Various Artists

Art Of Field Recording Volume II 4CD BOX

Label: Dust-to-Digital Country: USA

Subtitled: Fifty Years of Traditional American Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum.

"This is volume 2 of Dust-to-Digital's robust and highly-acclaimed Art of Field Recording series, assembled by esteemed archivist Art Rosenbaum. This impressive 4CD set includes ballads, blues, spirituals, work songs and slave songs, religious singing and other traditional folk music from Georgia, Arkansas, Texas, Florida and elsewhere. Housed in a 10"x10"x10" color cardboard box containing a 96-page perfect-bound book with over 100 illustrations and photographs, and four CDs with a total of 107 tracks.

Founded by Lance Ledbetter in 1999, Dust-to-Digital's mission is to produce high quality cultural artifacts, which combine rare, essential recordings with historic images and detailed texts describing the artists and their works. Art is a painter, a muralist, and an illustrator, as well as a collector and performer of traditional American folk music. He has been collecting and studying traditional American music for over 50 years. His focus covers Appalachian banjo tunes and ballads, Southern and Midwestern fiddle tunes, blues and spirituals.

Rosenbaum began seeking out traditional performers while in his teens, rediscovering and recording the great blues guitarist Scrapper Blackwell and fiddler John W. Summers, both in his then-home state of Indiana. His fieldwork has produced archival material in the Indiana University Folklore Archives, the University of Georgia Libraries and the Archives of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. His Art of Field Recording Vol. I was nominated for an Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. "Rosenbaum is a folk revivalist of the old school. He believes that traditional ballads, blues, spirituals, and fiddle tunes are among the glories of American culture, and he wanted to help preserve and disseminate them. Ledbetter, forty years younger, was less interested in preservation than in inspiration -- the best he could do for folk music, Ledbetter seemed to feel, was to research, remaster, and repackage it as beautifully as possible to make the old songs seem new again." --The New Yorker, "The Last Verse: Is there any folk music still out there?"-Dust to Digital