Then he summarized the Army career of the Van Dykes’ falsetto lead vocalist, Rondalis Tandy, and how the group was formed, who their influences were, the different record labels they were on, their best songs, and how and when they broke up. Normally three guys sound like whale s- sinking to the bottom of the ocean.” “They sound like four guys, but there’s only three of them. “Oh, that’s good you know them!” he said. “I know more about soul and funk.” I told him I was looking for a vinyl copy of “No Man is an Island” by the Van Dykes, a fairly obscure Texas soul group from the 1960s. Then he asked, “What do you know about my type of music, the group stuff?” I asked him what he thought accounted for the change. “I thought maybe that’s the problem.”īut in the last few days, he said, the empty feeling had lifted, his energy had returned, and he was feeling like himself again. “I couldn’t see the point of any of it-the music, my life, my record collection, the store-and I had no energy.” He’s 77 years old. “I’m a Christian, okay, and I was praying, but nothing was happening,” he said. He was describing a recent period of psychological malaise. Shively made some small talk and then launched into a monologue, talking fast with an abrasive Philly accent (actually a Delaware County, Pennsylvania, accent, I found out later). By selling records, he says, “I make people happy. Shively presides over the store six days a week, from noon to 6, and regards his business as a calling. This article is a selection from the July/August issue of Smithsonian magazine Buy Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 “Val and his dwindling band of fanatics call them ‘group harmony records,’ or ‘group records,’” he explained. Two days later, Levinson gave me Shively’s cellphone number and a word of advice.ĭon’t use the term “doo-wop,” he said. “He’ll probably test you first, or make you run some kind of gauntlet, but at this stage of his life, he might appreciate the validation.” I asked Levinson about the possibility of interviewing Shively and writing about him. He’s the authoritative collector of doo-wop records on the planet and one of the greatest record collectors of all time, even though his genre is narrow.” He’s a white guy who went nuts for Black music when he was young and never recovered. Levinson continued, “He’s a born-again Christian who curses like a mobster. But if they say something wrong, or he doesn’t like their attitude, he explodes in an unbelievable rage and throws them out of the store.” It’s likely the biggest record store in the world and collectors fly in from the U.K., Germany, Japan and wherever else, in order to buy from Val. “The building is listing like the Tower of Pisa because he’s got five million records in there. “He has a store called R&B Records in this sketchy neighborhood out past West Philly,” Levinson told me. He’s a Grammy-winning music producer, composer, DJ and rare vinyl collector who has been buying records from Shively for 40 years. I first heard about Val Shively -a legendary figure among serious record collectors-from a friend of mine in Philadelphia named Aaron Levinson.
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