Musical moments in time: ABQ 78 Spinners savor the music, history and nostalgia of an earlier era

Richard Hinds settles the tonearm gently into the grooves of the 78 record, and the music of Jelly Roll Morton and the Red Hot Peppers rises from the rotating disc and buzzes the room.

“ ‘Doctor Jazz,’ ” said Joe Washek, identifying the 1926 recording. “Greatest record ever made. That’s Johnny Dodds on clarinet.”

Musical moments in time: ABQ 78 Spinners savor the music, history and nostalgia of an earlier era

It’s a Saturday this past summer and the ABQ 78 Spinners, a small group of men and women who collect 78 records, are gathered for one of their monthly spins at Richard and Phyllis “Phyl” Bowman’s home in Albuquerque’s Spruce Park neighborhood.

Produced in this country primarily between 1898 and the late 1950s, 78 records are discs played at 78 revolutions per minute.

They came in different sizes, usually 10 or 12 inches in diameter, and were most commonly made out of shellac, a commercial resin, which is why the ABQ 78 Spinners sometimes refer to their monthly spins as shellac soirees.

Big bands such as the Count Basie Orchestra and the Glenn Miller Orchestra recorded on 78s, but so did the likes of Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers, an old time Georgia band; Big Chief Henry’s Indian String Band, a Choctaw trio out of Oklahoma; and the blues group Peg Leg Howell and His Gang.

And, of course, Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers jazz band.

“That band was so hot and swinging,” Washek said. “Jelly Roll’s vocals are incredible. He didn’t sing a lot. One of the great tragedies is that he didn’t sing more.”

Blame it on Bessie

It was a Bessie Smith record in a dusty, junky East Texas antique store that got Richard Bowman hooked on collecting 78 records in 1992.

That year, Bowman was dating Phyllis, his future wife, and had taken her to his native Texas to meet his mother and his aunt.

“They took us to antique town,” said Bowman, now 72 and a retired Second Judicial District prosecutor. “There was this Bessie Smith record on a stack of 78s.” Smith was the most popular female blues artist of the 1930s.

“I kept thinking, ‘Could that really be Bessie Smith?’ ” Bowman said. “I walked away three times. But then I bought it. It was only $2.”

That purchase triggered something in Bowman that soon had him actively looking for records. An ad in the Albuquerque Journal in 1992 led him to some records for sale in Rio Rancho. That’s when he met Dan Moss, the man selling the records.

Moss, now 63, thinks it was the music in Warner Bros. cartoons and in TV shows and movies, such as the ragtime soundtrack in the 1973 film “The Sting,” that propelled him into collecting records. He owns between 1,800 and 2,000 of them.

“I like anything hot and stompy — jug bands, klezmer bands,” Moss said. “Or, I like something earthy — Bessie Smith singing about killing her trifling man.”

After meeting in 1992, Bowman and Moss started doing record spins together. If you’re looking to mark the start of ABQ 78 Spinners, that’ll do.

Bowman said the Spinners have never really thought of themselves as a club.

“Dan and I started things, and after that people kind of came and went,” Bowman said. “We’re just a group of people who get together to spin these records and enjoy the music.”

Variety show

There are a dozen members of the ABQ 78 Spinners in and around Albuquerque. Two in Denver and one in Portland, Oregon, get to spins when they are in town.

The group meets on a Saturday every four weeks, starting with breakfast at a Downtown café before going to the Bowman’s house for the spin.

“It’s a social occasion, some sort of camaraderie,” said Washek, 70, of Placitas, a member of the Spinners since this past spring. “I get to hear records I haven’t heard before. And I like the record gossip.”

A retired attorney who has been collecting 78s since he was a law student in Boston, Washek estimates he has about 14,000 records. A couple of months ago, he made a trip to Boston and returned with 85 boxes of records, an estimated 8,500 discs.

“I got them from a friend,” Washek said. “He said he was downsizing. I said that’s like quitting.”

Washek said he’ll collect any record that plays music.

“I go through phases,” he said. “Currently, I’m going through a ‘20s and ‘30s jazz phase. But I’m a big fan of the blues from the ‘20s up into the ‘60s.”

Bowman said an important benefit of the monthly spins is that everybody brings their favorite music genres to play.

“That means a lot more variety in what we are hearing,” he said. “We did not play V-Discs before Dick came along, and, my gosh, that’s great stuff.”

Dick Barnitz, 63, of Bernalillo, has been with ABQ 78 Spinners since the summer of 2023. He started collecting 78s — big band and Western swing — to play on a wind-up Victrola his wife bought. But about eight years ago, he discovered V-Discs.

V-Disc was a label created in 1943 to provide records for people serving in the U.S. military. The V stood for victory. Popular singers, big bands and orchestras recorded for the label, which continued to produce records into 1949.

Barnitz, a Marine veteran with an interest in World War II history, was intrigued by the V-Disc story and started to concentrate his collecting on those records.

“There were 905 Army V-Discs and 275 Navy/Marine V-Discs,” he said. “I’m trying to collect them all. I probably got 20% of them still to find.”

He enjoys delving into the label’s history and the origins of the individual records.

“There’s stuff on V-Discs that was never recorded commercially,” he said. “Who were the bands? Was this an Army band? Was this recorded specifically for V-Disc, or did the V-Disc people just take it off the radio?”

‘I love it all’

Barnitz tracks down most of his V-Discs online, but he’ll look for other 78s at antique malls, flea markets, thrift stores, estate sales and yard sales.

Hinds, 68, refrains from buying records online.

“I’m a little afraid they will get broken in shipping,” he said.

Hinds, a Southeast Heights resident who worked in the photo lab business, is the ABQ 78 Spinners’ newest member, having attended only two record spins.

“I’m enjoying this group very much,” he said. “I’m in awe of the records they find.”

Hinds has about a thousand records in his collection.

“I have very broad tastes in music,” he said. “I listen to the old jazz, polka, country and Western. I love it all.”

His interest in 78s, however, goes beyond the music.

“I’m interested in the history of them, the designs on the labels,” he said. “I like to imagine people 100 years ago listening to these records the same way we listen to them now.”

Judy Muldawer, 78, is more about the music than the records. She and her husband, Michael, 84, a retired psychiatrist, like music from the early 1900s, Tin Pan Alley stuff. They perform that music, mostly at senior homes, in their duo act, Michael on guitar, Judy on ukulele. Judy also plays banjo.

“My mother was born in 1906,” Judy said. “I grew up on all these old songs that have 20 different chords, not just four or five, and I love the lyrics.”

Judy, who once owned a computer business, obtains records and then digitizes the music.

“I have digitized about 1,500 cuts,” she said. “Then I’ve been donating the records.”

But it could be she’s getting the collecting bug.

“Lately, I’ve been finding them harder to get rid of,” she said.

Most of the ABQ 78 Spinners are in their 60s, 70s or 80s, but Al Cross is just 23.

“I got interested in older music when I was 4 or 5 and my grandfather would visit from California and play that music on the radio,” said Cross. “I think I was 14 or 15 when I got my first 78. One day I found a box of dusty 78s in a box in a record store and bought a Bing Crosby record.”

Cross, who owns 450 records, was into collecting early jazz and country music, until 2019 or 2020, when he started collecting music by immigrants from Yugoslavia and Poland and music recorded in Malaysia and early 20th-century China and other foreign locales. You can count on Cross to show up at a spin with a jazz record made in Czechoslovakia.

Musical time machine

Bowman is telling a story about Lowe Stokes, a fiddler with the Skillet Lickers, losing a hand to a gunshot wound. Explanations about how that happened range from a hunting accident to a barroom altercation. But Bowman said Stokes resumed fiddling after replacing his hand with a prosthetic attachment.

“He’d participate in fiddling contests with this prosthetic and win,” Bowman said. “People complained that the judges were just feeling sorry for him. So, they started putting the contestants behind a curtain, and Stokes still won.”

It’s a Saturday record spin at the Bowman residence, a house filled with music memorabilia, furniture, lamps, posters and other ephemera that pull you to the early 20th century.

But the music at the spins could do that even without the nostalgic setting.

“There is an immediacy about 78s,” Bowman said. “They were recorded on wax discs, which were used to create the metal masters for pressing the shellac. You get as close to that artist and his or her sound as you will ever get.”

“There was no tape, no overdubbing, nothing,” Washek said. “What you hear on 78s is what the musicians did. It’s capturing a human musical moment in time.”