Yellowhammer Press:  How did your experience in college radio and your familiarity with the Anthology of American Folk Music turn into Goodbye, Babylon?

Lance Ledbetter: A friend of mine did a show on our college radio station called The Roots of American music.  When he graduated, he didn’t even bother asking anyone to take over, but I volunteered.  All I had at the time was the Anthology of American Folk Music [a formidable 6-disk anthology compiled by Harry Smith], and I coasted for a while on that.  But at a certain point, I began to look around for more.  In the vintage record stores, picking up the old 78s.  I found a lot of old jazz and blues, but I rarely found gospel.

YHP: So, this grew out of your personal collection?

LL: Initially, yes.  I reached out to other re-release labels and just asked how they did it.  One person who was instrumental was Joe Bussard [subject of the amazing documentary Desperate Man Blues].  He used to send me cassette tapes, and my collection just grew and grew and as I felt like I was becoming intimately familiar with these artists.  These were singers who had poured their souls out onto these old 78s, and had never really had the label support or production treatment they deserved.

So when I decided to release Goodbye, Babylon, I wanted to really honor their memory.  I wanted the packaging to be really exceptional, and I wanted each artist to get equal billing.

YHP: Were you worried about covering a lot of the same ground as the Anthology?

LL: No, for me it was less about some sort of completeness than it was about that reverence for these artists.  I wanted to produce something lasting for them.  I wasn’t really worried about the Anthology.

YHP: Were you worried about hipsterism?  That the revival of this sort of thing would be trendy or really just land among a crowd that didn’t take it as seriously as you do?

LL: To me, the 1997 re-release of the Anthology was a touchstone event for a generation of people to get interested in early American music.  I look back at the [original] 1952 release as being incredibly similar.  The people who were hearing that and becoming interested, Joan Baez, etc. – that impact is still being felt.

A lot of the people I know who are starting Old Time bands or doing Sacred Harp singing are in their 30s or 40s.  These are people who have been up to the festivals in Galax [VA] etc and were shocked at how many outsiders – how many non-Southerners were singing this music.  It kind of lit a fire under them to come home and bring attention to this sort of music.  So no, I really wasn’t worried about hipsterism or trendiness.

YHP: You’re putting out music that a lot of people have never heard or heard of. Old songs that may just be a farmer with a banjo singing a song he’s heard his whole life could come off to certain listeners as hokey or as a novelty, but Dust-to-Digital has deftly avoided any sort of hokiness.  How?

LL: I grew up immersed in indie rock and that whole scene.  I always made a connection with certain labels and quality music, and certain labels had a specific aesthetic that was easily identifiable, even territorial.  We’re doing the same thing, really.  It’s just what we do as a means to pay homage to these artists who never got a real treatment on their releases.  The power of the music compelled me to put it on a pedestal.

YHP: Obviously, we’re primarily concerned with Southern arts and culture.  So much of your output is Southern in nature, but nothing about your label is explicitly Southern.

LL: Right.  The things we found were those most readily available around us.  The musicologists and others who study this music, this is just our region, both geographically as well as where our interests primarily lay.  If we were elsewhere, I think our output would be very different.

YHP: Dust to Digital just released Take Me to the Water!, a book of baptism photographs with an accompanying CD.  This is something of a departure from what you usually put out.  Will there be more of this in the future?

LL: We’re 6 years in, and I think we’re constantly refining and learning and trying to make improvements.  We’re getting to a point where we can manage more projects at once.  We’ve been getting ready to release on vinyl, as well as doing more books, etc.

YHP: One last question – do you have a “Must List” – a suggested reading and listening list for people just getting into this music?

LL: [Laughs] Let me look at my bookshelf.  Here are a few books I would suggest, in no particular order:

Country Music Originals, Linthead Stomp, Saints and Sinners, Country Music USA, Lost Delta Sound, and A Cajun Music Reader.

As far as listening:

Obviously, The Anthology of American Folk Music, Alan Lomax’s Southern Journey, The Music of Kentucky on Yazoo, Goodbye Babylon, The Art of Field Recording, and the Charlie Patton box set on Revenant.

YHP: This has been really great, Lance.  Thanks so much.

LL: Anytime!

One question I could kick myself for not asking: How does he respond/react to the use of the word “primitive” in describing this music?  Bah.  Maybe next time.

When I was a child, my grandfather sang me odd, halting songs, seemingly atonal and operating within a structure I could scarcely remember, let alone master. Lyrically they were very simple and very much about the Crucifixion and its attendant imagery.  The lyrics were preceded by syllables more akin to shouts than notes, and though I had no idea what he was trying to teach me, I was completely fascinated by the performance.

He called it “Fa So La,” so named for the musical syllables sang before the lyrics began.  This was done so that members of the congregation could get an idea of the melody before the lyrics began on the second time through.  Later, I learned that this was called “Shape Note Singing” or, more commonly, “Sacred Harp,” so named for the song book in which the music was found (my mother has my grandfather’s tattered copy, an heirloom from the late 1880s — multiple attempts to smuggle it out of the house during holiday visits have failed).

Sacred Harp, such as it is, is a dying thing.  Even when my grandfather was a child in the 1920s, it was falling out of fashion, in favor of more structured congregational singing.  It was viewed as backward and rustic by many, even crude and unsavory by others.  What it ultimately was was an utterly unique form of music, complete with a historical pedigree dating back to the 17th century and producing a wall of wailing, shack-shaking noise that still reverberates through the piney North Alabama foothills where I was born.

Anthropological context aside, Sacred Harp, when performed correctly, is a wonder to behold.  Matt and Erica Hinton, Georgia natives and Emory grads, have produced what is easily the definitive documentary on the subject.  Awake, My Soul! is marvelous, and it makes me indescribably homesick.  The trailer is something to behold, but the music itself can’t be missed.  Once on the film’s website, the song “Idumea” will begin to play automatically, and they could hardly have chosen a better introduction to the art form.

What’s ultimately reflected in Awake, My Soul! is both defiance and deference.  At best, mainstream America (what few who are aware) will look at these singers as a curiosity; at worst, they will be painted broadly as rustics and unschooled zealots tucked away in remote corners of the South.  They are accustomed to both and are bothered by neither.  They venerate their dying art where they may, and I suspect you are welcome to join.

Take Me to the Water from Dust-to-Digital on Vimeo.

Take Me to the Water is, above all else, a book about spectatorship. Largely without text, the photographs are without any sort of context and are in no certain order. After all, you’re looking at photos that, as collector Jim Linderman says, were “found in flea markets, auctions, antique shows, and such.” That the baptismal participants, each undergoing a potentially life-altering event, are nameless and without history can make the book frustrating. The baptisms in Take Me to Water are dynamic things, full of characters and action, and seem hardly content to be confined to a static photograph. These were people who believed actively, whose religious faith was inextricably tied to the land they lived on, and whose belief spilled out of the primitive wooden-frame buildings in which they likely worshiped into the land around them.

The lookers-on, present in almost all the photographs in numbers ranging from twos and threes to seemingly hundreds, are engaging in a sort of voyeurism — they are watching the baptismal candidates experience a formative moment in their lives, one that many recall as equal to marriage or the birth of a child.

But they’re not just watching — there’s an air of solemnity, almost as though the spectators are supervising this ritual. After all, being baptized in the old Protestant tradition is often accompanied by the act of formally “joining” a church, the moment where an individual signs a document and the members hold a vote on whether to accept said individual into their church (these votes are almost always merely symbolic). The lookers-on in this case are witnessing the induction of a new member into their community, and if the crowd size is any indication, the communities range from tiny backwoods churches to large urban congregations.

Luc Sante’s essay, one of only two sizable pieces of text in the book, centers around his own voyeurism of the baptismal moment. As what a friend of mine refers to as a “casual Catholic,” Sante seems to feel cheated that he didn’t get to participate in such a baptism, and laments that his own took place at an age before he could really remember it. He offers, in the simplest of terms, a brief explanation of what exactly a baptism is, as though the reader is primarily curious as to why all these people wanted to get their clothes all wet.

The accompanying CD, along with Lance Ledbetter’s notes on each track, is a real treasure. If you’re familiar with Ledbetter’s Athens-based label Dust to Digital, you’ll probably recognize several of the artists like Washington Phillips and his odd homemade harp. The CD works as a kind of soundtrack to the book itself, but it’s also a good introduction to early recording and American primitive music (I know, I know — the term rankles). Ledbetter’s first work and certainly his masterpiece so far, Goodbye Babylon, explores this music in exhaustive detail and is well worth the $100 price tag (it’s hand packed in a cedar box with raw Georgia cotton — sometimes I take it out just to smell it).

Take Me to the Water is wonderfully primitive and jagged. The photos are mostly amateurish, the participants mostly rough and rural, and the book itself is without order or context. (Linderman does, however, try to offer clues where available — the back of one photo reads: “Baptism at Rockville, W.VA;” another: “Baptising in the Schoharie River near Sloansville, 1917″). It’s a frustrating thing, but invaluable as a collection of moments from America’s rural past. You can find it here.