Enlarge image The papa of Bear Family, Richard Weize. (© picture alliance / dpa) Here at PopTips we wouldn't normally stray very close to awards ceremonies. It's really just a question of necessity. That is: do you really need a tip about a German artist who won an award at a nationally televised awards show? But a guy with over 100,000 records who runs a tiny, influential label in a small hamlet of Germany made us change our minds.

So, this time we're jumping right into to the deep end with pop music's penultimate stars at the 53rd annual Grammy Awards. Whether you are hip or cold to the Grammys, which will take place this year on February 12, are you even aware of the categories Best Album Notes and Best Historical Album? A release on Germany's Bear Family Records, a re-issuer of mostly country and rockabilly recordings in collectors' box-sets, is up for both these awards. The label is run by Richard Weize, a collector himself, who opened up Bear Family's doors over 35 years ago in the tiny German village of Hambergen in the country's Northwest.

Specifically, Bear Family's “Bristol Sessions 1927/28: The Big Bang of Country Music” has been nominated by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States for the aforementioned honors. “Bristol Sessions” is a 124-song, 5-CD box-set that includes a 120-page book. Like most Bear Family sets, this one takes a holistic approach to its representation of recordings smeared to obscurity by time, in this case including every bit of sound taken from this series – even the alternative takes.

Enlarge image Bear Family recalls a time when most American music was needs be do-it-yourself. (© Bear Family Records) To call the music-mining customers of Bear Family enthusiasts is a bit light. They are one-percenter music fetishists. And they are after more than music: When they dig for artists or recordings, relegated far beyond memory or care, they are seeking out an entire subculture. Theirs is a sort of deeper appreciation for another time, when records were often taken down in one take, rather than patched together in a clean amalgam in the soul-free air of a recording studio. It is also a hobby that backs up against obsession for which empathy from others is scant to non-existent.

Such collectors see their modern-day offspring in the hipster hamlets of Brooklyn or Portland, through the recording-industry-shunning ethos of punk and hip hop that has looked for something better since the seventies and in the facial hair of the guy at the record store who doesn't have the Huey Lewis greatest hits record you wanted.

Enlarge image A Bear Family release entails a bit more, beyond a mere series of downloads it is an experience. (© Bear Family Records) In a 2010 Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazine interview, Richard Weize said that he possessed 30,000 LPs, 10,000 shellacs and 100,000 singles. A massive collection that speaks toward both the owner of Bear Family and the subculture he keeps alive with his reissues. But he says it is also a collection, which, when he passes it, will neither bring him money nor a second owner love – the former because records simply aren't worth as much as they were and the latter because “the few nuts who still collect are always diminishing.”

Perhaps, but Bear Recordings is still putting out new stuff. That is to say, even if the audiophile fetish withers, it will likely not fade into relic (it's already in the merely nostalgic). And, for once at the upcoming Grammys, maybe the rest will take off their pop-blinders and peer up to someone who digs a little deeper.