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BiTS: I gather that you bought Document Records.
I'm not sure it was still called that then, from

somebody in Austria. Does he have anything to do
with it anymore?
Gary: No. That was Johnny Parth. He became
primarily a jazz fan back in the 50s, and in actual fact,
I think Johnny was an interpreter for the British forces

during the war and he told me that that was when he
first started to hear jazz. By the 50s, I think he was in
a jazz band. I think he played trumpet and then in the
60s, he started to work with various different labels,
including the Roots label, which was actually owned by
his wife, Evelyn. It wasn't owned by Johnny, as I thought
it was for quite a considerable amount of time. He

worked on all of these different labels and then he had
a discussion with Chris Strachwitz from Arhoolie, and it
was Chris that suggested that Johnny could perhaps bring
all of the recordings that he'd worked on and he had
worked on an awful lot and maybe consider something

which I think a lot of collectors seemed to naturally do,
not so much now because it's sort of like gone in a way
but, I've been to a lot of collectors’ houses in the 70s and
the 80s, and there seems to be this natural instinct to get
an artist such as Blind Willie McTell and whatever they
had, a lot of it was scattered about. There could be the odd album dedicated to Willie McTell, perhaps
on Roots or Yazoo and they would start putting them all together and the instinct was to put them all

together chronologically, so pursuing that sort of an idea, and Johnny embarked upon this journey.
The humongous task, I think that he had Godrich and Dixon's ‘Blues and Gospel Records’ tucked under
his arm as he did that, and he used that as his guide and started to produce.

The first Document productions were on vinyl in 1986, and then he switched to CDs in 2000. I got

involved with Document because I was recommended to Johnny as a possibility as someone to write
booklet notes. There were quite a lot of booklet note writers and I became one of them and then in
1999, we'd got our PCs and were connected to the Internet and all the rest of it by then, well before
then, and I suggested to Johnny that he might want to consider having a website for Document from
where they could sell CDs. He wasn't interested. He said no. Johnny's wife had a computer, but Johnny
didn't have one and I don't think he'd ever sat in front of one and said that he wasn't interested, but

then he went on to say well you might want to do it if you would like to, go ahead. You could be regarded
as a sort of a reseller if you like and we'd provide you with the CDs and you could sell them.

Well, I didn't want to do it either. I just thought it was a good idea that he might be interested in and
this must have led towards Johnny thinking this over and then a few days later he rang me, and we
had this extraordinary conversation on the phone. I didn't quite get it at first, but basically what Johnny

was doing was he was offering me Document and after a few minutes, it sort of clicked that that was
in actual fact what he was doing and I just said yes, I'm interested and so the same with Gillian, and
after I came off the call, I went to Gillian, told her about this bizarre conversation I'd just had with

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