Cargo Records

• Dust to Digital

• Official Website >>
• Label rosta:
  • Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville,
  • Rev. Johnny L. Jones,

Dust to Digital

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Dust-to-Digital's mission is to produce high quality cultural artifacts, which combine rare, essential recordings with historic images and detailed texts describing the artists and their works.

Dust-to-Digital was started in February 1999 by Lance Ledbetter, a radio disc jockey at WRAS — the student-run voice of Georgia State University. Having been recently introduced to vintage 78 rpm records by the reissue of the Anthology of American Folk Music in 1997, Ledbetter decided to set out on a search for rare gospel recordings.

Four and a half years later, Goodbye, Babylon was released. The six CD box set was accompanied by a 200 page book and hand-packed with raw cotton in a wooden box. The response from music fans around the world was astounding, and Dust-to-Digital followed up the gospel set with Where Will You Be Christmas Day? in 2004. The record company was on its way.

Dust-to-Digital's mission is to produce high quality cultural artifacts, which combine rare, essential recordings with historic images and detailed texts describing the artists and their works.

Acknowledgments

"Dust-to-Digital is compiling CD collections of old roots music, cradled in elaborate, antiquarian-looking boxes crammed with charms and clothbound books of notes. These little mojo boxes have become the must-have fetish in hardcore blues and folk circles." — Candice Dyer, Georgia Trend

"Gold-standard reissue label... Although the folklorists lugging around tape recorders (and the performers carrying on ancient traditions) are worthy of much heralding, it's equally astounding how essential Lance Ledbetter's work at Dust-to-Digital has been to the preservation of traditional American folksong. It's easy to buy and appreciate these sets without realizing that the bulk of the material might have been lost — or, at the very least, tethered to archives, readily accessible only to curious faculty, paper-writing students, and bespectacled researchers — without Ledbetter's interference." — Amanda Petrusich, Pitchfork Media

"The Dust-to-Digital label is the latest of what can justifiably be called descendants of Harry Smith's work... Pop the CDs in the player, toss an extra log on the fire, and let this music from 80 years ago make you wiser and hipper." — David Greenberger, Metroland