Growing up in the explosive midst of Birmingham’s Civil Rights Movement years, Patrick Cather—a young white kid from the suburb of Homewood—was an unlikely champion for local Black music and musicians. In his early teens, however, Cather emerged as a prolific blues and jazz researcher and writer, a record producer, a music magazine publisher, and a devoted chronicler of Alabama’s rich African American musical legacies.

Born in 1947, Cather was about twelve years old when he fell into record collecting. He witnessed a neighbor tossing heavy stacks of old 78s into the curbside trash and, curious, hauled them all home, loaded them onto the family record player, and discovered—in the music of Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and others—an unexpected and thrilling world of classic blues and jazz. The revelation marked him for life. Soon he was placing want ads in local Black newspapers, seeking 78s, and he spent his weekends searching Salvation Army stores for old records. His father, encouraging Cather’s developing interest, introduced him to John T. “Fess” Whatley, Birmingham’s celebrated “Maker of Musicians,” the longtime local bandleader and Parker High School teacher whose classroom had launched countless professional careers in jazz. Now in his seventies, Whatley took Cather under his wing, taking him for rides in one of his famous Cadillacs and unspooling vivid first-hand accounts of the city’s jazz history.

In 1961, at the age of fourteen, Cather began producing a mimeographed auction sheet, which he distributed to collectors across the country, buying, selling, and trading records by mail. Operating out of his family’s printing shop, he quickly expanded the project into a full-fledged, glossy magazine, Music Memories Monthly (later, Music Memories and Jazz Report), publishing his own articles on blues and jazz history alongside contributions by nationally prominent critics and historians. As the folk and blues revivals of the 1960s sent folklorists and record producers scouring the South for traces of the region’s blues history, Cather became an important point of contact for researchers in Alabama, his family’s home welcoming such visitors as Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records and, on a mission from the Folkways label, Sam and Ann Charters. Cather himself became a vital preserver of local musical legacies. The legendary Bessemer harmonica player and recording artist Jaybird Coleman is remembered today largely through the efforts of the teenaged Cather; his interviews with Coleman’s family filled in essential details from the musician’s biography and made available the only known (now widely reprinted) photo of Coleman. Cather also recorded the harmonica player, singer, and guitarist Dave Miles, last survivor of the original Birmingham Jug Band, a group whose first and only recordings—highly infectious, and highly collectible—appeared on the Okeh label in 1930. In the meantime, Cather was developing relationships with several older Black musicians he came to regard, despite the racial and generational divide, as invaluable friends and mentors.

Through Birmingham bandleader and educator Frank Adams, Cather met and befriended Robert McCoy, a remarkable blues and boogie-woogie pianist whose music preserved a once-thriving local piano tradition. (McCoy had cut his first records in the late 1920s, backing local artists Guitar Slim, Charlie Campbell, and the surreally named Peanut the Kidnapper.) In 1962, Cather and McCoy entered Homer Milam’s downtown studio to record an LP, Barrelhouse Blues and Jook Piano, which Cather released on his new Vulcan record label; a second album, Blues and Boogie Classics, followed the next year. On Vulcan’s Soul-O imprint, Cather released two additional 45 singles by McCoy, who this time was joined by a rocking R&B combo, the Five Sins: Frank Adams on saxophone; Cat Eye Summerfield, drums; Ivory “Pops” Williams, bass; and Marcus Ingram, vocals. Cather himself sat in on second piano.

Since his early years in the music business, Patrick Cather—as a collector, dealer, and passionate preservationist of rare books, sheet music, artifacts, and ephemera—has continued to document his native state’s many diverse cultural legacies. As a writer and publisher, he has produced multiple works on Alabama history, music, literature, and art. For his indispensable efforts to preserve Birmingham’s blues and jazz heritage, Cather was inducted in 1991 to the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame. In 2002 the Delmark label reissued the first of his Robert McCoy LPs, along with previously unissued outtakes and personal, poignant notes by Cather himself; the original Vulcan and Soul-O records, today, are sought-after collectors’ items. Continuing his lifelong devotion to historic preservation, Cather in recent years has donated substantial collections of rare materials to the archives of Auburn University, the Birmingham-based Southern Music Research Center, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, his alma mater.

The Birmingham Record Collectors l Hall of Fame l Class of 2022

“The Preservation, Collection and Appreciation of Recorded Music”