• The Appalachian Photographers Project features 18 photographers from the Southern Appalachian states.  Their work is a broad and varied view of the Appalachian South.  Our own Maury Gortemiller is represented.

• It’s a great month for music. Both Southern Cultures and Oxford American have produced Southern music issues and both are accompanied by CDs filled with gems.  “Well Whatever” by The Kingsbury Manx is currently at the top of my playlist.

But this sort of thing can be dangerous.  Or perhaps “hazardous” is the word I’m looking for.  Were it not so well done, The Queen Family could easily sway veer into parody (a la The Dancing Outlaw) or dime-store nostalgia for “a simpler time.”  The casual viewer (does this sort of thing have casual viewers?) could easily smirk at the dialect and reminiscences for a group of people whom the 21st century has yet to impact (the trailer [below] seems sadly geared toward that very demographic).  At hazard is a reinforcement of stereotypes, but the reward is something far more valuable — a snapshot of a family whose musical traditions are as deep as they are genuine.

• Oxford American dedicates some space to some particularly wonderful Southern cheese.  Sweet Home Farm in Elberta, Alabama is a particular favorite of our very own Arts Editor, Brannon.  She grew up just miles away in Daphne, but has yet to share any with me.

• I had a birthday recently (28 — keeping 30 steadily at bay), and a friend, knowing my predilection for that venerable Southern cocktail sent me this, along with an excellent bottle of bourbon.  I look forward to enjoying it this weekend.  Now, if only I could find a poem about the Old Fashioned (I enjoy mine with rye, however — is that heresy?)

• City Journal provides an excellent essay/encomium for the formidable Zora Neale Hurston. John McWhorter illuminates her unorthodox and challenging views on race and politics, and her unfortunate end in penury.  Well worth the read.

• Novel Sounds of the Nouveau South, the recent release from Missouri’s Ha Ha Tonka is raw, quaking, and really damn good.  Go take a listen.

• Hailing from Appalachian North Carolina, the Red Fox Chasers were made up of four neighbors. A.P. “Fonzie” Thompson and Bob Cranford grew up making music together in the early 1900’s, and learned the basics of harmony from shape note singing, also known as Fa So La or Sacred Harp. Guy Brooks grew up in a nearby county with Paul Miles, who learned to play the banjo at the age of 5 on a homemade instrument crafted from a meal sifter and a groundhog hide. “I’m Going Down to North Carolina – The Complete Recordings of the Red Fox Chasers [1928 - 1931]” will be released on August 18, by Tompkins Square Records. You can get a preview of it here.

• The Mississippi Museum of Art’s new exhibition entitled “Name Change: One Artist – Twelve Personas – Thirty-Five Years” displays the work of Hattiesburg-born artist Ed McGowin.  McGowin notably believed that his work did not fit neatly into the orderly pages of art history, which demand that an artist produce a coherent and linear body of work. To demonstrate his point, McGowin has legally changed his name twelve different times over the past thirty-five years, and has produced varying bodies of work under each name, before changing his name back to the one he was born with – William Edward McGowin.

• Photographer David Key’s “Howard and Herbert” series masterfully chronicles two aging brothers’ preparations for the afterlife.  It’s austere and honest without being heavy handed or morbid.  What he captures is a stark rural grace that’s well worth our attention. Their home and everything around it, including themselves, seems to be on the verge of collapsing back into the soil they worked for decades.

• If you don’t know Elizabeth Cotten, you should.  Born in North Carolina in 1895, “Libba” taught herself guitar and wrote a number of songs that have been endlessly covered.  Among them, “Shake Sugaree” and “Freight Train” are the most enduring.  Though she retired from making music for several decades, she was rediscovered when she became a housekeeper for the Seeger family (yes, the Seeger family) and made music until her death in 1987.

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.