Enjoy 50,000 old and rare American songs thanks to a new project
The project between UC Santa Barbara and the Dust-to-Digital Foundation will include tens of thousands of songs from private record collections. Robert Garrova reports.
Thousands of rare American songs spanning jazz, blues and gospel (some more than a century old) are now available for the public to enjoy online.
That is thanks to a collaboration between UC Santa Barbara and the non-profit organization Base from dust to digitalwhich digitized recordings from rare and old vinyl collections.
It’s work that Dust-to-Digital founder Lance Ledbetter has done since the late 1990s, going to private collections so the recordings can be accessible to everyone.
the inspiration
Ledbetter recalled the first time he visited the late Joe Bussard’s 30,000-record collection in his basement in Frederick, Maryland.
“It was just one great recording after another. And he was getting excited and we were getting excited. And it was fantastic,” Ledbetter recalled.
Bussard was something of the original box digger, sometimes even going door to door to build his arsenal. His collection included rarities such as “The California Desert Blues,” recorded by Lane Hardin in the 1930s.
Ledbetter said only a few of the records are known to exist.
“The record companies didn’t keep backup copies of a lot of that music from that era. They were all destroyed, almost all of them. And it’s all up to the record collectors. They’re the ones who saved the music from that era,” Ledbetter told LAist.
how it works
The collaboration between Ledbetter and the UC Santa Barbara library will bring about 50,000 songs, including many from Bussard’s collection, to the library. American Historical Recordings Discography (DAHR) database for everyone to enjoy. Around 5,000 songs are available now.
Superior to a random recording uploaded to YouTube with no information attached, the database includes data such as where and when the song was recorded, as well as lists of musicians and songwriters who worked on the songs.
“These recordings, especially like Lane Hardin’s, where there are two or three known copies, like a Van Gogh painting or something, could disappear in a private collection for the next 50 or 60 years and no one would be able to hear that copy again,” said David Suebert, curator of the UCSB Library’s Performing Arts Collection.
One might assume that the Library of Congress or other archives would already have some of these historic tunes, Suebert said. But they don’t have it all. And bringing these hard-to-find songs that span decades of historic American music to audiences is a source of pride for Suebert.
“This is the kind of thing that makes any librarian or archivist shine. The fact that people’s lives have been enriched by giving them free information,” he said.
For his part, Ledbetter said he hopes everyone, from musicians to academics, can really use and appreciate the archive. And maybe even feel a little of the excitement he felt listening to record after record and talking to collector Joe Bussard in his basement.
“You don’t smell the cigarette smoke, you don’t see the needle going into the record, but you can hear the exact same record,” Ledbetter said. “People should always be able to listen to these songs.”