CLEVELAND — You know the song "My Alberta Home," by Clarence Noren? He's not a marquee country music star, so don't feel bad if you're never heard of him. There's a good chance no one would have if it weren't for a diligent Clevelander named Franklin Fantini.
"I just collect these country 45s. I find stuff that most people don't know, so regional, local releases, especially stuff that was released that was not on a major label," Frankling explained in a recent interview. "And so I started to find this interesting kind of local country stuff and play it on my show."
For Fantini, also known as "Frank the Drifter," this is not merely a hobby, it's a passion and a career. He says he didn't expect to pick up such a large following when he started the show.
"Originally it was just, you know, my friends heard it. It's gradually turned into this much bigger thing...I think probably a few thousand people listened to each episode."
Fantini's podcast "Dollar Country" has a devoted following. Franklin told me the show acts as a gathering place for people from all over the world who share the same interest.
"Some are just like regular like music country nerds who like Golden Age country music. Some people are people who grew up listening to country, like their parents listened to country around the house, then they got older and didn't wanna listen to it, and then they've kind of come back around."
A fan of many genres of music, Franklin's choice to focus on collecting old country records is the result of a very Cleveland-style mentality (though I should note, he's originally from Kansas.)
"Originally it was because it was cheap. Country's kind of an undervalued type of music in the record world...And so when I started collecting country, it was really cheap so I could get a lot of it and I liked it. So I'd listen to it and be like, this is really cool. It's only a dollar."
And in that collecting, Fantini's basement has become what might be the only place you could find the works of artists like Joe Keen, Jimmy Patton, and Lucky La Rue. He's amassed what he estimates is about 15,000 records here.
While Fantini is no stranger to online record shopping, he also still values the hands-on approach.
"The first thing I do is always look at the new arrivals," he told me on a shopping trip to local record shop My Mind's Eye. "I've just flipped through so many records that I kind of know what to look for, like what a label looks like from certain eras. The more homemade it looks generally, the more up my alley it is."
In addition to his online show, for years now, Franklin has also been taking his archeological country music discoveries directly to the people by live DJing a classic country night here at the Little Rose Tavern on the city's west side. But perhaps his greatest service is in archiving the music of as many of these unknown artists as possible.
"I did try to put like a thing together on Spotify, like a playlist of dollar country stuff, and the vast majority of anything I play isn't on there," he said.
Just because an artist isn't transcendent, that doesn't mean they're not worth remembering. And if not for people like Frank the Drifter, these voices might be lost. Lost forever to history and the world would be just a little less musical for it.