Original subtitles

my name is Joe Bizard and I am a record collector

how I found out about Joe Buzzer was buying reissue

LPs of uh

old blues and country stuff

uh gospel in particular

and seeing his name in the fine print

down at the bottom like over and over and over again

and me and my buddies

who would sit and listen to these records

would sort of

any little thing we heard about these guys

who had these records you know

we would start passing around like oh

I heard so and so is a real jerk

and you know

this guy has a beef with that guy

and that's why you never see them working together

who runs this label anyway

yeah oh

is this this guy over here

well you might say today I'm an old hermit

because I can't go anywhere anymore

I can't stand to go anywhere

I can't stand to go into restaurants

they got this stupid stuff coming out of the ceiling

and that woman screaming

you go you go to a filling station

and they got it coming out the gas pumps

you go to the to the little room in the back

and it's coming out of there only something worse

noise is all there I don't know

maybe my sense of humor is gone

I don't know but I just can't dig it

people have have congregated at Joe's

because of that record collection

let's go now anybody interested in

jazz eventually has wound up at Joe's Place

anybody interested in blues to a serious degree

has ended up at Joe's place

and so on and so forth and so on

the normal family stuff didn't exist

it was Joe Buzard and his records in the basement

that was it it's kind of a history lesson it

it lets people hear how things were

it wasn't for people like Joe

we wouldn't be hearing some of this stuff the

the second you delve into any sort of

you know original American music you

you you know about Joe almost instantaneously

uh

and and it's not like I'm immersed in it the way

you know the

the the geeks are

Joe's collection Joe himself

but the two well

the two are indivisible it is an international resource

Joe Bisard's collection in terms of

of it's

the man's an archivist you know and

and and not enough value can be placed on that

I mean that's a that's a cultural service

and that would be otherwise lost

I mean you can't

you can't Google that stuff

you know it

it's a if not for him

I mean the the

this music would just be gone forever

the people there's no well documented history of this

and and this is it

it's all in those records anyway

I was coming out the door

and here was this guy backing in

and had boxes of records

I did alright

I'm the one that keeps the family history

cause my dad doesn't remember anything

they were definitely

my dad was very pampered by my grandmother

you know whatever

whatever my father wanted

my grandmother did or gave to him

when I was a kid

probably 6 or 7 years old

I had a little big troll

people used to bring records by

we'd swap them

they'd leave some and I'd give them some more whatever

anyway that's when I first heard Gino Tri

and I just like Gino Tri

and I went around and I gave it up

all the Gino Tri records I could find

one day by chance I heard Jimmy Rogers

and when I heard Jimmy Rogers

man I I

I flipped out you know

his voice was so much better than

you know I couldn't believe it

he was the greatest singer that ever lived

and nobody go beat Jimmy Rogers

I don't care who it is

so I went to the record store in 1947 here in town

don't have anything by never heard of him

well you know

I heard where he sold

all these hundreds of thousands of records

Jimmy Rogers I said these gotta be somewhere around

so I started asking people

and this old lady

I asked her and she gave me a box of records

but that hi

and there were two Jimmy Rogers in there

everybody does in Hawaii is what I remember

but there was other stuff in there

I said hey man

this ain't bad hey

this is not bad this guy stinks

Jimmy Rogers him and the Carter Family

were the only two ones selling any kind of records

during the Depression 31

32 and 33 it was really tough

all music changed

the depression

uh jazz didn't make it

uh

33 was probably the last jazz record

the real pure stuff like in

you know in the mid

late 20s that kind of music was gone

it just disappeared country music

as far as any you know

country songs are

are the beautiful part of the music was gone in 55

55 was the last of country music

I don't care what they say

it was the last of it it went uptown

it went to the Bong Bong

Bong and I'm a teenage queen

Bong Bong

Bong Bong and

you know and this kind of stuff

the country part was lost and the world was changed

rock and roll was taken over

I think rock probably I call it the cancer music

I hate to be that way but I it ruined everything

I feel the same way about Frederick

but I was able to leave it

you know Frederick's my hometown

I grew up there Joe's too

and Joe still thinks he owns the town

Joe thinks wherever whatever spot he's in

he owns that spot and nobody should infringe upon it

and it's it's stupid to think that anymore

you're gonna be infringed upon

there are too many people around here and he

he wants to have his place

his spot his tap root

doesn't want anybody to infringe on it

and he's living in a dream

you know he's living in a dream world

it's not the only way you're gonna escape it

to get away from it go west young man

of course can you imagine moving that record collection

I'd hate to think about doing that one

I'm a record collector

been collecting for well over 50 years

early jazz

uh early country

string bands is the better part of the collection

early blues Cajun bluegrass

gospel you name it

I canvassed all around town

but then when I when I got my driver's license

then I started going out I'd hit

I hit the county first back in those days

a lot of dirt roads

people were kind of a little isolated

now it's all houses but then I got it

I started going in Virginia

and the first trip in Virginia

that's where I started hitting it

that's when I discovered the Carter Family

and all kinds of stuff I found records everywhere

and one thing LED to another

and I just kept going every day

uh

every chance that I could get and looking for records

and then we went up we went up in this cold camp

and the houses look so good

they just look like God

they gotta have records in every one of them

you know no paint on them

you can smell the records

and I went into Cole Camp

there's an old black guy sitting up on the porch

and I stopped I said

you got any old record yeah

so you come down with one record

you know I saw this not

you were full and my God

it was blind Blake I couldn't believe it

I said you got any more like that

nope so I gave him a buck for it

so we went up in the

went up in the cold camp and knocked on doors

and this guy came I said

does it

you know if anybody here in the camp that has any ring

oh there's someone here

got him I know it's a big secret

so we went to the last house

no luck

so I turned around

and I walked over the edge of this bank

and there was a house down there

you could have

you could have throw a rock right down the chimney

straight down so we made our way around

come down knocked on doors

all color lady oh yeah

I got some records come on in

that place was an antique dealer's dream

then they're set the little big troll

so I opened it up and the records are set on edge

you all have seen what was in there

I said what do you want for her

she said would a dollar piece be too much

I said here's $100

oh that's too much

I take it I couldn't have walked out of there

you know for

I just couldn't do it I had to give her something extra

what was in there

uh four or five mall rainy paramounts

like new uh

the Dixieland Jug Blowers

one I've been looking for

for years hen party blues

it was the only one I was missing

uh Clarence Williams

Jazz Kings Eva Taylor

just beautiful stuff ready to hear another record

yeah yeah

all right this is the record I found in Baltimore many

many years ago

the greatest jazz guy that ever lived Jelly Roll Morton

and I ran into a fellow from Silver Springs

I guess he's gone now nice fellow

he gave me a list of jazz records

I never heard jazz

so I started going into some of the black neighborhoods

and that's where I found my first blues

of guy playing slide guitar whoo I about went nuts

and I found some of these jazz records

so I brought them home

and I washed them off and gave them a play

I said man

this is not bad either I don't

I'm not gonna I'm gonna keep these

so then that's how I got in

from country over into blues and jazz

it's just something I like

and I discovered a lot of other stuff

I my first uh

Cajun records Louisiana Cajun stuff

you can't understand what you're saying

but the music's so good you know

great stuff man

I'll tell you one thing

if I wanted to gone out and got them records when I did

they'd all be thrown out

the people would have dumped

come up sometimes are you

are you writing your somebody doing

interviewing you or somebody taping

I don't know what they're doing

I don't know what they're doing

there are only three or four major collectors of 70

eights

there are a lot of people fool with collecting them

you know the time has passed

uh he hit it at the right time

not many people thought about doing it yet

and when you knocked on doors

I mean he was doing it long before I met him

long time before I met him

he was doing it coming back with record

so many records in the back of the car

that the bumper would drag on the ground

if he hit a bump the condition will never exist again

I mean you can't go do that anymore if

if we went out on a record trip now

and went back to the same areas we were in

I mean you might knock on 200 house

doors before you hits a house that had a 78 in it

and a lot of times

when we go to those places and knock on the door

oh we got rid of them about five years ago

we got rid of them two years ago

should have been here six months ago

we just you know we used them

we ran out of wood and they burn really good

I don't know what makes them things burn so good

you know Schleich does burn good and hot

so uh

there you go I mean

what more can you say about it

so uh

this is this is a fiddle tune from Frank Levins called

Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss

anybody who's into this kind of music

is completely in debt to 78 collectors

because there's so much stuff

we never would have heard

if it wasn't for people like him

who just couldn't help but go out and collect them

falling in love with these old recordings

it's really made me appreciate

the people who are obsessed with collecting old records

because um

it takes a lot of time to find those records and

you know a lot of them are gone now

so it's people like Joe

who are preserving those records

and making them available to everybody

this is the important thing about Joe

I think is that there are a number of people with

a small number of people with really big collections

but it's always been true of Joe

that if somebody wanted a record

to put it out to other people

to the rest of the world on an LP or a CD

Joe would always do it and so

Joe has been the conduit through which

records on a shelf in Frederick

Maryland get to be heard

by people in Tokyo and London and Berlin

and for all I know Moscow

wherever

there are people who buy reissues of all tiny music

and blues and jazz somewhere

Joe's finger has

Joe's hands have taken a record off a shelf

and made it possible for them to hear those records

and that's something for which he's owed

thanks from thousands of people

the modern old time scene um

I'm not sure

I'm not sure it could possibly exist as it does

without the Seventy Eights um

there you know

there have been a lot of field recordings made

and stuff you know

of folks who were old in you know

the 60s and 70s

and a lot of people learn tunes from older folks

like Tommy Jarrell but um

but the Seventy Eights it's has you know

that's where we get the incredible breadth of material

from otherwise

you know

we'd have like a few specific little pockets of

of musical influence you know

from the the old folks that that folklore is

were smart enough to go out and collect from

and document

I just collected them because I enjoyed the music on

I had no idea they were gonna become really viable

you know of course that was 50 years ago

he just he had a way with people

where they would invite him in

and they'd fix him dinner and

you know he would talk and he's very good at that

I mean

he's very friendly people meet him and they like him

and they really weren't worth anything

I mean

they were just these records that nobody really wanted

you know that were shoved away in attics and

and record players down in the south

from very poor people he just loved the music

he really loved what was on it

and he was just very good at getting them from people

we all appreciate a rare record

cause it might be one you never have heard before

here's a new sound nobody's heard before

there's a lot of records out there still nobody's found

there aren't any copies of them

and if you find it

think about the J as you get out of that

if you're the one that finds that record

you got the only copy of it

you're the first one listening to that

since the record was cut

that's pretty neat you know

I mean something

it's like going

like John Glenn doing the first deal with the

with the uh

with the spaceship

you know my grandmother was

like I said she was always like

what do you want those old stupid hillbilly records for

what are you gonna do with them

put the kettle on I really like that one

here to start us off on our country classics here

right here at the W R E K

I wanna go back to uh

1926 and play you a recording by the Uncle Dave Mackin

let's listen to Uncle Dave

he gets some told quick the Bible's true

Uncle Dave Big and Sam McGee

yeah Lord yes

when I had that little

bootleg radio station in the basement

that was fun

and people used to bring records by

you want some records to play

Joe here

take a box you know

got a lot of records that way

I always thought that was funny

just because I'd always heard about it from my father

and um

it was this you know

they were running this radio station

and the FCC finally tracked them down and came in

well I

I heard the story from my grandfather's point of view

which was they came to this house

and it was these men in suits

my grandmother answered the door

and they were like does Mr Joseph Buzzard live here

and they're junior and senior

and she was like oh

good Lord what did Joe do

and she calls him at work and

and uh

she's like Joe

you have to come home there's government men here

and my grandfather comes flying home

and um

I mean

my grandfather was the kind of person that got upset

very easily and I

I will never forget I can

I wish I would have been here to see that

when he actually had to meet these FCC people

about his son being in trouble

because my grandfather would have flipped

he would not have handled that well

and he's and my my grandfather's like

I just don't want to talk about it

I don't want to talk about that

it was awful you know

but uh

and dad thinks the whole thing's funny

I mean he tells the story and it's all hysterical

my grandfather was not happy hahaha

I love that one

happy ever get the blues

get your heart rate 49

we're having fun and we have a good time

get your heart before you die

I was hunting records around my Jackson

and I turned on the radio

and who did I hear but happy Johnny

Happy Johnny or Johnny Zufal is his real name

is last name in the phone book

he was I love John he

he played anything

and here he was already I'm so

my golly I'm going up to see him and he knew I was

hello Joe

hey my golly

seen you a long time that's what he talked

and I we were talking

I said what do you think about thinking up a program

and call it country classics

and play some Carter Family and Uncle B

and stuff like that he said

you do it I'll play it

so I made up the first one I made right there

the Old Betsy

my first show was 1955 I was only 17

Joe was a

he was a notable in that whole area over there

down through all those valleys and hollows

I mean everybody knew who Joe Buzard was

those people loved that music

and he had the only game in town

you know when he first went on that radio station

he got hundreds of letters

and it dwindled over the year

but those hundreds of letters

would lead him to a lot of houses

you know you got a tip on this

this one particular place

but we were out searching for it

you could smell

you could smell Moonshine in the air

it was thick in the air

and the closer we got to this place

the thicker the smell got

somebody's making some shine around here

I said they certainly are

I said we better be careful too

so we got up on the place

where they were actually making the stuff

and it was one of the places that he wanted to stop at

and he zooms now this car

this this

that's 64 Ford Galaxy he had looked like

look like the cop cars of the thing

the cops were driving galaxies

and he's got 102 inch radio whip antenna on this thing

he's got magnetic flashlights on the dash

you know the time

he couldn't look any more like a revenue or a cop car

and he just zooms right down into the

into the front yard of this place

and you could see the smoke

you could smell the whiskey

and now comes

all these guys with double barrel shotguns and

you know and I just

I just sunk down on the seat I said this is it

we're dead

he gets out his bedroom slippers and his and his pipe

slams the door hi

I'm Joe Buzzard

and I'm thinking this guy has lost his mind

these people are gonna kill us

they don't know who we are

and the guy said who'd you say you were

I'm Joe Buzzard I run that

I got a show on wld fish West Virginia over here

and the guy turns out says

hey Ma get out here in the yard quick

Joe Buzzard's in our yard

he says tell your friend

come on out from cringing in there too

he says y'all come on in the house hahaha

but I really did thought

I thought we bought it that time

but fearless Joe you know

thank god we were near Fisher

thank god these people had heard the radio

well my mom always had a theory

because there was a couple

record collectors that were from

up North New York and places

and they had like the the accent like that

you could tell they were from the north

and um my dad always sounded like he could be from

the next county over I mean

he always just seemed like he was very southern and

you know very laid back

and he would go to these houses

and a lot of the times

I don't think the people even knew where he was from

I was in the National Guard and uh at those days

we used to take her on drill nights

we used to pick guitars

everybody played something

and today it's nothing

it's just these stupid things plugged in your ear

we went in there we play and these guys said

hey man I wish we could get a record of that

I said yeah

she's how many of you would want a record

oh we want a record

so I picked up a record cutter

I got it off a preacher and so we made a tape

and we cut from the tape to the disc

and I cut I don't know 50

60 of them and they bought them

so then I said well hey

if they want that I'm

I'm gonna start looking around for other things

you know and I found friend of mine

we made a little guitar picking thing together

and a lot of people wanted that

and then some people came in

made a record

they must have had 75 relatives that wanted a copy

well the fun was when it was on the

when you cut it you can see the grooves appear

but I love making records

and then I I met

that's when I met Lucky Chapman

that's when they came out with uh

with Duffy

uh Lucky Chapman played the guitar

Duffy played mandolin I can't remember

the banjo player

and the cameraman to curl a hard ball on the base

and Bill Popenberg on the fiddle

and we really they just came out to play

we didn't think about making reckoning

they start playing say hey man

I'm get might get out and hang it over the ceiling

over the pipe

let it hang down is that that diamond ribbon Mike

you know was both open on both sides

so come some couple got on one side

couple got on the other and we recorded and Duffy uh

played that tune bluegrass which he wrote

of course then Faggy came by in 59

made his first records

I I had a little sneaky suspicion

back and back in my mind

that they were gonna be collector's items

on these days especially the face

I just something just told me they were gonna be right

I wish I kept some of them well

I don't know just cause he was so weird

you know

so different

um he was something

you know man

like that way out man ha ha ha ha ha ha

you see

he was a nice guy he

he when he came

he was only about 17

I guess he wouldn't be much more older than that

when he made his first stuff

it was in November 1959 at 4 o'clock in the morning

that's when he got wound up

he got six titles that night and they sold for one

he came back and 60

cut a bunch more and 61 a bunch more and 62

that was the last

six titles were made and then he disappeared

we sat out on the front porch of this old place

and we played music till 1 o'clock in the morning

Oscar was there I was there

Ted was there and it was beautiful

all that music floated across that meadowland

that was fun we went back and did that a lot

just played music

they were the good days

they had a lot of fun and of course

they came up to the house

you know and we made some records

they were here all the time doing all kinds of stuff

and then people started coming by

you know and

and playing I listen to him

you know some I record

just all kind of

people showed up and just went on like that

a lot of fun

get him down and make a record

um

usually for payment they got a record

no budget cutting nobody signed any contracts

nobody got anything cause I was

I was just breaking even I wouldn't make any money

it's fun

check that out

I don't think there was any other time

in the history of the world

that more traditional music

throughout the whole world

was recorded

between 26 and 31 or 32

how does it go on time 1924 1925

1926 1927

you got these snapshots of

this is string band music in North Georgia

this is banjo music in Texas

this is fiddle and guitar music in Mississippi

you got all these snapshots of traditions

which at that stage are highly distinctive

in some cases terribly localized

you get forms idioms

which exist in precisely that form

in maybe one or two counties

sometimes maybe in one town

it really is like a time capsule

it's just the most amazing document

those records you know

it's just

it's an era before everyone had heard everything else

you know before it became something that was more mass

you know um

and and more homogenized

so

I get a lot of creative

musical ideas from listening to Old 70 Eights

because people just played things really quirky

that's what made the music so great

is because people did not hear each other

and they had their own styles

and it's unbelievable

how many different styles of music

on these 70 eights

they weren't aiming for a national audience

they were just playing their local dances or

you know singing the local

songs that were traditional to their area

especially back then the music was done

just because the performers wanted to do it

it's not it wasn't to make a million dollars

and it wasn't to become famous

it was because of a love that they had for it

and you know

this couple minutes is frozen in time

and it's there forever and I just think that's so cool

I think that's fascinating that he got them

because chances are

if he hadn't taken them out of those houses

they would be gone

does he really appreciate it

how could you not think that he does

how could you not think it what

what would make you question that

have you ever met that funny reefer man

and

if he trades you dimes for nickels

and calls watermelons pickles