★Dust-To-Digital
Ain't No Grave: The Life and Legacy of Brother Claude Ely (Book + CD)
** 2024 Stock **360-page hardback biography with CD, includes 290 sepia photographs
CD features rare and electrifying audio recordings of Pentecostal worship services in the mountains of Kentucky and Virginia accompanied by a fiery sermon preached by Brother Claude Ely.Penned by Macel Ely II, Ain’t No Grave: The Life and Legacy of Brother Claude Ely is written as an oral, biographical history taken from the recorded interviews of more than 1,000 people in the Appalachian Mountains who knew Broth…
Bolinus Brandaris: Flamenco from the Bay of Cadiz
Bolinus Brandaris takes the listener to the Bay of Cadiz, which is often referred to as "cuna del cante" ("cradle of song"). This southernmost part of mainland Spain is considered the birthplace and heartland of flamenco, where many song styles originated then radiated out through the rest of Andalusia. Expertly recorded with modern technology in informal and natural environments, this is flamenco culture as it is being lived today. Generally speaking, modern flamenco recordings have often misse…
Excavated Shellac: An Alternate History Of The World's Music
100 recordings on 4 CDs; 184-page hardcover book printed on artbook-quality paper; Packaged in a deluxe gloss-laminated box. It begins with a South African choir from 1930 and a song about police brutality; it ends in Cuba with dreamy innuendo. This collection is about music that is often invisible in today's world, the incredible world of global recordings that aren't jazz, blues, country, rock n' roll, R&B, or "classical." This physical edition of the box set, eight years in the making, conta…
Rawhead & Bloodybones
The third in composer and artist Brian Harnetty's series of recording projects stemming from the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives, Rawhead & Bloodybones combines samples of music and folk tales with live instruments. The historic archival recordings of children recounting folk tales were made by Leonard Roberts in the 1940s and '50s. The combination of the children's youthful voices and the often gruesome stories they tell offers a striking and dramatic contrast. These recordings, along …
The Harry Smith B-Sides
**81 newly-remastered recordings on four CDs with a full-color, 144-page, cork-cover book in a cigar-style box. ** The Harry Smith B-Sides box set contains the flip side of every 78-rpm record that Harry Smith included on the Anthology of American Folk Music. In 1952, Folkways Records published the legendary six-LP series entitled the Anthology of American Folk Music, compiled by eccentric record collector, filmmaker, artist, and anthropologist Harry Smith. Many historians cite Smith's reissue, …
Voices of Mississippi
This watershed release represents the life's work of William Ferris, an audio recordist, filmmaker, folklorist, and teacher with an unwavering commitment to establish and to expand the study of the American South. William Ferris was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi in 1942. Growing up on a working farm, Ferris began at a young age documenting the artwork, music, and lives of the people on the farm and in his local community. The archive of recordings that he created and the documentary films that …
The Early Films of William Ferris 1968-75
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, folklorist William Ferris toured his home state of Mississippi, documenting the voices of African Americans as they spoke about and performed the diverse musical traditions that form the roots of the blues. This DVD features seven films made by Ferris between 1968 and 1975. In addition to being a groundbreaking documentarian of the American South, Ferris is Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History and senior associate director of the Center for the Study of…
Washington Phillips and His Manzarene Dreams
Dust-to-Digital's inaugural release, 2003's Goodbye, Babylon (DTD 001CD), included two recordings by a mysterious gospel musician from Texas named Washington Phillips, who died in 1954. After fielding inquiries about the hauntingly beautiful songs from listeners around the world, in 2013, Dust-to-Digital checked in with Michael Corcoran, the leading researcher on Phillips, to see if any new information had been uncovered. Indeed, Michael had some leads, but he would need a working budget t…
Ola Belle Reed and Southern Mountain Music on the Mason-Dixon Li
FOla Belle Reed and Southern Mountain Music on the Mason-Dixon Line is the first in-depth look at the life of Ola Belle Reed, a groundbreaking artist and one of the all-time greatest performers of authentic, old-time music. Born to a musical family in the mountains of Ashe County, North Carolina, in 1913, Reed became a prolific songwriter and performer, known for her unique style of banjo playing and singing. Reed inspired many musicians throughout her life, eventually becoming one of the …
Joe Bussard Presents: The Year of Jubilo - 78 RPM Recordings of
Legendary collector Joe Bussard is putting records out once again! After running the last 78-RPM label in the US (RIP Fonotone Records, 1956-1974), Bussard had relegated his efforts to promoting old-time music by making cassette tapes for people hungry to hear his rare treasures and producing his Country Classics radio show for stations in Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia. But in 2014, Bussard and his daughter Susannah Anderson had the idea to produce a compilation of Civil …
Music of Morocco: Recorded by Paul Bowles, 1959
**in restock** Silkscreened cigar box with foil stamping details throughout, 120-page leatherette book, and four CDs containing 4 hours and 30 minutes of audio. Includes introduction by Lee Ranaldo, field notes by Paul Bowles, and annotations by Philip Schuyler. From July to December 1959, Paul Bowles crisscrossed Morocco making recordings of traditional music under the auspices of the Library of Congress. Although the trip occupied less than six months in a long and busy career, it was the culm…
Appalachian Visionary
Hardcover 84-page book with CD and streaming/download code. Born blind on June 15, 1880, in Floyd County, Virginia, Alfred Reed grew up on a West Virginia farm. In the 1920s, when radio became available in his area, Alfred listened to and enjoyed performances by several of the era's popular singers. Alfred would purchase songbooks and hymnbooks, and his wife Nettie would read the lyrics to him. Because the songs he learned from others did not always express aspects of what he was thinking, …
Excavated Shellac: Strings
Mesmerizing performances from the four corners of the world played on stringed instruments and recorded and released 78-RPM records circa 1920-1950. Featuring fiddles, shamisen, charango, Paraguyan harp, Indian vina, Lebanese oud, Persian violin, Vietnamese moon guitar, and more. All previously unreleased on CD, with three bonus tracks not available on the now-out-of-print 2010 LP. All records have been carefully transferred and mastered and are presented in a digipak with a 20-page booklet feat…
No More Good Time In The World For Me
In 1965 and 1966 Bruce Jackson visited Ramsey State Farm in Rosharon, Texas, where he recorded the remarkable epic songs of Johnnie B. Smith, a prisoner-composer doing a 45-year bid for the murder of his wife. Three of the recordings included on this two-disc set appeared onEver Since I Have Been A Man Full Grown, an LP produced by John Fahey's Takoma Records in 1965. The other 15 -- traditional work songs and J.B.'s original pieces -- are issued for the first time. Folklorist Bruce Jackson was …
The Birth Of Rock And Roll
"Collector and Americana yay-sayer Jim Linderman is an archivist of the obscure. His collections tell vast stories in sotto voce, allowing curios and objects shadowed by mainstream culture and ideology to converse and be heard. What we hear is an enormous American sub-culture speaking in forbidden, marginalized languages: stuff discovered boxed in the attic out of embarrassment or zealotry, smutty ash trays crowing next to religious pamphlets, each claiming a part of the complex, sometimes contr…
Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Mi
Folksongs of Another America is a compilation of field recordings made in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin between 1937 and 1946. Armed with bulky microphones, blank disks, spare needles, and cumbersome disc-cutting machines, several folklorists had the foresight to document and preserve a significant but overlooked part of the nation's musical heritage, made by immigrant, Native American, rural, and working-class performers. Almost all of these restored dance tunes, ballads, lyric song…
Lead Kindly Light: Pre-War Music and Photographs from the Americ
What happens when a 78 collector marries a collector of antique photographs? Lead Kindly Light: recordings of rural Southern music: old time, string band music from Appalachia, extremely rare country blues and African American gospel singing from 1924-1939. A portrait of the rural American South between the dawn of the twentieth century and World War II, Lead Kindly Light brings together two CDs of traditional music from early phonograph records and a fine hardcover book of never-before-pu…
Parchman Farm: Photographs and Field Recordings, 1947-1959
In 1947, '48 and '59, renowned folklorist Alan Lomax went behind the barbed wire into the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. Armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck -- and, in 1959, a camera -- Lomax documented as best an outsider could the stark and savage conditions of the prison farm, where the black inmates labored "from can't to can't," chopping timber, clearing ground, and picking cotton for the state. They sang as they worked, keeping time with axes or hoes, adapting to their …
Arkansas at 78 RPM: Corn Dodgers & Hoss Hair Pullers
For the traveling recording men of the late 1920s, Arkansas offered enticing pickings. The region was thronged with vigorous, idiosyncratic string bands. This album carries the listener from the hillbilly music craze of the '20s to the song-based country music of the late '30s. Scarcely more than a decade, but a period, in music as in all American life, of galvanic change. This CD serves as the soundtrack album to the newly-released photograph book, Making Pictures: Three for a Dime by Ma…
Making Pictures: Three for a Dime
In the 1930s, the Massengill family of rural Arkansas built three portable photography studios on old truck frames, attached each to the back of any car that would run, and started a mobile photo booth business that would last for a decade. Without formal training or help, the Massengill family invented and improvised ways to mimic the popular photo booths they had seen in drug stores and brought their business to the dirt roads and open fields they knew well. Making Pictures: Three for a …