rare live recordings from country's golden era

Chris Walke · From: St Charles, IL

Saw this on another website. Sounds amazing!! I don't know where this article came from.

> April 22, 2001
>
> Recordings Document a Golden Age of Country
>
> By ALEX HALBERSTADT
>
> BALTIMORE -- RECLINING in an armchair surrounded by a bank of
> audio equipment, Leon Kagarise surveys a collection of garage sale
> bargains he has accumulated over most of his 63 years. Scattered among
> old clothes, rusty electric fans and fading concert announcements are
> records — roughly 100,000 — stacked to the ceiling, filling two bedrooms
> and spilling out onto the kitchen counter. In fact, the living room of
> his small house here accommodates one person, standing, in addition to
> Mr. Kagarise, while other rooms are accessible only by walking sideways
> through the narrow passageways formed by the mountains of LP's.
>
> His most remarkable possessions, however, are the reel-to-reel tapes
> stacked in neat white boxes beside his recliner. On them are
> performances by country and bluegrass stars like Johnny Cash, George
> Jones, Patsy Cline and Bill Monroe, recorded as mementos of concerts
> that Mr. Kagarise attended as a teenager. Stashed away and forgotten for
> nearly 40 years, the recordings have recently been discovered by dozens
> of collectors, scholars and historians and have given Mr. Kagarise
> (pronounced KEG-uh- rice), a retired audio technician, a moment of
> prominence.
>
> "Leon's recordings are unprecedented in country music," the historian
> and author Charles Wolfe, said recently. "They are the equivalent of
> someone finding pristine- sounding recordings of Louis Armstrong and
> King Oliver playing at the Sunset Cafe in Chicago." The Library of
> Congress Folklife Center and the Country Music Foundation and several
> record companies have expressed interest in Mr. Kagarise's collection,
> and he has appeared on NBC's "Today" show.
>
> While the recordings are being called important discoveries, their
> creation was hardly so auspicious. As a Baltimore high school student
> obsessed with audio equipment, Mr. Kagarise attended his first country
> music concert in 1958. He liked what he heard and soon returned with a
> tape recorder and microphone. During the next 10 years, Mr. Kagarise
> rarely missed a show in the Washington-Baltimore area and recorded
> virtually every nationally known country and bluegrass performer of the
> time, many in their prime. Bootlegging was not yet a widespread
> practice, and Mr. Kagarise was allowed to set up his equipment on the
> stage. As a result, many of his tapes sound as clear and well balanced
> as studio recordings.
>
> Mr. Kagarise recorded many of the performances outdoors in rural
> settings, a common occurrence in the 1950's and 60's. New River Ranch in
> Rising Sun, Md., and Sunset Park in southern Pennsylvania, which drew
> thousands of fans every Sunday, consisted of little more than rows of
> plank-and-cinderblock benches arranged in front of a makeshift stage.
> The price of admission was $1 a car, and entire families listened to
> music while picnicking under the trees, usually staying until dark. The
> atmosphere was casual, and between sets musicians wandered among the
> spectators, signing autographs and chatting with fans.
>
> The music heard on Mr. Kagarise's tapes is likely to be quite different
> from what most listeners are familiar with today. Performing live,
> musicians did away with the choir and string arrangements that had
> become commonplace on country records in the early 1960's, and singers
> were usually accompanied by mostly acoustic four- or five- piece bands.
> Mr. Wolfe says live performances reflected the music of the time far
> more accurately than its recorded legacy. "Country music is basically a
> concert medium," he said. "Studio recordings didn't have the gritty feel
> of a live band, and the music captured on Leon's tapes is the way it
> sounded to thousands of fans."
>
> Another element that was frequently lost in the studio was the
> spontaneity of these outdoor concerts. "When you went into a recording
> session, it was like going into church," said Ric Nelson, who played
> dobro with the singer Patsy Cline in the late 1950's. "You were very
> aware of what you were doing, and you wanted to do it right. So you went
> in and were very cautious, but you lost the rough edge, the excitement
> you get when you play in front of an audience."
>
> Listening to Mr. Kagarise's recordings bears out that claim. The
> unedited performances are often more spirited than the studio versions,
> retaining the whoops and hollers and false starts as well as the
> cornpone comedy and impersonations that were part of almost every
> touring country and bluegrass act.
>
> His recordings are among the few surviving documents of live
> performances from a period that is frequently described as the golden
> age of country music. "Live recordings were extremely uncommon at the
> time, both because of the difficulties of recording live and the neglect
> country music suffered at the hands of the mainstream media," said Paul
> Kingsbury of the Country Music Foundation. "Record companies did not get
> into the practice of releasing concert records until years later."
>
> Mr. Kagarise's recent celebrity is even more unlikely because his
> recordings would probably never have come to light if not for the
> curiosity of a local record dealer, Joe Lee. "The tapes would probably
> have ended up at the Salvation Army or the city dump," Mr. Kagarise
> said. Mr. Lee, the owner of Joe's Record Paradise in Rockville, Md., was
> told about the record collection by a friend in 1998 and made an
> appointment to see it. Rummaging through the house for rare vinyl, Mr.
> Lee stumbled across a tape box marked "Johnny Cash, Maryland, 1962," and
> asked Mr. Kagarise to play the tape. He was astounded by what he heard:
> "Here was an unreleased recording of Johnny Cash in his prime, sounding
> as if it was recorded yesterday," Mr. Lee said. "I just couldn't believe
> what I was hearing."
>
> A lifelong fan of jazz, blues and rock 'n' roll, he became so obsessed
> with Mr. Kagarise's collection that he took it upon himself to catalog
> and publicize the discovery. For almost two years, he let his employees
> run the store while he sat on the porch of his farm in Mount Airy, Md.,
> listening to hundreds of hours of country and bluegrass.
>
> Mr. Kagarise says that so far he has unearthed more than 4,000 hours of
> music — a collection whose value has yet to be estimated. Roughly 60
> percent of the tapes have been transcribed onto CD, and new discoveries
> keep turning up. Recently, Mr. Kagarise came across recordings of
> long-gone country music television shows like "The Jimmy Dean Show,"
> "The Porter Wagoner Show" and "The Don Owens TV Jamboree." Most of the
> shows were never documented, and the pristine sound quality of Mr.
> Kagarise's tapes surpasses that of the surviving recordings and
> kinescopes of the programs.
>
> Among the rare pleasures found on the tapes are the dozens of televised
> performances by the young Dolly Parton, who began her career as a
> regular performer on "The Porter Wagoner Show," as well as hundreds of
> unreleased appearances by Loretta Lynn, Jim Reeves, Buck Owens and many
> others. Another stellar find was a recording of "The Buddy Dean Show," a
> local rock 'n' roll television program from the late 1950's, which
> served as the basis for John Waters's 1988 film "Hairspray."
>
> In a large box near his bed, Mr. Kagarise also found more than 500
> color slides of the musicians he recorded, whom he photographed both on
> and off stage. Mr. Kingsbury said there are few candid photos of country
> musicians from the period, and he believes that Mr. Kagarise's
> photographs are as important as his tapes.
>
> Mr. Kagarise's once leisurely retirement has had to take a back seat to
> his collection. On a recent weekend, he listened to and annotated newly
> discovered tapes, transcribed recordings onto CD's and rummaged around
> his house for more reels.
>
> When he is not listening to country music, Mr. Kagarise, a divorced
> father of two grown children, spends time at the Long Green Valley
> Church of the Brethren in Glen Arm, Md., where he operates the audio-
> visual equipment. He says he hasn't missed a day of church in 30 years.
> "We believe in the simple life," Mr. Kagarise said, casting a wary
> glance around his living room. "Of course, if you look around, you could
> say I kind of missed the boat."

Dave Van Allen · From: Doylestown, PA , US , Earth

holy smokes!!
makes me feel like the Gannaway films ... like a time machine has just been discovered and I get to ride in it

thanks for posting this!

Donny Hinson · From: Glen Burnie, Md. U.S.A.

Word has it that several major labels are "very interested" in this treasure trove. I can only hope they come through for us. But...the licensing and royalty arrangement "nightmares" will likely keep these treasures hidden. Pity.

Neil Hilton · From: Lexington, Kentucky

Wow, holy cow I guess!!! Chris, I see mention of these tapes being pressed on CD, do you have any idea where this article originated and/or if a label is going to distribute and make available. Do I read this correctly that there is old video that has been uncovered as well?? boy-oh-boy would this really be something if old live recordings, video, and photos could be made available to the general public - if this guy has old Haggard, Cash, and Buck footage from shows in the 60's - I'd gladly tank up at $1.70 a gallon for a roadtrip to Maryland to see some of that! - Neil H.

nick allen · From: France

I notice that Ric Nelson is quoted in the article - I assume this is the same Ric Nelson who contributes often to No Peddlers - is he/are you involved in cataloging this collection, or have any knowledge beyond what's in the article?
(Also, I don't remember you ever mentioning on the forum that you played w/Patsy Cline.. I think there's a bunch of you guys hiding your lights under bushels!)
Nick

Chris Walke · From: St Charles, IL

Neil, I don't know where the article came from. Some guy said he got it in his email. I'll try to contact him and find out if he has any additional info.

The way I'm reading it, I don't think he has video footage, I think he has audio recordings of the tv shows. It's not very specific in that area, so I could be wrong.

Like Donny said, I'd imagine there would be alot of legal issues regarding the distribution of these recordings. Indeed, it would be a tragedy if this time capsule never got to the audience that would appreciate it. And I'd imagine the surviving artists themselves (or the families of the artists) would be very interested in these.

Donny Hinson · From: Glen Burnie, Md. U.S.A.

The text in Chris's post is an excerpt (or maybe the whole article) from the Baltimore Sun Apr. 22nd, 2000 issue. The story was also in the Washington Post a little sooner (Mar. 8th, 2000). W.P. has removed it from their archive, and the B.S. charges $10.95 to retrieve articles more than 2 weeks old.

Ain't capitalism just grand?

ebb · From: nj

it was also in the ny sunday times arts section 2 wks ago.

Dave Van Allen · From: Doylestown, PA , US , Earth

more about this- I sent a friend in DC a link to this thread and he e-mailed me the following:

Record-Setting Cache
One Man's Clutter Is a Collector's Dream

By Peter Carlson

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, March 9, 2000; Page A01

TOWSON, Md.-Leon Kagarise has so much love that his
little house can't hold it all.

Kagarise loves music, American music--blues, jazz,
gospel and especially old-time country music. His house is
filled with it. Well, not completely filled. There's still a
little bit of space left to live in.

He's got so many records stacked in the kitchen that he
can't get to the stove, but he can use the microwave. He can
squeeze his portly 62-year-old body down the narrow canyon
that winds through the mountains of records in his living
room, and he can plop down into his comfy armchair, the only
chair that can fit in the room.

Sitting there, he's got about as much space as a
passenger in a Volkswagen. But that's all the room he needs.
Without moving out of his chair, he can pick up one of the
hundreds of tapes he recorded at country music shows 40
years ago--performances by Johnny Cash, George Jones, Tammy
Wynette and Patsy Cline, among many others--and load it onto
a big old reel-to-reel machine. Then, with the flick of a
couple switches, he can record that music onto a CD and
make, as he puts it, "a perfect clone."

Which is good, because a lot of people want to hear
Kagarise's music. The Country Music Hall of Fame is
interested. So is the Library of Congress, along with a slew
of historians and disc jockeys and collectors. A record
company is eager to put the stuff out. And all these folks
are salivating over the hundreds of candid color photographs
of country stars that Kagarise shot backstage in the days
when you could just sidle up to the stars between shows and
shoot the breeze.

This Kagarise collection could be the country equivalent
of legendary jazz performances recorded live by buffs and
released decades later--Dean Benedetti's nightclub
recordings of Charlie Parker's saxophone solos or audio
engineer Jerry Newman's recordings of bebop being born at
Minton's Playhouse in Harlem in the early '40s, recordings
that filled in gaps in jazz history.

Kagarise's stuff could do the same for country music.
And he keeps finding more. A couple of weeks ago he
discovered another 60 reels of tape that he'd socked away in
his ex-wife's basement.

"It's sort of an endless supply," he says.

Suddenly the world is interested in this stuff and
Kagarise is thrilled. When a man fills his three-bedroom
ranch house in suburban Baltimore with more than 100,000
records and God only knows how many tapes, people tend to
rib him about being a pack rat and a junk collector.

"As it turns out," he says, sitting in his armchair,
hidden in a Himalaya of records, "some of the junk turned
out to be gold."

The Hillbilly Circuit

Kagarise is a shy man with short gray hair and a tiny
screwdriver that peeks out of the pocket of his plaid sports
shirt.

The screwdriver is for fiddling with electronic gizmos.
Kagarise is an audiovisual wizard, now retired after decades
of working with tape recorders and video cameras. That's why
his old concert tapes sound as though they were recorded
yesterday in some fancy studio.

When he was a kid, his family moved from the mountains
of Pennsylvania to Baltimore, where his father took a job at
Bendix Radio. Dad was a techie, too, and he taught Leon how
to make a crystal radio set. In high school in the late
'50s, Leon built a hi-fi record player. He has a picture of
himself standing next to it, smiling proudly, a skinny AV
nerd in a polka-dot shirt and a string tie.

After graduation he got a job repairing recording
equipment and taping church choirs and concerts. He loved
it. He also loved country music--the old-fashioned kind with
fiddles and mandolins and singing so high-pitched it makes
your teeth hurt.

In those days--the '50s and early '60s--the
Baltimore-Washington area was a hotbed of country music,
home to thousands of folks who'd migrated from Appalachia to
work in factories and government offices. On weekends they
flocked to country music parks--the New River Ranch in
Rising Sun, Md., and Sunset Park in southern Pennsylvania,
among others. There, sitting on crude plank benches under
the trees, they listened to what was then called hillbilly
music.

Kagarise went, too, lugging his suitcase-size tape
recorder. This was before the advent of bootleg records, so
nobody cared when he set up his equipment and recorded the
shows. The atmosphere was loose--the stars wandered among
the picnickers between shows--but the music was intense.

"That brand of music had a real rough edge to it,"
recalls Ric Nelson, a backup musician who played dobro with
Patsy Cline in those days. "You came out blasting."

When the Nashville stars came to these country parks,
they dropped the fancy studio tricks and sang their hits
straight up. Kagarise caught them all on tape--Loretta Lynn,
Flatt and Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers, Ernest Tubb and
countless others.

He recorded hundreds of hours of live performances and
then he stashed the tapes away, buried among the thousands
of records he was collecting. And there they sat, unheard,
for the next 35 years, until Joe Lee came along.

Bluegrass From the Trees

Lee squeezed through the canyon in Kagarise's living
room and then traversed the main hallway, which is so
crammed with records that you've got to lean your back
against the one wall that's visible and move sideways, like
a crab.

This was two years ago, when Kagarise was looking to
sell some of his 145,000 records. Lee's a used-record dealer
who runs a Rockville store called Joe's Record Paradise.

Poring through piles of old vinyl, Lee spotted a tape
labeled "Johnny Cash, Maryland 1962." When he asked what it
was, Kagarise put it on the reel-to-reel. Out of the
speakers came the sound of a crowd cheering and then the
strum of a guitar and the unmistakable Cash voice singing,
"Country boy, ain't got no shoes . . . ."

The music was hard-driving rockabilly. The sound quality
was superb.

"It took my breath away," he recalls. "Nobody has a
recording of Cash in that period of that quality."

"He went bananas," Kagarise says. "He said, 'Got any
more?' and I said, 'Yeah, I got a few more.' And the rest is
history. Old Joe Lee hasn't been the same since. I ruined
him."

Kagarise bursts out laughing, but he's not kidding. It's
true: Lee really hasn't been the same since.

Lee was 50 then, an aging hipster who loved rock and
blues and jazz. When his son was born a couple decades
earlier, Lee wanted to name him Thelonious Monk Lee, after
the great bebop pianist. But his wife refused so they named
the kid Robert Johnson Lee, after the Delta bluesman.

Lee had never paid much attention to country music,
until he listened to Kagarise's tapes. The music was soulful
and the musicians were amazing. He gets all worked up when
he starts talking about the Stoneman Family, an old-time
bluegrass band that Kagarise recorded repeatedly.

"I'm listening to this stuff for the first time and I'm
hearing Donna Stoneman and it sounds like [jazz pianist] Art
Tatum on harpsichord!" he gushes. "What she's doing on
mandolin is insane!"

For about a year, Lee pretty much stopped going to work.
He let his employees run the store and he sat on his front
porch in Mount Airy with Kagarise, playing tape after tape.

"It was great," Kagarise says. "The bluegrass was
emanating from the trees."

And Kagarise kept bringing more tapes. Not only did he
have hundreds of hours of concert recordings but he also had
hundreds of hours that he taped from long-gone country music
TV shows--"The Jimmy Dean Show," "The Porter Wagoner Show,"
the "Don Owens Jamboree"--all sounding just about perfect.

One day he told Lee that somewhere he had some
photographs he'd shot of the stars performing at the country
music parks, or relaxing under the trees. He spent a few
days digging around, and then called Lee to say he'd found
about 500 color slides.

"They were six feet from my bed in a big slide box," he
says. "I stayed up till 2 or 3 in the morning looking at
them with a flashlight, 'cause I was so ecstatic."

So was Lee. He's as outgoing as Kagarise is shy, and he
started promoting the collection with the zeal of a
boardwalk pitchman. He recorded three CDs--a sort of
Kagarise Greatest Hits sampler--and sent them to country
music experts, along with a selection of the photographs.

"This is a great treasure," says Eddie Stubbs, staff
announcer at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville and a country
deejay on Washington's WAMU. "There are very few concert
recordings of country music from that era. . . . These live
performances have a lot more spirit to them than studio
recordings."

"As interesting as the music is, the photos are better,"
says Charles Wolfe, author of many books of country music
history.

Word of the Kagarise collection spread quickly. Paul
Kingsbury, deputy director of the Country Music Hall of
Fame, called to say he was interested in the photos. Judith
McCulloh, a member of the board of trustees of the Library
of Congress's American Folklife Center, wrote begging for
the original tapes. And Rob Miller, owner of Bloodshot
Records, a Chicago-based country music label, wants to start
releasing the music as soon as he can work through all the
copyright hassles.

Kagarise stands to make some money out of all this but
he's not likely to get rich. Vintage country music just
isn't that commercial. He doesn't care.

"I wake up in the morning," he says, "and I think, 'Is
this really happening?' "

Irresistible Yard Sales

Leon Kagarise takes two steps into the back bedroom of
his house. He stops. He has to. He can't go any farther. The
room is completely filled with records and stereo equipment.

He calls this "the record room," but every room in the
house is packed with records, even the bathroom. This used
to be his daughter's bedroom. "I hope she doesn't move back
in," he says, grinning. "She'll have to sleep standing up."

He's been collecting records since his high school
days--mostly country, but also blues, rock and vintage jazz.
By the '80s, he had accumulated tens of thousands. In those
days, his wife, who did not share his fondness for vinyl,
made sure he confined his collection to the basement. But in
the early '90s they divorced, their two grown children moved
away, and Kagarise, alone and unchecked, began filling the
whole house with the music he loves.

"It wasn't till the dear wife left and the kids moved
out that it really became an obsession," he says.

At its peak, his collection contained 145,000 records,
but that was two years ago. He sold his 45s, which filled a
truck, and his 30,000 78s. Somehow the house is still
packed, though, perhaps because he just can't resist hitting
the yard sales, buying more records.

"I'm ashamed of it," he says. "I'm trying to reverse it,
but it's hard to do."

Now, he squeezes sideways down the hallway, which is
lined floor to ceiling with more records, takes the canyon
path into his living room and eases himself into his
armchair. He picks up a tape. He's been recording them on
CDs, laboriously noting all the artists and the song titles.
There's a blast of country fiddling and then Bobby Lord
sings, "I keep my eye wide open and my gas buggy ready to
go."

"Some days I spend six or eight hours doing this,"
Kagarise says. "I'll stay up till midnight just cutting
CDs."

He's gazing toward a mountain of records, which is
topped with a framed picture of Jesus and a poster
advertising a "Strawberry and Ice Cream Festival" on June
16, 1956. The poster has sentimental value for Kagarise. The
festival was sponsored by his church and the music was
provided by "Happy Johnny and Family."

"I ran the sound system," he says proudly.

He starts talking about his religion. "I'm a rather avid
Christian," he says. "I belong to the Church of the
Brethren. One of the things the Brethren believe in is
living the simple life. Anything that takes time away from
Jesus is not good."

He gazes at the thousands of records piled around him,
and smiles mischievously.

"I'm a sinner," he confesses.

© Copyright 2000 The Washington Post Company

Neil Hilton · From: Lexington, Kentucky

Reading this just now - have goosebumps and a lump in my throat realizing what lies there with Mr Kagarise and Mr Lee.... simply unbelievable - I may have difficulty sleeping for a few days knowing that this stuff does exist, a direct living connection to the very core of what so many of us have such a reverence. If some indeed becomes available, there will be increadible anticipation and response.

Chris Walke · From: St Charles, IL

DVA--thanks for adding that article. Being from the Chicago area, I hope Bloodshot gets a crack at some of this stuff.

Leigh Howell · From: Edinburgh, Scotland * R.I.P.

I got into a site that has old songs I have,nt heard since I was a boy, and I,m 67 now!It. called "The Record Lady,s All Time Country Favorites" Try It!

http://pub47.bravenet.com/elist/add.php?usernum=4012131516&id=4161577

Leigh

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