Book review: Do Not Sell at Any Price, by Amanda Petrusich
Tracing the rise of the record collectors' market from its infancy to the present, Amanda Petrusich follows the souls - mostly men - whose restless drive to unearth obscure recorded sounds has helped shape America's musical memory.
by Amanda Petrusich
Scribner
4.5 stars
Tracing the rise of the record collectors' market from its infancy to the present, Amanda Petrusich follows the souls - mostly men - whose restless drive to unearth obscure recorded sounds has helped shape America's musical memory. As collectors salvaged a slice of vanishing history, their tastes and influence - and, for some, egomania and possessiveness - helped bring to a mainstream audience artists such as the blues' Robert Johnson, Skip James and Ma Rainey.
A music journalist, Petrusich examines the impulse to possess artefacts and illuminates the rush of discovery and the often sanity-testing ways in which chasing elusive, unknown platters can lead men towards pettiness, hoarding and, in some cases, an isolation akin to that of an addict.
While documenting the culture and the characters who occupy it, Petrusich also looks at her own role as one of an even rarer breed of record collector: a female in a mostly male realm. This means hunting for treasures at flea markets, yard sales and "in Victrola cabinets, under piles of John Denver LPs, wrapped in sheets of yellowed newspaper, in the back seats of vendors' cars, shoved under tables, in blue Tupperware bins labelled 'old records'."
The prize for the scrounge? Probably a scratched-up 10-inch record, unplayable on your average turntable, holding hiss-filled music that might be far more easily found online, if it hasn't been totally bypassed by posterity.
Petrusich's collecting fever carries her on a pilgrimage to Grafton, Wisconsin, to better understand Paramount Records, a furniture company turned record label that became one of the great chroniclers of raw "race records" starting in 1917. The label released thousands of 78s until it closed in the early 1930s, and only a handful of most have surfaced. Some are still missing, which drives many searchers in .
This scarcity also propels Petrusich to undertake the book's most action-packed and indulgent diversion, in which she learns to scuba dive to chase a myth. For decades, rumours told of a bounty of Paramount titles at the bottom of the Milwaukee River near the label's pressing plant. Upon the company's demise, it is said, former employees chucked hundreds, if not thousands, of remainders into the river.
Diving for buried records might be the final frontier, considering the bounty of music available online. The internet has unlocked the attic to a new generation searching for 78s in avenues such as eBay. Petrusich follows this evolution and provides a fascinating counterpoint by profiling collectors searching other continents for lost recordings.
