Reviving the Field Recording
By STEVE DOLLAR <http://www.nysun.com/authors/Steve+Dollar>
December 18, 2007
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
It was Saturday morning, and Art Rosenbaum
<http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=Art+Rosenbaum> was
getting ready to do what he often does on weekends: go rambling along
the country roads of North Georgia to visit an elderly blues singer. He
had a pair of microphones and a Tascam flash digital recorder to capture
what the performer, 91-year-old Cora Mae Bryant, might play. And he had
a trusty sidekick, Lance Ledbetter
<http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=Lance+Ledbetter>, the
young founder of the Atlanta-based Dust-to-Digital record label, at his
side.
"Things are moving so fast these days," Mr. Rosenbaum said. "People are
looking for some continuity with region and culture. But they also want
to get some strong, expressive art. People don't look at Rembrandt in
the museum or listen to Mozart just because they want to know what
people felt like back then. They want something that also works in the
present tense."
Mr. Rosenbaum, 69, a painter who retired in 2006 after teaching art for
30 years at the University of Georgia
<http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=University+of+Georgia> in
Athens, and Mr. Ledbetter, 31, have kept steady company during the past
two years. The latter, whom you might call an indie entrepreneur,
specializes in archival boxed sets of vintage Americana — the kind of
crackly, analog testimonies that Harry Smith made totemic in the 1950s
and '60s with his "Anthology of American Folk Music." Remarkably, half a
century later, a market remains for these anthologies of essentially
American music. Mr. Ledbetter spent nearly five years assembling his
first project, "Goodbye, Babylon
<http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=Babylon>," a six-disc,
decades-spanning set compiled from 78-rpm recordings of raw gospel tunes
and sermons from both sides of the color line. The package was nominated
for a 2003 Grammy Award.
That success spawned several subsequent releases, mostly drawn from the
collections of such homespun cultural historians as Maryland's Joe
Bussard <http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=Joe+Bussard>. A
major contributor to the "Babylon" set, Mr. Bussard's stacks of 78
recordings, made for his own custom Fonotone label in the 1950s and
'60s, got the deluxe treatment in a 2005 boxed set. By then, Mr.
Ledbetter was looking for new collaborators, which was how he met Mr.
Rosenbaum, a fellow old-time music obsessive who had begun making his
own recordings in 1956 after hearing Pete Seeger while an undergraduate
at Columbia University.
Mr. Rosenbaum's endeavors are given their affectionate due in a new
collection on the Dust-to-Digital label that is surely one of the best
releases of the year, both for the music to be heard and for the history
to be learned and applied to the music that's been made since. "Art of
Field Recording Volume I" is a four-disc set that details a half-century
of blues, gospel, mountain ballads, and banjo and fiddle tunes. The
music was documented on travels ranging from New Hampshire to Indiana to
the southern states, which have always been a fertile source of
vigorous, unrefined American sounds. Each song — whether it features the
fabled mandolin player Yank Rachel, the Midwestern fiddle-banjo team of
Frosty Lamb and Buzz Fountain, or Deacon Tommy Tookes and the
congregation of the Pilgrim's Rest Primitive Baptist Church — was
cherry-picked from one of the countless reels of three-quarter-inch tape
and more recent digital sources, many of them archived at the University
of Georgia.
The project is distinguished in several ways, including Mr. Rosenbaum's
warm, anecdotal commentaries, printed in a 96-page booklet that is
illustrated with his wife Margo's photography and his paintings of the
musicians; the impressive geographic range of his travels, which tap
Midwestern sources not usually heard in such anthologies, and a focus on
players, many from the professor's backyard, who are more or less
contemporary and not well-known.
"Part of the reason so many musicians were recorded in Mississippi was
the Delta's proximity to Memphis," Mr. Rosenbaum said. "The recording
companies also had a lot of contacts along the Piedmont corridor [in
North Carolina]."
Legendary folklorists such as Alan Lomax ignored large areas of the
country — like, say, Nebraska. In the early 1960s, Mr. Rosenbaum made
the historically significant acquaintance of blues guitarist Scrapper
Blackwell, obscure since the mid-1930s, who was living in Indianapolis.
He made recordings (which are featured on the new set) that fired the
curiosity of a young Bob Dylan, who was then playing at one of Mr.
Rosenbaum's frequent Greenwich Village haunts, Gerde's Folk City. But
his first effort at field recording was a group of Mexican migrant
workers he met outside a general store in Michigan. They sang a
"corrida" about Pancho Villa and a 30-30 Winchester — not exactly the
hellhound-haunted crossroads of rural blues lore.
The folk revival of the early 1960s, a time when Mr. Rosenbaum counted
future Smithsonian Institution
<http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=Smithsonian+Institution>
curator Ralph Rinzler and New Lost City Ramblers co-founder John Cohen
as friends, has seen sequels through the decades. The alternative
country movement of the 1990s helped to revive interest in Appalachian
ballads, gospel singing, family groups, and bluegrass. More recently,
indie-rock avatars like the White Stripes have worn such affections on
their sequined sleeves. Where once institutional outlets such as
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings dominated the market, independent labels
such as Revenant, Old Hat, CaseQuarter, and Mr. Ledbetter's
Dust-to-Digital have introduced a new generation of would-be Harry
Smiths to the scene. Archival sets such as the new "People Take Warning!
Murder Ballad and Disaster Songs, 1913–1938," from the New York-based
Tompkins Square label, lend fresh ears to well-traveled sagas of
catastrophe (by Charlie Patton, Uncle Dave Macon, Son House, Furry
Lewis, and others). As with similar projects, baby boomers who lament
their lost LP collections in an iPod era are targeted by smart package
design that adds collectible value to their purchase.
"I think the people who purchase our releases are either fans of
old-time music or 'adventurous listeners,'" Mr. Ledbetter said. "The
old-time music fan believes that traditional-style music made years ago
remains the purest form, while the adventurous listener is someone who
is constantly looking for sounds that are new to them. The job of our
label is to make the music as accessible as possible, which is why we
deem the packaging and liner notes invaluable."
Mr. Ledbetter is serious about making the experience as tangible as
possible. Purchasers of his "Babylon" set, for instance, can slide open
a hand crafted pine box to find CD sleeves cushioned by puffy balls of
raw cotton. Even with a second box set of his recordings due for release
next year, Mr. Rosenbaum was busy adding to the archives. After decades
of chasing singers and their songs, he was enthusiastic about someone he
had just gotten to know. "He's a 96-year-old black minister who used to
sing with Mahalia Jackson," he said. "And he lives right down the street."
_______________________________________________
Tnd mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://mallard.tomanddarryl.org/mailman/listinfo/tnd
Did you miss a message? Well, don't.
http://www.mail-archive.com/talk2%40andrelouis.com/
has it for you. Never miss a Talk2 message again.
