"I think if he's sustaining this great and wonderful rare collection, that's a great role - playing it on the radio, making it accessible," said Gene DeAnna, head of the Recorded Sound Section of the Library of Congress. DeAnna applauds everything but the legally iffy retail sideline.
(Various state laws restrict unauthorized copying of recordings for commercial use, though experts doubt that record companies would go after someone like Bussard, given the minimal money at stake.)
Bussard has a fair bit of music that neither the Library of Congress nor anyone else has, and more rarities than most collectors. There is no central repository of American sound recordings, and over time even big labels lost or tossed some of the masters used to reissue recordings on CDs. That makes Bussard and fellow collectors unofficial guardians of part of the nation's musical legacy.
He boasts that his collection includes the only known record featuring the 1929 country toe-tapper "Way Down in North Carolina," by the Grayson County Railsplitters; one of three examples of "Outside Woman Blues," recorded by Blind Joe Reynolds in 1929; and a never-issued test recording of Frank Stokes' 1927 rendition of "Jumping on the Hill."
His most prized gem has to be the world's only known copy of "Stack O' Lee Blues," released in 1927 by the Black Patti label. A high-profile blues collector named John Tefteller openly covets it. "That's a significant blues piece; of course I'd like to have it," he said.
But Bussard has told him he turned down $30,000 for it, and Tefteller's frustration was evident over the phone from his home in Oregon. "You can say, 'I'll pay more,' but it doesn't seem to make any difference to him, because he doesn't want to sell."
And so that 10-inch shellacked black disc stays in Bussard's basement, hidden in the shelves that extend 18 feet across and rise 6 feet toward the ceiling. The catalog exists only in the collector's head, the better to thwart would-be thieves. The only nod to climate control is a dehumidifier.
One recent morning in his basement, Bussard suddenly took on the look of a madman. He flung his arms wide, splaying both hands like matching stop signs. His eyes darted this way and that. He stuck out his tongue.
It was his signal that real fun lay just ahead.
