Antique Music Project: The Don Hahn Collection vol. 1

In 1999, I moved to Mendocino County as a Y2K escapist. I expected or hoped that Microsoft computers would all melt down on January 1, 2000 and wanted to prepare for the worst. Which for me meant being out of the city. I had also become priced out of living in the Bay Area, where rentals costs were rising two- and threefold. My office in Berkeley went from $500/month to $1500/month overnight. So I went north and began an attempt to homestead in the Mendocino woods. Instead, I found the small towns of Boonville and Philo, and a rural public radio station (KZYX in Philo). I rented an apartment on a sheep farm and got invited to work at the radio station. I did a radio show there for five years, focusing on antique and avant-garde music, a strange mix but often quite compelling. Very early audio recordings contrast with modern sound art in a way that makes both seem fresh. Antique recordings are avant-garde by virtue of their strangeness. Old things are often more interesting than new, or rather they are in fact new or newer because they had been overlooked, forgotten or unnoticed.

I started playing antique music on the air because I had a growing collection of recordings since hearing The Happiness Boys (Ernest Hare and Billy Jones) records on WMFO one day as I drove by Boston and up to Maine. Over the Jalopy Hour shoot in New Orleans, the first half of 1998, I added many antique recordings to me collection on CD, LP re-issue and in their original formats. I put together a transcription turntable to transfer 78rpm discs over to digital forms I could easily play on radio.

In Boonville, the real estate salesman Don Hahn worked out of an old gas station there. I noticed he had a stack of 78s sitting in there collecting weather and asked him about them. I told him I'd transfer them over to tape for him if I could also have a copy and he agreed. The stack of records, an odd assortment of various old time records, wound up being about 180 songs, filling six 90-minute cassettes. The music is not particularly special, although a few of the tracks are: there's a great Happy Birthday record and several memorable pieces amidst some otherwise common household music. She Had to Go and Lose It At The Astor and MA! He's Making Eyes at Me are very fun sides of the same disc. There are several tracks with racial slur stereotypes of the time, still shocking to hear how some people could demean others so bluntly. All of the music is interesting in its raw unfiltered and EQ'd state, a rough sonic picture of the past. I recorded the tracks in stereo and left them that way, but these recordings will be cleaned up at some point.

So here anyway, is the first of my collection of antique music, for the study and enjoyment and general use of all.

Music of Sound: Don Hahn Collection