Take Me to the Water: Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography 1890-1950

"For most of his life, collector Jim Linderman has searched high and low for authentic things—unique and special objects that define the artistic culture of the American experience. From folk art to popular culture, from pulp fiction to Delta Blues— Jim is a walking authority on so many things American they are too numerous to mention. One thing is certain— his collecting interests are for things that have fallen through the cracks, those things lost and forgotten—the box of material under the table at the flea market booth. If it wasn’t for dedicated collectors like Jim Linderman— so many important objects about our culture would have surely been lost to time and indifference.

Take Me to the Water: Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography 1890-1950 is Linderman’s first book. The 96-page hardcover book (8.75 x 6 inches) has 75 sepia photograph reproductions from 1890-1950 and is accompanied by a CD of rare gospel and folk recordings from original 78-RPM records (1924-1940). It features recordings of artists like Washington Phillips, Carter Family, Tennessee Mountaineers, and lesser known and rare groups like the Belmont Silvertone Jubilee Singers, a vocal quartet in 1939. Included as well are rare vocal recordings of sermons and preaching which highlight the fervor leading up to the moment of cleansing one’s soul in immersion baptism." — John Foster, Accidental Mysteries

Audio Interviews about this Title

Listen to Lance Ledbetter and Art Rosenbaum discuss Take Me to the Water on WMLB.

Acknowledgments

Other Music: "Whether or not to baptize as adults or as infants is a theological argument well beyond the Other Music Update, but the transformation from one thing to another is the hallmark of all baptisms. It is this profoundly transformative experience that is the subject of the 75 photographs collected by Jim Linderman and compiled for this release by the incomparable (and Grammy winning) Dust-to-Digital label."

Aquapoetics: "[This wonderful presentation of photography along with a CD containing songs and sermons] reminds me that our relationship with water is a deeply emotional and spiritual one, and is expressed in many different contexts. The significance of water manifests itself differently in different religions and beliefs but it is perhaps the following two qualities of water that underlie its place in our cultures and faiths. Water cleanses. It not only purifies objects for ritual use, but can make a person clean, externally or spiritually, ready to come into the presence of his/her focus of worship. Without water there is no life, yet water has the power to destroy as well as to create. We are at the mercy of water just as we are at the mercy of our God or gods."