Black Rose Records

Black Rose Records is a record shop on Memorial Parkway in Huntsville, Alabama. It opened on Record Store Day in April 2023.

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Interview with Black Rose Records

Black Rose opened in May 2023 on Memorial Parkway, and the shop's grown into a real anchor of Huntsville's Vinyl Trail alongside Vertical House. What's the origin story — what made 2023 the right moment to open, and why Memorial Parkway specifically?

My wife and I moved to Huntsville in 2020, and then we spent about a year just locked in the house. I worked as a barista for about 2 years before finding a space for the shop. We actually opened in April, on Record Store Day, which felt appropriate. We’d been looking for potential locations for about a year before that. I’d worked in record stores for years and was selling online and at markets and record shows. Luckily, we were able to find an affordable space that didn’t require much work to make ready, and being friends with people who can build things is enormously helpful. The location was chosen mostly just on availability and visibility. There were a few anchor businesses here, and we definitely saw the potential for it to be a good spot. It’s been awesome to see the plaza grow and have other cool new businesses move in.

Huntsville is a smaller music market than the Nashville-Atlanta corridor around it, but the scene has grown fast — Vertical House, Blue Moon, Chek Milliken, and now Black Rose all coexisting. What does Black Rose do that the rest of the Huntsville shops don't, and who's coming through your door specifically for you?

I don’t know what Chek Milliken is, and Blue Moon is closer to Birmingham, and I’ve never been there. However, Huntsville does have Vertical House, which you mentioned, Maxwell’s Music, House of Sound, and a few other places that stock some records. I think people have come to expect us to have a clean records, priced right, and a well-curated selection, from plenty of cheap common albums to more expensive rare titles. That’s what we try to provide anyway!

The shop shares space with Faith Skateboards, which puts you in the punk/skate/hardcore overlap that goes back decades. How does that shape what ends up in the bins — is the skate customer buying records, or are they two crowds sharing a doorway?

We are actually totally separate spaces. But when Peter introduced himself after we’d been open for a month or two and told us he was opening Faith next door, we were super excited. Like you said, underground music and skating have gone hand-in-hand forever. There’s definitely plenty of overlap with customers, and people will often come here for one store and end up going to both. Luckily for us, skaters have super eclectic taste and like some of everything, so it works out well.

When someone walks in with a box of records to sell or trade, what makes a collection an easy yes for you in the first thirty seconds?

The biggest and easiest identifier is if things are CLEAN, and that starts with the sleeves on the outside. If someone brings a box where everything is stored neatly, in plastic poly bags, and there isn’t dirt and dust everywhere, it’s a very good start. Dirty, dusty, and haphazardly tossed around is part of the game, and it’s certainly not a dealbreaker, but it definitely gets taken into account.

Punk and indie are strong for Black Rose — those are also genres where a common record is worth $3 and a rare one is worth $200. What's the most overvalued thing that keeps walking in the door, and what's the quietly-valuable record people don't realize they're holding?

Scratched up records are the thing that gets overvalued the most, for sure. Even small scratches can have a huge effect on how a record plays, and therefore the value goes way down, or is gone altogether. We have to turn away beat up records all day, and it’s a bummer. Some things have a bit of leeway where there can still be some value, but it still makes a huge difference. As far as common perception of value versus what it can actually sell for, Elvis is probably the one people overestimate the value of the most. There are just so so many Elvis albums, and they made millions and millions of them, for the most part. Some certainly have value, but they’re mostly very very common. The quietly-valuable things tend to be the ones most people have never heard of, like weird garage rock 45’s from the sixties, or private press funk records from the seventies. But that stuff also looks just like the stuff that isn’t worth much, so you still have to do your research and know what you’re looking for.

Alabama summers are humid and hot, and a lot of local collections lived in a garage or attic. What condition damage do you see most in Huntsville-area collections, and what would you tell a seller to do differently going forward?

Water damage and heat are the killers, for sure. The advice is always to keep them stored upright in a cool dry place that stays cool and dry. Unfortunately, it’s one of those things where hindsight is 20/20, and sometimes people’s options are limited to begin with.

You ship out of town — that means grading vinyl for people who won't see it in person before buying. What have you learned about grading and packaging that most people who resell records only figure out after a bent sleeve or a complaint?

It’s better to grade and price something at a lower condition if you’re unsure which side it should fall on. It’s definitely better to have someone be pleasantly surprised when something shows up nicer than expected versus the opposite. And for shipping, don’t skimp on padding, and make sure you label things as fragile. Nobody is ever going to complain that something is packed too well. There’s no guarantees once it leaves your hands, but at least you know you’ve done your part.

Black Rose is a young shop that grew fast into a Huntsville staple. For someone thinking about opening a record store in a mid-size Southern city today, what did you learn in the first two years that made the difference between staying open and not?

Luckily, I’ve been familiar with the business for long enough that I had a pretty good idea of what I needed to do for the store to potentially be successful. I knew how to set up and run the store, so it was really a matter of not knowing if people would come out or not, and thankfully they have! Making sure the business adds value back to the community, rather than simply trying to extract money from it, was always going to be an important part of what we do here. We help promote, sponsor, and support local music and art whenever we can, and we’re involved with mutual aid distribution and animal welfare projects in the city as well. I think demonstrating that we want to help and support the community makes a difference in people wanting to help make sure we stay around in order to be able to do so. Also, I’m of the opinion that there can never be too many record stores, so I say go for it!

Last updated: 2026-09-05

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