He recorded shows for a variety of stations over more than 40 years. Bussard found kinship in people like Ivy Sheppard, a disc jockey and 78 collector with whom he recorded radio programs for several stations including WAMU in Washington and WBCM in Bristol, Va., all built mostly around his rare records but also including some of hers. Bussard in Washington City Paper in 1999, his wife was quoted as saying that if she had not been a “born-again, spirit-filled Christian, who the day I married him made a commitment to God,” she “would have left long ago.”īut, she added, she loved music as well (she blared bluegrass records in another part of the house while her husband blared his music from the basement), respected his collection and appreciated that he was “saving it for history.” “It was all I could do to keep my hands from trembling.” “‘Oh my Gahhd!’” he recalled thinking in the liner notes to his CD “Down in the Basement: Joe Bussard’s Treasure Trove of Vintage 78s” (2002). Bussard found some good country records ( Uncle Dave Macon, the Carter family) and then the sort of mind-blowing discoveries he craved: a 78 on the Black Patti label, which recorded jazz, blues and spirituals in the late 1920s. Bussard was driving the streets of Tazewell, a small town in Virginia - the kind of place he often canvassed door to door, asking people if they had 78s - when he met an old man who said he had some 78s at the shotgun shack where he lived.įrom a dusty box under the man’s bed, Mr.

“It’s like coming out of a mansion and living in a chicken coop.” “How can you listen to Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw when you’ve listened to Jelly Roll Morton?” he said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2001. Nashville? He called it “Trashville.” Rock ’n’ roll? A cancer.

He loved country music but decreed that nothing good came after 1955. He loved jazz but detested any jazz recorded after the early 1930s. He was selective about what he brought back to his basement. Bussard (pronounced boo-SARD) drove the country roads of the South seeking 78s that had been languishing in people’s homes. From his home near the Blue Ridge Mountains, Mr.

Music collector since 2001