Bussard himself remains willfully oblivious to most of these developments. The very term "folk music" rankles him: The music he worships was made by professionals‹backwoods or no‹and released on commercial records that were revolutionary in their day. He dismisses Dylan as "****," but then again he despises all forms of rock 'n' roll, which to him is no more than the cuss-word verb of its original meaning, a blues double-entendre for ****ing. He similarly rejects all country music made after '53, saying it was finished when Hank Williams croaked in the back of that Cadillac in West Virginia. As for jazz, well, that died out around '33, murdered in cold blood by the Depression and the arrival of the big bands. When told about the so-called swing revival, he nearly chokes on his cigar, incredulous that anyone would bother resurrecting the brassy dreck of the Dorseys and their ilk.
In his absolute negation of postwar American mass culture, Bussard is very much in line with his fellow 78 collectors. This rabid brotherhood is almost invariably made up of eccentrics who came of age in the '50s and '60s, rejecting everything around them. More than just hippie-haters, though, these men loathe the very idea of popular music, right back to the time of fox trots and Al Jolson, the Jazz Age clichés often mistaken for the soundtrack for their beloved era. They've got their own names for such million sellers as Vernon Dalhart: Vermin Dogshit and Vernon Stalefart. These are the enemies, the pop crooners on the crapola 78s that they've had to muck through to find the gems that never made it in mainstream America. Their Jazz Age is strictly the music of poor whites and blacks: wild-ass jazz and string-band hillbilly, surreal yodels and king-snake moans, lightning-bolt blues and whorehouse romps and orgasmic gospel.
