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JT: Yeah, I mean, it adds to the cost, but if you're paying $37,000 for a record, another $1000 for a
plane ticket and a rental car to go get it is not really that big a deal. It is, but it's comparatively not.

BiTS: That's true. I know a little bit about this area but obviously not as much as you, what is it
that people are looking for at the moment? Is there a holy grail somewhere?

JT: Yeah, there's always a holy grail somewhere. Now, in the last 30 years, when I first started

really seriously chasing rare blues records, which I did for a while but seriously where you're
talking about spending serious money and spending a lot of time to do it, that started for me in the
1990s and when I got to that point in collecting where I had a lot of the common records and I was
looking for the really super rare stuff, I had a lot of the old-time collectors that were friends of
mine tell me hey, you're never going to find that stuff. It doesn't exist, or it's just not out there and
I took that as a challenge that okay, well let's see if they really are out there or not out there and so

I spent a lot of time on the road, going places, meeting people, making phone calls, chasing stuff
down and I came up with a lot of records. Not a lot in the sense of hundreds, or anything like that,
but a lot of records that had never been known to have been found before. People thought they
were missing. They didn't exist, they would never be found, and these old-time guys would always
tell me that – oh, you're not going to find that, you're not going to find that, and then I'd turn
around and surprise them and find it. After a while, they

stopped saying that and now nobody really says anymore to
me well, you're never going to find whatever it is. They
don't say that. They say well, we don't know. If anybody's
going to find it, you are, is the new way they put it and so
after finding a lot of these one-of-a-kind type records,
there's always going to be few that have alluded me and

have alluded everybody else. Probably the most talked about
ones are two records by Willie Brown. 'Future Blues' is
known to exist, and we have a few copies of that, and it's
been beautifully reissued, and you can listen to that any
time you want to, but Willie Brown made two other records
for Paramount, most likely with Charley Patton on the

second guitar and those other two records just have never turned up. One is Paramount 13096,
which is called 'Kicking in my Sleep Blues' and then there's a 13001, which is called 'Grandma
Blues' and those two have not turned up and I have a standing offer of anywhere from $25 to
$50,000 or more for a really playable copy of either one of those records, but so far, the world's
been turned upside down and they haven't come up.

BiTS: Well, fingers crossed… You mentioned, John, that you spent a lot of time travelling around

looking for stuff and all the rest of it, but doing your calendar must be an epic job. You're in the
19th year coming up. It must be like painting the Forth Bridge. By the time you've finished one,
you're starting another.

JT: That's correct. Well, not exactly correct. We usually finish the next year's calendar right around
the first part of September of the year before the calendar date. For example, the one we're doing

right now is for 2022. We will have that finished by September. Hopefully, a little bit before that
and then we have a break between September and January or so, where we sell them, and they get
shipped out to the stores and they get shipped out to the collectors and all that. That's the selling
period for the calendars and then around January, February of next year, I'll start working on the