Long ago...
in some college humanities class, I did a short paper on the blues. Can’t recall what the thrust of the paper was, but I still remember my amazement to find out that a massive amount of early blues records were made just a mile or two from my home...a town even more white-bread and boring than the one I was living in. Grafton, Wisconsin went up a whole lot in my estimation with that nugget of info. (I believe Port Washington, aka the town of my birth, also hosted some recording operations.) I was blown away that when my mother was a little girl, the same same interurban rail line that she would ride to high school etc. was travelled by some of the greatest figures in American musical history. The very path I had walked home from school everyday was the torn up interurban tracks. The synchronicity boggled my mind. Not that I was destined for a career in the blues. But still...

Skimming the Milwaukee area news this morning I found this:
”So as part of a "History Detectives" episode on the history Paramount Records that is expected to air in August, four scuba divers were hired to scour the river's bottom for the master recordings and records. The divers work for the Deep Blue diving center in Milwaukee.

From 1922 until 1932, Paramount made roughly one-fourth of all blues recordings produced in the United States at the Wisconsin Chair Company factory in Grafton.But would the dumped records be playable after more than 70 years in the Milwaukee River?

"You just don't know how well the shellac will hold up on the 78 records," she said. "But we hope to find out." *

The PBS show has found a specialist who has equipment to listen to master recordings if any are found, she said.

The August episode also will tell viewers what happened to Paramount Records and will share something about some of the African-American musicians who came to Grafton, said Tukufu Zuberi, who will host the show.”

*Rick and I were discussing the shellac thing. We have our doubts. Most of my experience with old records is limited to handing the load of Edison Diamond discs - which play at 80rpm, by the way - that I inherited from my mother’s family. Those babies are delicate. Then again, maybe the waters of the Milwaukee River will have had some miraculous preservative property.

I wonder if the Raloff family investment in records that played at 80 rpm was a portent of descendants who keep big boxes of BETA tapes...