Dust-to-Digital was started in 1999 by Lance Ledbetter, a radio disc jockey at WRAS -- the student-run voice of Georgia State University. Having been recently introduced to vintage 78 rpm records by the reissue of the Anthology of American Folk Music in 1997, Ledbetter decided to set out on a search for rare gospel recordings.
Four and a half years later, Goodbye, Babylon was released. The 6CD box set was accompanied by a 200-page book and hand-packed with raw cotton in a wooden box. The response from music fans around the world was astounding, and it won a Grammy® award for Best CD Box Set in 2004. Since then, the label has consistently released high-quality, handsomely packaged, accolade-winning material.
Dust-to-Digital's mission is to produce high quality cultural artifacts, which combine rare, essential recordings with historic images and detailed texts describing the artists and their works.
"Gold-standard reissue label ... Although the folklorists lugging around tape recorders (and the performers carrying on ancient traditions) are worthy of much heralding, it's equally astounding how essential Lance Ledbetter's work at Dust-to-Digital has been to the preservation of traditional American folksong. It's easy to buy and appreciate these sets without realizing that the bulk of the material might have been lost -- or, at the very least, tethered to archives, readily accessible only to curious faculty, paper-writing students, and bespectacled researchers -- without Ledbetter's interference." -- Pitchfork
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LP
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PT 2004LP
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Kassidat: Raw 45s from Morocco is a full-length LP that features six extended tracks from the golden age of the Moroccan record industry. After Morocco gained its independence in 1956, Moroccan-owned record labels sprouted and flourished in Casablanca. The inexpensive 45 rpm format allowed the record companies to release thousands of songs during the 1960s, creating a snapshot of the raw and hypnotic Berber music that thrived throughout Morocco. Powerful traditional styles were still alive and well at this time and untouched by international pop influences. Kassidat looks back at this era and presents it anew for audiences hungry for intense and authentic folk music. David Murray is the curator of Haji Maji (www.HajiMaji.com) a blog dedicated to the exploration of 78 rpm Asian music, as well as www.shellachead.com, a blog featuring 78s from around the world. He previously produced Dust-to-Digital's Luk Thung: Classic & Obscure 78s from the Thai Countryside, as well as the forthcoming Longing for the Past, a 4CD set of Southeast Asian 78s. In addition to collecting and researching old records, he is a musician and graphic designer in Oakland, California.
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PT 3001LP
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A collection of spiritual and gospel songs performed in informal non-church settings between 1965 and 1973. Most are guitar-accompanied and performed by active or former blues artists. "Most records of black religious music contain some form of gospel singing or congregational singing recorded at a church service. This album, though, tries to present a broader range of performance styles and contexts with the hope of showing the important role that religious music plays in the Southern black communities and in the daily lives of individuals." --David Evans, from the liner notes. LP, 16-page 11"x11" booklet, tip-on sleeve, 16 photographs. David Evans is an ethnomusicologist and director of the Ethnomusicology/Regional Studies program at the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music in the University of Memphis, where he's worked since 1978.
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CD
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DTD 026CD
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Fans of Sun Ra, take notice -- there is a new American original on the scene who hails from Birmingham, Alabama. Lonnie Holley's music is unlike anything ever heard, and these recordings are a welcome addition to the continuum of music. This album marks the first time Dust-to-Digital has taken an artist into a recording studio. Lonnie Bradley Holley was born on February 10, 1950 in Birmingham, Alabama, the seventh of twenty-seven children. From the age of 5, Holley worked various jobs: picking up trash at a drive-in movie theatre, washing dishes, and cooking. He lived in a whiskey house, on the state fairgrounds, and in several foster homes. His early life was chaotic and Holley was never afforded the pleasure of a real childhood. Since 1979, Holley has devoted his life to the practice of improvisational creativity. His art and music, born out of struggle, hardship, but perhaps more importantly, out of furious curiosity and biological necessity, has manifested itself in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and sound. Holley's sculptures are constructed from found materials in the oldest tradition of African American sculpture. Objects, already imbued with cultural and artistic metaphor, are combined into narrative sculptures that commemorate places, people, and events. Holley did not start making and performing music in a studio nor does his creative process mirror that of the typical musician. His music and lyrics are improvised on the spot and morph and evolve with every event, concert, and recording. In Holley's original art environment, he would construct and deconstruct his visual works, repurposing their elements for new pieces. This often led to the transfer of individual narratives into the new work creating a cumulative composite image that has depth and purpose beyond its original singular meaning. The layers of sound in Holley's music, likewise, are the result of decades of evolving experimentation. Digipak with 20-page booklet featuring lyric transcriptions and artwork by Lonnie Holley.
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2CD/BOOK
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DTD 024CD
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Based on four years of fieldwork throughout the state, the Florida Folklife Program released the two-album, 27-track LP Drop on Down in Florida: Recent Field Recordings of Afro-American Traditional Music in 1981. The album was intended to highlight African American music traditions for a statewide public audience, particularly blues and sacred traditions. When the Folklife Program sought the opportunity to produce an expanded reissue of the album that would include previously unissued fieldwork recordings and photos, Dust-to-Digital, an award-winning record label known for specially packaged re-releases of American vernacular music, agreed to release it. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork materials now housed in the State Archives of Florida, the expanded edition includes all of the recordings from the original double LP, plus nearly 80 minutes of audio available for the first time on 28 new tracks. Complimenting the two CDs is a 224-page hardback book containing the original liner notes, plus new essays, annotations and 60 images (most of which are published for the first time). Notable among the previously unreleased tracks are additional musical selections and personal narratives from one-string musician Moses Williams, four-shape-note Sacred Harp singing from an African American community in the Florida Panhandle, and recordings from the Richard Williams family in the blues and gospel-blues traditions. The reissue also includes new track notes from respected music scholars David Evans and Doris J. Dyen; reflective essays from past and present folklorists with the Florida Folklife Program, including Peggy A. Bulger, Dwight DeVane, Doris J. Dyen, and Blaine Waide; and an extensive essay on African American one-string instrument traditions by David Evans. This edition highlights the significance of the previously unreleased material. In addition, it calls attention to the importance of the original LP and makes it available once again, this time to a larger audience.
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DTD 025CD
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Using modern technology, Patrick Feaster is on a mission to resurrect long-vanished voices and sounds--many of which were never intended to be revived. Over the past thousand years, countless images have been created to depict sound in forms that theoretically could be "played" just as though they were modern sound recordings. Now, for the first time in history, this compilation uses innovative digital techniques to convert historic "pictures of sound" dating back as far as the Middle Ages directly into meaningful audio. It contains the world's oldest known "sound recordings" in the sense of sound vibrations automatically recorded out of the air -- the groundbreaking phonautograms recorded in Paris by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in the 1850s and 1860s -- as well as the oldest gramophone records available anywhere for listening today, including inventor Emile Berliner's recitation of "Der Handschuh," played back from an illustration in a magazine, which international news media proclaimed to be the oldest audible "record" in the tradition of 78s and vintage vinyl. Other highlights include the oldest known recording of identifiable words spoken in the English language (1878) and the world's oldest surviving "trick recording" (1889). But Pictures of Sound pursues the thread even further into the past than that by "playing" everything from medieval music manuscripts to historic telegrams, and from seventeenth-century barrel organ programs to eighteenth-century "notations" of Shakespearean recitation. In short, this isn't just another collection of historical audio--it redefines what "historical audio" is. The CD is packaged in a deluxe 144-page hardback book (10 x 8 inches) with 164 full-color images with gold-foil stamping on the cover and spine.
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CD
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DTD 023CD
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I Have My Liberty! Gospel Sounds From Accra, Ghana is an album of sounds and performances recorded live in 2008 from the churches of Ghana's capital city. This album is the missing link between American gospel records by artists like Rev. Johnny L. Jones and traditional African artists like those featured on Opika Pende: Africa At 78 RPM (DTD 022CD). Amid Accra's bustling sprawl of swirling dust and exhaust, are countless havens for homegrown musical expression: charismatic and spiritual Christian churches. There, distorted PA systems, anchored by female singers, and ramshackle guitars played by a rotating cast of local men weave in and out of popular melodies, bringing congregations to their feet. Singers emote in repeated phrases, lifted by tambourines, claps, and percussion, to unite their voices in praise and worship. I Have My Liberty! Gospel Sounds From Accra, Ghana takes listeners into these churches, where congregations join together to process the anxieties of their West African metropolis. Recorded and edited by Calpin Hoffman-Williamson, a Philadelphia-based producer and audio engineer.
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4CD/BOOK
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DTD 022CD
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2012 Grammy nominee for Best Historical Album. Opika Pende: Africa At 78 RPM is a 4CD collection featuring 100 tracks taken from rare 78rpm recordings of African music (1909 to mid-1960s), none of which have ever been issued on CD until now. Pan-African in scope and wildly diverse, Opika Pende is a testament to the deep riches found in early recorded music across the continent. 112-page softcover book with 4 CDs in a separate portfolio -- all housed in a deluxe cloth slipcase. Jonathan Ward is a Los Angeles-based collector, researcher, and writer. In 2007, he began the well-known web site Excavated Shellac, which features a wide range of scarce, international 78rpm records from across the globe with extensive commentary. In 2010, Jonathan released his first LP in a series for Dust-to-Digital's vinyl imprint Parlortone. Titled Excavated Shellac: Strings (PT 2001LP), it contains 14 exemplary performances on string instruments from across the globe, all from his collection of 78s.
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5CD BOX/BOOK
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DTD 021CD
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Subtitled: The Fonotone Years 1958-1965. 2012 repress now available! More than 10 years in the making, this box set features the earliest recordings and the first book ever written about one of the most influential guitarists from the 1960s and '70s, John Fahey. The five CDs feature 115 tracks, most of which are available on CD for the first time. The audio was remastered from Joe Bussard's reel-to-reel tapes to achieve pristine sound quality. As for the accompanying book, the list of scholars who contributed essays includes Eddie Dean, Claudio Guerrierri, Glenn Jones, Malcolm Kirton, Mike Stewart and John's childhood friend R. Anthony Lee. Byron Coley contributed a poem about John, and Douglas Blazek's 1967 interview with Fahey is published for the first time. Released 10 years after John Fahey's death, this set puts one of the final puzzle pieces of Fahey's career in place. Everyone can now hear where this guitar legend got his start -- a smoky basement in Frederick, Maryland. Co-produced by Dean Blackwood of Revenant, Glenn Jones, and Lance Ledbetter of Dust-to-Digital, this set is released with the support of Joe Bussard and the John Fahey Estate. The set is dedicated to John's mother, Jane C. Hayes and the late musician Jack Rose. Includes a 88-page hardcover book with 5 CDs in a separate gatefold portfolio -- all housed in a deluxe slipcase. Book measurements: 12 x 12 x 1.25 inches.
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DTD 020CD
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2012 reprint. Subtitled: Music In Vernacular Photographs, 1880-1955. I Listen To The Wind That Obliterates My Traces brings together a collection of early photographs related to music, a group of 78rpm recordings, and short excerpts from various literary sources that are contemporary with the sound and images. It is a somewhat intuitive gathering, culled from artist Steve Roden's collection of thousands of vernacular photographs related to music, sound, and listening. The subjects range from the PT Barnum-esque Professor McRea -- "Ontario's Musical Wonder" (pictured with his complex sculptural one-man band contraption) -- to anonymous African-American guitar players and images of early phonographs. The images range from professional portraits to ethereal, accidental, double exposures -- and include a range of photographic print processes, such as tintypes, ambrotypes, CDVS, cabinet cards, real photo postcards, albumen prints, and turn-of-the-century snapshots. The two CDs bring together a variety of recordings, including one-off amateur recordings, regular commercial releases, and early sound effects records. There is no narrative structure to the book, but the collision of literary quotes (Hamsun, Lagarkvist, Wordsworth, Nabokov, etc.). Recordings and images conspire towards a consistent mood that is anchored by the book's title, which binds such disparate things as an early recording of an American cowboy ballad, a poem by a Swedish Nobel Laureate, a recording of crickets created artificially, and an image of an itinerant anonymous woman sitting in a field, playing a guitar. The book also contains an essay by Roden. Hardback book, 8.5 x 6.5 inches, 184 pages, 150 photographs reproduced in full color and two audio CDs from the author's collection.
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DTD 019CD
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Subtitled: Vintage Songs & Photographs of the One Who's Always True. The newest release from the Dust-to-Digital holiday series, Never A Pal Like Mother celebrates the maternal theme with a hardback book containing 65 antique photographs and 40 recordings from 1927-1956 on two CDs. Compiled from such esteemed collectors as Joe Bussard, the recordings include songs by Louvin Brothers, William McCoy, Washington Phillips, Carter Family and more. The songs on the first disc describe mother's activities on earth: kindness, discipline, teaching and love. The second disc's songs involve coping with a mother's death and the emptiness it creates. The book features 65 antique photographs from such noted collectors as Sarah Bryan and Jim Linderman. Included is a foreward by Grammy-Award winning singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash and an essay by Sarah Bryan. "We can feel our American past here: how we lived, how hard we worked, how we were a nation of travelers and wanderers, how we held fast to our faith, how great our losses were, how quickly death came, and how often our mothers were the rock and the lighthouse, the home inside our hearts. These songs could never be written in the age of jet travel, therapy, delayed adolescence, the internet, nor could they survive current popular ideas of human psychology. They are pristine and deeply wrought sonic images, unfiltered through modern expectations, and are all the more refreshing and thrilling for being so. Those of us who treasure American roots music are listening to the very center of its essence in this anthology: a nearly century-old collection of songs about the most important person in the entire lexicon." --Rosanne Cash, from the introduction. Never A Pal Like Mother is elegantly presented in a 96-page hardback book (5.75"x8.5") with 2 CDs in front and back sleeves on the inside covers.
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