Leave it to me to write a whole big "Vinyl Hunter" post about records that aren't vinyl, and then forget about the newest additions to my old-time music collection that ACTUALLY ARE vinyl. First up is an album released earlier this year. I had my local record store pre-order me a copy of Rhiannon Giddens & Justin Robinson, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow , which was released in April on Nonesuch. The album features two-thirds of the original Carolina Chocolate Drops lineup and arrived shortly before the band's reunion concert at the inaugural Biscuits & Banjos Festival , April 25-27, in Durham, North Carolina, and it also preceded the release of a new documentary about the band that you can watch now on Amazon Prime. The Giddens-Robinson duo provide a dozen North Carolina fiddle and banjo tunes. The entire album was recorded outdoors at Joe Thompson’s and Etta Baker’s North Carolina homes, as well as the former plantation Mill Prong House. In the bac...
For whatever reason, I called my record collecting posts "Vinyl Hunter" back in 2016. I had just gotten back into collecting vinyl records , and at the time I didn't really think about the possibility of adding 78 rpm records to my collection. That all changed a couple years ago, when I shared my copy of Uncle Bunt Stephens, "Sail Away Lady" / "Louisburg Blues" (Columbia, 1926), which I got off eBay. However, that wasn't even the first piece of shellac I bought. But, we'll get to that. First, I wanted talk about my most recent 78 haul. Earlier this year, I stopped into an antique store in South Carolina while traveling for work and walked out with four shellac records. Awhile back, I joined a 78 rpm collecting group on Facebook, and someone posted some records that had just been put on the store floor at Catnip Antiques in Simpsonville, S.C. It just so happened that the store was on my way back to the airport, so I decided to check it out. ...