound became the national sound of country music. Then there are people who replicated the sound of others- Gene Autry, Jimmie Davis, Cliff Carlisle, and others who were pretenders to the Jimmie Rodgers yodeling throne, Macon minstrelsy, vaudeville and medicine show traditions from the late 19th century. Then there’s music from guys like Alex Hood and his Railroad Boys from Corbin KY; Taylor’s Kentucky Boys; the great Skillet Lickers from North Georgia – hot mountain music, some dual fiddling, heavy on the banjo; that’s real mountain music. That stuff started to fall out of style as folks got into the cowboy songs and western swing, which kind of put the mountain music out of people’s tastes.
The stuff that’s really exiting in the collection is the idiosyncratic material. The Alfred G. Karnes…. that stuff just wouldn’t be popular come the 1930’s, because it wouldn’t fit the emerging country music genre.
“And this was a result of the recording industry, and radio sort of homogenizing the regional differences?”
Yes, radio did it.
It’s terribly interesting, confusing, and a little sad to think of recorded sound, the 78 record and, by extension, radio as contributing to the ironing out of American vernacular music; that the media themselves colluded in erasing the thing that they sought to capture and preserve. Country music, in a sense, killed its parents. This notion though, comes from and leads right back to the concept of Authenticity, the slippery and ever-present Oroborus that circles around folk music in general, and country music very specifically.
The other day I was listening to the local country music station, to the sounds of those musicians and songwriters who were the heirs of the cultural history contained in the Wahle Collection. After the bumper music, right before another recitation of “He Stopped Loving Her Today”, was a short sound bite advertisement for the station in which a couple of devoted listeners described why they tune in.
“It gives me a connection to the past.” “It’s real. It’s true.”
103.9 Country Legends.
I was fairly awestruck at the density of conflicting historical, but complementary emotional messages in the 6 seconds of audio. The truth and falsity of the ideas wrapped around one another like a ball of yarn, begging to come undone. In my mind it spoke directly of the very human need to connect with and understand our past, and the desire for that connection to be founded on something which is perceived to be real and authentic, in spite of clear indications that the authenticity sought after may only be legend.
When we came back to the house that night last spring we sat down to drink a few beers and revel in the moment. Crowded around the little portable 78 player, we listened to two sides by Mississippi John Hurt- ‘Stagger Lee’ and ‘Candy Man Blues’- recorded in 1928 for Okeh Records. There’s only one song on each side of a 78, and these were about two minutes long. There’s not much else a person has time to do than put the record on and listen to it. Actually listen. So we sat, and we listened.
While I’d heard those songs dozens of times before on CD or LP or on a computer, I got pretty choked up that night. Something about that listening, something distinct, and just barely out of reach in my mind and heart’s understanding, made the moment stand out from every other listening experience of my life. There was John Hurt’s truly singular voice and finger-picking guitar style, stationary in time, physically locked into grooves that were etched in lacquer when my grandmother was a toddler, when there was still a country called Prussia, and when the Civil Rights movement was thirty years away, only a possibility in a totally uncertain future.
And there we were, a community of listeners, removed from the era of the recording in almost every way possible, engaging with a physical object whose emotional and historical meanings are highly mitigated and illusory, but which were simultaneously felt physically and seemed so apparent to me. I felt connected to something real and true from the past, but I also conceived that that connection was constructed by me and me alone. Who was the last person to play that record before it was saved from the trash? What did they feel like? And the listener before, and the listener before…all the way back to 1928. It was one of the most touching musical experiences of my life, and I will never forget those five or six minutes, and I may never understand why I react that way to the perception of authenticity.
It’s been difficult to ascertain much about Don Wahle. He collected 78’s, 45’s, and LP’s by the thousands. He was a meticulous listener, often taking notes on the varying recording qualities within his collection, and corresponded widely with other collectors. He lived alone, in squalor, and kept his collection close to him. Some of the rarest 78’s were left to rot and mold, while other records were obviously attended to with great care. It seems as though Mr. Wahle’s concern was not with the “value” of his collection, but with having a collection. He took comfort, it seems, in having it close, listening, and just knowing it was there. I’ve found myself wondering if Mr. Wahl found the same comfort in his country records that the ‘real and true’ fans of 103.9 FM feel, and that I feel too when I hear music that strikes my ears and heart as somehow more real than the rest. Collectors collect for reasons that are their own. Some of them know why, others don’t. What stands out in the end is that every collection can, if saved in perpetuity, allow the rest of us to wonder why salvaging things and ideas is important to us. It’s a dialogue with our past and, though the reason remains mysterious, it feels important.
–Joe Manning
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