This story was originally published by ArtsATL.
In 2003, Dust-to-Digital, an Atlanta-based record label founded a few years prior by Lance and April Ledbetter, released its first album. “Goodbye Babylon,” a compilation of vintage gospel songs and religious sermonizing on six CDs, is housed in a light-colored cedar box with a sliding top on which is engraved an illustration of the Tower of Babel by Gustave Doré. In addition to the audio discs, the contents include a 200-page booklet of liner notes and essays, vintage postcards and two or three bolls of raw cotton. Artfully packaged, historically notable and sonically compelling, the album was, at first, a novel revelation. Then it became a bona fide sensation.
A brief review extolling “Goodbye Babylon” appeared in The New York Times. Rolling Stone and other entertainment publications put the album on their “Best” lists. Soon, a flood of orders from distributors presented the Ledbetters with an opportunity to forego their day jobs and run a record label from the basement of their house in Ormewood Park. Six Grammy nominations later, including two wins for Best Historical Album (“Art of the Field Recording Vol. 1: Fifty Years of Traditional American Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum″ [2007]; and “Voices of Mississippi: Artists and Musicians Documented by William Ferris” [2018]), Lance and April, who met when they were students at Georgia State University, are still operating Dust-to-Digital from that same basement, plus a small office on Auburn Avenue.
Credit: Photo by Lizzy Johnston
Credit: Photo by Lizzy Johnston
To date, Dust-to-Digital has released some 70 album titles, videos and books-with-music on vinyl, CD, DVD and digital formats. The label’s wildly eclectic catalog includes adventurous surveys, such as “Excavated Shellac: An Alternate History of the World’s Music”; historical collections of rural folkways, such as “Arkansas at 78 RPM: Corn Dodgers and Hoss Hair Pullers”; and contemporary works including “Brian Harnetty: Rawhead & Bloodybones”; and visionary artist Lonnie Holley’s first two albums (“Just Before Music” and “Keeping a Record of It”).
Today, through its educationally entertaining posts on Instagram, Facebook and other social media platforms, Dust-to-Digital enjoys an audience of millions across the globe. The label’s latest releases are “Sun Gonna Shine” by Mississippi bluesman Roosevelt Holts, assembled by David Evans, and “Excavated Shellac: Voices,” a compilation of vocal performances from around the world by 78 rpm collector Jonathan Ward.
Credit: Courtesy of Dust-to-Digital
Credit: Courtesy of Dust-to-Digital
Most recently, the nonprofit Dust-to-Digital Foundation and the University of California, Santa Barbara announced a partnership project that eventually will produce an online archive of thousands of rare recordings. The material will be freely accessible to scholars and the public through the university’s Discography of American Historical Recordings, a digital warehouse containing music from the 78 rpm era along with detailed information about the artist and label.
“The idea for the partnership grew out of our early experiences, which showed us just how much of this material is out there but which isn’t commercially viable even within the niche world we inhabit,” said April Ledbetter.
The Dust-to-Digital Foundation archives contain tens of thousands of recordings captured in high-resolution 24-bit/96kHz format. Many of the recordings destined for the Discography of American Historical Recordings were sourced from collectors who spent their lives — and no small amount of their income — amassing the fragile shellac and vinyl discs on their shelves.
Among those guides was Joe Bussard, the late curator and caretaker of what the Ledbetters describe as “one of the most culturally important private archives in the United States.” In 2011, Dust-to-Digital began digitizing Bussard’s collection, estimated between 20,000 to 25,000 78 rpm discs. Mostly blues, country, early bluegrass and jazz, the records were meticulously cataloged and stored in the basement studio of the Bussard family’s modest house in Frederick, Maryland.
Known as a friendly curmudgeon, generous with his time but protective of his extraordinary record collection, Bussard helped the Ledbetters cull the gospel herd for “Goodbye Babylon.” In 2003, Dust-to-Digital released “Desperate Man Blues,” a short documentary about Bussard. In 2005, the label issued a 5-CD compilation of music produced by Bussard for his own Fonotone label. Beginning in 2004, Dust-to-Digital underwrote “Country Classics,” a radio show featuring Bussard spinning discs and yarns, which ran for hundreds of episodes on WREK-FM (91.1), the Georgia Tech student station.
“When things reached a certain point, I brought up the subject of digitizing the collection,” says Lance. “I knew it was a big ask, but Joe agreed to do it because he trusted us, trusted our judgment, and we’d never done him wrong.”
Over the years, the Dust-to-Digital technical team set up their gear in the attic of Frank Mare’s house in Covington to capture a trove of old-time, bluegrass and country music. In the barn behind musician-archivist Nathan Salsburg’s house in Louisville, Kentucky, the same squad focused on a priceless assemblage of folk, gospel and country recordings salvaged from a number of dumpsters.
After running into each other a few times at conferences, in 2018, the Ledbetters and David Seubert, special collections curator at University of California, Santa Barbara, started discussing the creation of a massive online archive. The university had received a license from Sony Entertainment that allowed for online posting of music up to the late 1940s from the company’s long list of brands. Conveniently, much of the music in the Dust-to-Digital archives was on Sony and labels the company had acquired or inherited, including Columbia, RCA Victor/Bluebird, Epic and Okeh. The stage was set for an epic archival collaboration.
“Then the pandemic hit,” says Lance.
The partnership and project finally came together in 2025. So far, more than 5,000 tracks from the estimated 50,000-song Dust-to-Digital archive have been uploaded to the Discography of American Historical Recordings with “thousands more in the pipeline,” says Seubert.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Dust-to-Digital
Credit: Photo courtesy of Dust-to-Digital
In the mix are bushels of Georgia musicians including Blind Willie McTell, Barbecue Bob, Fiddlin’ John Carson and Moonshine Kate (Carson’s daughter Rosa Lee), Gid Tanner’s Skillet Lickers, the Georgia Yellow Hammers, Curley Weaver, Peg Leg Howell, Buddy Moss, Rev. J.M. Gates, Seven-Foot Dilly (John Dilleshaw, a 7-foot-tall guitarist-fireman from Atlanta) and the Wheat Street Choir from the Old Fourth Ward.
“That shows you how many great artists were from here,” says Lance. “The record companies would send down recording engineers with equipment several times a year, set up a temporary studio somewhere around town and conduct invitation-only sessions.”
Going forward, Dust-to-Digital will continue releasing its own creative projects while the nonprofit foundation adds recordings to the Discography of American Historical Recordings. The goal of the partnership is to provide a public resource where people can find a large swath of American music that otherwise never would have been heard.
“What’s significant about this project is not just the breadth of rare material and the amount of transfers,” says curator and collector Jonathan Ward. “It’s the fact that they’ve maintained collector provenance, which is becoming more and more of an important study.”
In practice, scholars, musicians and enthusiasts can enjoy nearly endless hours of rare music while also contemplating the vital collections built by pioneering American collectors.
“We’ve been looking for the best way to preserve and share this music without having to consider the commercial aspect of it,” says April. “And we found it.”
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An Atlanta native, Doug DeLoach has been covering music, performing and static arts in his hometown and beyond for five decades. Doug is a regular contributor to Songlines, a world music magazine based in London, and his ruminations on arts and culture have appeared in publications such as Creative Loafing, Georgia Music, ArtsGeorgia, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, High Performance and Art Papers.
Credit: ArtsATL
Credit: ArtsATL
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