Category: General Posts

About General Posts

Subscribe Feeds

Late January 2026: Behind the scenes organizing and mail. So much mail. Sale List!

Posted on by Frank The Drifter

Dollar Country studios is slowly getting cleaned up. This week I opened mail. A couple years ago I had the bright idea to assign a Source Number to every discogs or ebay user that I bought something from so I could have that history with the disc itself in the archive. That made opening mail a longer process than it used to be and so I often put it off until there’s a critical mass of boxes that I need to take of. So that’s what the picture up top is. At least I’ll never run out of 45 mailers!

LP Logging
Back in the newborn times of early 2024 I had a lot of time in the middle of the night when I had to be up with the newborn but he mostly slept. So I went through every box of 45s I had and logged them all on a private discogs account. This filled my time but it was also practical. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve bought a record online that I had already bought without remembering. So now I can check and see if I already have something.

Approximate amount of 45s left to add to the archive: 9803

Well I logged (most of) the 45s in 2024 but the LPs I had were still a mess. I had logged some of them but it was sporadic and not uniform in any way. Starting last week I got to work and started logging the LP shelves. I’ve logged about 1600, which seems tiny in comparison to the 45s, but that’s a lot of records!

Approximate amount of LPs left to add to the archive: 1625

Despite only having only about 15% the amount of LPs compared to 45s the LPs take up a huge amount of space. They’re just a bulky medium in comparison, but there’s so much stuff on LP that isn’t on 45 (and vice versa). The LP collection is much more focused on Country Gospel and private pressed records, whereas I have a ton of major label 45s that have made it into the collection. In doing this I’ve also found two full boxes of LPs I plan on selling that I have more than a couple copies of or don’t fit the criteria for me to keep. I keep at least 2 copies of any LP if I want them in the archive, so if I have more than that that are the same pressing those go into the sale box.

One last thing, the numbers above are just the records that are on discogs. I still have a large amount of things that have never been submitted, I might estimate about 10% of what I have, although that number is shrinking every day.

Sale List!
So I’ll be updating the sale list in the next few weeks to send out once again, and this time there will be 45s AND albums. I might even get fancy and grade everything even though that adds a lot of time.

If you’d like to be on the sale list email then drop me a line at host (at) dollar country (dot) org and I’ll send it your way once it’s ready.

Cheers
Franklin

Jan 2026: Streaming Server, Digital Organization, and Gospel Mixtape

Posted on by Frank The Drifter

Dollar Country ended 2025 with a lot of work that is invisible to the outside world, although it’s work that is incredibly important. I’ve taken on the task of organizing DC’s digital files. This got kicked off by my project to host a small streaming service for myself.

Dollar Country Streaming Server
I found myself without a streaming service last month and after thinking about what I wanted to do and trying a few things I decided not to pay for one at all. They’ve always felt unfortunate to me anyway, so this way I don’t have to feel like I’m supporting a system that is generally exploitative of the artists who make it possible. Multiple people had suggested I try self hosting my own music so I could listen to my collection via streaming instead of paying for a service. It seemed like a lot of work at first but after consideration I thought it made a lot of sense.

Plex is a streaming service that allows you to host your own media server. Many people use it for TV shows and movies, but it also works with music. Considering that the vast majority of music in the Dollar Country archive isn’t on any streaming service then this would allow me to actually be able to hear this stuff outside of putting the records on. I love putting on a record, but now I can listen to obscure country gospel LPs while I’m driving or out of the house. Ideally this streaming server would be available to many others, but I’m not entirely sure how that would work from a logistics and legal standpoint.

Digital Organization
Starting the Plex server made me realize that my digital files needed to be organized. In the last 9 years I’ve taken pictures of thousands of records and created tends of thousands of photos. According to windows I’ve got 27,709 label pictures that take up 33.5 gigabytes of space. This work is largely invisible to the outside world but I’ve found it to be very important to the work of archiving. If my folders are all mixed up and only I know how they are set up then that only helps me, when I standardize their organization it can be helpful to anyone who looks at it.

Over the years I’ve accumulated hundreds of newspaper clippings, thousands of pictures, and thousands of audio files that are all located in different folders. By the end of 2026 I aim to have all of this digital information organized so that when you click on the Eddie Noack folder you have folders for clippings, pictures of records, and audio instead of them being in three different places. From there I hope to be able to have audio digitized of large swaths of the collection to share. This information is great to have, but my goal is to have it available to people that aren’t me, so that’s where I’m trying to shift my focus this year. This is going to require a tremendous amount of work, if you’d like to help with data entry on the database then drop me a line at host@dollarcountry.org.

Gospel Mixtape
The biggest change that’s happened with having a streaming server is that I’ve gotten to spend much more time with the country gospel LPs in the archive. I love putting on a record and giving it a listen, but the huge volume of records in the archive prohibit me from actually doing that. When I have time to listen to the records I prioritize digitizing new ones and adding them to the stacks, so relistening rarely happens. Now that I can listen in the car I’ve been spending some serious time with these records and putting certain songs away for a mixtape I’d like to release. Gospel music spends a lot of time singing about getting to the other side. Death or what happens after. Having grown up non-religious, I find this very interesting and after asking people about this I’ve found that it is generally of interest to a lot of people.

So by following this thread of cancelling a streaming service we arrive at a large scale digital reorganization and a new DC mixtape. It’s interesting how following these paths can lead to places you never thought of at first.

See you next time,
Frank The Drifter

LP Arrivals, NTS Xmas Show, State Of The Archive 2025

Posted on by Frank The Drifter

State Of The Archive 2025
2025 was a year of adaptation for Dollar Country. After having our baby in late 2023 I scrambled with what to do in 2024. DC started a newsletter, tried to still release a ton of episodes, and generally tried to do too much. For 2025 my goal was to slow down and get an idea of not what could be done but what should be done. So here’s the rundown:

  1. First Full Year As A Non Profit
    2025 was the first full year that Dollar Country was a non-profit organization. It was also the first year where DC received any sort of grant money, which was part of the reasoning in going for non-profit status. With help from my friend, non-profit guru, and supporter Max Paley, we were able to apply for a few grants, eventually receiving one from the Ohio Arts Council to help with our project to digitize many old, odd, and unloved discs that are in the collection. (See the Dollar Country Acetate Project)
  2. The Newsletter
    When it started I had intended on the newsletter to be every month, that quickly proved to be unsustainable. Now I think of it more as a bucket that slowly fills with ideas to write about, once the bucket is full the newsletter gets written and sent out. I’ve also stopped posting it online except to patrons. That wasn’t intentional at first. I kept hearing bad things about substack and so I wanted to switch platforms, but I just didn’t have time to think about it. I’d still like to post it online somewhere but I also kind of enjoy the community of just sending out the physical version. I’m not making any promises with how this will work in 2026, but I haven’t lost my interest in writing and designing the newsletter.
  3. Goals For 2026
    Next October is the 10 year anniversary of Dollar Country. I have a short list of goals for October that include having every 45 pictured, adding more audio, and having every show page updated with links to the records. Tentatively I have a big show planned for the 10 year anniversary, but, once again, I won’t be making any promises until I know I can keep them.
  4. How To Support Dollar Country
    • The best way is to join the patreon
    • Send a one time donation via
      • paypal – host@dollarcountry.org
      • venmo – @dollarcountry
      • cashapp – $dollarcountry
    • Tell a friend! Let someone know about what I do!

LP New Arrivals
Below are the records I’ve listened to and logged since last time.

NTS Xmas
My bi-monthly episode on NTS radio was right before Christmas this year so why not do a Christmas show? You can hear it here: https://www.nts.live/shows/dollar-country/episodes/dollar-country-20th-december-2025

Thanks For Reading
If you need to contact me for anything, feel free to drop me a line in the comments or email me at host at dollarcountry dot org

Cheers
Franklin

Dec 2025 Updates: A Bummer Country Mix and Full Time Daycare

Posted on by Frank The Drifter

A Bummer Christmas Mix

Every December I think that I should make an Xmas mix and I usually don’t. I assume that if you want to hear holiday music then there are hundreds of other places to do that, so my addition would just be another link on your feed. Nonetheless people ask me to make them and I realize that it’s not about the amount of mixes, but that people respect my taste and want to hear specifically what Dollar Country can make out of it. This year I did something that I thought would stand out, all bummer Xmas songs.

Country music has a great tradition of sharing human emotions, often about things that people might not feel comfortable talking about with each other. For many, Christmas can be a difficult time of year. It reminds folks of who’s not there, who has been lost, and point out how happy other people seem, which can create difficult comparisons to your own situation. In the 60s and 70s a lot of families were affected by the war in Vietnam, and there is no lack of country songs about Christmas in Vietnam, Christmas without someone who’s in Vietnam, and the loss of a family member from the war.

My assumption was that people didn’t want to hear sad Xmas songs about loss, broken families, and death, but I had all of these singles about that stuff and I really wanted to share them. So the Bummer Xmas Mix was born. People loved it, give it a listen and tell me what you think.

*See tracklist below

Full Time Daycare

Years ago I studied abroad with someone who’s family had a child care business and at one point she told me that her mom would say “we don’t watch days, we watch children.” Whenever I say Daycare I always think about that because it’s true, it’s child care. Well we’re having our child watched now. It has opened up my week to be able to actually do DC again. I was hobbling along for the last two years but really I only had the time and energy to do whatever task was the highest priority on a given day, and sometimes not even that.

This affects you, dear listener, in a big way. I have had time in the last two weeks to put together the above Xmas mix, get a show ready to record, and do a bunch of other work that I had been neglecting. I’m hoping to be able to share more and more things with this new time I have. It has been on the front of my mind for the last two years that I want to be able to make more shows to share stuff, but the time I had to do it in wasn’t enough, and the product never felt completely up to snuff. Such is life with a newborn/baby/toddler. If I did manage to make an episode of DC it took up all of my available free time that week to put it together. Now I’m hoping to get back to somewhat regular releases, although I won’t set any schedule in stone.

That’s all the updates for today, I hope you have a holiday that’s slightly better than some of these folks:

Tommy Hestler – Daddy’s Drinking Up Our Christmas
Eleanor Wells – Christmas In Vietnam
Sullivan Family – Merry Christmas From Vietnam
Arlie Brady & The Cavaliers – Christmas Plea
Starla Parrish & The Parrish Bros – Is There A Santa Claus In Vietnam
Dallas McComb – Blind Christmas
Jack Cardwell – Christmas In Vietnam
Lena Hix – I Want My Daddy For Christmas
Bobby Myers – I Want A Mommy For Christmas
Brent Pace – I Won’t Be Home For Christmas
Bob Smith – Lonely At Christmas
Clyde Murphy – There’s A Christmas Tree In Heaven
Billy Egr – What Would Santa Claus Think
Mike Tuttle – Can Johnny Come Over For Christmas
Joyce Brown – Christmas In Viet Nam
Susan Wheeler – A Christmas Prayer
Royel Clark – Christmas Time Draws Near
Jim Eanes – It Won’t Seem Like Christmas
Commander Cody – Daddy’s Drinking Up Our Christmas

LPs on the Database

Posted on by Frank The Drifter

When Dollar Country started I only collected 45s, it seemed easier and cleaner. Two songs per disc is nice. No picture sleeves, a nice big hole in the middle that helps you hold onto a stack while you flip through. Life was easy back then.

People used to mention how I didn’t collect LPs, I had to turn down so many, but at that point they just didn’t interest me. There’s probably a reason I told people but really I just wasn’t interested in them for whatever reason. At some point that changed because I realized there were a lot of great things on big records and the genres represented were different. In country you’ll always have more than enough 45s. Gospel and Bluegrass are much more LP centered. If you’re gonna spread the word of god you may as well do 30 minutes instead of 6.

So, anyway, things are different now. I’m still picky about country LPs because it’s not really worth collecting stuff unless it’s rare, you can find non-rare stuff in other people’s collections. But with Country Gospel you just have so many options on LP that never made it to a single.

Another thing 45s have going for them is that they’re easy to input to a database, LPs on the other hand have significantly more information. Not just more songs, but more songwriting credits, more publishing credits, more, more more. Personally I also have a check in system for my 45s. Clean them, sleeve them, stamp them with a date, ID number, and source number from where I got it, and now it’s in the collection. LPs take longer to listen to, take longer to log, and take up more space. Now multiply that by a few thousand.

Now that you’ve heard plenty about my feelings towards the different sizes, maybe you can understand why I haven’t put any LPs on the database yet. But I wanted to put them on there, I was just waiting to get my head right. To have the best entry point into it. I made sure the database was ready (there’s a lot of inside baseball for database and info stuff happening here), and I had all the right fields set. Yesterday I put the first full listing up with audio and everything.

This record isn’t special outside of it being the first one. I mean it’s special in the way that any bit of music is special, but I didn’t choose it just for this. I’ve also made the streaming audio into a basic video with the album covers so it’s more like youtube. People seem to like that style of video and something about just having streaming audio felt lacking to me, and maybe to others it did too.

The end goal is to have the website feel institutional in that it’s focused on the information but also not have it feel clunky in the way that many institutional websites feel. Useful in the way that the internet used to feel 10+ years ago and without the constant ads, unneeded widgets, and website features that seem to take away from the actual usefulness of the website. Has anyone else noticed this? It drives me crazy when I want the hours of a business and I have to go to a website that’s mostly scrolling pictures and I can’t just find out when they’re open.

Here it is, I hope you like it. The Byrd Sisters are as good a group as any to start it off. Three Sisters In Jesus, although in real life they’re two daughters and a mother.

Visit the entry here, and keep checking for more.

https://dollarcountry.org/items/show/27946

My First Dig Trip As A Parent

Posted on by Frank The Drifter
The look of a man who had 6 hours of sleep and then drove 8 hours

Well I finally did it, I left the house. When my wife and I found out we were having a baby I made plans to not make plans for all of 2024. Normally I go out digging for a week once every couple months, but with a newborn I knew I wouldn’t be able to do that, so I didn’t. And then I felt like I couldn’t even after we got the hang of everything around the house. The problem was inside myself and didn’t have to do with my wife or kid, I just felt weird about leaving, I put a lot of pressure on myself. So last friday I dipped my toes in to see what happened.

I had been speaking with Steve Foehner about buying some records and since it’s within a half days drive it was the perfect test trip. The night before I got the feeling I always get, the same feeling I used to get as a kid on christmas eve, excitement in my belly about what’s coming. I woke up early and headed south to West Virginia, stopping at Waffled House for breakfast and a couple goodwills along the way.

It turned out to be a nice day, the weather hit the high 50s and the sky was clear. I ended up at Steve’s around midday and had a great time. He had some boxes picked for me to look through and I ended up buying all of them, as usual. He’s always looking to move things along and I’m always looking to get more, so it’s a good pairing. Visiting other collectors and dealers is one of my favorite things about collecting because we all have different things we like and something to say. Steve is a real music lover, he listens to every record he prices and can recall the song if you ask him about it. I can’t even recall some of the songs I’ve played on my show.

The real prize of the day was the most well known rare country record. Steve had a copy of Psycho by Eddie Noack he had mentioned to me online and I wasn’t really looking for it. I have some bootlegs and the price it usually goes for is enough for me to buy a few boxes of unknown country singles. However when he offered it for what I thought was a very reasonable price I decided to go for it, I wanted to have a copy someday anyway, so now I do.

Another exciting thing I got there was a box of instantaneous discs Steve had been holding onto for quite a while. Like many collectors out there, he had them because they were unique and thought someone should save them eventually, which is my exact plan with my acetate project coming up soon. So now I have another 75 or so discs for that.

After buying 5 boxes of records there I hit the road for Huntington. Steve told me about a record store there that would have more country gospel LPs than I could shake a stick at. Unfortunately when I got to town I found the store being cleared out by a number of people with trucks. The owner had sold the contents via auction and I just showed up on pick up day. So I went down the road to the Peddlers Mall, an antique mall I’d gone to in 2023.

It was the regular stalls of stuff until I got near the end and I found a few boxes of records on the floor. From there I ended up with a dozen or two country things from the area and a couple 45s. Nothing amazing, but for a dollar each they were well worth it. After being gone for over 12 hours I decided it was time to head back.

I hit a goodwill on the Ohio side of the river and found a really great bunch of bluegrass and gospel LPs for a dollar each before heading out of Huntington for Cleveland. Waffle House was my stop for dinner and at about 11pm I landed home with some cool records and a nice day under my belt.

It felt great to be out again although it’s different now because even though it was only one day I missed my family a lot, and I doubt it will get easier, but I also love digging so I’m going to have to do it.

Cheers
Franklin

The Elephant In The Room (or The Importance Of Private Archives)

Posted on by Frank The Drifter

The Elephant In The Room (or The Importance Of Private Archives)

Well I’m sure many of you have been paying attention to politics in America recently, it’s been fairly difficult to get away from even if you wanted to. Normally I try to have DC be a supportive place without talking specifically about political issues, but this issue I think is very important to what I do and what you’re here for. The next few years we really have no idea how safe our public archives are.

I know a few people who work for public institutions and the general feeling is that we just don’t know what’s going to happen, but the status quo will most likely not remain. If we were to guess based on the massive layoffs and other sweeping financial decisions happening then it’s possible that nearly all federal funding for arts, archives, and other services will be gone.

This means that private archives like Dollar Country are going to be very important. The problem with a private archive is that archiving takes a ton of work and a ton of time, which is why so many archives are based on public institutions. Archives are for the public good, it’s important to preserve and provide access to our history, which is why so many are funded by public institutions or through federal funds.

In 2024 Dollar Country applied for and was granted 501(3)(c) non-profit status by the government in hopes that it would be able to attain grant money from private and public places. Not having the option of federal arts and archive grants in the future is a bummer, but thankfully the DC archive isn’t at risk of losing all funding because it is funded by 100+ individuals who choose to donate.

I consider myself very lucky to have that support for DC, most people don’t have that, and that’s because I’ve spent a ton of time putting in work and grinding it out to get here. So I’m writing this to say a big giant thank you to the folks who have donated and those who continue to do so, and that I know that we may be seeing some wacky things in the next few years that might include job losses and other types of financial trouble. DC has no intention of stopping, and the records I have archived are not even half of what I envision for the future. DC has been amassing records for years knowing that they would go up in price and become harder to get, so there are thousands of records yet to be filed, digitized, and shared! Without funding I’m not sure what will happen to all of these records, but I’ll worry about that if we get there.

I hope those of you that already donate are able to continue to support Dollar Country in the coming years because you all understand that it’s important to be archiving this culture. That being said, I understand if things get tight and you lose income, too.

If anyone out there would like to donate you can join the patreon or donate one time via paypal, cashapp, or venmo (info at the bottom). If you want to donate bigger amounts or know anyone who might want to donate more then please pass along my information or let them know where to find me. All donations are now tax deductible being that DC is a non-profit organization.

As always, the best way to help Dollar Country (besides donating) is to tell someone else about Dollar Country.

Thanks,
Franklin

Donation Information:
Venmo: @dollarcountry
Cashapp: $dollarcountry

Paypal: you can send a donation to host@dollarcountry.org

or use this donation page: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=LULUWNS7G4FD6

Welcome to the DC Blog

Posted on by Frank The Drifter

Howdy Folks, Frank the Drifter here. Who starts a blog in 2025? I guess I do. I’ve spent the last 8 years hustling on instagram, facebook, and twitter to try and get people to listen to my show and sometimes it feels like those platforms make new rules to just to make it harder for people to see my posts. I’m happy that so many people heard about me from instagram, but the hustling stresses me out and a lot of folks dig what I’m doing no matter where it’s posted, so I thought it was time to slow down and do my own thing. I also didn’t like that you had to use any particular app to hear from me about what I’m doing, so here we are.

I plan on posting my “social media” style posts here to the blog as well as my newsletter so you can just check here for it. You can “follow” what I’m posting with RSS (if you don’t have an rss app they are easy to find and very simple) by putting this in your reader: https://blog.dollarcountry.org/feed/

In other words, this is where I’ll update you about anything related to DC. I know it will reach fewer people than instagram but I just don’t feel good about being on instagram anymore, as I like to own my own data.

Cheers
Franklin