The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of: Super Rarities

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Total Tracks: 46   Total Length: 140:49

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Mike McGonigal

eMusic Contributor

Mike McGonigal is editorial director for YETI publishing and the author of three little music books. He lives in Portland, OR, where he spends his time assembli...more »

03.31.09
Some of the rarest records ever made — aside from that demo you made in college.
Label: Shanachie Entertainment / INgrooves

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of is subtitled The Dead Sea Scrolls of Record Collecting, and most of these tracks really are as rare as the title implies. There's only one known copy of the majority of these sides, quite a few of which appear here digitally for the first time. Compiled by Richard Nevins, the music runs a pretty wide gamut: deep Delta blues, rough-hewn shape note singing, backwoods fiddle tunes, weird wartime story-songs, squeezebox-driven Cajun reels, punch cowboy songs, drunken-sounding jug band numbers and rousing sanctified singing. The whole enterprise feels like a natural extension of Harry Smith's vaunted 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music.

You may not exactly be amazed by this statement — especially if you've seen Ghost World or High Fidelity or American Splendor — but record collectors can be an awfully obsessive bunch.

And nothing can match the obsession of hunting for 78s of which there are no known copies. How many garages, flea markets, back rooms, cellars and thrift stores have been turned upside-down searching for them? One of the rarest surfaced in September 2003: Paramount 13096, a Son House disc with "Clarksdale Moan" backed with "Mississippi County Farm Blues," recorded in the… read more »

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They Say All Music Guide

For anyone who’s collected 78-rpm records, enjoyed Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, or expressed interest in the great missing old-time and blues records of yesteryear, The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of will be the Holy Grail. Whereas it isn’t unusual for Yazoo to place a rarity on a new collection by Blind Blake or Blind Lemon Jefferson, this two-disc collection — all 46 cuts — is a testament to rarities. Perhaps the best-known (to a general old-time/blues audience) performer here is Son House, and the collection includes recordings of “Mississippi County Farm Blues” and “Clarksdale Moan.” Others might be familiar with Dock Boggs (“Old Rub Alcohol Blues”), Ken Maynard (“Sweet Betsey from Pike”), and the Memphis Jug Band (“Jim Strainer Blues”). Incredibly, several of these tracks were recorded as test pressings and never officially released, meaning that as far as the recording industry is concerned, they don’t exist. It’s probable that all of the fuss made over this collection of rarities will make little sense to folks who don’t spend all of their spare money and time hunting down 78-rpm records, and there’s a point here. If you don’t know that a certain item is rare, you won’t value it in the same way a collector might. In this sense, one CD filled with scratchy old recordings is as good as another. But even for those who might not understand why they should be excited by The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of, the collection nonetheless holds up as good old-time folk and blues, and expense-wise, Yazoo always offers lots of quality music for one’s money. As an added bonus the cover art and inside cartoon has been put together by none other than Robert Crumb, a record collector and one-time string band performer himself. – Ronnie D. Lankford, Jr.

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