Hello, hello, hello. I wrote a reminder for myself to make a blog post every weekend to keep the internet updated on Dollar Country, but of course when the reminder bell went off I was pretty tired so I put it off and put it off. Many things have happened this Autumn in the world of DC.
Nick Shoulders
On November 18th and 20th I had the pleasure of playing records at the Nick Shoulders shows in Detroit and Cleveland respectively. I’ve done this a handful of times before, all of the gigs he’s done in Cleveland since 2021, and a few elsewhere. It’s always fun because Nick is a buddy and it’s great to see him, but I also love his music. The crowd at his shows are just about the perfect crowd for Dollar Country too. I met a ton of nice folks who seemed interested in what DC does and a bunch of people who already knew about DC. Opening the Detroit show was Jackson & The Janks, and Clover Lynn at the Cleveland gig, both were acts I’d never seen before and both were excellent.
Playing with Nick is a perfect storm because we’re both admirers of what each other does, so the admiration ends up going both ways. It makes me feel good.
A Truck Full Of Records
In early November my buddy Brian contacted me saying there was a guy on the east side of Cleveland who had boxes and boxes of LPs, 45s, and 78s and that I should get over there and look them over. Well, I couldn’t make it there that weekend and before I knew it Brian had texted saying the guy wanted $1000 for all the 45s and would I like to go in on the collection with him. The answer was Yes and a day later we were the proud owners of 100+ white boxes of 45s. I told him I just wanted the country stuff, and so we got to work looking through all these records. Buying that many 45s at a time is something that is always exciting because anything could be in there, but then a week later you’re surrounded by boxes and asking yourself what the hell you were thinking. Fast forward another week and those feelings have gone back and forth so many times that you don’t even know how you feel about it, but now you have a few boxes of cool records you didn’t have before.
All in all I found about two boxes of keepers for myself, 5 or 6 boxes of country stuff I’m going to add to the sale list, and most of the rest went back to Brian for him to sell.
Sale List
I stashed many boxes of stuff to sell over the years and finally started putting it all together recently. I’ve sent out the sale list twice so far, if you wanna be on the email list then let me know at host at dollarcountry dot org. I’ll be adding a TON of solid country to the list from the recent buy.
Dollar Country Volunteers
In the last couple months I’ve come to the realization that the amount of work I’ve set out to do can’t be done by one person, so I’ve been trying to take advice from other folks by understanding that to really have Dollar Country do all the great archiving it can do then I will need help from others and have to let go of some of my control to allow for more to happen.
KMC and Zach have been helping with computer stuff. KMC hosts the website and I’ve been working with him for a few years now, Zach has been writing code to make the database a lot better. Zach and Glen are helping me with digitization. Zach digitizes LPs and posts them and things from his own collection at The Vinyl Archive on youtube. Glen will be digitizing 45s. DJ is going to be helping with database submissions and editing starting next month.
If you’d like to help with the database then please drop me a line. I’m looking for folks who are interested in editing the database (adding records and editing record information) as well as research.