Can a record collection have a soul and does it reveal the man who owned it?

In my time on earth as a music dealer, I've bought a number of record collections from those who’ve passed and whom I’ve know sometimes quite well.

Which isn't to say you've got to die for me to buy your records. I buy shamelessly from the living and the dead – a real bone collector like the medieval days. Remember that scene in Monty Python's “Life of Brian” where there was a not-quite-un-living person in the hereafter cart? But we're talking records here, not cadavers.

On a number of occasions in my decades buying and selling on High Street a particularly fine collection would come in--vinyl, compact disc, cassettes even – after I purchased I’d lament what a shame it was going to be to bust up such a sweetly assembled, beautifully woven, tasteful palette of music. Years if not decades in the purchasing and appreciating and absorption went into it. The man (I'm assuming) went for depth in sidemen like I have never seen: Art Tatum, whom I’ve never liked, showed up in at least a dozen titles.

Twenty years ago, the Columbus Free Press came back into print backed by donations from the pro-hemp/medical marijuana movement. Our underground anti-war publication originated on the Ohio State University campus as an as a reaction to the Kent State killings in October 1970, and after 25 years we went strictly online. Through donations from hemp festivals at Rainbow Farm, arranged by legendary local activist Cannabis Kenny Schweickart, the Free Press was resurrected in 1998.

One hundred forty-five years ago on Jan. 1, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, helping to transform this country from a union of states into a nation, from a country stained by slavery into one moving at great cost closer to “liberty and justice for all.”

On Jan. 1, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, the Republican president, issued the proclamation on his own authority as commander-in-chief “in time of actual armed rebellion” against the United States. The emancipation was grounded on his wartime powers, as a “fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion.”

The emancipation did not end slavery in the United States. It applied only to the states still in rebellion, exempting the slave owning border states such as Maryland, Missouri and Kentucky that still had slaves. Lincoln was desperate to keep the border states from joining the South. Some abolitionists ridiculed him for this. “Where he has no power, Mr. Lincoln will set the negroes free, where he retains power we will consider them as slaves,” declared the London Times.

Wednesday, January 3, 7-8:30pm, Columbus Metropolitan Library [Rm. 1-A], 96 S. Grant Ave.
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