The oldest record store in the state is turning another year older.

Wuxtry Records has been sitting on what owner Dan Wall calls "the best corner in the best college town in America" for almost all of its 40 years in business.

After opening in a space on Foundry Street on March 1, 1976, Wuxtry moved to its downtown corner three months later.

For its first 12 years, Wuxtry was in the small sliver of corner space that is now where the record store's Sidecar shop sells discounted records. In 1988 it expanded into its current space.

The same year Bizarro Wuxtry opened upstairs selling comics, graphic novels, toys and games.

Its weathered yellow sign and windows covered in artist posters have been icons of the store since Wall started it with friend Mark Methe.

In 1976 the two drove from Illinois down south in a newly purchased Ford station wagon towing a U-Haul storage container filled with records on a mission to start a record store.

"We were looking for a college town that didn't have a record store because that's who had records back then is college kids, and they always needed money so they'd sell used copies to us. That was the plan," Methe said.

First they drove to Knoxville, Tenn., but Methe said he couldn't imagine himself living there. They'd heard about a little town called Athens a few hours away, and when they found it Methe and Wall set up shop immediately.

"The way I remember it we had 3,000 records, and after the first week we were down to about 300 of those, so we said, 'We better find a way to get more records or else this isn't going to work,'" Methe said.

The store was so successful that in 1978 Methe moved to Decatur to start a second Wuxtry location near Emory University's campus that is still open today.

Since then the store has reached legendary status for its efforts to promote and support local musicians and their work.

Wall said he's always made an effort to hire musicians. Over the years the roster of Wuxtry employees includes R.E.M.'s Peter Buck, Mike Green of The Fans, Dana Downs of Go Van Gogh and Brian Burton, also known as Danger Mouse.

Two current employees of the shop, John Fernandes of Olivia Tremor Control and Mike Turner, manage their own record labels now, Cloud Recordings and Happy Happy Birthday To Me Records, respectively.

Both labels have records prominently displayed in the front of the store.

Records are on an upswing of popularity fueled by hipster culture and enthusiasts, but that wasn't always the case. It took some effort to stay alive in the last four decades when the medium for music was almost constantly in flux.

"When CDs became popular we had to move them to the front and the records to the back, but now the CDs are over to the side and the records are taking over," Wall said. "We're constantly moving around the living room furniture … we had to. So many stores like ours went out of business, but we made changes that kept us successful."

The store keeps the past alive in more ways than one. Employees still use hand-written lists of each record sold as inventory lists.

Neither Methe nor Wall is sure that records will always be around, but the future isn't worrying to them.

Both store owners said the same thing: "What I like is music," they said, so it doesn't matter if it comes on tapes, CDs digital files or records.

The store will celebrate its birthday March 1 with coffee and cake, and anyone is welcome to stop by.

There is also a concert celebration in the works for later this year.

Follow reporter Hilary Butschek on Twitter @hilarylbutschek or at https://www.facebook.com/hbutschek.