Spinning Americana

folk voyeurism in a record collector’s ghost world.

You’ve got one week to watch pitchfork.tv’s online presentation of the film Desperate Man Blues, which chronicles the life of 78 rpm collector Joe Bussard.

As with Roger Kappers’ Alan Lomax – The Song Hunter, chronicled in Culture Rover #148, Desperate Man Blues focuses not on old “folk” music itself (or in this case, the 1920s and 30s commercial recordings of folk music), but rather on a collector of that music.

We are listening and watching someone listening and watching.

Just as Kappers chose to film Alan Lomax, incapacitated by a stroke, as a kind of monument to the folk music he obsessively collected, so too Australian director Edward Gillen takes special pleasure in panning up and down Bussard’s lean, pale frame as he expresses the ecstasy of the music collector.

Pulling the sacred shellac from its nondescript paper sleeve, Bussard lovingly places the platters on the turntable; then he bops, toe-taps, air-guitars, tilts back in his chair in glee, gets up from sitting as if lifted by the ghostly force of scratchy sounds from the past, then sits down again, as if he realizes he’s getting carried away. He’s entirely oblivious, absorbed in his pleasures — then he comes to again. It comes across like watching someone fall into a spell, overtaken by the music, spoken to in tongues, then emerging again from another zone.

Joe Bussard

The film’s focus on Bussard renders it an appreciation of appreciation, an ode to an ode-maker, the collecting of a collecter. Which is well and good. But this viewer longs for more. Bussard’s dancing, his secret basement musical hideout, his obsessions and revulsions, all hint at deeper emotional and social meanings.

The most powerful scene comes toward the end of the film, when Bussard heads out to an old African-American Virginian man’s house in search of 78s lurking in his basement. The trip only yields records from the 1950s, not what Bussard is looking for. But he takes pleasure in playing some of his musical finds on his truck’s cassette player, so that the African-American man and his friend can listen.

As the three men — two black, one white, all aging but not quite as old as the music to which they are listening — gather around Bussard’s truck speakers, the dynamics of Bussard’s travels across the social hierarchies of race, class, region, and power crackle to the surface, then recede again. There is a connection made among the men as they listen. The music grows on them, and one of the elderly African-American men recalls lyrics to an old blues song, summoning to his throat and body age-old traditions of the black vernacular.

As Bussard departs the house, the camera lingers for a moment, as if wanting to stay with the African-American men and tell their story, the story not of music crossing over from a lost world to a collector’s trove of buried treasure, but of a living tradition, one fading, shifting, rearranging, mouldering, sprouting again from generation to generation: the echo turned back into a shout.

But that’s not what Desperate Man Blues set out to do. We return from the African-American men to Bussard’s own odd odyssey, the story of someone fleeing from the present into the past, encountering living souls along the way, but only to get back to his own basement. He drives home, but something is also driving him back to his underground lair.

Yet we never really learn more about what that deeper drive is. We gaze at Bussard, follow him on his record hunts, hear from his fans and admirers, and hang in his basement, but we never really get to the man’s inner life, his deeper emotions. How did and does he make a living? What was his family like? What have been his trials and tribulations?

Everything’s all joyful, whoop ’em up Cindy foreign appreciation of the odd American bird (who started out collecting birds’ nests before he switched to records). But you sense that there is a bluesier, more earthy, more resonant story lurking in the film: a Ghost World story whose phantoms flicker in the grooves, but never get amplified.

The title Desperate Man Blues hints at something more fascinating and important — perhaps also more painful and difficult — going on with Bussard than merely his quirky, human-interest-story habits. The specter of this other tale haunts the film, a tantalizing record that remains lost in the basement, unspun, up a sleeve, under cover.