Page 23 - BiTS_07_JULY_2021

next one for 2023, and we'll have it finished by September. It's about eight to nine months out of
the year we're putting together in some format, whether it's restoring the songs for the CD or

restoring and completing the artwork and filling out everything. Working kind of part-time because
I'm doing all this other stuff too, but kind of part-time, it takes roughly eight to nine months to do
one. If I had a full-time ability to just sit and do it, I could probably cut that down to about three
and a half, four months, but I do it kind of part-time over a period of time.

BiTS: There's just one more question that I want to ask you. Particularly in relation to a record like
'Alcohol and Jake', there are any number of them, what it is that attracts you to them? Is it just the

rarity of them, or is there something like I'm interested in, the sociology, the reason why the
records exist in the first place?

JT: All of it. I think first of all the most attractive thing is for me is it's a challenge to find it. Now
'Alcohol and Jake' was not a particular challenge to find. It was for sale on the internet, on eBay.
[Laughing] If you looked at eBay, you saw it was
there for sale. That wasn't a challenge to find it. A

challenge to find it is when you have to go out and
hunt it down or hunt something down in a barn or
a basement and look and look and look in
different barns and different basements and
different flea markets until it actually shows up.

That's more of a challenge, but it's the idea that
some of these things are so rare and have been
eluding people for so long to the point where
people just said, oh, you'll never find them. You'll
never find them. I take that as a challenge that a)
they should be found because usually, when you
find those super rare records like that, usually

they're quite interesting. They're usually not bad.
They're usually quite interesting and so I'm
looking at it as a historical thing too, as to why
are these things so rare? And I can explain all
that. I don't know if you want me to do it, but why are these things so rare and since they're rare,

how do we find them and then make them available where people can hear them after 80 years of
being lost?

BiTS: That's part of what your calendar does, of course.

JT: When these early blues records came out originally in the late 20s and early 30s, they didn't
sell that many of them and they didn't sell that many of them because of a number of things, but the
majority of the reason is because white people back in that time period did not buy, as a rule, there
were always a few exceptions here and there, but as a rule, white people did not buy records by

black people. The world was segregated. It was the Jim Crow era. It was still a very prejudiced time
and white people thought that those black singers and black songs and all that were basically things
that you didn't associate yourself with. You didn't listen to those things. They might be of the devil;
they might be whatever. They had all kinds of different reasons as to why they didn't associate with
them, but most of it was just a simple prejudice, and as a result, they didn't sell them to white

people, so they only sold them to black people. Well, back in the late 20s and early 30s, during the
depression, especially, most people who would have even thought of buying records like that were