From 1968 to 1977, Mingering Mike and his crew made more than 80 records and performed in sold-out venues around the world. Not bad for a made-up superstar. All photos courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collections: the tape recorded songs and a curious cache of hand-made imitation record albums of a make-believe R&B artist, known as Mingering Mike.

The collection was discovered nine years ago when Dori Hadar, a record digger who owned more than 10,000 records at the time, found a stack of the faux albums early one morning in a Washington, DC flea market. Hadar is a criminal investigator for a Maryland law firm, and he sometimes worked night hours at DC’s Central Detention Facility. The flea market was across the street. He finished particularly late that night, so he showed up in the pre-dawn hours as the market was being setup to rummage through its offerings.

On this morning, Hadar leafed through one vendor’s record boxes and came across a set of 38 album covers that appeared to be hand-made. The records’ titles spanned an entire career of an artist he’d never heard of, complete with solo albums, greatest hits collections, movie soundtracks, even a sickle cell anemia benefit concert. Most were “produced, written, arranged and performed” by Mingering Mike. After Hadar puzzled over the sketches of an afro-sporting soul singer performing to sold-out crowds and the blocks of song lyrics that blanketed the albums’ jackets, he pulled out a few of the records inside, only to realize that they were were not vinyl but black-painted cardboard disks—completely fake, but with labels and even etched-in grooves.

“I was flabbergasted. I really didn’t know what to make of them,” Hadar says. He bought the entire collection.

At home, he posted pictures of the albums on the vinyl record collector site Soul Strut and asked “Who is Mingering Mike?” The discovery, in his words, “totally blew up.” Soul Strut’s traffic went through the roof as record enthusiasts speculated about the origins of the mysterious creations. New York Times, Washington Post, and ­Spin ran pieces on the discovery. Mike’s albums carried a signature style—figures are colored with markers, words are disproportionate and off-center—but the collection, created between 1968 and 1977, captures a volatile decade in America’s history with arresting insight and imagination. Alongside love albums and songs for Kung Fu films are album covers about protests, racial equality, drugs and the Vietnam War. The albums’ new-found online fans called the creations “outsider art” and “folk art.” Hadar didn’t know what to call them, but he knew he had to find Mingering Mike.

A week later, after tracking Mike down through a few personal letters that he found with the albums, Hadar grabbed a bite with the self-made artist at a local Denny’s. Mike, who is fiercely private—he asks that his last name not be published—was thrilled to learn that Hadar had the albums. They had been left in a storage unit, but when Mike missed a payment, the contents were auctioned off.

He never expected to see his art again.

Mike’s idea for his world-famous alter ego began in his late teens. The introverted artist started sketching album designs and writing songs about love and heartache in his free time. During the Vietnam War, and as his creativity grew, Mike changed his focus to the social issues he saw affecting people around the city. His art became a means of processing tumultuous times, an outlet for his moral and political views. “Anyone who is aware of their surroundings and what is going on, they might do different things like study to be a social worker, or a doctor, or a lawyer, or a policeman, or a fireman, something to help out the community,” Mike says. “Me, I didn’t have a voice in the outside world, so I figured I’d make a voice for myself.”

Besides a few shows at a mental hospital, Mike never performed any music live. He did sing, though, and claims to have written more than 4,000 actual songs, many of which he recorded a cappella on tape (listen to some here). “There’s something so honest about his work, and personal. It’s really touching,” Hadar says. “He has different personas on the albums, but what he’s expressing is what he truly feels. Even though his ultimate dream was to be this soul super star, he knew that wasn’t going to happen. It really is like reading a diary.”

Mike’s work arrived at the American Art Museum via Mike Wilkins, a collector who purchased the full body of work for donation. Shortly after Hadar discovered Mingering Mike, he returned to the flea market with fellow record aficionado Frank Beylotte to unearth more of Mike’s creations, and Mike’s cousin later added even more albums, so the full collection now consists of more than 80 LPs and 45s, 65 unused record labels and hours of recorded audiotape.

“These albums reach people in a way that’s powerful and direct, and makes them feel like anybody can do something meaningful and play a role in history,” says the museum’s Leslie Umberger, who will curate an exhibit on Mingering Mike in 2015. “I think this kind of work has a great democratic spirit. It makes people feel like they’re part of it instead of just observers.”

In 2007, Hadar wrote a book on the discovery, and he and Mike have toured internationally telling the Mingering Mike story. Mike, who invented his stage name by jumbling the sound of “merging” when he read it on a road sign, still can’t believe his fame. “Did I think my voice would ever be heard? Never in a million years,” he says.

UPDATE 3/5/2013: This post was updated to include more details on how the record albums were found.

Our curators and researchers recommend a little something for everyone.

The curators and researchers spend a lot of time reading, everything from classic novels to the latest exhibition catalog. We asked some of them to lend us their reading lists to see which titles rose to the top and why.

For the Art Connoisseurs:

Leslie Umberger, from the American Art Museum, recommends:

“James Castle: Show and Store, an exhibition catalogue produced by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sophia in 2011 brilliantly navigates the complex depths of Idaho artist James Castle (1899-1977). Fresh, insightful, and deeply moving, the images and essays explore a truly, astonishing, poetic and enigmatic body of work–drawings of soot, paper constructions, and carefully rendered books and letters–entirely in its own terms. Perfectly magical.”

Lisa Hostetler, from the American Art Museum, recommends:

“Photography Changes Everything, edited by Marvin Heiferman (Aperture/Smithsonian Institution, 2012). It’s an interesting look at the wide variety of ways that photographs are used and how photography itself has affected contemporary culture. Two exhibition catalogues that I’ve been looking forward to reading are Cindy Sherman (MoMA, 2012) and Rineke Dijkstra (Guggenheim, 2012). Sherman and Dijkstra are two of today’s most compelling artists, and these retrospectives are important compendia of their careers.”

Maya Foo, from the Freer and Sackler, recommends:

“Rome by Robert Hughes. In college, I studied art history in Rome and I have wanted to return to Italy ever since. Robert Hughes’ Rome is a readable and rich history of the city told through art, architecture, literature and the author’s personal narrative.”

For the Wordsmiths:

David Ward, from the National Portrait Gallery, recommends:

“What with the opening of Poetic Likeness at the museum this fall and co-editing Lines in Long Array: A Civil War Commemoration, which includes 12 newly commissioned poems, my mind has been mostly on poetry the last year or so. I have been especially taken by the following titles: First, work by two of the great “voices” in modern American poetry, one still vital even at 85, John Ashbery, and the other sadly gone, Adrienne Rich, who passed away earlier this year after an amazingly powerful career. Adrienne Rich, Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971-2012 (WW Norton, 2012). John Ashbery, Quick Question: New Poems (Ecco, 2012).

The writer Eavan Boland is not only a first-rate poet but she is continually interesting on the subject of writing, literary history and social roles. Her latest book explores the sense of doubleness that she navigates in her career: A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet.

Two prize-winning books by two of America’s best poets are also of note: Jorie Graham’s Place (Ecco, 2012) and Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars (Greywolf, 2011), which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2012.

Also, a pitch for a book that was published a couple of years ago that I don’t think got as much attention as it should have, from Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, A New Literary History of America (Harvard University Press, 2009), which came out in paperback in 2012. It provides a really valuable, entertaining and incisive view of 500 years of American writing.”

For the Scientists:

John Grant, from the National Air and Space Museum, recommends:

Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity and the Exploration of the Red Planet by Steve Squyres is good for adults. Squyres writes about his work as the principal investigator on both the Spirit and Opportunity missions to Mars in 2004. A good read for people following the more recent Mars developments with the Curiosity mission.

And for the younger set: Fly Me to Mars by Catherine Weitz is a terrific kids book.

For the History Buffs: 

Cory Bernat, co-curator of FOOD: Transforming the American Table at American History, recommends:

Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America by Harvey Levestein, which covers America’s eating habits from the 1930s to present day.

John Edward Hasse, at the American History Museum, likes:

Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood and How It Changed America, by John M. Barry, because it’s a “fascinating story told so compellingly that it reads almost like a novel.”

Nancy Bercaw, of the American History Museum, suggests:

Tiya Miles’ Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, first published in 2006, but an interesting read for readers looking for something different in the Civil War sesquicentennial.

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