photo: Canary Records' No One Cares: International 78rpm discs, ca. 1912-55
Recently, Jack White’s Third Man Records raised the bar for reissuing historical 78s. The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Volume One (1917-1932)—all 22lbs of it—is a massive archival achievement with packaging and price ($400) to match. Which means that not many people will get to hear it.
At the other end of the spectrum, archival imprint Canary Records recently launched a Bandcamp page, offering downloads of albums from founder Ian Nagoski's own extensive collection of 78s for as little as $4.50. The most recent upload is No One Cares: International 78rpm discs, ca. 1912-55. As the wry title indicates, it seems Nagoski doesn't expect these tracks to attract any more listeners than Third Man does for their box set, even at 1/100 of the price. I would also venture that at the end of the day, they each will have cleared about the same profit... none. Both projects are gifts to the music world, archiving sounds that might easily be lost, since there is so little demand for them to be saved.
In his review of The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Grayson Haver Currin notes the box's (literal and metaphorical) resemblance to a coffin. Nagoski's approach to reissues feels opposite to this; he's doing whatever he can for people to hear this music. He too has produced lovely LP packages—from Bed of Pain, whichseems to take the old Smithsonian Folkways one-color album as its model, to Kesarbai Kerkar, a lavish presentation with not one but two nesting booklets inside. But Nagoski has equally made use of CDs—the three-disc To What Strange Place, produced for Tompkins Square and designed by Susan Archie, is probably his best-known collection (despite now being out of print itself). And he's even released CD-Rs: There are now dozens of volumes to explore in his cheap, unannotated "True Vine 78 series" of thinline jewel cases with Xerox covers.
The move to Bandcamp downloads would seem to be just another expedient means to Nagoski’s larger end of sharing the music. It's preservation through dissemination—pamphlets of the word passed out on the street, as opposed to Third Man's precious reliquary kept in an inner sanctum. Which strategy gets the music through to a future Nagoski or White is anyone’s guess.
However, it’s notable that in both cases the 78s themselves are absent. The museum or library idea of preservation—where the original artifact is itself what must be saved—is left behind by vinyl box set and Bandcamp download alike. These preserve the content without the form of the 78. In this way, the download is no different than the LP; both continue the work Harry Smith initiated in the 1950s to preserve music that would otherwise be lost along with the physical artifacts of 78s, by separating it from the format and reproducing it in a different, more current one.
When I reach out to him via email, I find that this larger historical perspective seems to fit Nagoski’s rather mystical view of the 78. "I have no particular feelings about any format other than 78s," he told me. "The other formats are just music delivery systems.” When I asked him to elaborate, I received a very Harry Smith-like reply:
"They are also stones. Magical speaking stones. Stones that remember the voices of human beings. Most are made of, roughly, about 70% ground stone, 20% shellac (the secretion of the lac beetle of Southeast Asia) and 10% binder and color (almost always black).
And because they're stone, they each weigh about a half a pound, which means that you FEEL them as you interact ritually with them at the turntable, and they demand that you engage with them… And you can SEE the records' flaws. You can see the music on them. You can see the relationship that previous owners and generations had with the discs - the bright, unplayed surface of a symphonic record which was purchased purely as a status symbol, vs the greyed grooves and crisscross of scratches of a dance record that came out year after year after a few drinks, vs the flaws of disregard, bordering on hostility, toward an immigrant grandparents' embarrassing nostalgia for Back Home..."
Given Nagoski’s powerful and emotional connection to 78s—objects as inseparable for him from their physical presence and particular history as paintings or manuscripts—all other formats are more or less equal because they only reproduce the music. The download and the LP reissue may not be as far apart as they seem.