Tefteller, 50, is one of the world’s most prolific collectors of Paramount blues. “And they sure as hell would kill your mother, and you.” “There are some people who would kill their own mother for the only copy of a Son House record,” Mr. Paramount’s blues releases especially its “race” records with label numbers in the 12000s and 13000s are among the most coveted records in the world. became an unlikely home for blues legends like Patton, Blind Blake, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Son House and Skip James. A furniture company in a largely white Midwestern suburb is rarely evoked in these reveries, but in the late 1920s and early 1930s Paramount Records an arm of the Wisconsin Chair Company, a manufacturer of wooden phonograph cabinets in Port Washington, Wis. He noted a particular spike last fall, when the economy first faltered.īlues music is in part mythological its legend involves sweltering juke joints, homemade whiskey and Faustian bargains at rural crossroads.
“Prices have been rising at a phenomenal rate, as people take money out of the stock market and out of different real estate investments and look for a place to put it,” said John Tefteller, a collector who makes his living dealing in rare records. (A rarer Patton record could command $15,000 to $20,000.)īut according to some, the rare-record business is booming, despite the recession and the devaluation of music as a physical product. At a time when music fans expect songs to be delivered instantaneously (and often at zero cost) online, scouring the globe for a rare record and paying thousands of dollars for it might seem ludicrous. Heneghan, 41, is part of a small but fervent community of record collectors who for decades have hunted, compulsively and competitively, for 78s: the extraordinarily fragile 10-inch discs, introduced near the turn of the 20th century and made predominantly of shellac, that contain one two- to three-minute performance per side. The coarse, crackling voice of the blues singer Charley Patton, performing “High Water Everywhere Part 1,” his startling account of the 1927 Mississippi River flood, rose from the speakers, raw and unruly. Behind him, in the corner of his East Village apartment, sat 16 wooden crates, each filled with meticulously cataloged 78-r.p.m. JOHN HENEGHAN tugged a large shellac disc from its brown paper sleeve, placed it on a turntable and gently nudged a needle into place.
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