WHEN REQUIRED TO POST A PROFILE on the in­ternet, I usu­ally write, “Mys­tical lib­eral likes long walks alone at night in the dark in the city in the rain with an um­brella and a flask of 10-year-old Laphroaig.” While this bit of irony works for some readers, others want a little more in terms of per­sonal back­ground information. [Continue reading]

MY BLUES AND R&B BOOK was be­hind schedule and com­pleting it was get­ting dif­fi­cult. My plans in­cluded a full-color cover de­signed by a local artist that used la­bels from sev­eral highly col­lec­table records from the ’50s and re­ally cool ty­pog­raphy. There were over a hun­dred high-resolution black & white photos set for the in­te­rior of the book, in­cluding both rare records and fa­mous and not-so-famous recording artists. [Continue reading]

THERE’S ALCOHOL & JAKE BLUES and there’s re­ally rare records and John Tefteller, who has been col­lecting those records for a long time. And he doesn’t col­lect reis­sues of great old music on great old LPs—he col­lects orig­inal, brittle-to-begin-but-even-brittler-with-age 78 rpm sin­gles. John has been tracking down 78s no matter where they may be, no matter how many other col­lec­tors as­sure him that copies of cer­tain records no longer exist. I’ve [Continue reading]

A RECORD FEW KNEW ABOUT at the time was the Jets on Gee 1020, Heaven Above Me / Millie Brown. Re­leased in 1956, it was a rarity whis­pered about by the handful of col­lec­tors who knew it was one of the se­cret gems in the genre. In any field of col­lec­tables, there is a ‘top ten’ of collectors—the ones who have most every­thing and can and will spend what it takes to get those pre­cious few items that they do not have. [Continue reading]

WHAT ABOUT COMPETITION? Frankly, there wasn’t much there, and what had come be­fore wasn’t to be feared! The first price guide to take on the field of rhythm & blues—at least that I was aware of—was an­other O’­Sul­livan Wood­side guide by Jerry Os­borne and Bruce Hamilton. This was fol­lowed by Jeff Kre­it­er’s self-published guide for group collectors. [Continue reading]

MY RHYTHM & BLUES BOOK was first con­ceived in 1986, but a book that com­bined r&b and blues record didn’t occur to me until the early ’90s. My first and only choice for co-author was the leg­endary Val Shively: his store, R&B Records, had been a fix­ture in the Philadel­phia area for decades; cus­tomers came from all over the world to get lost in the back rooms filled with little records with big holes. [Continue reading]