Welcome to His Wax Museum : Music: Joe Bussard’s passion is records of the ‘20s and ‘30s--jazz, country, Cajun, early swing, gospel, the blues--and he loathes rock ‘n’ roll.

Once you descend the stairs with Joe Bussard, you’re trapped.

You’re a prisoner of the 1920s and ‘30s, detained not by steel bars but by Bussard’s raging exuberance and his stunning collection of 78-rpm records of traditional American music--country, Cajun, early swing, gospel, the blues.

“Joe has the greatest collection in the world--far away and hands down,” in the opinion of Richard Nevins, a fellow collector and president of Shanachie Records in Newton, N.J. Its Yazoo label specializes in early American rural music.

Bussard, 56, owns about 25,000 78-rpm records, not to mention 1,000 45s, 2,000 LPs, 30 to 40 Edison cylinders of music from 1898 to 1928, and the tie Hank Williams Sr. supposedly was wearing on the night he died.

A lifelong resident of Frederick, Bussard, silver-haired, unshaven, wearing jeans and house slippers, escorts a visitor into his basement and closes the door. He lights the first of an endless string of Dutch Masters cigars and says with the urgency of an exclamation point: “Now you’re going to hear what Duke sounded like when Duke was the Duke.”

He plops Duke Ellington’s “Misty Mornin’ ” on the turntable. Suddenly the clarinets, the trumpet, the upright bass of the 1928 recording blow out of Bussard’s incredible speaker and sweep back your hair.

“Too loud?” he says.

He doesn’t hear your reply. He shakes his legs, throws back his head, closes his eyes, opens his mouth, wags his tongue and he’s lost, gone, floating on the ceiling.

“You talk about feeling, man,” he says. “This is it! It doesn’t get any better than this. And it’s there, right in that old wax, buddy!”

Bussard has collected that old wax since he was a boy. He liked the hillbilly music he heard on the radio, especially Jimmie Rodgers--”the greatest singer that ever lived, no doubt about it,” he says.

But Jimmie Rodgers died at age 35 in 1933, and this was about 1948. The 12-year-old Joe Bussard couldn’t find Jimmie Rodgers’ records in stores.

So he boldly went door-to-door around Frederick, asking: “Got any Jimmie Rodgers records?”

He started driving at 16 and motored around Frederick County and eventually into West Virginia, Virginia, the Carolinas, knocking on doors, asking: “Got any old records?”

He worked at an electric company, an A&P;, his father’s farm-supply store, and he joined the National Guard. But every spare minute he chased down records.

“I’d come back with 400, 500, 600 records sometimes,” he says. “People would always tell me: ‘We just got a TV set. We don’t listen to that old Victrola anymore.’ ”

Bussard got the records cheap and sometimes free. He had no idea that they’d become valuable, or that he’d become the greatest chronicler of 1920s and ‘30s American music. He just liked the songs.

“He was the earliest of anybody collecting these records,” says Nevins, the record-company president. “He’s just done it with a fury, a vengeance all these years.

“This guy has been the No. 1 force, depository, library, archives in the world for traditional American music. The Library of Congress has nothing. There’s no collection in the Smithsonian. One or two colleges have great collections, but Joe blows those collections away.”

What’s more important, he says, is that Bussard has always shared the music with anyone willing to listen.

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When he was 15, Bussard built a radio station, WCRT, in his house--a control room, three turntables, an antenna in the yard. He even sold advertising.

“Every chance we got we were on the air,” he says. “Played nothing but hillbilly music. We covered Frederick like a blanket.”

After about eight years, he says, two FCC officials came in and shut him down--reluctantly. They had been listening for months and enjoying the music, he says.

From 1958 to 1970, he ran his own record company, Fonotone, recording old-time string music, bluegrass and the blues in a studio at his house. He also played guitar, mandolin and banjo in his own band; he was Jolly Joe in the Jolly Joe String Band.

Since 1959 he has taped a radio show for WELD in Fisher, W.Va. He also tapes shows for three other stations, two in North Carolina and one in Thurmont, Md.

He records old country music on cassette tapes in his basement and sends them off every week. He also transfers music from his 78s onto cassettes for sale around the world.

But don’t expect to find songs by B. B. King or Garth Brooks. As far as Bussard is concerned, jazz died in 1934 and gave way to big bands playing swing. The blues died shortly thereafter, and country faded out about 1955.

“Anything’s better than now,” he says, referring to modern music. “It’s like wind blowing through a hollow log.”

He especially loathes rock ‘n’ roll.

‘Rock has ruined 98% of all traditional music throughout the whole world,” he says. “It’s like a cancer. It’s eaten into every form of music.”

He says jazz and blues in the 1920s and ‘30s, and country into the 1950s, came from the heart. It was emotional, powerful, uninhibited.

Then it became formulated, commercialized, glitterized.

“You know what the best switch is on the radio today?” he says. “The off switch. I find it works perfectly every time.”

So he scurries like a crab from his turntables to his long shelves of 78s plucking records by Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers and Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra, songs with titles such as “Burnin’ the Iceberg” and “Get Low-Down Blues.”

“Can you believe this stuff?” he says “See what people are missing?

He won’t say how much his collection or any single record is worth. But he says he owns a couple that are the only known copies in the world.

He grabs a record and gushes: “You ready for something wild? You holding on to something? I’m not kidding you, boy!”

It’s “Ring Dem Bells” and “The Blues With a Feelin”’ and “Tank Town Bump” and “Hop Head.”

And he hasn’t even started playing country.

“I consider this like a museum for the preservation of American music,” he says. “The only way to keep this music alive is to get it out so people can hear it.”

And once you descend the stairs with Joe Bussard, you hear it. And you keep hearing it.

“Oh, I’ve got another one I want to play for you,” he says.

And you might as well throw away the key and throw back your head and shut your eyes tight, because you’re trapped, and you’re on the ceiling with Joe Bussard, and your ideas about music are likely to be changed forever.