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It all started with sticky sweet breakfast cereals. Every morning before I set off for Lindley Park Elementary School in Asheboro, Mama would place three or four boxes on the kitchen counter for me to choose from: Cap’n Crunch, Cocoa Puffs, Quisp. But the ones I wanted to empty out as quickly as possible were the Post brand cereals like Alpha-Bits. Because stamped into the cardboard on the back panels were flexible laminate records that I could cut out and actually play on my parents’ stereo: “Sugar Sugar” by The Archies, “Last Train to Clarksville” by The Monkees, “Easy Come, Easy Go” by Bobby Sherman. In 1971, the record I wanted to get to the quickest was “I Want You Back,” the No. 1 radio hit by my favorite group, the Jackson 5.

At 10 years old, I hardly knew that you could buy records in stores. I assumed that all the hits by my favorite groups came from cereal boxes. Then, one day, Mama took me to The Record Shop on North Church Street and introduced me to the owner, Archie Burkhead. Standing behind the counter, a wise smile on his face, surrounded by rows and rows of big 12-inch vinyl albums and tiny 45-rpm singles, Archie could tell you everything you wanted to know about records. The latest hits by The Supremes, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones. Albums with wild cover art like the fuzzy photo montage on the front of Stand by Sly and the Family Stone. For me, visiting Archie at The Record Shop was like hanging out with Willy Wonka at the Chocolate Factory.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, almost every town across the state had an Archie and a Record Shop. Some of the most influential were Daniel Adams’s DJ’s News Stand & Records in Goldsboro, Jimmy Liggins’s Snoopy’s Discount Records in Durham, and David Lee’s Washington Sound in Shelby. There was something special about these sage shop owners, the way they’d point knowingly at the iconic images on covers of Impulse! jazz albums like Hamlet-born John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Or put the needle to the grooves of The Temptations’ “Cloud Nine” 45 and let you hear the glorious crackle that segues into a squiggly wah-wah guitar riff.

This was before chain stores — like The Record Bar, which started in Burlington as Musicland, and the smaller Schoolkids Records, founded in Raleigh in the mid-’70s — started spreading their vinyl tentacles across the state. By then, I’d gotten my driver’s license and would cruise the curvy backroads to Chapel Hill, where I’d spend entire Saturdays flipping through the bins at the Schoolkids on Franklin Street. The clerks there were young and hip, and they introduced me to new kinds of records (psychedelic rock, funk, punk, new wave) as well as older ones I wasn’t as familiar with (classics by North Carolina jazz, blues, and old-time folk legends like Thelonious Monk, Elizabeth Cotten, and Doc Watson). My record collection swelled into the hundreds, and within a few years, it would number in the thousands.

Nowadays, record stores are mostly relics — most folks stream music on their electronic devices — but the resurgence of vinyl has kept a precious few alive. There’s still a Schoolkids in Raleigh, and tenacious owners of indie shops across the state — All Day Records in Carrboro, Carolina Soul Records in Durham, Lunchbox Records in Charlotte — continue introducing great music to fans. And every time I walk into one of them, I think of Archie, his ever-present smile, and the glorious crackle of those 45-rpm singles as he put needle to grooves.