Vast collection of historic American music released via UCSB Library partnership with Dust-to-Digital Foundation

Thousands of songs representing some of the rarest and most uniquely American music borne from the Jazz Age and the Great Depression would have likely been lost to landfills and faded from memory. Fans and historians have long credited obsessive record collectors for preserving much of that music, and today they can thank a new partnership between UC Santa Barbara and the nonprofit Dust-to-Digital Foundation for making it available to the public for free.

UCSB Library's Special Research Collections has been uploading music from the foundation's trove of approximately 50,000 songs to the university's Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR) database. So far, more than 5,000 songs from Dust-to-Digital have been added to DAHR, said David Seubert, curator of the library's performing arts collection. "Thousands more are in the pipeline," he noted.

"The Dust-to-Digital Foundation has digitized some of the most significant private collections in the country," Seubert added. "We are pleased to partner with them to make this rare content accessible."

Cofounded by Lance Ledbetter in 1999, Dust-to-Digital launched as a commercial label focused on preserving hard-to-find music and producing high-quality box sets, vinyl records, CDs, DVDs and books that share the detailed stories behind rare recordings. In 2011, Ledbetter and his wife, April, launched the label's nonprofit foundation.

Over the years, the Ledbetters have worked closely with collectors to digitize and preserve record collections for educational purposes and public consumption. Earning trust and forging those relationships with often-reclusive collectors takes patience and an authentic appreciation of the music and its place in American history, April said. "We share their passion to keep our musical heritage from being forgotten."

Once a relationship is established, Dust-to-Digital sets up special turntables and laptops in a collector's home, with paid technicians painstakingly digitizing and labeling each record, one song at a time. Depending on the size of the collection, the process can take months, even years.

Along the way, the Ledbetter's efforts have earned Grammys for Best Historical Album, in 2007, for "Art of Field Recording Volume 1: Fifty Years of Traditional American Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum" and, in 2019, Best Historical Album and Best Liner Notes for the box set, "Voices of Mississippi: Artists and Musicians Documented by William Ferris."

"We've built our reputation through storytelling," Lance Ledbetter said.

Seubert described the library's partnership with Dust-to-Digital as a symbiotic coming together of an incredible music archive and the university's established public-access platform.

Slashdotted

As the Ledbetters remember it, they first crossed paths with Seubert decades ago at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. In 2006, they heard about Seubert's Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Projectgetting "slashdotted," a term that describes when a website crashes or receives a sudden and debilitating spike in traffic after being mentioned in an article on Slashdot, a popular news site at the time.

"We were aware of what David was doing with digitization," Lance remembers. "He had been working for years to put wax cylinder recordings online through a public-facing institution - that was definitely on our radar."

While the newly uploaded DAHR recordings come from multiple collectors - including Roger Misiewicz, Frank Mare and Kentucky-born folk artist Nathan Salsburg - the bulk belonged to Joe Bussard.

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