Emmylou Harris

I live in a small town, as I’ve mentioned before. A vast portion of it is relatively unsettled state park lands, and the rest is fairly centrally located. I work at the library, which seems to be the epicenter of all things hilarious and tragic that concern town politics and personalities. People know me, for what it’s worth. I help them find the books of town code or get on the internet or summer reading for their kids, and I like doing it.

Word has gotten around town that I collect LPs, as well as whatever manner of spinny black discs that our small town might have hidden in its spidery attics and squirrely garages. It was a few weeks ago that a gentleman came into the library seeking me out, as he understood that I collected these records. He’d been driving around with a considerable collection of them in his car, looking to get rid of them somehow, and while the overpriced record shop in the next town over had given him a few bucks for a handful, a majority of them remained unclaimed. Sure, I’m always excited about the prospect of a new stack of records to play during my lonely evenings at home… and usually, I’m excited enough to go out to some stranger’s car and poke around inside of it to see what he’s got to offer me. I live dangerously.

It was clear that this man was a music lover. These wooden crates full of discs were listened to and appreciated. As he leafed though them, he’d pull out a few to mention how great this or that album was, or how he loved Emmylou Harris… but he had to get rid of them, all of them, or his wife would kill him. He no longer had a turntable, and his sentimentality didn’t justify marital strife. Was this a dark telescope into my future? Would I one day be making daily, forlorn trips to the Toys for Tots box against my will?

Through a process of negotiation in the parking lot, I made it clear that I had no personal knowledge of which record would be worth what, since I’m a record collector concerned only with the listenability of the music, not the condition of the sleeve. There were a few options to make his wife happy, but we eventually settled upon a convenient donation of records to the library, to benefit everyone. I didn’t have the money or frankly, the energy, to buy them outright, and the library was about to have a big bi-annual booksale. We could sell the records as a library, I’d buy them from the library (and get first pick), the library could get a few bucks, and he’d get a tax write-off for his generous donation. I didn’t know the tax value for a record donation of that size, but I hope that the financial and marital compensation was worth the loss.

And the donation was generous. Generous enough to make me feel physical pain as I watched him part with his beloved music collection, which he vocally lamented as I tried to comfort him in his loss.

We estimated about 500 records, and while I had to sort through them before the sale to remove the ones that were destroyed by mold, moss, moisture, cracking and general grossness, the resulting pile of leftover music was still excellent. While it hurt to have to chuck a copy of Zeppelin’s IV that had been colonized by alien spores, we kept Duke Ellington, Sly and the Family Stone, Donovan, The Young Rascals, Joe Cocker, Santana, and all kinds of things that would be great to listen to on a turntable. Especially notable was Santana’s first album, which came signed by Carlos Santana and six or seven of the other recording artists on the album. I’d brought it home to listen to, and only afterwards discovered the signatures.

I limited myself to about 30 one-dollar records, since I’m still indoctrinating myself into the parts of the musical world of the 1970s that didn’t involve Jethro Tull. I’m already a total Tull expert. Don’t tell anyone that. I’ve also outgrown my own LP spaces and have expanded into the unfriendly climates of the garage, which are never good for records.

I could likely download any one of these albums in perfect clarity, but now I know the guy who’d once listened to and loved them, and I want to listen to them like he did – hisses, pops, and all.