The joy of digging through thrift store vinyl crates is the prospect of discovering new arrangements, new songs, even new bands or composers which had previously escaped my attention. The main draw is what’s on the disc, although the liner notes can be equally fascinating. Very often the brief bio on a sleeve prompts further research about the players and tracks therein—but a recent buy took me down a different kind of rabbit hole, thanks to some handwritten notes on the back.
The record was The Ellington Era 1927-1940: Volume One, Part Two, which I bagged at a hospice shop in a little village not far from Oxford. I don’t normally go for the multi-volume discs, as I don’t see much point in owning one out of umpteen, but I was learning “Drop Me Off In Harlem” at the time and its inclusion prompted me to pick this one up. Perusing the sleeve as I listened that night, I spotted some pencil scribblings by a previous owner.
While many collectors will asterisk favorite tracks or mark those too damaged to play, this person had gone through [English jazz writer] Stanley Dance’s liner notes with a fine-toothed comb and amended them as he saw fit. Where Dance noted that “HARLEM SPEAKS was written in London,” they had inserted, “and recorded.” Where Dance listed Fred Guy as playing “guitar,” this vinyl vandal had crossed out the instrument and written “banjo” in i
