I unbolted it in my workshop. The second I saw what had been hidden inside that machine all those years, my hands started shaking, because it was records. Not paper records. Discs.
Sixty-one acetates, ten and twelve inch, standing on edge in felt slots somebody had cut and glued in by hand.
Acetate is a lacquer disc cut on a home recorder. You could buy the machines through the mail in the thirties and forties. One pass, one copy, and the lacquer goes soft and sheds if you play it much, which is why almost nothing cut that way survives.
These survived because they spent seventy years bolted inside a nickelodeon in a dark building at a steady temperature with nobody able to get at them.
The man who ran that hall was named Ozeme Guillory. He cut those between 1938 and 1952, on Saturday nights, in his own room off the dance floor, and every sleeve has a name and a date on it in grease pencil.
Fiddle players. Accordion players. Two brothers from Mamou. A woman named Odile Sonnier who sings on four of them and who does not appear in any discography, any label, any archive anywhere in this country, and I have had people look.
On the sleeve of the top disc, in that same grease pencil:
These are ours. The men from the record companies came through in 39 and again in 47 and they did not want what we play, so I am keeping it myself. Whoever finds these, they are not mine and they were never mine. Find the families.
I did not try to play a single one of them.
They went to the folklife center at the university in Lafayette in a padded case on the seat beside me. They have the machines to read a lacquer disc without touching it with a needle, and it took them fourteen months.
Fifty-eight of the sixty-one came back. The three that did not were water damaged at the edge.
Odile Sonnier died in 1991 in Ville Platte. Her grandson is sixty-four and drives a fuel truck, and he had heard his whole life that his grandmother could sing and had never once heard her do it.
They played it for him in a room at the university last March with about thirty people in it. His daughter had to hold him up.
The whole collection is public now. Free, streaming, anybody can hear it, and the university put Guillory’s name and the hall’s name on it and put those sleeve photographs up beside every track.
Eleven of those musicians have living descendants who have come in and listened.
The nickelodeon is restored. It works. It sits in my front room and it plays exactly what it played in 1946, and I have not put those discs back in it and I never will, because the whole point of that box was that they were not for playing yet.
Two record companies came through that country and decided nobody wanted to hear it. A man with a mail-order recorder and a steel box disagreed with them for seventy years, and he turned out to be right, and he never got to know it.