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the poorest of all people. If you think that white people were poor during the depression and you
see all those things, that famous movie with Henry Fonda, “The Grapes of Wrath”, and the dust
bowls and no jobs and bread lines and lines for jobs and all that, that was the white people. Imagine
what the black people, what they went through. They had it even worse and so if you were black in

1932, you didn't have much income at all. You had barely enough to put food on the table for
yourself and your family, if you were one of the lucky ones. So the idea of buying a 78 RPM record
was a luxury to a black family. It was a luxury and so some of the black families that worked in the
tobacco industry and some of the other places
where they got a little bit more money than the
average salary of almost nothing, they would
occasionally buy records. But occasionally, and not

only would they occasionally buy them, once they
had them, they were considered pretty much some
of their prized possessions and they would play
them over and over and over and wear the heck out
of them to where there were almost no grooves left

on the 78s. And that's why when you see them why
they're so battered, and you have to spend so much
time trying to get some kind of sound out of them.
To find late 20s, early 30s black blues records in
store stock new condition is really hard. There is
some like that out there and I have a lot of it now
because I've been doing it for a long time, but it's

really hard. You're basically dependent on unsold
stock that didn't sell back then that somehow
didn't get thrown away. It becomes very, very
difficult, and those records become very, very rare.
It's not just that they didn't make a lot of them.

They didn't, compared to if it was a Bing Crosby
record or some other kind of white record by white
musicians that was selling a lot of copies. They
made enough of them, but they didn't sell that
many and so a lot of stuff just got dumped and then
during World War II, when the records were about
say ten years old at that point, the US government

had what they called scrap drives and record drives
and they encouraged the American public to take
their unwanted, old used records and take them
down to the recycler to be recycled to make the
paint that was going on the tanks. That drab olive-coloured paint is made out of 78 RPM records.

BiTS: That's a new one to me. I've never heard that last bit before. Ever.

JT: There's newsreel footage where you have footage of little black kids going through the ghettos
in America with wagons stacked with the 78s up on them and they're taking those wagons to the
scrap drive to be melted down to be made into paint and so whatever records were in existence by
1943/44 when these scrap drives were happening, a whole lot more of them got destroyed during