America's Upper Midwest is a distinctive region where many indigenous and immigrant peoples have maintained, merged, and modified their folk song traditions for more than two centuries. In the 1930s and 1940s, Sidney Robertson, Alan Lomax, and Helene Stratman-Thomas—with support from the Library of Congress and armed with bulky microphones, blank disks, spare needles, and cumbersome disk-cutting machines—recorded roughly 2,000 songs and tunes throughout Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Spanning dance tunes, ballads, lyric songs, hymns, laments, versified taunts, political anthems, street cries, and recitations, these field recordings—made by people born before or shortly after 1900—were captured at a transformative moment when America was in the throes of the Great Depression, World War II was erupting, and market-driven mass entertainment media were expanding rapidly. Yet, except for a handful of Anglo-American performances, these remarkable field recordings in more than twenty-five languages have remained largely unknown, along with the lives of their mostly immigrant, indigenous, rural, and working-class performers. Since the 1970s, folklorist James P. Leary has worked steadily to bring the folk music of the Upper Midwest to a larger public. Folksongs of Another America presents 187 representative performances by more than 200 singers and musicians, carefully restored in digital form from deteriorating original formats. The accompanying book provides an introduction, full texts of all lyrics in the original languages and in English translation, extensive notes about each song and tune, biographical sketches and photographs of many of the performers, and details about Robertson, Lomax, and Stratman-Thomas and their fieldwork efforts as song collectors. These restored performances reveal with clarity and power a nearly lost sonic portrait of another America. Winner, Best Historical Research in Folk or World Music, Association for Recorded Sound Collections Honorable mention, Wayland Hand Prize for Folklore and History, American Folklore Society Runner-up, History, Midwest Book Awards “A treasure. . . . Leary's deep knowledge of the subject matter is demonstrated by thought-provoking facts placing the dance tunes, ballads, lyrics songs, hymns, political anthems, and more in historical context.”—Book Verdict, Library Journal “An amazing ‘bible’ . . . A magnificent boxed set of Midwestern music.”—Surface Noise, WFMU Radio, New York, NY “The best set of folklore documents that I have heard in a long time. It is a truly amazing production. If it does not win an award for the best reissue set of 2015, then I really will eat my hat!”—Musical Traditions, UK “Most celebrated field recordings of American folk music are documents of the rural South, but this absorbing collection makes the case for a different milieu entirely. . . . A mind-boggling swath of material.”—New York Times, Holiday Gift Guide "Amazing. . . . The end-all book on folk music of the Midwest."—Finnish American Reporter “This monumental effort will have an audience among students and fans of traditional music. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.”—Choice “So comprehensively detailed and thoroughly vetted that it would be hard to see where one would have a complaint about this magnificent volume. . . . It should serve as a standard text for understanding folklore in this region and a proud example of how best to package the surviving output of field trips. It outstrips most of its predecessors by virtue of its offering text, sound, images and moving images; Folksongs of Another America is a model of its kind."—ARSC Journal, Association for Recorded Sound Collections “Attains the highest standards of folklore studies. . . . A landmark presentation of traditional music of the Upper Midwest.”—Journal of Folklore Research “Grammy nod for the polka prof: Leary has spent the last ten years . . . on [this] enormous, Grammy worthy undertaking.”—Isthmus, Madison WI “Every track here, all 188 of them, is explored in ocean-depth, including translations of lyrics, stories of and from the performers, details of the various ethnic groups. . . . The wealth of goods here is staggering, and I suspect that, for many listening to even a single disc’s worth of this collection, the United States just got bigger.”—The Old-Time Herald “No other American book provides as rich a portrait of a distinct multilingual songscape than this one. . . . A magnificent achievement and tribute to the ethnic diversity that continues to shape American expressive culture, so welcome at a time when immigration and language issues persist in the news and political rhetoric.”—American Studies “What James P. Leary has accomplished is breathtaking. . . . Folksongs of Another America demonstrates research and scholarship of the highest quality that paints a complex and evocative picture of racial and ethnic elements too long disregarded in the study of American music.”—Minnesota History

Folksongs Of Another America: Field Recordings From The Upper Midwest, 1937-1946

Dust-to-Digital

A staple of the 1920s parlor-room, the Victrola was a wind-up gramophone designed to play 78-rpm shellac records. Victrolas were hard on 78s: “each plays slightly different than the last as the needle bites deeper into the groove,” says Robert Millis, co-compiler of this seductive homage to both the Victrola and the 78. With Victrola Favorites, Millis and Jeffery Taylor, both musicians (in the band Climax Golden Twins) and collectors, aim to recreate the Victrola listening experience―clicks, pops, hums and all. “The surface noise as the records played was engulfing and warm,” writes Millis; “You could walk into it.” With the rise of the phonograph came a fascinating print culture of logos, slogans, hand lettering, mailing labels, postcards and ephemera, and Victrola Favorites reproduces a hefty sampling of these colorful gems of design along with two CDs of recordings made between 1920 and 1950. These CDs are packed with what you could call aural “bugs in amber”: Chinese Buddhist nuns chanting circa 1915, Japanese bamboo xylophones circa 1910, London traffic noises circa 1929, Burmese guitars, Chinese opera, Persian folk songs, Fado, hillbilly and lost stars of jazz and blues such as The Tennessee Ramblers, Slim Lamar's Orchestra, Jessie May Hill and many, many others. Richly illustrated throughout, Victrola Favorites is an already widely acclaimed secret history of ancient objects that digs all the way down into the history of recorded music.

Victrola Favorites: Artifacts from Bygone Days

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Making the past vividly present once again, Grammy winner Dust-to-Digital unveils Take Me to the Water, a revelatory examination of baptismal rites and music. Comprising a beautiful hardcover book and a CD featuring rare, vintage songs and sermons recorded between 1924-1940, Take Me to the Water draws on the collection of Jim Linderman, a scholar of American outsider art, early American folk art and daguerreotype photography. It reproduces 75 sepia photographs that depict amazing scenes of immersion baptisms-the likes of which are rarely seen today-with preacher and baptismal candidates shown immersed in the middle of the river, while the congregation looks on from the riverbank. The CD compiles rare gospel and folk recordings from original 78-rpm records, with artists such as Washington Phillips, Carter Family, Tennessee Mountaineers, the Belmont Silvertone Jubilee Singers and rare vocal recordings of baptismal sermons. Renowned writer Luc Sante provides a history of baptismal rites in America, and writes of this volume: "Whether you have ever actually experienced a baptism or not, whether you are a believer or not, these pictures and the music that accompanies them transmit all the emotional information: the excitement and the serenity, the fellowship and the warmth, the wind and the water you would have to have a heart of tin not to recognize this as one of the happiest collections of archival photographs ever assembled."

Take Me to the Water (DUST-TO-DIGITAL)

SANTE, Luc

Linderman, Jim

Ledbetter, Steven

Religion & Spirituality

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, separation from loved ones was an accepted fact of life, for several generations of Americans. Westward migration had cleaved many families along generational lines, as young people left their elders in the east, rarely if ever to see them again. Immigrants from Ireland and Germany and Italy said goodbye to their mothers as they prepared to cross the ocean to America, while African Americans in the South did the same as they boarded northbound trains. Another wave of young soldiers left home, headed for the hills of Cuba and the Philippine boondocks, and their sons would write home from the trenches of Europe. This generational nostalgia became a mainstay of pop culture: in early country music, the mother song was a staple, from the heartbreaking to the maudlin; blues and black gospel singers missed their mamas too, from Jaybird Coleman to the Pilgrim Travelers. Gathering vintage photographs of mothers and children and a two-CD compilation of 78 rpm recordings of motherly love, Never a Pal Like Mother is the ultimate homage to--and gift for--mothers everywhere. Rosanne Cash captures the Americana flavor of this book in her foreword to the volume: "Those of us who treasure American roots music are listening to the very center of its essence in this anthology: the nearly century-old collection of songs about the most important person in the entire lexicon."

Never a Pal Like Mother: Vintage Songs & Photographs of the One Who's Always True

Bryan, Sarah

Music

Music is as self-reflexive as any of the arts, even if its generally greater power to transport sometimes deceives us into thinking otherwise. Dust-to-Digital's marvelously titled I Listen to the Wind That Obliterates My Traces compiles music, photographs and literary excerpts that reflect on or present music itself as subject matter, from the earliest days of the phonograph. Culled from artist Steve Roden's collection of thousands of vernacular photographs related to music, sound and listening, the many gems to be found in this book (and its accompanying two CDs) include accounts of the Barnum-esque Professor McRea (“Ontario's Musical Wonder” ) and anonymous African-American guitar players, and an amazing trove of photographs of early phonographs. Other images range from professional portraits to accidental double exposures, via photographic formats such as tintypes, ambrotypes, cdvs, cabinet cards, real photo postcards and albumen prints. The two CDs bring together a variety of recordings, including one-off amateur recordings, regular commercial releases and early sound effects records. An array of contemporaneous quotations on music and early music technology from writers such as Knut Hamsun, Vladimir Nabokov and Pär Lagerkvist, as well as an essay by Steve Roden, bind the volume's conception into a unique meditation on recorded music's earliest consciousness of itself.

I Listen to the Wind that Obliterates My Traces: Music in Vernacular Photographs 1880-1955

In the 1930s the Massengill family of rural Arkansas built three portable photography studios on old truck frames, attached each to the back of any car that would run, and started a mobile photo booth business that would last for a decade. Without formal training they invented ways to mimic the popular photo booth and brought their business to the dirt roads and open fields. Making Pictures, featuring Massengill family prints and photo albums collected by the artist Maxine Payne, illuminates a Depression-era South previously unseen by the public. Unlike the hardscrabble lives captured by WPA photographers, the Massengill photographs often show folks working to look their best. Hand-painted backdrops, colorized prints and the occasional prop add a playful edge to these scenes. Not unlike photographs by Vivian Maier or Mike Disfarmer, the Massengill photographs invite us to reconsider a time and place from a new perspective.

Making Pictures: Three for a Dime

Individual Artists

Lead Kindly Light: Pre-War Music & Photo / Various

Honig, Peter

Photography & Video

The first in-depth look at the life of Ola Belle Reed, a groundbreaking artist who is one of the all-time greatest performers of authentic, old-time music. Ola Belle Reed s 1960s recordings, some of the earliest she ever made and available here for the very first time, are counter-balanced by a disc of modern-day field recordings of her descendants and those within her Appalachian community that she inspired. This deluxe edition highlights Ola Belle s deep repertoire folk ballads, minstrel songs, country standards, and originals and traces the impact her music made and is still making today.

Ola Belle Reed and Southern Mountain Music on the Mason-Dixon Line

Glassie, Henry

Murphy, Clifford

Peach, Douglas

In The Birth of Rock and Roll, Americana collector Jim Linderman has arranged a storyboard of sorts that dramatizes the spirit of rock and roll in its early days-when "a juke-joint with fifty patrons was a big show," as Linderman writes in his introduction. "A church with fifty congregants was a full house. The annual square dance at the town hall, a rent party, a fish-fry, the honky-tonk piano in the whore house, the union meeting There was no real money in it. A performer was lucky to be fed, get drunk and get laid." The photographs have little to do with the conventional iconography of the birth of rock and roll: conspicuously absent are pictures of young white men in Memphis, poodle skirts, Alan Freed and Bill Haley's Brylcream. These photographs instead document and celebrate the pure but indefinable essence of rocking. Ordinary, anonymous men, women and children-some white, some black-are holding guitars and strumming while looking relaxed or frantic, but nearly always blissful. Some of the action takes place in rural fields, some in dance halls, some at civic events, some in living rooms and basements. Wherever there was an urge to make acoustic or electric music-whether to help at a rent party, busk in front of a crowd or testify in the name of Jesus-there was an uncredited photographer there to snap an image, and these are the photographs that comprise Linderman's fascinating narrative.

The Birth of Rock and Roll

In 1947, 1948 and 1959, renowned folklorist Alan Lomax (1915-2002) went behind the barbed wire into the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. Armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck--and, in 1959, a camera--Lomax documented as best an outsider could the stark and savage conditions of the prison farm, where the black inmates labored "from can't to can't," chopping timber, clearing ground and picking cotton for the state. They sang as they worked, keeping time with axes or hoes, adapting to their condition the slavery-time hollers that sustained their forebears and creating a new body of American song. Theirs was music, as Lomax wrote, that "testified to the love of truth and beauty which is a universal human trait." Their songs participated in two distinct musical traditions: free world (the blues, hollers, spirituals and other songs they sang outside and, when the situation permitted, sang inside as well) and the work songs, which were specific to the prison situation. A chilling account of how slavery persisted well into the 20th century in the institutionalized form of the chain gang, Parchman Farm includes two CDs with 44 of Lomax's remastered audio recordings and a book of more than 70 of Lomax's photographs, many published here for the first time.

Parchman Farm: Photographs & Field Rec 1 / Various

JACKSON, BRUCE

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