Bob Pinson, 1934-2003
Consummate collector and discographer built the unparalleled record collection of the Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum
Thanks to the Internet—which he never consulted because he didn’t like to use computers—word of Bob Pinson’s death on Sept. 4 spread swiftly among hard-core country music lovers last week. The modest and friendly longtime senior researcher at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum had died in Nashville at age 69 after a lengthy battle with leukemia, and many felt indebted to this behind-the-scenes expert.
A consummate country record collector and an enthusiastic booster of traditional country music, Pinson had generously encouraged and assisted innumerable authors of music books and compilers of recording anthologies for more than 30 years—in addition to compiling several outstanding anthologies himself. He was also a key figure in developing country music discography—the documentation of records and recording sessions—into a discipline of academic rigor.
Pinson began collecting records as a boy in Texas in the mid-1940s. The hobby became a career by the time he was in his 30s living in California. How good a collector was he? He could tell how worn a record was just by feeling its grooves and could accurately gauge its market value on sight. For six years, he supported himself and his wife on proceeds from record auctions alone. After selling his collection of 15,000 prize discs to the Hall of Fame, he joined the museum in 1973 to manage and build the collection. By the time of his retirement in 2001, he had expanded the unparalleled collection to 200,000 recordings without an acquisitions budget, enlarging it through donations, trades and canny sales of duplicates.
Along the way, Pinson started the library reference service at the Hall of Fame. Though others eventually took over reference duties, Pinson remained the man to see about rare country music records and obscure historical facts. Even the experts on country music regularly relied on Pinson and acknowledged his often crucial help in their works.
Fortunately, a great deal of Pinson’s knowledge is preserved in Country Music Records: A Discography, a massive book documenting the details of every pre-World War II country recording session, to be published by Oxford University Press early next year. English music writer Tony Russell is the bylined author; but, as Russell himself notes in the book’s introduction, the work is nearly a collaboration and would not exist without Pinson, who helped Russell formulate and authenticate nearly every single entry—and yet asked for no more credit than as provider of “editorial research.”
Historian Charles Wolfe has already hailed the book as “a monumental work of American music scholarship.” In many ways, so was Bob Pinson’s diligent, unselfish life.
—Paul Kingsbury
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