Home is where the beats are: HR Records

“There’s a hustle to selling records,” says Charvis Campbell, co-owner of HR Records on Kennedy Street NW. “People treat their records like their children. Once you sell that $250 Eric Dolphy record it’s gone. You might get 20 reissues in, but they’re never going to sell for what that first printing did.”

Campbell first hooked up with his now business partner, Michael Bernstein, a decade ago when he was getting married.

“Mike came to my house to buy some records. And he tried to low-ball me in my naivete at the time,” he laughs. “I was happy to sell two classic Blue Note albums for like five dollars.”

And Bernstein wasn’t the only person shopping at Campbell’s house back then.

“The guys that were coming to my house to buy my records were all the guys who owned record shops in the city. And that was when the light bulb went off. Mike and I did some record events together and saw that [records] were a viable opportunity.”

Scored by Pharoah Sanders’ “The Creator Has a Master Plan” coming from the house speakers, Campbell explains that the HR in HR Records stands for “Home Rule,” the elusive autonomy from the Federal government that generations of Washingtonians have been fighting for without fail.

“Kennedy Street is the center of the city,” he says proudly, tugging at his black tee that dons the HR Records logo. “When we got into [the 700 block of Kennedy Street] there was just Anxo, and Soup Up was just opening.”

Campbell’s life in music began with the Catholic hymns his family played on Sundays in West Hempstead, Long Island. But he was quickly seduced into the cult of 80s and 90s hip-hop. Long Island native’s Public Enemy and Eric B (of Eric B. and Rakim) were regular fixtures in his world before he went to Howard University. While in college he earned a cultural degree in Black music listening to acts like War, Gil-Scott Heron and the late Phyllis Hyman for the cost of a beer at the bar at Blues Alley because the right homeboy had the right hookup.

As the owner of one of the less than 40 African American-owned brick and mortar record stores in the country, Campbell values the collections that have come to him from neighborhood grandparents who have either passed on or moved out of the city, but he always welcomes the condos and new real estate that define the neighborhood's here and now.

“Music is history. It’s my history. It's our history. It’s art history.”