A little boy would often dance around his family's record player in Frederick, Maryland. That boy was Joe Bussard. The UCSB Library reports that his love for vintage music by artists such as Gene Autry and Jimmie Rodgers was so strong that he began trading records with his neighbors, and this ultimately led him on a 75-year search for rare music. Many of the songs in his collection are now available to listen to for free in the Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR), a database run by the UCSB Library.
Bussard did not stay close to home. According to the library, he traveled all the way into the coal camps of Virginia and even southward from there and knocked on people's doors asking whether they wanted to sell their old records for some money. People felt glad to sell off their dusty records and receive a few dollars in return. The collection he assembled included early jazz, bluegrass, Cajun, and gospel music, genres that influenced the artists he loved as a child. Bussard died in 2022, leaving his family with nearly 15,000 disks, some of which are so rare that they sell for thousands of dollars among serious collectors, UCSB Library notes. A documentary from 2005, Joe Bussard: King of Record Collectors, called him an archivist who helped preserve bits of American music from the 1920s and 1930s, the Jazz Age and the Great Depression.
