Record Store Opens in Woodstock

Brent and Kim McGhee’s love of music became more than a hobby and more than a source of pleasure when Housewölf Records recently opened its doors.

Located at 9820 Highway 92 in Woodstock, Housewölf is a bright, well-organized record store with plenty of room for patrons to browse new and pre-owned vinyl records, cassette and 8-track tapes and music-inspired merchandise.

“Kim and I are both record collectors,” Brent McGhee said. “Even before we married, we talked about what a great thing it would be to have a store where music lovers could not just shop, but also have a place to be together and share ideas.”

The store opened on May 12, Mother’s Day.

“We really kind of took all our favorite record stores and put the best things about them together here,” Kim McGhee said.

The McGhees are especially proud of the wall display at the front of their store that features album covers of Georgia-born bands, including the Black Crowes, the Georgia Satellites, Blackberry Smoke and many others.

Another visual feature of Housewölf is a larger-than-life, hand-painted mural of country music legend Johnny Cash embracing his wife June Carter Cash.

“One of Kim’s favorite songs is ‘Ring of Fire,’ which June wrote for Johnny,” Brent McGhee said. “A lot of people don’t know that connection.”

Housewölf’s unusual name is a tribute to the McGhees’ 6-year-old German Shepherd, Bella. “In Germany, a big dog that looks like it descended from wolves is called a Hauswülf,” Brent said. “We thought it was a good name for our family’s store, but we don’t let Bella hang out here. People either love dogs like Bella or they’re afraid of them.”

The record selection at Housewölf includes all music genres, Kim says, but rock predominates, because that’s what the store’s clientele are often shopping for or hoping to sell. The McGhees buy new records from wholesale suppliers, but they also buy quality pre-owned records from the general public.

Bryan Parks, who lives in Marietta, was on his second shopping visit to Housewölf recently.

“What I enjoy is flipping through the records, looking at the album art and then listening at home,” he said. “I like blues, rock and country music.”

Like most music consumers, Parks switched from vinyl records to digital music several years ago. But then he received a gift from his sister-in-law: a framed cover of the rock album “One Size Fits All,” a 1975 release by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention. “That sent me back vinyl records,” he said. “Now I only listen to digital music in the car.”

Brent McGhee thinks Parks’s experience demonstrates that there is more to the enjoyment of music than just listening to technically perfect sound.

“Digitally recorded music has its place,” he said, “but we’ve lost something when we don’t have the full album experience — listening to the songs as the artist wanted us to hear them, in the order the artist chose to record them. There’s also a visual experience from the cover art that comes with a vinyl album. I want people to enjoy all that along with the music.”

Although Housewölf doesn’t currently sell CD recordings, the McGhees plan to add the discs to their product line.

Brent McGhee works full-time at the store, which opens at 11 a.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Kim, a solutions architect with an IT firm, pitches in evenings and weekends, and their son-in-law, Cody Sanders, works part-time at Housewölf.

After a career in the hospitality industry, Brent McGhee said he and Kim decided now was the time to fulfill their record store dream.

“I’ve opened a lot of restaurants,” he said, “and that’s hard. You only have so many of those openings in you. We decided it was time to open our record store.”

The McGhees say their new business has taken off faster than they expected. The store’s website (https://housewolfrecords.com) is not yet fully developed, but this and other marketing initiatives are part of their plans for the future.

For more information, follow Housewölf Records on Facebook or Instagram .