About a month ago I was bored and so I did what I have been doing these last twelve years or so whenever boredom strikes. I did a little random web surfing. I found a web site where some guy had decided to share his extensive collection of 78 records. He was about halfway through the massive task of converting what he had to mp3 and making them available for free download. He hadn't done anything to clean up the audio, just transferred each song as was to the new medium. A lot of the stuff there didn't really interest me, but as I went through what he had I found some wonderful stuff, mostly blues and R&B from the fifties along with a few earlier things and even a few examples of rare 78 pressings from the 60's. I downloaded all I could, planning to go back in a few days and contact the brilliant person doing all this, and to get more musical swag.

Well, the days turned into weeks, and I finally got back to the site the other day only to find that the downloads were gone. It seems that when you have a server account with 'limitless' bandwidth, there is a limit to what 'limitless' actually means. So many people were downloading his entire collection at once that his server demanded he take them all down. The guy was looking at alternatives, but in the meantime, I thought I would pay forward his amazing gesture just a little by making a mixtape of some of the gems I downloaded. Some of this stuff is available on pristine CDs, but I am positive a fair bit isn't, so I will sendspace this mix for anyone who wants to hear it, scratches and all.