May 2011. The world’s greatest record store, if you can find it

It’s not bragging when I say I consume more music than anybody else I know. It’s instead more an admission of a handicap. Music is the thing that pieces the world together for me, and the older I get, the more fractured that world becomes. I once was a collector, moving thousands of albums with me every time I’d jump to a new apartment, a new city. That carefully curated library offered a commonality to my geographically and emotionally peripatetic twenties until one evening in an apartment in Redmond I looked over at all those albums. I hadn’t played a single one of them the whole time I lived there. They were properly traded in for tidy little pile of CDs and I was freed.

Now, my listening is almost entirely through a device of some sort; through massive listening libraries and subscription services and 3G wireless service, I can go from spot to spot, seamlessly tapped into my great ocean of music. But, I still retain a taste for the old stuff, scouring through albums for hours on end, which is what led me to the Little Big Store, a treasure trove of albums ensconced in a clapboard train depot in the tiny hamlet of Raymond, Mississippi. Or at least that’s where I thought I was going.

I dutifully followed the little glowing dot on Google Maps as it took me down one sun dappled hilly country road after another taking me further and further off the highway. Friends in Jackson raved about the Little Big Store but I wondered how they ever found the place. The dot deposited me before a weathered clapboard store that looked a little like what I’d seen on the web, but now the cell phone signal was gone and there was no way I could confirm it but the old fashioned way. I went inside to find a functioning general store; canned goods and fishing supplies shared a display next to a stack of deer antlers. An actual cowboy—like, with spurs—jangles in and picks an apple from a basket for his horse. This was no record store! Had I fallen asleep at the wheel? Was I dreaming in some ditch? Where was I?

I asked the cowboy’s companion, checking her iPhone from atop her own horse tied up outside that very question. She informed me I was in Learned, Mississippi. “It’s a nice place, but it’s not what you’re looking for,” she laughed and pointed me back to Highway 18 and to Raymond, on the outskirts of Jackson. “You can’t really trust a computer like this for out in the sticks.”

“Oh yeah, iPhone’ll take you way out there,” said Betty Strachan from behind the counter at the Little Big Store. “People get lost all the time on their iPhones.” I started to ponder the greater implications of that sentence, but I was quickly distracted, for the Little Big Store might just be the best record store on the planet.

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