Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 16, 1993 TAG: 9306160081
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SETH WILLIAMSON SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
\ WHEN Dave Freeman was a classics scholar at Columbia University in the '50s, odds are he wouldn't have believed any crystal ball that told him the truth about his future.
After all, the Carter Family and claw hammer banjo are a far cry from Sophoclean choruses and Homer's lyre.
Nevertheless, 35 years after parsing Virgil and Aristophanes, Freeman runs what is probably the world's largest distributor of bluegrass and old-time music from both Roanoke and the town of Floyd. And he's recognized by scholars and folklorists as a major figure on the American-roots music scene.
Each day The Record Depot in Roanoke and County Sales in Floyd ship hundreds of CDs, tapes, videos and books to lovers of southern Appalachian folk music in Japan, Australia, France, former Soviet-bloc countries and most everywhere else.
A large chunk of those people are fans of hard-core bluegrass and old-time mountain music - the rest buy everything from Cajun music to the blues. And Freeman's County Records and Rebel labels are major forces in the world of bluegrass and old-time music.
"I was always one just to do my own thing and not worry about what other people thought," recalled Freeman, who got his first glimpse of a new musical world driving south down old U.S. 11 on family vacation trips.
In Virginia he heard the shivery wail of bluegrass singers; in Alabama and Mississippi it was the blues.
Back home he discovered he even could find country music on the airwaves in the Big Apple - if he looked hard enough. WAAT in New Jersey played hillbilly music, and he stayed up late to catch country deejay Lee Moore on WWVA from West Virginia.
As to how a New York City boy with classical-music-loving parents got hooked on the Louvin Brothers and Bill Monroe, go figure.
"Nobody quite understood how it happened, but they were patient," Freeman remembered, shaking his head. "I got a banjo when I was 14 and a mandolin when I was 16. The music was just real to me, it communicated to me. It was like a loaf of homemade bread compared to store-bought."
Freeman developed into such a fanatical collector of obscure country-music 78s that he was running mail auctions while still in his teens. And as soon as he got his driver's license, he staged safaris to Baltimore and points south in search of old vinyl. He still remembers with satisfaction the day he bagged a rare Mississippi Possum Hunters disc for a quarter.
The thought of teaching Latin and Greek pailed after graduation from Columbia in 1962. So Freeman went to work for the Railway Mail Service and made extra money by shipping country music records to fans in England.
And after witnessing the success of the Origin Jazz Classics label in reissuing pre-war blues tracks, he decided to try the same thing with old-time Appalachian music. County Records was born when "Mountain Fiddle Classics" hit the market in early 1964.
Bluegrass writer and broadcaster Bill Vernon of Franklin County says it's hard to overestimate the importance of County Records to mid-century American traditional music.
"When Dave started the County label, bluegrass music had become extremely fragmented," said Vernon. "The major labels were not allowing their name bands to record real bluegrass, the folk boom had about run its course; and except for the Rebel label, which Dave would later buy, there was little distribution," said Vernon.
"By coming to the Southern mountains and seeking out the old-time musicians whose music was being heard almost nowhere except at area fiddlers' conventions, Dave played a pivotal role in preserving old-time music for new generations of musicians and fans."
Folklorist Neil Rosenberg of the Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland, said, "He's the person that people turn to when they want informed input. He was consulted by UNC-Chapel Hill for the 1989 Conference on the Collecting and Collections of Southern Traditional Music."
According to Pete Kuykendall, editor of Bluegrass Unlimited magazine, Freeman's "interest in and dedication to the music, especially bluegrass and old-time, rank him among the top five people" in the world of traditional music. "Other roots-music distributors have taken their lead from him - he pretty much wrote the book on how to do it."
For someone who elicits such praise from colleagues, Freeman is self-effacing to the point of invisibility. During the five years after he moved to Floyd County in 1974, he was regarded as somebody who kept to himself. Now living in Roanoke, his sole flamboyant gesture is the license plate - OLD 78S - on his battered pickup.
His two business locations are as hunkered down and discreet as their owner. The Record Depot, where six employees mail CDs and tapes to retail outlets, occupies an unmarked building in the Blue Ridge Industrial Park off Aerial Way in Roanoke. And it hasn't been long since County Records in Floyd finally acquired a modest sign proclaiming its existence at the end of Talley's Alley. County Records' five employees concentrate on filling retail mail orders.
Both spots are shrines for foreign bluegrass lovers, who regularly seek them out, especially Japanese visitors. This writer once guided a Welsh couple who came to Virginia on a music trip to Freeman's then-unmarked Floyd location. Though he doesn't advertise the fact, both spots can accommodate a limited amount of retail trade from people who are persistent enough to find them.
Almost as much of an icon as the warehouses is Freeman's bimonthly County Newsletter, which has carried its editor's often impassioned opinions into the world since the '60s. Pete Kuykendall of Bluegrass Unlimited credits Freeman with the first genuine bluegrass record reviews.
"Before Dave there were basically only fan magazines, and everything that got mentioned was the greatest thing since sliced bread," said Kuykendall. Freeman, says Kuykendall, was unafraid to speak bluntly, even if it meant he would sell fewer copies of a given release.
Freeman famously slammed the final LP from Flatt & Scruggs, and in 1977 refused to review the album "When the Storm Is Over" by the Newgrass Revival, then regarded by some as dangerous bluegrass radicals. These days he sells - and occasionally even has a kind word for - such progressive bands as the Horse Flies and David Grisman. "I've mellowed some, I guess," conceded Freeman, who says he still prefers the hard-core, raw-edged original sound.
But even in his purist days, Freeman had no idea that his favorite music would one day reach the audience it does now. "I remember in one issue of the newsletter back in the '60s I referred to `the dying days of bluegrass.' I'd never have believed there'd be so many bands playing hard-core bluegrass today."
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by CNB