The photos of country music stars in their youth flash from the projector onto the screen like snatches of recovered memory.
"I was trying in my own little way to stop time, if you will," says Leon Kagarise, his voice a bit wistful.
"Stop time," he repeats.
He started taking the pictures in the late 1950s when he was young, too. He's 62 now, but still buoyantly youthful when he talks about country music.
"I loved the music so much," he says, "and I loved the people so much, the stars. I didn't want it ever to change, or go away."
Johnny Cash appears on the screen smiling and handsome, already the Man in Black, but without the worn lumpy face that looks like a range of Appalachian hills.
"The guy looks like he's 22 years old," Kagarise says.
Kagarise, who lives in Olde Hillendale in Baltimore County, is up at Joe Lee's place out in Mount Airy showing off his photos and recordings. He and Lee sit on the porch, jawing about country music like a couple of farmers pausing on the steps at some Clinch Mountain courthouse. They're partners in exploiting Kagarise's collection.
For each of the 400 photos he took, Kagarise has a couple hundred tapes and records. He figures he has maybe 100,000 now, down from his peak of 150,000.
"So now I only have a small collection," he deadpans.
His hoard is stashed in two Baltimore County homes he owns. Both are full, packed, crammed, loaded, bursting with photographs, tapes and records. And they're almost all pure, unadulterated country -- "before the poison hit," his impression of the contemporary crossover Nashville sound.
They're like a cache of unknown Picassos. That's why folk art studies scholars from the Library of Congress came out to Lee's house to listen to the tapes and look at the pictures. That's why the Country Music Foundation is interested. And that's why a record label is negotiating a deal.
Many of the recordings are unique. He taped Johnny Cash live in 1962, for example, long before "Live at Folsom," the 1968 LP that country music encyclopedias consider Cash's first live album.
"We've got him doing `Rock Island Line' a million miles an hour," says Lee, who's the proprietor of Joe's Record Paradise in Rockville, a mecca for Washington-area collectors for about 25 years.
"And he spits those words out so clear," Kagarise says. "He could never have done that in '68. He couldn't achieve that."
