By AMANDA PETRUSICH

John Heneghan tugged a large shellac disc from its brown paper sleeve, placed it on a turntable and gently nudged a needle into place. Behind him, in the corner of his East Village apartment in New York, sat 16 wooden crates, each filled with meticulously cataloged 78-r.p.m. records. The coarse, crackling voice of the blues singer Charley Patton, performing “High Water Everywhere Part 1,” his startling account of the 1927 Mississippi River flood, rose from the speakers, raw and unruly. The record is worth about $8,000.

Mr. Heneghan, 41, is part of a small but fervent community of record collectors who for decades have hunted, compulsively and competitively, for 78s: the extraordinarily fragile 25-centimeter discs, introduced near the turn of the 20th century and made predominantly of shellac, that contain one two- to three-minute performance per side. At a time when music fans expect songs to be delivered instantaneously online, scouring the globe for a rare record - and paying thousands of dollars for it - might seem ludicrous.

But according to some, the rare-record business is booming, despite the recession and the devaluation of music as a physical product. “Prices have been rising at a phenomenal rate, as people take money out of the stock market and out of different real estate investments and look for a place to put it,” said John Tef teller, a collector who makes his living dealing in rare records.

By any standard 78s are unwieldy, impractical and unstable. By the mid- 1950s they had been mostly replaced by 33⅓r.p.m. long-playing albums and 45r.p.m. singles.

“I’m not proud of the fact that I have to chase these records down like a maniac,” said Mr. Heneghan, who works as a video technician.

Although most collectors subspecialize by genre, it’s early American rural blues - loose acoustic laments, recorded before 1935 and performed by artists who were born in or near the Mississippi Delta - that inspires the highest prices and the most fevered pursuits.

“There are some people who would kill their own mother for the only copy of a Son House record,” Mr. Heneghan said. “And they sure as hell would kill your mother, and you.”


Obsession and a big payoff motivate collectors of old, fragile 78-r.p.m. records by Mississippi Delta blues musicians.