Page 16 - BiTS_07_JULY_2021

BITS INTERVIEW: JOHN TEFTELLER

John Tefteller is one of the major figures in the discovery and curation of old 78rpm blues
records. In 2013, Tefteller purchased "Alcohol and Jake Blues" by Tommy Johnson (1930), a
very rare blues 78 rpm record, on eBay for $37,100. Ian McKenzie spoke to him on the
telephone at his home in Grants Pass, Oregon.

BiTS: John, please tell me something about how you got started in this record collecting business? I
gather you were quite young.

JT: My grandmother had a Victrola in her garage, and as a kid, I was fascinated by it. I knew what a
normal record player was, but I had no
idea what that was, and she showed

me how it worked. I was probably
eight years old at that point and I
would sit in her garage and play 78s
on that Victrola. Now, she didn't have
any blues records. She got married in
1922 in Los Angeles, and she got that
Victrola as a wedding present when

she got married. I don't know who
gave it to her, but somebody gave it to
her as a wedding present and there
were records along with it, and they
John Tefteller
were all from the period of about

1922/23 and they were mostly dance
type records because that's what I guess was popular with her friends at her time, so that's what I
was listening to. Then as I got a little bit older, there was a radio programme in the Los Angeles
area called the Dr Demento show. I don't know if you've ever heard of that. It's actually still
available to listen to. It's on the internet now, but he's still alive and he's still doing the
programme. He's 80 years old now, but he was much younger then – so was I – and he had this
radio programme where he played a lot of kind of crazy novelty songs, including a lot of 78s and so

I started listening to that and he would be playing everything from Spike Jones to Stan Freberg to
whatever. Just kind of novelty stuff and I liked that, so I started asking my parents if we could find
some records like that because they didn't have them in normal record stores. My parents thought
that was kind of interesting, so we went to a few that were termed back then, old collectors type
stores in the Los Angeles area and the people that ran those stores were mostly at that point selling

rare jazz records from the 20s and 30s. They weren't really selling novelty 78s from the 40s and
50s, so they were happy to see me coming and buy some Spike Jones records for 50 cents, or
whatever it was. Then I started looking in thrift stores too because my mom used to like to go to
thrift stores and look at stuff and I found some records there. When I was 16 or so, I had both sets
of grandparents die within a very short period of time, and my father was put in charge of being the
executor for those estates. That meant clearing out the equivalent of two houses and one of the sets
of grandparents lived on a farm in California and filled up barns with stuff. Now, there were no

records in any of that, other than what my grandmother had had and given me a long time before
with the Victrola, but in clearing out all that stuff, we would take it to the flea market every
weekend – the swap meet and sell it one truckload at a time for quite a while. It took two or three