Collins' voice, low in the mix in classic rock & roll style-you can barely make out the words-is rough-edged but not grotesque, unwhite but not undignified. For someone who grew up with Elvis and Mick and\ Gregg Allman, it's difficult to hear the Coon in it; it just sounds natural, unaffected. It's the 'white' voices of the time, all those ee-nun-see-yating parlor singers, that sound weird. Thanks to Collins-and Al Jolson and Bert Williams and Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby-everyone sings like Coons now.

Zoom in for a moment on the way Collins tosses that odious "nigger" into the chorus. It's the most intelligible word on the record, because he steps outside of the song to just say it, plainly and clearly. No "Massa Linkum" stuff here. You can hear contempt in his voice, white to black, but there's also a surprising dignity there. He breaks song, but not character, and his Coon is no shuffling, mush-mouthed plantation darky-he's a tough son of a bitch.

But it's what the other guy on this record is doing that really makes it rock & roll. Sylvester Louis Ossman-"Plunks" to his cronies-was one of those thick-necked types who make a starched collar look like a bondage device. Born in 1868 in grimy Hudson, New York, he grew up in respectable bourgeois surroundings; he had a work ethic. He picked up the banjo at twelve and claimed to have practiced ten hours a day for the first three years and four hours a day forever after that. He could and did play anything, from Wagner on down; it was the on down, however, that spread the butter on his toast. Ragtime (like 'rock', the word covers a whole spectrum of pop, from parent-friendly to call-out-the-National-Guard) was what he did best, and by the turn of the century he was cutting bales of the stuff, with all kinds of accompaniments from studio orchestras to piano players to nobody at all.

Old Plunks' skill and determination paid off: he was a star. His records sold, his gigs were packed, he played for Roosevelts and royalty. He became respectable, an institution. He was given to windy pronouncements like "You have to pick hard and keep the same volume of tone [v. of t.?] all throughout a piece, combined with absolute accuracy; [this makes] a superb foundation on which to put light and shade for concert work" and "I am . . . addicted to grace notes and appogiatura" (Glossary of the Vulgar Tongue: appogiatura = skipping up to a dissonant-to European ears, anyway-note and then falling quickly back to a 'correct' one; slipping in a fast blue note). If his words mark him out as a bit of a stiff, his playing tips the needle back the other way: it's fast, it's loose, it's even swinging (especially when compared to that of his younger competitor Fred Van Eps or '20s banjo king Harry Reser). "St. Louis Tickle", from 1906, is probably the funkiest record of the ragtime era. And as for that "absolute accuracy"-bullshit.

Of all the miles of groove Ossman cut, Edison 7317 may be the finest stretch. His banjo is unleashed, rampaging-the way he pitches chords in on the whomps and stitches them together with ripples and tickles is the quintessence of hot. Like all real rock & roll, it's got drive. More important, it's got what I like to call 'swerve'-that something arbitrary, irrational, spontaneous, excessive, unexplainable that's at the heart of all hot music. Here Ossman's trying to cram too many notes into one of his fills, there he's zipping up and down the neck in a little chromatic parabola, everywhere he's burning with a breathless, nervous energy that's rare in any era, and precious wherever you find it.

The only place I've been able to find "All Coons" is on a cassette-Two Minute Cylinders Vol. 1ósold by P&L Antiques, in California: www.pandlantiques.com/audiocassettes.html