Category Archive 'Music'
08 Jun 2022

The Greatest Collector of Old 78s

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The Washington Post interviews the greatest collector of American roots music on 78 rpm recordings: Blues, Jazz, Country.

FREDERICK, Md. — Joe Bussard stood on the driveway of his home here near the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and glared at a noisy crow perched atop a nearby pine tree. Tall and gaunt with white hair, he wore black sweatpants held up by suspenders, a blue flannel shirt, brown slippers and white socks. He looked all of his 85 years.

“Damn bird,” he muttered. Then he craned his head and hollered.

“CAWWW, CAWWW, CAWWW!”

The startled crow flew away, and Bussard cackled.

“He don’t know what to think of me,” Bussard said, laughing again.

Join the crowd, crow. People have been not knowing what to think about Bussard for decades. His singular obsession has entranced some and baffled others. If you weren’t interested in his passion, Bussard probably wasn’t much interested in you.

He turned and shuffled back inside, through his cluttered garage, past his bedroom that he heats in winter with a wood-fired stove and down the creaky steps to the basement where the treasure is stored.

Since the early 1950s, Bussard (“Everybody thinks it’s pronounced ‘buzzard,’ but it’s Boosard,” he says) has been acquiring 78 rpm recordings of the earliest and rarest examples of blues, bluegrass, jazz, country and gospel music. The collection of discs he has amassed is considered by many fellow collectors as one of the finest and most eclectic of early American roots music in the country. In the basement of his unassuming home, some 15,000 records fill the shelves.

In the world that pays attention to these things, Bussard’s treasure is legendary. Filmmakers have made documentaries about him. Writers have paid homage. Fans and musicians from all over the country have journeyed here just to see the records and listen to Bussard tell how he traveled the back roads of Appalachia and the South to find them. And they come to hear the songs.

But in recent years, as Bussard has gotten older, the fans and musicologists have had questions. Is there a plan for the collection? Has he even thought about it?

Looking for a record on the shelves in his lair, Bussard doesn’t want to hear that kind of talk right now. “Aw hell, I don’t know,” he says, waving his hand dismissively. He’d rather play some music for a visitor.

“Oh my gawd, listen to this,” he says in his thick rural Maryland accent as he gently lowers the needle on a 1929 recording “Wolves Howling” by the Stripling Brothers. “This is the most beautiful sound of a fiddle I ever heard in my life.”

In his basement, time has stopped. There are no computers, no flat-screen televisions. Other than two newer turntables, there’s almost nothing that looks like it was made in the past 50 years. There’s a 300-pound speaker cabinet he bought in 1960, photos on the wall from the ’50s, and rows and rows of records from the ’40s, ’30s and ’20s.

Bussard’s collection “is almost mystical,” says Ken Brooks, a fellow 78 collector who first learned about Bussard when he watched “Desperate Man Blues” a 2003 BBC documentary about him. “It’s so deep and wide. He has blues records that nobody else has. Country records that no one else has. Jazz records that no one else has.”

In the book of Bussard, the spirit and soul and depth of American music can only be heard on the oldest 78s.

Modern music, he’ll tell you often, is ‘awwful, just awwful.” And by modern, he means anything since Elvis Presley and the Beatles and “all that crap” destroyed music altogether. For Bussard, real jazz ended in 1933. And the last good country song was Jimmy Murphy’s “I’m Looking for a Mustard Patch” in 1955.

Before being overwhelmed by vinyl records in the 1950s, 78s were the way most people listened to recorded music in their homes other than on the radio. Typically 10 inches in diameter, three and a half minutes a side and made of shellac, the records are called 78s because of the number of revolutions per minute the disc makes.

In his basement redoubt, Bussard walks over to his wall of records to make another selection. The records are all in identical faded green sleeves with no marking to differentiate them. They are not ordered alphabetically or by year or by label. Only he knows the system.

“If I get Alzheimer’s, I’m really in trouble,” Bussard says.

He pulls another record from the shelf — “Death May Be Your Paycheck,” by F.W. McGee, recorded in 1928 on Victor — and flashes a wicked smile. “Wait till you hear this.”
In the basement of his Frederick, Md. home, Joe Bussard, 85, plays a 78 rpm recording from 1936 of “Everybody Ought To Pray Some Time.” (Video: Joe Heim/The Washington Post)

Wait till you hear this. It’s Bussard’s mantra.

What he wants, more than anything, is for people to listen to the far-flung, wild, beautiful music found in America before recordings became commonplace and swallowed up regional idiosyncrasies. He wants people to hear the music created before vinyl, before 8-tracks, before cassettes, before CDs, before one-stop shopping on Spotify.

“Wait till you hear this,” he says and puts on Jesse Stone’s “Starvation Blues” from 1927. And then it’s “Florida Rhythm” by the Ross De Luxe Syncopaters. And “It’s a Good Thing” by the Beale Street Sheiks. And “Original Stack O’ Lee Blues” by Long Cleve Reed and Little Harvey Hull.

And on and on and on.

RTWT

HT: John W. Brewer.

07 Jan 2022

Fanfare for the First Lady

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Who says that Joe Biden has accomplished nothing in his presidency? Why, he got the Marine Corps Band to compose a brand-new entering-the-room tune, equivalent to “Hail to the Chief,” for his wife Jill.

Will it stick and become a tradition? Who knows? The Republican-minded, like Mr. Jefferson, would think this sort of thing smacks of Monarchy, sounding like the sort of thing that would be played when Louis XVI’s platter of roast peacock was ceremoniously delivered.

26 Apr 2021

Anatomy of Songs

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25 Feb 2021

Tim Storms Holds the Record for the Lowest Vocal Note

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Classicfm.com:

How low can he go? Turns out, ludicrously, earth-shatteringly low…

Since 2012, Tim Storms has held the world record for the lowest ever vocal note – that’s a deliciously gravelly G -7 (0.189 Hz), which is eight octaves below the lowest G on the piano.

The American bass, who stretches the lowest male voice type to its extreme, holds the Guinness World Records for both the “lowest note produced by a human” and the “widest local range”.

Speaking to Classic FM in his winning year, Storms said his voice “was always low”.

“The older I get, the lower I get,” he said. “I never went through that adolescent voice changing phase.”

Pour some liquid thunder down a microphone, and Storms’ voice is sort of what you get (listen above).

RTWT

HT: Karen L. Myers.

13 Jul 2020

Ennio Morricone — “March Of The Beggars”

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Ennio Morricone, who passed away on the 6th of July at the age of 91, is best known for the unusually-instrumented title music to “The Good the Bad and the Ugly” (1966).
His “March Of The Beggars” from “Duck You Sucker” (1971) is similarly amusing.

21 Mar 2020

Just the Thing for Today

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A virtual choir of 36 women all recorded separately at different times and in different locations.

HT: Karen L. Myers.

19 Feb 2020

Oldest Music in the World

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YouTube:

For fifteen years Prof. Anne Draffkorn Kilmer puzzled over clay tablets relating to music including some excavated in Syria by French archaeologists in the early ’50s. The tablets from the Syrian city of ancient Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra) were about 3400 years old, had markings called cuneiform signs in the hurrian language (with borrowed akkadian terms) that provided a form of musical notation. One of the texts formed a complete cult hymn and is the oldest preserved song with notation in the world. Finally in 1972, Kilmer, who is professor of Assyriology, University of California, and a curator at the Lowie Museum of Anthropology at Berkeley, developed an interpretation of the song based on her study of the notation.

The top parts were the words and the bottom half instructions for playing the music. Kilmer, working with colleagues Richard L. Crocker and Robert R. Brown produced a record and booklet about the song called Sounds From Silence.

The song, it turns out, is in the equivalent of the diatonic “major” (“do, re, mi”) scale. In addition, as Kilmer points out: “We are able to match the number of syllables in the text of the song with the number of notes indicated by the musical notations”. This approach produces harmonies rather than a melody of single notes. The chances the number of syllables would match the notation numbers without intention are astronomical.

This evidence both the 7-note diatonic scale as well as harmony existed 3,400 years ago flies in the face of most musicologists’ views that ancient harmony was virtually non-existent (or even impossible) and the scale only about as old as the Ancient Greeks, 2000 years ago. Said Crocker: “This has revolutionized the whole concept of the origin of western music.”

13 Feb 2020

The Lion Sleeps Tonight (Three Versions)

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Vanderleun will probably like these.

From Lawrence Person.

HT: Karen L. Myers.

06 Jan 2020

We Three Kings

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29 Dec 2019

Wexford Carol

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Alison Krauss with Yo-Yo Ma.

28 Dec 2019

Ça, bergers, assemblons-nous

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Québecois tenor Raoul Jobin with choir.

27 Dec 2019

Once in Royal David’s City

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St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir.

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