Billy Briggs and his X.I.T. Boys - X.I.T. Song (vocal: Briggs) / Autograph Your Photograph (vocal: Jess Williams) (Time 103)
It would an exercise in futility to determine why some records survived in quantity, and others did not. The life cycle of a record was generally shorter than that of a dragon-fly, going from birth at the pressing plant to commercial death within a month or two. Of course, records usually did not immediately die -- they sat on shelves, in the warehouse of a distributor, waiting for a hopeful resurrection, when the song or artist eventually had a hit. For most, this day never came, and their purgatory status ended abruptly when the distributor sold his business. The boxes of unwanted old records were carted off to their grave, the city dump.
It is a mystery why Billy Briggs' other Time singles survived in quantity but Time 103 did not. Perhaps when his "Chew Tobacco Rag" hit in 1951, the older, unsold singles were resurrected from the warehouse, and therefore survive in larger numbers, or possibly were re-pressed to meet the new demand. For whatever reason, Time 103 was not among those either resurrected or repressed. Today, it is among the rarest of Texas country singles, alongside other "black swans" such as Homer Clemons on Swing, the Bar X Cowboys on Eddie's, Link Davis on Gold Star, and Al Urban on APU.
For more information about Briggs, see our post from 2009.
