Leola's Records and Tapes
The name on the side of the Omaha music store properly known as Leola’s Records and Tapes belongs to founder/owner Leola McDonald. Both the 
handle and the woman are synonymous with music on the city’s north side.
Her small shop at 56th and Ames is where today’s beat generation heads for the latest hip-hop and rap tracks, including hard-to-find mixes and chopped-and-screwed versions of hit cuts.
Bright as the colors decorating that wall is Leola’s own passion for music.
“I love music,” she said. “I always have. I used to play it all. At one point in my life I even sang. I sang in the church choir.”
A 68-year-old church lady who prefers gospel may not be what you expect behind the counter of an urban music store carrying CDs and tapes with R-rated lyrics, but that’s exactly what you get. Leola’s operation is pretty much a one-woman show. Her grandkids come by to help some, but “mostly I do it by myself,” she said.
As the store’s sole proprietor, Leola is there seven days a week, waiting on customers, answering the phone, registering sales and bantering back and forth with whoever saunters in from the street. Some visitors stop by just to chat with her, others to inquire about new releases.
One day, the doorbell rings, and in walks a young man, Eric Miller, who’s been shopping at Leola’s since he was a boy.
“Hi, Miss Leola,” he says.
“What you want, babe?”
“I’m looking for that CD that got, uh, Slim Thug and Young Jeezy on it.”
Leola searches the shelves behind her. Another young man comes in, hawking a boxful of high-end electronic gadgets.
“Honey, my money’s funny and my change is strange,” she tells him. “I’m broke.”
Whatever brings them in, Leola welcomes her visitors with a cheerful greeting — “Hey, sweetie” or “Hey, babe” or “How ya doin’?” or “What’s up, doc?” — delivered in a musky voice made husky by years of cigarette smoking. An Omaha native, Leola grew up dividing her time between here and Cheyenne, Wyo., where her mother moved after splitting up with her father. As a youth, she loved to sing in the Sunday Baptist church choir and in church-sponsored competitions. She dreamed of performing professionally. That was a long time ago.
“I could sing once in my life,” she said. “I won every contest I got into. But I messed up my own voice. I started smoking and drinking. I was grown. I could do what I wanted to do. But didn’t nobody suffer for it but me. Now, I can’t carry a tune across the street and bring it back in one piece.”
That doesn’t change her passion. That’s why she’s still at her store every day when most women her age are retired.
“I love music and I love people, so it’s easy for me,” she said. “And you really have to to deal with this, because you can get some fools in here, and sometimes it’s more than one, and you have to deal with them.”
Then there’s “that crap they call rap,” as Leola puts it, which she feels obliged to carry. Whether she likes it or not, it’s what customers want, and as a good businesswoman she must be familiar with the artists and their work.
“Yeah, I pretty much have to be up on all of it now,” she said. “I don’t particularly care for it, but hey, maybe if I was these kids’ age [I would]. To me, it’s nothin’ but noise. But different strokes for different folks.”
Despite the generation gap and difference in taste, Leola’s customers return because she stocks what’s in vogue. “You can find things here you can’t find at a lot of places,” Miller said.
Another customer, Carmelette Snoddy, prefers Leola’s for its quality inventory. “Like with these mixed CDs,” she said, holding up a few, “you can buy them off the streets, but they’re not quality. They don’t play as good.”
Leola tries to ensure customers know what they’re getting. “If they don’t know what
something sounds like, I’ll play the music for them, so they’re not just buying something blind,” she said. “ I’ve always done that.”
Long before rap, back when jazz, blues, R & B and soul ruled the charts, Leola was a respected black music source. Music buff Billy Melton of Omaha said he often relied on her opinion while compiling some of his extensive collection. “She’s very studious,” he said. “She knows music. She always had what I was looking for. And she loves what she’s doing now, too. She’s been faithful to that music line. I just wish she would have stayed with the older music, but there’s no money in that. She knows I love music and she’s given me pictures and things of older artists over the years. She’s quite a gal.”
Leola’s savvy got her a job at the Hutsut, a now-defunct music store. Then an advertising salesperson with the Omaha Star, she called on the store one day. When she saw the clerks couldn’t answer customers’ questions about black music, she offered to help. Leola so impressed the owner that he hired her on the spot.
She and a partner soon opened their own store, Mystical Sounds. Then she went solo, and Leola’s followed. For a time, she ran both shops. For the last 30 years, just Leola’s.
While most of her store’s inventory is given over to current CDs or tapes, Leola reserves a few bins and racks for old-school vinyl recordings. Her own personal collection of CDs, LPs, 45s and 8-tracks, drawn from four decades in the business, is all R & B and gospel.
“Gospel music to me is like no other. I love it. Nothing compares … There’s just something about it.”
There’s another reason she opens the doors of her business daily. As a small independent, she’s squeezed by national chains and bled by music pirates. With so many people underselling her, she can’t afford not to light up the neon “Open” sign.
“I don’t have a choice,” she said. “I have to work. If I didn’t have to work, God knows at my age I wouldn’t be. I’m sure doing this [rather than some other kind of work] for the love of it. Besides, I’m too old to go get a [regular] job. I can’t even think about it. But if push comes to shove and that’s what I have to do to survive …”
Profits are down as a result of those buying and selling on the black market. Her no-return policy is aimed at pirates who buy CDs, copy for resell and bring them back for a refund. “Like I tell them, I wasn’t born yesterday … I was born the day before yesterday,” she said. “You have too much competition from the bootleggers,” she said. “They stand on the street and they make more than I do sitting up here. Why, it’s not fair … I have sat up in here all day long and gone from open to close and walked out the door with $20. Before, it might have been $500-$600 in the drawer. So, there’s no comparison.”
That’s why she takes umbrage when some people suggest she pack it in and rest easy on her supposed riches. “If I had the money people tell me I have, I probably wouldn’t be here,” she said. It’s not as though she has a pension or retirement fund to fall back on. “No, when you work for yourself, unless you save or invest your own money, you don’t have any. And I had four kids to raise, so I didn’t do any saving.”
Leola never counted on being single at 68. But things never quite worked out with the men in her life. Like many young women coming of age in the 1950s, she bought into the happily-ever-after ideal.
“I never wanted to be [single]. It just happened. Back then, you were to get married, have some kids and be happy. Well, I got married, had the kids, but damn if I was happy,” she said, laughing at herself. Twice-married and twice-divorced, she now takes it all in stride. “If you don’t have any regrets, you haven’t had any life,” she said.
Faith has a way of healing wounds and easing doubts, and Leola renews herself at church. Mount Nebo Baptist Church is where she gives praise and worship. “I’ve always liked church,” she said. “It’s been a very short time [when] I wasn’t in the church. Now I go every Sunday and, if I can, Wednesdays, too. It’s just that I enjoy it so much.”
With that, she turns up the boom box on a cut from the William Murphy Project’s All Day CD. The rousing choir anthem fills the store, rising, rising … the spirit moving her to answer the call. As the words “I am trusting you, to bring me through” reverberate, she hums and sings along, swaying to the beat. Hearing the lyrics “So, all you’ve got to do is,” Leola finishes the thought herself: “Be strong.”
Leola’s Records and Tapes, 5625 Ames Ave., is open Monday through Thursday 10 a.m.- 9 p.m., Friday and Saturday 10 a.m.-10 p.m. and Sunday 12:30-8 p.m. For more information call 453.8678.
