“The clarity and sound speak for themselves,” Ledbetter said.
rare birds
Included in the partnership release are two songs by Tennessee-born blues guitarist and singer Lane Hardin, who recorded “Hard Time Blues” and “California Desert Blues.” The songs, considered classics of the genre, appear on both sides of a 10-inch 78 rpm record released by Bluebird Records in 1936. Only a handful of copies are known to exist.
Also in the archive are recordings by guitarist and singer Memphis Minnie, singer and stage actress Eva Taylor, Reverend JM Gates and country music pioneer Fiddlin’ John Carson and his daughter, Rosa Lee Carson (popularly known as Moonshine Kate), who became an established solo artist and an innovative female performer in the genre.
“We felt it was important to get this music out there in some way,” April Ledbetter said. “DAHR is a great home for music that doesn’t necessarily have a commercial market but is no less valuable to history.”
bar and points
As the Ledbetters remember, they first crossed paths with Seubert decades ago at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. In 2006, they learned that the Seubert Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project was being “dotted,” a term that describes when a website crashes or receives a sudden, debilitating spike in traffic after being mentioned in an article on Slashdot, a popular news site at the time.
“We were aware of what David was doing with digitalization,” Lance recalls. “I had been working for years to put wax cylinder recordings online through a public institution; that was definitely on our radar.”
While the newly uploaded DAHR recordings come from various collectors, including Roger Misiewicz, Frank Mare, and Kentucky-born folk artist Nathan Salsburg, the bulk belonged to Joe Bussard.
The saint of ’78
Bussard grew up in Frederick, Maryland, dancing as a child alongside the Victrola family and exchanging records with neighbors and friends. His early favorites were Gene Autry and Jimmie Rodgers, and his search for more of their music launched his 75-year obsession with record collecting.
Beyond the outskirts of Frederick and into the coal camps of Virginia and further south, Bussard purchased 78 calibers at rural general stores. Knocking from door to door, he loaded his trunk with boxes and crates unloaded by families happy to part with their dusty collections for some quick cash.
Increasingly, Bussard’s collection grew to include pioneering country string bands, jazz, bluegrass, Cajun and gospel, many of the musical seeds from which the popular songs of his beloved Jimmie Rodgers and the Singing Cowboy emerged.
In “Joe Bussard: King of Record Collectors,” a 30-minute documentary produced by Dust-to-Digital in 2005, he is portrayed as an archivist providing an invaluable cultural service; His ever-growing collection preserves musical snapshots of traditional and often highly localized American music of the 1920s and 1930s. The era featured diverse musical dialects that existed only in small regions, sometimes even in a few contiguous rural counties. Musicians and historians point out that if it were not for the obsessive collecting of Bussard and others, much of this music would have disappeared. When Bussard died in 2022, he left his family approximately 15,000 records, the rarest of which could cost hardcore collectors several thousand dollars.
“Joe had an exceptional collection that was built at a time when you could really build something like this,” Seubert said. “You can’t do that anymore. Even if you are fabulously rich, you could never end up with a collection that big and that good.”
Bussard wanted people to enjoy this music, Seubert added. “But you can’t create a culture of enjoyment if everyone is locked in archives, you know? There was a dichotomy between the collection being so good that it should be in a museum. But Joe didn’t want that. So Dust-to-Digital and UCSB have threaded that needle, making the music accessible to the public for free.”