News and Reviews

Take Me to the Water receives Grammy nomination for Best Historical Album
"Best Historical Album is a Grammy category that never attracts much attention, but the nominees are usually excellent. This year is no exception: Among them are the Little Walter Chess recordings and a Sophie Tucker collection from the folks at Champaign-Urbana’s great Archeophone label. The excellent Dust-to-Digital label is a regular presence among the nominees, and this year it’s up for a fascinating package called Take Me to the Water: Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography 1890-1950.

The 8.75" x 6" hardbound book includes a gorgeous collection of rare photos of riverside baptisms by both white and black congregations, taken from the collection of Jim Linderman; there’s also a terrific essay by Luc Sante. Accompanying the images is a wonderful CD featuring black gospel, blues, and old-timey country songs that touch on baptism—including tracks by ubiquitous preacher Reverend J.M. Gates, quirky gospel singer Washington Phillips (who also played a fretless zither he built himself and called a Dolceola), the Carter Family, and J.E. Mainer’s Mountaineers. I don’t really think that baptism songs comprise a truly important genre, but the practice itself is obviously a huge part of religious life, and immersion baptism is still practiced today in the U.S. So while this may seem like a rather esoteric subject for a Grammy bid, that doesn’t make the music (or the photos) any less compelling." — Peter Margasak, Chicago Reader


Lance Ledbetter: Founder, Dust-to-Digital named one of 50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World
Photograph by April Ledbetter
"Labors of peace, love, and justice are rarely recognized by our celebrity-obsessed media, and by extension most of us. Quiet resolve does not fill tents at the circus. Principle doesn’t make for a sexy photo. Selflessness, unless it is exhibited by heroes in the heat of a crisis, is often presented as weakness. Yet it is only the strongest among us who can stay true to a vision. This section is a tribute to that resolve. Here’s hoping it inspires your dreams." — Utne Reader


Brian Eno endorses Goodbye, Babylon
Photograph by Andrew Youssef
"Eno was mostly interested in talking about his general theories of art, but those of us attending the small press conference last Friday were treated to a rare insight into the contents of his iPod: 'I've been listening a lot lately to a box-set called Goodbye Babylon which is 6 CDs of early 20th-century American religious music, black and white music, you know. wood-box-cover.jpg ?It's got those Norfolk a cappella quartets and it's got country singers, and there's church services and everything. It's the best compilation I've seen for years. It comes with a fantastic book. I find that so intriguing that I just listen again and again.'" — Gustavo Turner, LA Weekly



Dust-to-Digital profiled in The New Yorker
Photograph by Sylvia Plachy
"Art Rosenbaum was a folk revivalist of the old school. He believed that traditional ballads, blues, spirituals, and fiddle tunes are among the glories of American culture, and he wanted to help preserve and disseminate them. Ledbetter, forty years younger, was less interested in preservation than in inspiration: the songs on Goodbye, Babylon had influenced artists as diverse as Bob Dylan and Arcade Fire. The best he could do for folk music, Ledbetter seemed to feel, was to research, remaster, and repackage it as beautifully as possible—to make the old songs seem new again.

Earlier that fall, Ledbetter’s label had released Art of Field Recording: Volume I, a four-CD retrospective of Rosenbaum’s work. It contained everything from ring shouts and murder ballads to a song about twenty frogs going to school. It was full of throaty voices and clanging banjos and the incidental music of daily life—babies crying, bar glasses clinking, cicadas on a summer night. A critic at the Times had called it “a gold mine, an ark . . . spooky and blindingly beautiful.” But now Rosenbaum and Ledbetter were gathering songs for the second volume, and wondering what they’d find. Fifty years after Rosenbaum’s first recordings, what was left of folk music?" — Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker

Click here to read the full article: "The Last Verse: Is there any folk music still out there?"