Treasure Trove of Twang

The tiny frame house is cluttered from floor to ceiling with a lifetime’s leavings. Leon Kagarise buried treasure beneath his mounds of junk, guarding it with a collector’s obsessive ardor. After 40 years, he finally has let the world in on his secret, an unheard, unseen trove of American cultural history.

“I never throw anything out, so I guess that makes me a pack rat,” said the 64-year-old Kagarise, who must perform spelunking maneuvers just to reach the bathroom. “People been pooh-poohing me all my life about being a hoarder, but something’s finally come of it.”

In a living room darkened by teetering towers of records, mounds of clothes and a tangle of wires, Kagarise has assembled a rickety shrine to his beloved country and bluegrass music. From the late 1950s through the mid-1960s, the electronics whiz privately recorded and photographed country stars at the top of their game. He did not stop until he had amassed 5,000 hours of music and nearly 1,000 color slides. Then he stowed it all away.

Now, as word of his cache makes its way from collectors to record companies to archivists, the suburban Baltimore retiree has become an unlikely legend. Record executives have made offers. The Library of Congress has come courting. What makes Kagarise’s stockpile such an intoxicating prize, they all say, is more than its vast breadth and its near-pristine sound quality. It provides a front-row seat on a vanished world, an era when country artists such as Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline and George Jones mingled up close with their fans like kin gathered at a mountain family reunion.

“This is a phenomenal documentation of a period that was lost to time,” said Eddie Stubbs, a Nashville disc jockey and a staff announcer for the Grand Ole Opry.

The celebration of Kagarise’s bounty comes as sweet revenge for a man who took years of grief for his single-minded devotion. He is a man out of time, a rec room hobbyist who never outgrew his obsession, a basement tinkerer whose electronics sorcery was so masterful he figured out a method of recording pristine sound off ‘50s-vintage television sets--far surpassing the dismal, tinny kinescopes of that era.

Yet it was not until others began hearing his long-hidden tapes that even Kagarise himself understood the magnitude of his home-grown accomplishments.

“I had no idea of what I had,” he admitted. “I just packed it away and forgot about it.”

Anything abandoned in the collector’s jungle that has grown out of control in Kagarise’s one-story house is something soon forgotten. What still can be seen--a dropped wrench, antique radios, stuffed animals, tossed shoes, stacks of warping records, discarded jars of peanuts--obscures older drift like layers of buried prehistoric shale.

“I haven’t been in some rooms in months,” he said sheepishly.

Kagarise spends most of his time near the front door, in a perch he has carved out near a brace of old reel-to-reel tape recorders and audio equipment. This is where he sits for hours, a sedentary retiree sunk deep in an armchair, punching buttons and flipping knobs, copying spools of fragile old tape onto modern-day compact discs.

He is making the discs for Joe Lee, a suburban Washington record dealer and roots music champion who first brought word of the Kagarise treasure to the outside world. Lee, the son of a former Maryland governor, went to Kagarise’s house two years ago after the collector had told friends that he planned to sell some of his 140,000 records.

As Lee “crab-walked” through the narrow trails dug out of the mounds of Kagarise’s private effects, he noticed a stack of tape boxes. One was marked “Johnny Cash, Maryland, 1962.” A Cash fan, Lee asked to hear it.

“It comes blasting out of the speaker and I just swooned,” Lee recalled. “It sounded like it was recorded yesterday, clear as a bell. I didn’t believe it; it was too good to be real. But Leon’s the real McCoy.”

The two men agreed to work together. Lee is now the shy Kagarise’s voice to strangers, overseeing the massive transfer of old tapes to disc and collating a vast archive of color slides.

They were mostly made at country music parks, makeshift institutions that long have faded from the American scene. From the 1940s through the 1960s, in rural parks such as New River Ranch in Rising Sun, Md., and Sunset Park in West Grove, Pa., homesick Southern emigres gathered by the thousands every weekend for daylong music festivals. It was a different era, a time when even the most finicky celebrities thought nothing of wandering out into the audience to chat--or allowing fans such as Kagarise to rig up tape recorders right in front of the stage.

Kagarise taped off television too, recording hundreds of hours of country variety shows. He plunged into the guts of old television sets, hooking up directly to their cathode followers. The ploy enabled him to obtain pristine sound directly from the airwaves--instead of muffled by the sets’ speakers. “It’s about as good as if you were sitting in the studio,” he said.

Country music has been Kagarise’s joy since childhood. He picked it up from live bands on radio stations that faded in and out of the airwaves from hotbeds such as Nashville, Richmond, Va., and Wheeling, W.Va. The son of a Pennsylvania farmer who took up electronics work when he moved his family to Baltimore, Kagarise shared his father’s mechanical skills--learning the tricks of the trade. It was his father’s diagrams of television set innards that allowed Kagarise to tape the variety shows he adored.

As he shuttled between electronics jobs in Baltimore that took him from hospital maintenance man to cable company staffer, Kagarise’s music addiction outlasted his wife’s tolerance and the bafflement of his son and daughter.

Now divorced, Kagarise lives alone in his temple of disarray. He sees his family now at Sunday services at the Mennonite church they all attend. But four decades ago, Sunday afternoons were reserved for Kagarise’s fixation. He dragged the whole family along to the outdoor music fairs he attended as religiously as morning prayer.

At the parks, Kagarise hunched over his recorder, hemmed in among extended families of Virginians and Tennesseans who roosted all day on wooden benches. Local farmers often caught an early show, rushed home to work in the fields and returned in muddy overalls to watch the evening encores.

Volatile rising stars such as George Jones and Johnny Cash sang just inches from his perch. Country troubadours such as Ernest Tubb and Webb Pierce, acoustic legends such as Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs and the Stanley Brothers all obliged Kagarise’s taping fever.

The long days had their hazards. The Stanleys had to perform through dive-bombing bees. Cash showed up drunk at one show and was led offstage until he sobered up. Jones burst into a rage in front of his audience when he learned that there were no available telephones for miles. Often, the acerbic Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass music, ordered Kagarise to turn off his machine. “Mean as a bedbug,” Kagarise said, still complaining.

Alone among the home tapers, Kagarise added a sound man’s expertise to his fervor. He used a 50-pound portable Ampex recorder, the best commercially available model, and a full-direction microphone.

Once his machine was running, Kagarise would wander away to meet the stars he idolized. He never worried about theft. “These were honorable country people,” he said.

Veteran country performers such as the Stoneman Family still remember Kagarise as the man with a shirt pocket protector full of pencils and screwdrivers. He was the quietly smitten Northerner who always hung back behind the more aggressive autograph hounds. He blushed when they kidded him.

“Honey, I can remember that man’s eyes and his face,” said Roni Stoneman, a bluegrass banjo ace who was a regular on the country variety show “Hee Haw” for nearly two decades. “He was like a little child at Christmas. You never saw such awe in a man. He loved his music.”

Kagarise was driven by his knowledge and dedication. But he also had perfect timing.

The late ‘50s and early ‘60s were country music’s “golden years,” Stubbs said. It was a moment when scores of artists came into their prime, when rockabilly swelled into rock ‘n’ roll and when a raw, unfiltered sound that had been a regional novelty for decades finally transformed into a national popular music. But despite thousands of studio recordings during those years, live country recordings were rare.

Kagarise’s tapes and photos provide a window into that period, a vantage point so close, Lee said, “that you can hear these guys sweat and smell their after-shave.”

By the mid-1960s, the spontaneity and access Kagarise thrived on began to wither. Record executives in Nashville had started experimenting with their own live recordings. Freewheeling hobbyists such as Kagarise were seen as potential rivals.

By 1967, Kagarise was returning empty-handed from the music parks. Band managers had ordered him to turn his machine off. Ernest “Pops” Stoneman, the autoharp-playing patriarch of the Stoneman Family, insisted that Kagarise could continue taping his family’s sets. But with no one else to record, Kagarise stopped going to the parks. The music had changed too, he reckoned: more amplified, too slick. “The big money got in the way,” he said.

So he retreated to the dim terrain of his living room, listening to the past. In time, even the warmth of nostalgia wore off and Kagarise shoved his beloved tapes deep into the piles and turned to new enthusiasms: old 78 recordings, blues, early jazz.

The tapes lay buried until Lee’s prodding in 1999 spurred the retired electrician to dig his prize out. Slowly, snippets of his tapes have made their way into the world, electrifying country music industry people in Nashville, archivists in Washington, bluegrass lovers scattered across Appalachia.

“You hear the bantering on stage, the corny jokes. These are entire sets, warts and all,” said Charles Wolfe, a country music historian and folklore professor at Middle Tennessee State University. When he heard Kagarise’s tapes, “I was floored.”

So was Library of Congress cultural historian David Taylor, who asked Kagarise to donate his collection. After hearing the growing buzz, Smithsonian cultural division curator Charlie McGovern said last week that he too is eager to hear the Kagarise trove.

There have been contacts from record firms, said Lee--among them Columbia, Rounder, Bloodshot and the Country Music Foundation. Kagarise likes the idea of “making some money.”

He yearns more, he said, for a widening audience for the music he loves. The recent popularity of the top-selling soundtrack for the film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” gives him hope, Kagarise said.

But the complicated minefield of music publishing rights, and the traditionally limited audience for unvarnished country music, makes it doubtful that the entire 5,000 hours could be released commercially. Artists, estates and music publishers all have to give their blessing and be paid. There is no way to place a value on the collection.

More likely, a few choice items from Kagarise’s vast archives will surface--released by one of the firms that already have come calling, Lee said. “Someone will do it, but we’ve got to be realistic about what comes out.”

Much of what remains could end up joining scores of other privately donated collections in the National Archives. But for the moment, the glory of Kagarise’s collection plays only in his dimmed living room.

Ethereal voices and mountain twang well up as he relives concerts he has not heard since he was in his 20s. The shows are so far in the past now, so distant, that Kagarise has a hard time remembering what he was doing while the fiddles sawed and the steel guitars whined.

On tape, it was 1962 again, and a country fiddler named Scotty Stoneman was using his instrument to impersonate, in short order, a baying hound, truck gears, a hot rod and a keening police siren. “I listen to this stuff now and it hits you square in the face it’s so good,” Kagarise said.

Stoneman is long gone now, just a faded name from country music’s past. Behind closed drapes in Kagarise’s cluttered living room, he plays on as if the show never ended.

To see more of Kagarise’s photos, go to https://www.latimes.com/leon.