Talking the hunt for 78s with Amanda Petrusich

What are you willing to go through to acquire an ultra-rare recording?

Acting on hazy reports that some of the most desirable country blues recordings ever were dumped, 80 years ago, in the Milwaukee River near Grafton, Wis., journalist and collector Amanda Petrusich learned to scuba dive, dove, and lived to write about it in her book Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records (Scribner, 272 pages, $25).

Whacked? In fact, she's one of the saner characters in that world, the apotheosis of which arrived last month with The Rise & Fall of Paramount Records, Volume Two, a $400 box set on Third Man Records - 800 rare recordings of ancient voices that surfaced briefly in Paramount Records' Wisconsin studio in the 1920s and 1930s, then disappeared. Home in Brooklyn, Petrusich, 35, discusses how something so casually discarded in one generation speaks so profoundly to another.

Q: Country blues are all over YouTube. Yet the original records sell as high as $37,000 on eBay. Why is it important to own the actual object?

A: The old labels are gorgeous. The shellac surface has a luster . . . the discs feel heavy and substantial. . . . And there's an intimacy one gets with a 78 r.p.m. record played on the right equipment. There's a communion with an artist and performance that I've never been able to achieve with a digital audio file.

But some Paramount discs are so worn that listening is tough.

They weren't produced with sound quality in mind. Paramounts were made with a mixture of shellac and God knows what else. Wisconsin clay? Ground-up chairs? But a 78 wears its history on its surface. You get a sense of how long these songs have been around and how frequently they were played. It's like looking at the scars on somebody's body.

What is it about country blues that seized you?

It's unadulterated. The way these songs were recorded. . . . These performers came in the studio and did what they always did. No mediation. Less self-consciousness than in contemporary music. I find the records to be devastatingly beautiful . . . the music sounds ghostly and otherworldly.

So much of the music was created in isolation - for example, the hillbilly singers who developed their version of Mongolian throat singing.

The isolation . . . is almost impossible for us to conceive in 2014. These traditions were nurtured free of outside influences that allows a kind of purity of the sound - or at least a sound that accurately reflects its time and place.

The mythology that's grown up around these performers is downright picaresque.

We need to make up the stories to explain the ghostly sounds we hear. But now researchers and collectors are discovering narratives there are even more incredible than the ones we were making up.

Every collector has a dumpster story, of finding something valuable just before it was swallowed up into oblivion.

There's a lot of trading and auction activity, but the really rare things turn up maybe once a year. Junking still tends to be the way that most records are found, like Salvation Army flea markets.

Your diving outing in the Milwaukee River didn't turn up anything, but it made a great story. Would you have done it if you weren't writing a book about record collecting?

I don't know. Scuba diving wasn't that fun. It's not my sport. I'm too much of a city kid. . . . I've hung up my flippers.

Future Blues, Willie Brown. "A dark song about feeling lost - 'Can't tell my future/And I can't tell my past,' Brown sings, plucking out a string of ominous descending notes, a bit like a clock ticking down the remaining minutes of someone's life."

Skinny Leg Blues, Geeshie Wiley and L.V. Thomas. "It starts off sweet enough: 'I'm a little bitty mama ....' Then things get abruptly homicidal: 'I'm gonna cut your throat baby," Wiley coos. It's the placid way she delivers the line . . . I find totally paralyzing."

Sur le Borde de l'Eau, Blind Uncle Gaspard. "All there is to know is that he was born in Louisiana in 1880, and died there in 1937. This was recorded in New Orleans in 1929 - a haunting, spectral song that lingers long after the record stops."

Candy Man Blues, Mississippi John Hurt. "He recorded this song for Okeh Records in New York City in 1928: It's a funny, filthy song about a stick of candy (or, well, you know)."  

Devil Got My Woman, Skip James. ". . . Maybe just the best song ever recorded. James manages to encapsulate and broadcast the devastation of lost or broken love with a terrifying clarity."

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