Do Not Sell at Any Price – The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records

You’re not a true collector until you’ve battled a river for records. DJ Shadow tells a story about rescuing private press discs from a flooded basement while the Colorado river is coursing in. Amanda Petrusich goes a few steps deeper – her search for the world’s rarest records sees her scuba diving in the Milwaukee River, scrambling in its ‘brown and nearly opaque’ water for country blues records from the 1920s. History notes that Paramount Records, an offshoot of a furniture manufacturer (and no relation to the film company) once had a busy pressing plant on the riverbank. Paramount specialised in the street-level blues releases that are now most highly prized by collectors, and in 2013 someone paid $37,100 for Tommy Johnson’s ‘Alcohol and Jake Blues’, one of only two copies known to exist. Petrusich is risking life and limb in a wetsuit because there’s a chance she might strike gold. Apparently, when they closed the pressing plant in the 1940s, disgruntled Paramount employees spent their last day frisbeeing the remaining discs into the waves. She imagines these treasures, ‘deteriorating at the bottom of the Milwaukee, providing shelter for crawfish alongside crushed Schlitz cans and rusted car parts.’

On her mission to sequence the collecting gene, we visit record fairs, reissue labels and private listening rooms, meeting entertaining oddballs with immaculately organised shelving. Petrusich’s collectors are from the rarified world of 78s – those brittle shellac 10-inches that spun round at double speed (78rpm) and were phased out by the 1950s. Thanks to their age and fragility, they’re so rare that some copies are the only ones in existence.

While researching a story on the resurgence of vinyl, someone told her ‘I can introduce you to plenty of guys who are obsessed with LPs, but if you really want to talk to someone who’s totally bonkers, you need a 78 collector.’ This breed is so rooted in their well-bounded world, few are interested in any music after the ’40s. But they have stories, emotions and dilemmas any vinyl junkie will recognise. Why this and not this? Why the record and not just the recording? Are you a treasure hunter or a preservationist? What’s the difference between an archive and a hoard? When should you say no to an expensive purchase? Or as collector John Heneghan put it, ‘I knew it would be a financial burden beyond what any rational mind would consider a wise decision.’ Some are strange loners; others more communally minded: ‘I could not live with myself as a “collector” without at least one person I could share sounds with,’ says one. Do Not Sell At Any Price is a meditation on the soul of record collecting.

Aside from the nutters, collecting has serious implications – collectors’ subjective tastes are what have defined our view of past music styles: ‘The music that gets collected is also, by default, the music that is preserved and endures.’ She quotes blues historian Elijah Wald: ‘As white urbanites discovered the ‘race records’ of the 1920s and 1930s they reshaped the music to fit their own tastes and desires, creating a rich mythology that often bears little resemblance to the reality of the musicians they admired. The more records an artist had sold in 1928, the less he or she was valued in 1958.’

Immersed in pre-vinyl music, Petrusich brilliantly conjures the early days of the recording industry, a time when America was on the move, with south migrating north and country folk pouring into the cities, bringing the blues and countless other rural styles with them, with recent immigrants throwing global flavours into the mix. The first record companies made the most of this haphazard melting pot, sitting anyone with a guitar and fiddle – or a jug or a banjo, a balalaika or a laughing mule – down in the studio. This produced a wealth of oddities, and one of the great joys of the book is the stream of lovable obscurities it gives you.

The records she picks out are time capsules of human quirks. Wind up your Spotify and wallow in the utter lament of Geeshie Wiley’s ‘Last Kind Word Blues’. Or hear the sheer god-given urgency of Rev FW McGee in ‘Fifty Miles of Elbow Room’, as he and his choir belt out the good word fit to bust. Marvel at the strangeness of Arthur Miles’ ‘Lonely Cowboy’, which sounds conventional enough until Arthur spits bars of eery polyphonic throat-singing, as if he’s straight out of Mongolia. Like a flash of eye contact with a long-dead face in an old photo, these tracks give you human connections that dissolve a century. 1922’s ‘Okeh Laughing Song’ is one of the daftest things ever recorded – a couple of people cracking each other up for three life-affirming minutes. And you have to hear ‘Flat Wheel Train Blues’ from 1930, where Red Gay and Jack Wellman use their guitar and fiddle to create the steady beat and mournful whistle of a steam train. With their Appalachian drawls rambling over this locomotive rhythm track, it’s as as sparse and motorik as any Kraftwerk. Towards the end they spot a lonely mule who races the train, mewling at being left behind. ‘You’d holler too like that if you was to get left,’ says Jack.

As well as these gems she directs you to archivists and compilers who offer further treasures: like the Secret Museum of Mankind, or the Excavated Shellac and Dust to Digital websites. One delight was Opika Pende; Africa at 78rpm, a hundred recordings from 1909 to the ’60s. Do Not Sell At Any Price is a door into a wide world of long-gone music you’ve probably never bothered with, but that you’ll be grateful to have heard. They may be scratchy and trebly, but these selections have a humanity that deepens your feel for the early twentieth century. 78 collectors look down on the rest, suggesting it’s ‘comparable to collecting pebbles versus collecting diamonds’ By bringing you tunes filled with exuberance and life, Amanda Petrusich shows you there’s some truth in this.

And her adventures with the more bonkers end of the collecting spectrum are hilarious in any case, as these 78-hunters epitomise the mad optimism of the crate digger. To help her find those records in the depths of the Milwaukee River, she brings in someone with expert experience. ‘Steve worked part-time rescuing golf balls from the bottoms of nearby lakes; he knew a little about blindly digging around in mud.’ Frank Broughton