Dance had a feeling she wasn’t going to be welcome much longer, despite the angling conversation she and Madigan had had. She made quickly for the trailer. Stepping inside the place, which smelled of hot, plastic furnishings, she froze. It was a museum. She’d never seen anything like this, not in a residence. Posters, record jackets, guitars, statuettes of musicians, a Hammond B-3 organ, parts of wind and string instruments, ancient amplifiers and hundreds of vinyl records—33¹/₃ LPs, 45 singles and ancient 78s, reels of tape. She found a collection of turntables and an old Nagra reel-to-reel, made by the Kudelski Group, the best portable tape recorder ever manufactured. Looking at all of these items, it was like seeing beautiful but antiquated cars. These analog devices had long ago lost the battle to digital.

Still, they were to Dance, as apparently they had been to Bobby, works of art.

She found hundreds of concert souvenirs, mostly from the sixties through the eighties. Mugs, T-shirts, caps, even pens—an item, not surprisingly, commemorating that most intellectual of singer-songwriters, Paul Simon, whose “American Tune” had inspired the name of her music website.

The majority of these artifacts, though, involved the country world. Photos covering nearly every square foot of wall space revealed the history of the genre, which, Dance believed, had reimagined itself more than any other musical form in America over the years. She spotted photos of musicians from the traditional era—the Grand Ole Opry and rockabilly styles—in the 1950s. And from the era of country rock a decade later, followed by outlaw with the likes of Waylon Jennings, Hank Williams, Jr., and Willie Nelson. Here were photos and autographs of Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers and Eddie Rabbit, who were part of the country pop trend in the late seventies and eighties. The neotraditionalist movement in the eighties was a move back to the early era and brought superstar status to Randy Travis, George Strait, the Judds, Travis Tritt and dozens of others—all of whom were represented here.

In the nineties country became international, with artists like Clint Black, Vince Gill, Garth Brooks, Shania Twain, Mindy McCready and Faith Hill, on the one hand, and a strong alternative movement that rejected slick Nashville production values on the other. Pictures of Lyle Lovett and Steve Earl, who were part of the latter, stared down from one wall.

The present day was on display too. Here was a picture of Carrie Underwood (yes, of American Idol fame) and an autographed copy of the sheet music for Taylor Swift’s “Fifteen,” which spoke not about truck driving or God or patriotism or other traditional country themes but about high school angst.

Kayleigh Towne’s career was, of course, well documented.

Dance knew there were many historians of the music scene in the past fifty years but she doubted they had as many artifacts as Bobby did. No death is worse than any other but Dance felt a deep pang that Bobby Prescott’s devotion to archiving all aspects of country music in the twentieth century had died with him. It was the entire world’s loss.