April 28, 2008 Issue

The Last Verse

Is there any folk music still out there?

The singer Cora Mae  Bryant with  her son Tony her grandsonPatrick and her son David at her home in northeastern...
The singer Cora Mae (Sweet Petunia) Bryant with (from left) her son Tony, her grandsonPatrick, and her son David, at her home, in northeastern Georgia. Photograph by Sylvia Plachy.

In a small white house on a quiet country road in the foothills of northeastern Georgia—the end of Appalachia or the beginning, depending on your point of view—there lived an old blues singer named Cora Mae (Sweet Petunia) Bryant. Rumor had it that she could be difficult. Bryant had been known to slam her door on uninvited visitors, to demand a few “dead Presidents” for an interview, and to beat her manager with a purse for getting her onstage too late. Her nickname was borrowed rather than earned. It came from a song that her father, the blues guitarist Curley Weaver, wrote in 1928. Cora Mae was born two years earlier, but the lyrics were clearly about someone else: “I’ve got a gal, she’s long and tall, every time she do the shimmie I holler, Hot Dog!”

When Lance Ledbetter and Art Rosenbaum arrived at Bryant’s house one morning in December, the place looked welcoming enough. There were electric candles on the windowsills and candy canes on the lawn. The porch was hung with pots of plastic daffodils, and metallic letters spelling “Merry Christmas” had been strung above the door. A closer look, though, revealed some cause for concern. The old piano on the porch had a serrated knife laid across its keys. The Bible perched on the railing was open to Hosea 4-5: “They shall eat and not have enough. They shall commit whoredom, and shall not increase. . . . They shall go with their flocks and with their herds to seek the Lord; but they shall not find Him.”

Ledbetter looked around, a little nervously. He wasn’t cut out for field work. Moonfaced and bespectacled, with brown hair slicked back and parted, he looked like a character from “Little Orphan Annie”—the millionaire’s son, out for a spin in his Studebaker. He was thirty-one years old and owned a small record label in Atlanta called Dust-to-Digital. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of American blues, country, and folk music, and had released what many consider the greatest gospel compilation ever made: a six-CD set called “Goodbye, Babylon.” But he wasn’t used to working with live musicians: most of his artists had been dead for decades.

He glanced over at Rosenbaum, who had plopped into a wicker chair on the porch, completely at ease. A faded gray vest hung over his belly and an old baseball cap was pulled down over his pale, dumpling features—his white hair stuck up around it as if charged with static. A minute ago, he’d knocked on the door and been told that Sweet Petunia was indisposed—she was still digesting her breakfast, her son David said. But Rosenbaum was happy to wait outside. A folklorist, a painter, and a professor of art at the University of Georgia, he had spent fifty of his sixty-nine years travelling around the South and the Midwest, recording folk musicians. He’d taped one old singer through a screen door—she wouldn’t let him into her house—and another shortly before she was sent to prison, at the age of eighty-two, for dealing marijuana. “That jury’ll never convict me,” she reportedly said. “I’ve sold moonshine to half of ’em and fucked the rest.”

Rosenbaum was a folk revivalist of the old school. He believed 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 songs on “Goodbye, Babylon” had influenced artists as diverse as Bob Dylan and Arcade Fire. 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.

Earlier that fall, Ledbetter’s label had released “Art of Field Recording: Volume I,” a four-CD retrospective of Rosenbaum’s work. It contained everything from ring shouts and murder ballads to a song about twenty frogs going to school. It was full of throaty voices and clanging banjos and the incidental music of daily life—babies crying, bar glasses clinking, cicadas on a summer night. A critic at the Times had called it “a gold mine, an ark . . . spooky and blindingly beautiful.” But now Rosenbaum and Ledbetter were gathering songs for the second volume, and wondering what they’d find. Fifty years after Rosenbaum’s first recordings, what was left of folk music?

Bryant liked to call her house a museum of the blues. When her son let Rosenbaum and Ledbetter in, it took a while for their eyes to adjust. A dingy light seeped in around the shutters, and the doorframes were hung with rumpled sheets. Most of the “exhibits” on the walls were secondhand stuff: yellowed newspaper clippings, blurred copies of black-and-white photographs, candy-colored cartoons of legendary bluesmen by R. Crumb. In the back, next to the kitchen, Bryant sat in a room that smelled of honey and funk, a shrivelled daddy longlegs hanging from the ceiling above her. Her face was still formidable—sharp bones, taut brown skin, steel-gray hair combed straight up. But her left side had been paralyzed by a stroke, and her amber eyes had gone vague with age and inactivity.

“They thought the blues was gone,” she sang, when Ledbetter sat down beside her. “But I got them walking around my home.” While the two of them talked, Rosenbaum attached a pair of condenser microphones to a two-pronged stand. He set them a few feet away from her, to capture the room’s natural resonance, then put on a pair of headphones and checked the recording levels. He had used a bulky reel-to-reel deck in the early years, then switched to a digital audiotape machine, and, finally, to this small flash recorder—his equipment growing sleeker as his musicians grew more infirm.

Bryant came from one of the great blues families. Her grandmother Savannah (Dip) Weaver played the twelve-string guitar. She taught her son Curley the quick, ragtimey licks that came to define the Piedmont blues, then he showed them to his friends Blind Willie McTell and “Barbecue” Bob Hicks. When Cora Mae was a teen-ager, in the early forties, she used to hobo around the state with her father—he was known as the Georgia Guitar Wizard—and sing at fish fries and house parties. Sometimes, when they were in Atlanta, they’d be joined by Yank Rachell, Buddy Moss, and other blues greats. “Curley was the best,” Bryant said. “He’d play all night and you couldn’t hear nothin’ but shoe heels hittin’ the floor.”

When Rosenbaum asked if she’d like to sing something, she shook her head at first. “I’m always runnin’ out of breath,” she said. But her son might sing one or two. David was tall and powerfully built, with a gap-toothed smile. He picked up a battered National guitar, coated in chipped brown paint, and fumbled a few chords on the neck. “I’d do better if I had a drink of booze,” he said. Then he went out to his trailer, parked beside the house, and brought back a half gallon of homemade muscadine wine. It was pale yellow and sour-smelling, but it did seem to improve his playing.

Cora Mae had been married twice and given birth to twelve children. All of them had been steeped in the blues, but only her son Tony was said to sing or play with any skill. When he showed up later that morning—wearing dark shades, a grizzled beard, and a wary grin—Cora Mae seemed to sit up straight for the first time. David brought out a banjo and placed it next to her good right hand. He propped up her elbow with a folded towel, so she could pluck the strings, and the three of them played “Broke Down Engine,” an old blues that Curley and Blind Willie McTell used to play:


Went down to my prayin’ ground

Fell down on my knees

Went down to my prayin’ ground

Fell down on my knees

Ain’t prayed for no religion

Send me back my good gal, please.

“They gone,” she said, when the music was over. “They gone and left me behind.” She looked up at Rosenbaum, whose recorder was still on. “That’s my song.”

A good folk song is easy to learn and hard to forget. Its melody is brief, its chorus repeats, its rhymes lead from line to line like the base pairs in a chain of DNA. A folk song is a meme, an evolutionary biologist might say—the cultural version of a gene. It passes from generation to generation, evolving as it goes, till every clumsy or extraneous line is stripped away: “Oh, the cuckoo she’s a pretty bird / She sings as she flies / She brings us glad tidings / And tells us no lies.” You only have to hear it a few times to know it by heart.

Or so it was in America until recently. When the first colonists came to Georgia, in 1733—a shipload of English debtors, followed by Scots, Welshmen, Africans, Germans, and Piedmontese Italians, who named the hills for their home—their songs survived the trip better than they did. They brought jigs, reels, hymns, and ballads, field hollers, sea shanties, and nonsense songs, and taught them to their children. The Appalachians were as isolating as any ocean. A new tune might make it over the ridge every so often, and instruments and styles gradually intermarried: Scottish fiddles joined African banjos; hymns and field hollers gave birth to spirituals and the blues. But the old songs remained.

In 1916, the English folk-song collector Cecil Sharp made the first of three tours of the southern Appalachians. Sharp was fifty-seven, a short, bony, hawk-nosed figure full of nervous enthusiasm. He suffered from gout and asthma, smoked heavily, and ate no meat—a diet so strange, in parts of the South, that some took him for a German spy. The trip was often a torture to him: he collected in the heat of summer, travelling on foot and horseback, by bicycle and motorcar, pack mule, punt, and the aptly named jolt wagon. “I have swallowed enough filth and grease in the last six weeks to have upset five hundred stomachs,” he wrote in his diary. “Even the stewed apples had hog’s grease mixed up in them.”

It was worth it. The Appalachians were a kind of cultural Galápagos. Every hill and hollow seemed to ring with some odd yodel, buck dance, or banjo riff. Every family seemed to know some long-forgotten variant of an ancient folk song. “They speak English, look English, and their manners are old-fashioned English,” Sharp wrote. “The people are just English of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.” Back home, he told an audience in Chicago, people had become so falsely sophisticated that no one under seventy knew any folk songs. In Appalachia, little had been forgotten. It was a place, he wrote, where singing “was as common and almost as universal as speaking.”

Sharp had narrow interests, as the best collectors usually do. He wanted only English and Scottish ballads, with a few dance or fiddle tunes thrown in. He had no patience for hymns, spirituals, ragtime, or cowboy songs (“the dregs of literature and the garbage of musical phrase”), not to mention anything German, Italian, Spanish, or French. He avoided railroad towns, where the pure currents of folk tradition might be sullied, and ignored black music almost completely. “When we reached the cove we found it peopled by niggers,” he groused, when he was in Kentucky. “All our troubles and spent energy for naught.”

Still, after forty-six weeks in the mountains, Sharp had transcribed some sixteen hundred songs from nearly three hundred singers: the richest trove of American folk music yet collected. “What I want more than anything else is quiet, no children, no Victrolas, nor strumming of rag-time and the singing of sentimental songs,” he wrote, on his last trip. “I am satisfied with what I have done and the rest can be left to others.”

It’s impossible to hear today what Sharp heard then. He never made recordings, though he could have. Phonographs were still crude and ungainly—the singer would shout into a horn, driving a stylus into a spinning wax cylinder—but ethnographers had used them for almost thirty years. They’d recorded dirges in Sumatra, love songs in New Guinea, conjuring songs in Greenland, and flute duets in the Amazon. They’d lugged their equipment over Himalayan peaks and kept their wax on ice in tropical heat. (The pictures they brought back were wonderfully surreal: Tibetan monks, African tribesmen, Inuits, and Indian chiefs staring at Victrola horns as if they were flowers from Mars.) Yet only a handful of Southern folk songs were recorded. Collectors like Sharp were more interested in transcriptions than in sound, and the record labels stuck to Caruso and Tin Pan Alley.

Then, abruptly, the market changed. In 1920, you could get a Victrola for fifteen dollars and a record for seventy-five cents, and most buyers weren’t interested in Verdi. In 1923, Fiddlin’ John Carson, a housepainter and cotton-mill worker in Atlanta, recorded “Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane.” His producer, Ralph Peer, declared it “pluperful awful” but agreed to release five hundred copies. Within a weekend, they’d sold out. Within a year, Carson had sold half a million. That same year, Bessie Smith’s “Down-Hearted Blues” sold seven hundred and fifty thousand copies.

The rush was on. By the late twenties, scouts for the record labels had fanned out across the South, scouring juke joints, fiddle contests, dances, and street corners for new talent. In Bristol, Tennessee, in 1927, Ralph Peer persuaded a local newspaper editor to run a column on his search for musicians. Within days, they were lined up around the block—flushed like quail from the surrounding hills. Peer recorded Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family in a single week. In Jackson, Mississippi, a music-store owner named H. C. Speir began cutting demos of local guitar players. He soon found Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Skip James, and Tommy Johnson—the founding fathers of the blues. By 1929, the upper floors of the Peabody Hotel, in Memphis, were filled with jug bands and jazz combos, cutting “race” and “hillbilly” records for Victor, Vocalion, Brunswick, and OKeh. If you listened closely to their tracks, you could sometimes hear the rattle of a trolley car in the street below, or the faint ahwoogah of a passing truck.

Folklorists needed a little longer to catch on. The Library of Congress founded its Archive of American Folk Song in 1928. Five years later, John Lomax, an out-of-work college administrator from Texas, signed on to make field recordings. Lomax was sixty-five. He had already collected cowboy tunes in the West, while on a fellowship from Harvard, in 1907. But those were just “squeaky reproductions,” he admitted, made with a wax-cylinder machine. His new recording rig was of an experimental type developed for the library. It had a microphone, an amplifier, and a diamond-tipped phonograph, and could cut songs straight to an aluminum disk. It weighed five hundred pounds—Lomax had to rip the back seat out of his Ford to make room for it—and ran off two massive Edison batteries. “Portable recording machines are necessary,” he later explained, in Southern Folklore Quarterly, “to secure music in its native habitat.”


Lomax had lost his wife two years before, so he took his eighteen-year-old son, Alan, with him. He stuck to the back roads and looked for work farms, cotton fields, lumber camps, and chain gangs—wherever there was “the least likelihood of the inclusion of jazz influences,” as he put it. At one point, the car flipped over, spraying his son with battery acid and burning his skin. They kept on going. Together, separately, or with collaborators like John Work, the Lomaxes recorded more than twenty-five thousand performances in the years that followed. They found Muddy Waters on a Mississippi plantation, Woody Guthrie at a benefit for migrant farm workers, Leadbelly in a Louisiana penitentiary. The prisoners had “dynamite in their performances,” Alan Lomax later told the Times. “There was more emotional heat, more power, more nobility in what they did than all the Beethovens and Bachs could produce.”

The time for field recordings was almost over, John Lomax wrote, in 1937: “The influence of good roads and the radio combined will very soon put an end both to the creation and to the artless singing of American folk songs.” He was both premature and a little too late. Decades later, Rosenbaum would still find musicians who remembered ballads that were centuries old. But the golden age of recorded folk music had already ended.

Between 1929 and 1933, record sales dropped by more than ninety per cent. During the war, the government curtailed the production of phonographs and shellac records, and encouraged citizens to turn over their old 78s to the military. By the late forties, when the music industry returned, the scrappy regional bands it had once corralled into studios—groups like the Skillet Lickers, the Yellow Hammers, the Dill Pickles, and the Gully Jumpers; the Rail Splitters, the Buckle Busters, the Tar Heel Rattlers, and the Henpecked Husbands—had given way to full-time professionals, playing more stylized country music and bluegrass. Before 1945, Ledbetter liked to say, you could tell which side of a ridge a banjo player was from; after 1945, most just played like Earl Scruggs.

Soon, towers with million-watt transmitters were springing up along the Mexican border, blasting music from Tijuana to Bangor, Maine. By the fifties, the airwaves were so thick with it that you could wrap a tin can with wire, hold it to a fencepost, and hear the latest hits coming out. Folk music, for better or for worse, was just another thing on the radio.

One day at his house, in a leafy section of Athens, Rosenbaum sang me a song that his father had taught him. Rosenbaum has an extraordinary memory for music. He plays the fiddle, the guitar, the banjo, and the harmonica, and knows several hundred songs by heart. Still, he doesn’t consider himself a folksinger in the strictest sense—that is, part of an oral tradition. By the time he was growing up, in Indianapolis in the nineteen-forties and fifties, his family’s repertoire had dwindled to a handful of songs. His grandmother taught him a few Yiddish tunes from her childhood, in Poland, and his father some comic songs he’d learned as a boy in Paterson, New Jersey. The best was catalogued in the late nineteenth century, by the Harvard scholar Francis Child:

One Saturday night as I come home as

drunk as I could be,

I saw a head right in the bed where my

head ought to be.

So I says to me wife, me darling wife,

whose head is that I see?

Whose head is that right in the bed

where my head ought to be?

Rosenbaum sang it in his usual, oddly endearing bray. Then he grabbed a banjo from beside the couch and played a ballad about a shipwreck. With his hat off, he looked like a figure out of Melville: bald pate, hooked nose, long, shaggy sideburns. He played in the clawhammer style, whanging the bottom string with his thumb, and strumming or plucking the other strings with his forefinger. When Rosenbaum talked about folk music, he was sometimes prone to an old professor’s windiness—terms like “vital tradition bearer” kept cropping up. When he played, his eyes lit up like a ten-year-old’s.

Beside him, his wife, Margo, picked up a banjo and plinked along for a few bars. The two met in New York in 1965. He was a painter living in SoHo on twenty dollars a day; she was a photographer working as a receptionist at the Museum of Primitive Art. He played banjo and made field recordings; she played guitar and had taken lessons from Alan Lomax’s sister, Bess. They’d been collaborating in the field ever since—“Art of Field Recording” is filled with her luminous black-and-white portraits of the musicians—and the years had shaped them with a similar hand. She had his gnomic figure, gravelly voice, and earthy yet abstracted style. “Sometimes Art sings like an old man,” she said, quoting a critic they knew. “And sometimes he sings like an old woman.”

It was late afternoon. Outside, past the living room’s tall plate-glass windows, the sweet gums and water oaks around the house had gone gray in the dimming light. Inside, on the wall above the couch, one of Rosenbaum’s paintings—a six-by-nine-foot oil called “Rakestraw’s Dream”—seemed to glow in the crepuscular air. It showed a black man on a stormy night, finding a guitar that had washed ashore in a flood. In the foreground, a young white couple stood braced as if for a revelation.

The rediscovery of folk music, in the early nineteen-fifties, was an almost mystical experience for musicians of Rosenbaum’s age. The folk records of the twenties and thirties had long been out of print, their musicians forgotten, and the Lomaxes’ recordings were mostly moldering in archives. The McCarthy hearings were on television, duck-and-cover drills in the classroom, and the frictionless pop of Perry Como on the radio. And then, in 1952, Harry Smith released his “Anthology of American Folk Music.”

Smith was an artist and record collector from Seattle—“a polymath and an autodidact, a dope fiend and an alcoholic, a legendary experimental filmmaker and a more legendary sponger,” as Greil Marcus put it in his book “Invisible Republic” (1997). Raised by theosophists—his father gave him a blacksmith’s shop for his twelfth birthday and told him to turn lead into gold—he believed that the old music held a kind of magic. “I felt social changes would result from it,” he said, in 1968. The anthology was divided into three double albums, each illustrated with mystical drawings, and color-coded blue, red, or green, to represent air, fire, and water. The real mysteries, though, lay in the music. Using crackly transfers from his own collection, Smith pulled together every kind of ballad, work song, parlor tune, and Cajun chanson. There were moaning blues by Blind Lemon Jefferson, hair-raising gospel by the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers, and anarchic banjo numbers by Dock Boggs—the sound and spirit of a forgotten world.


Rosenbaum first heard the album at the Indianapolis Public Library, at fifteen. “I can still remember the sequence of the songs,” he told me. He’d taken some guitar lessons by then, at a Jewish community center, and bought a banjo with the winnings from a painting contest at the Indiana State Fair. He’d heard his first blues on a friend’s 78s, his first fiddle tunes on an Alan Lomax compilation. Now here was this music, like the final clue in a treasure hunt: raw but carefully constructed, intimate yet formal. There was death in it and bitter humor and the ring of real experience. Where could he find more?

Four years later, when he was an undergraduate at Columbia, Rosenbaum took a summer job as a dishwasher at a resort on Lake Michigan. One evening, after work, he went by a general store a few miles inland and heard some men singing inside. They were migrant workers from Mexico, he found, who’d come to pick the area’s blueberry fields. They sang corridos with high, keening harmonies, and played bittersweet arpeggios on their guitars. From then on, Rosenbaum would bring his banjo to the store and play with the other pickers. “Sometimes, when we were jamming, these old-timers would come out to buy provisions,” he told me. “As soon as they’d hear us playing, they’d start doing a buck dance. They’d go up the stairs and through the swinging doors, and in a few minutes they’d go back down the wooden porch and out the door. They wouldn’t even look at us, but there wasn’t any question that they’d do a few steps.”

He made his first field recording that summer with a reel-to-reel player that he borrowed from his boss. The song was called “Carabina Treinta-Treinta,” an impassioned ode to Pancho Villa’s rifle. Later, he drove out to one of the blueberry farms, where a family of Southern white pickers was living in a tent, and taped a song called “Fred Adams.” It was the true story of an Arkansas man who killed a marshal in 1934 and was publicly hanged. “He walked down on the sky stand with a cigarette in his hand,” a seven-year-old boy sang on the tape, in a high, clear voice. “The trigger sprung at 8 P.M. He took it just like a man.”

Rosenbaum was hooked. He spent the next few years shuttling between coursework in New York—he earned an M.F.A. in visual arts at Columbia in 1961—and field work in Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. He followed tips from friends and musicians, knocked on farmhouse doors, and tagged along with old bluesmen who played guitar with a pocket knife. By the early sixties, there were hundreds like him searching the hills. “It was like all these guys got hit by the same epiphany at the same time,” Ledbetter told me. “The collectors said, ‘I’ve got to go find these old records.’ The musicians said, ‘I’ve got to learn to play these songs.’ And guys like Art said, ‘I’ve got to record these people.’ ”

Talking to Rosenbaum about those years can be a little disorienting. The story of the folk revival has been told so often that its signal moments seem carved in oak, like Stations of the Cross: Woody Guthrie hopping freight trains, Pete Seeger serenading civil-rights marchers, Bob Dylan anointed for his protest singing, then crucified for going electric. But Rosenbaum’s focus was elsewhere. He seems to have known or met every musician and major figure in the revival—Dylan and Seeger, Doc Watson and Mississippi John Hurt, Alan Lomax and the New Lost City Ramblers—yet recorded only those you’ve never heard. Folk music, to him, was the art of the anonymous.

Late that night at his house, after Margo had gone to bed, Rosenbaum played me a song by Banjo Bill Cornett, a clawhammer player from eastern Kentucky. A few of Cornett’s recordings had been released in 1960, on a Folkways album called “Mountain Music of Kentucky,” but they weren’t his best stuff, he said at the time. The songs that Rosenbaum was playing were Cornett’s home recordings. They’d first surfaced in 2002, forty-three years after they were made, and were released on a tiny label called the Field Recorders’ Collective, based in Croton, New York. Rosenbaum listened quietly for a few minutes—the picking was fast and sure, the voice a mesmerizing howl—and shook his head. “He may be the greatest old-time banjo player that ever lived,” he said. “And no one’s heard of him.”

Fame in folk music can be less a matter of talent than of opportunity, he said. People talk about the Delta blues because Charley Patton and Robert Johnson were from Mississippi. But if H. C. Speir hadn’t opened his music store in Jackson we might talk about the Georgia blues instead. “There were guys playing all around southern Georgia and Alabama,” Rosenbaum said. “But the record companies never came through. A lot of artists had to go somewhere else to record. When you read about the Carter Family driving to Bristol—how many flat tires did they have to change?”

In New York in the late fifties, the folk movement was already dividing along commercial and anti-commercial lines. Groups like the New Lost City Ramblers tried to capture the exact sound of old recordings, while the Kingston Trio made smooth modern hits out of old English ballads. The future, though, lay with singer-songwriters. Rosenbaum remembers Dylan grilling him about his field recordings—especially those of the great blues guitarist Scrapper Blackwell. (Rosenbaum had rediscovered him in Indianapolis, where he’d been working in an asphalt plant.) But his best memory is of having a beer at Gerde’s Folk City one weekday afternoon when Dylan burst in, waving a copy of his first album. “He was shouting, ‘My record came out! My record came out!’ ” Rosenbaum said. “The cool, reclusive superstar was still in the future.”


The difference wasn’t always clear. How old did a song have to be in order to be traditional? When John Lomax first recorded the blues, the genre was newer than hip-hop is today, and both Leadbelly and Robert Johnson learned songs from records. In parts of the Appalachians, the old ballads were kept alive by “settlement schools,” where rich Eastern ladies taught crafts, folk songs, and country dances to poor mountain children. Did that make the music less authentic? The musicians didn’t care, even if their promoters did. When Muddy Waters went to Chicago in 1943, the first thing he did was get an electric guitar. When Leadbelly came to New York, he wanted to wear a natty suit onstage. It was John Lomax who told him to put on prison stripes.

“There is no purity,” Rosenbaum admitted. “Music is always an interchange. We have this simplistic way of outlining things—folk culture, pop culture, academic culture—but they overlap in so many ways.” He’d spent enough time at folk conferences to know that folk music could include anything from “Barbara Allen” to a Burger King jingle. (As Louis Armstrong—or, some say, Big Bill Broonzy—once put it, “I don’t know no other kind of music but folk music. I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song.”) And yet, like Cecil Sharp and the Lomaxes, Rosenbaum stuck to his narrow, contested turf. “I’m sure I’ve missed out on a lot,” he said. “I’m sure I have. But we’re getting close to the time where there might not be any family or local music traditions. So I’ve concentrated on preserving those.”


Now and then, over the years, Rosenbaum’s path had crossed that of some popular artist on the rise, like a dirt road passing beneath an interstate. In the early seventies, when he was teaching art at the University of Iowa, he met a brilliant young songwriter named Greg Brown. He recorded him singing a Civil War ballad with his grandmother, but none of his original songs. When Rosenbaum arrived at the University of Georgia, a few years later, Athens was home to seminal bands like R.E.M. and the B52s. He taught drawing to R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, and even paid Stipe to sit for a portrait once. But the two never connected musically. Stipe had little interest in folk songs then, and Rosenbaum was busy taping string bands in the mountains.

There was no money in it. Some of his recordings came out on small labels: five albums of Indianapolis blues for Prestige, and one of coastal slave shouts for Folkways, among others. But most wound up at the Library of Congress, the University of Georgia, and the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University—waiting, like Banjo Bill’s home recordings, for someone to dust them off.

“Art’s a romantic when it comes to this stuff,” Ledbetter told me. “He wants it to be around forever.” We were having lunch at Carver’s, a combination diner and general store in a weedy section of northwest Atlanta. The store had mustard-colored walls and a pink concrete floor, slow-moving ceiling fans and Formica tables surrounded by grocery shelves. The food was dished out in back, from steam bins—great piles of grayish vegetables and grease-encrusted meats—and served with tubs of syrupy iced tea. The motto above the door read, “Country Cookin’ Makes You Good Lookin’.”

Ledbetter stared at the menu board, grinning, and ordered a piece of the Coca-Cola cake. He was a child of the New South, which is to say, an amalgam of anachronisms. He had an easy drawl and an ironic wit, the tastes of an urban aesthete and the manner of a small-town innocent. (When he first came to Athens for college, he told me, he found the city overwhelming: “I saw doom in my path. I saw the downfall of Lance Ledbetter.”) He was born a generation too late for the folk revival, but he was all the more attracted to the music for its obscurity.

Ledbetter was a collector at heart, a lover of rarities. When he was a boy, in LaFayette, Georgia—population six thousand—his parents took him to church three times a week. He, in turn, dragged them to baseball-card shows. “It’s still in my blood,” he says. “The labels, the pictures, the search for complete sets—it instilled a lot of obsessive behavior.” Later, his interests turned to fan organs and other odd instruments he found at flea markets, and, finally, to vintage records. If Rosenbaum’s model was Alan Lomax, Ledbetter’s was Harry Smith, the half-mad compiler of the “Anthology of American Folk Music.”

He first heard the anthology in 1997, on the night of its re-release on CD. He was a business major at Georgia State in Atlanta at the time, working at the student radio station. A d.j. he knew had received a special discount on the anthology, and was selling it from the back of his car. “It was sort of like a drug deal,” Ledbetter says. “I remember going out to the parking lot and walking up with my forty-eight dollars. And I got it and that night I listened to it and it just completely blew me away.”

The church songs Ledbetter had heard as a boy were mostly four-square Wesleyan hymns—nothing like the ecstatic, apocalyptic gospel on the anthology. The folk music was like the food at Carver’s: Southern staples cooked beyond all recognition. In search of something more challenging, he’d turned to noisy indie bands like Fugazi and the Jesus Lizard, then to experimental rock and musique concrète. (At one point, he flew his fan-organ collection to Chicago and had Steve Albini—the legendary producer of Nirvana and P. J. Harvey—record the sound of just the fans oscillating at different frequencies.) He’d never thought to find what he wanted on a forty-year-old compilation.

In a sense, it was the nineteen-fifties all over again. Folk music had disappeared from the radio and Smith’s anthology had been out of record stores for years. Although labels like Document had reissued hundreds of classic blues and country disks, they were aimed mostly at aficionados. The sound was thin and scratchy—poorly transferred from tapes or worn-out 78s—the tracks freighted with alternate takes and other ephemera. “I remember looking at all those CDs and thinking, Where do you start?” Ledbetter said. “Then I got the Harry Smith anthology and I thought, This is where you start.”

Not long afterward, he took over an old-time radio show at the station and began playing cut after cut from the anthology. When that grew thin, he sought out some of the better blues and country reissues from labels like Yazoo and the Bear Family. “The one thing I had a hard time finding was early gospel,” he told me. “I kept thinking, Who’s got these records? Who’s got them? They have to come from somewhere.” One day, on the Internet, Ledbetter came across a story about a man named Joe Bussard, who was said to have the finest private collection of prewar folk and gospel records in the world. “It is one of the great glory holds,” a collector was quoted as saying. “Bussard’s got shit that God don’t have.” When Ledbetter read that, he thought, I’ve got to find this guy.

Bussard lived in a plain brick ranch house on the outskirts of Frederick, Maryland. Its rooms were mostly shuttered and dusty with disuse, the yard overgrown. To find him, Ledbetter had to go underground, to a special listening room in the basement where Bussard spent most of his waking hours. It was a long, low-ceilinged space with pine panelling and bright banks of fluorescent lights—part bunker and part shrine. A mahogany Victrola stood on one side, an Edison cylinder player on another, a modern turntable across from it. The rest of the wall space was given over to records: some twenty-five thousand rare 78s and wax cylinders, stacked in wooden cases six rows high.

Bussard was born in 1936 and wished that he’d been born half a century earlier. His was the collector’s mind-set taken to an extreme. He had never lived outside of Frederick, apart from a stint in the National Guard, and hadn’t had a full-time job since sacking groceries in high school. He lived off a small inheritance, occasional radio work, and shrewd buying and selling. “Collecting, to Joe, is like a predator-prey relationship,” Ledbetter told me. “And if you’re a fellow-predator the claws can come out.”

Bussard bought no folk or jazz recorded after 1933—“The Depression killed everything”—no country made after 1953, when Hank Williams died. Popular music had been homogenized by mass media, he said, coarsened by drums and drugs, made meretricious by multi-tracking and other studio gimmicks. (On Duke Ellington’s big-band period: “Dullsville. Like watchin’ paint dry.” On Johnny Cash: “You mean Johnny Crack?” On the Beatles: “Oh, geez, please. Yuck.”) The records in his basement, he once said, were the “sound of American music before the modern world fucked it up.”


“Wanna see something that’ll knock your eyes out?” he told me when I visited. He plucked a tobacco-colored sleeve from the wall and spindled its shiny shellac on the turntable. Bussard’s collection was unmarked and unalphabetized—the better to thwart potential thieves—but he knew the location and exact condition of every record. This one was a mint copy of “Revenue Man Blues,” by Charley Patton, one of perhaps three or four in the world. “Try and get that on eBay!” Bussard said. His gray eyes were bulging beneath bushy white brows, his gaunt features twisted into a happy leer. “Haw! Haw!” Then the music came on and he was quiet.

Patton may be the greatest bluesman ever recorded and one of the hardest to listen to. The few records he made were pressed out of too soft shellac and worn down by constant playing. (Victrola needles were made of steel, easily dulled, and designed to be discarded after a single use, though they rarely were.) Not this one. Bussard had found it in a drugstore in Georgia, in the early sixties, in a stack of 78s that had lain untouched for thirty years. There was no crackle, hardly any hiss. You could hear the hoarseness in Patton’s voice—the growling authority of it—and the stutter and snap of the strings. You could hear the hollow thump of his palm against the guitar and the sharp intake of his breath. Bussard shook his head: “This is as close as you’ll ever get to him, kid.”

When Bussard started collecting, such finds weren’t uncommon. The music he liked was out of fashion, its format obsolete. (“Do not throw away your old gramophone records,” one magazine article urged in the thirties. “Instead, turn them into decorative wall vases, bulb bowls or miniature garden containers.”) “I guarantee you, eighty per cent of these records would have been destroyed if I hadn’t got them,” he said. “I went into Richmond when they had them big riots. Went into the black section and hunted house to house and alley to alley. I’d beat the backwoods. Look for houses without much paint on ’em—lace curtains, old rusted coffee can on the front porch. In Virginia in the sixties, the houses looked terrible, but inside they were like mansions. I could just smell the records.”

Then things got harder. By the late nineties, a mint Charley Patton could fetch several thousand dollars, and most houses had been picked clean—as had pawnshops, flea markets, record warehouses, and jukebox factories. The metal masters from which 78s were pressed had mostly been sold for scrap (or, in Patton’s case, tossed into a river), and the best surviving copies often didn’t make it to CD—they were squirrelled away by collectors. By the time Ledbetter found Bussard, in 1999, he was semi-retired, content to sit in his basement with his rare 78s, now worth more than a million dollars. (When he needed a new car, not long ago, he paid for it with a single Gene Autry record.)

“The first time I called him, I had this long list of gospel records I was trying to find,” Ledbetter remembers. “And I said, ‘Joe, have you got any of these?’ And he said, ‘I’ve got ’em all!’ ” Every week from then on, Ledbetter would send a check and a list of songs culled from Bussard’s typewritten catalogue. In return, Bussard would send two cassettes, dubbed at fifty cents a song. “I probably got a hundred and fifty tapes from him—five thousand songs,” Ledbetter says. “And I thought, I can’t believe that nobody can buy this stuff. It’s just nuts.” What was needed, he realized, wasn’t another record collector. What was needed was a go-between, an anthologizer—someone to collect from the collectors. What was needed was another Harry Smith.

The basement of Ledbetter’s house, in southeast Atlanta, has no room for Victrolas. It’s a cramped maze lined with empty boxes, rolls of shrink wrap, bags of Styrofoam peanuts, and rack after rack of CDs. Ledbetter and his wife, April, run Dust-to-Digital entirely from their home, packing and shipping every order. If Bussard’s basement is a bunker—a place to hole up in while the world goes to hell aboveground—theirs is a way station, a depot. It’s a place for sending music out rather than hiding it away.

Within a few months of getting his first tape from Bussard, Ledbetter quit the radio station, started an M.B.A. program, and took a job as a Web-site manager. Mostly, though, he thought about records. He planned, at first, to release a single album of rare gospel music. But, after two years of combing through private collections and field recordings, he had a hundred and sixty songs—enough for six overstuffed CDs.

It wasn’t clear that he could sell even one. Gospel music accounts for little more than one per cent of the record market, and industry groups like Billboard and Nielsen SoundScan don’t bother to track folk music as a separate category—the numbers are so low. (“We don’t put out any reissues anymore—none,” Yazoo’s owner, Richard Nevins, told me. “There are no sales.”) The songs that Ledbetter had chosen were even less commercial than most. He’d included a few classics by the Carter Family and Mahalia Jackson, but also songs by a reformed axe murderer, a Pentecostal jug band, and a teetotalling street preacher (“You snuff dippers, tobacco chewers / When you get to Heaven, you won’t have nowhere to spit”). There were no fewer than fifteen blind musicians, five of them called Willie, and one disk was devoted entirely to sermons. Their titles included “Black Diamond Express to Hell” and “Death Might Be Your Santa Claus.”

Like Smith’s anthology, Ledbetter’s was an act of faith. To succeed, he would have to find a new kind of audience. Not aging boomers of the kind who taped Peter, Paul & Mary reunions and tuned in to “A Prairie Home Companion” (“I hate that show,” April, who wears cat’s-eye glasses and shares Lance’s sweet manner and offbeat wit, told me. “They’ve got that rhubarb song they sing all the time”), but younger, more adventurous listeners like Ledbetter, who followed scruffy indie labels and were just as likely to be fans of synth pop, German noise rock, or minimalist soundscapes. To succeed, eighty-year-old gospel would have to somehow seem cutting edge.

“Goodbye, Babylon,” as the collection was eventually called, was a feat of both research and design. To rescue the musicians from anonymity, Ledbetter asked more than a dozen scholars and writers to put together essays and biographical sketches. To make the songs more accessible, he and April spent hundreds of hours transcribing every sermon and lyric, then months tweaking the song sequence and packaging. “I wanted everything to be old, old-looking, like something you might see in a general store in 1929,” he told me. He had his art director, Susan Archie, design the accompanying booklets to look like old hymnals. He had the boxes built of raw cedar with sliding lids, like a pioneer’s keepsake. In the space left over inside, he and April tucked strands of raw cotton, from a relative’s farm in Alabama.

By the time the first shipment arrived, in the fall of 2003, Ledbetter had worked on the project for four and a half years. He’d spent thirty thousand dollars of his savings, fifteen thousand from an inheritance, and racked up fifteen thousand in credit-card debt. He’d lost his job, fallen out of touch with friends, and finished his M.B.A. with the lowest allowable grade-point average. “I was in this little apartment in midtown Atlanta, when the eighteen-wheeler pulled up one morning,” he remembers. “Two pallets, a thousand boxes, two pounds apiece—literally a ton of wood.” If he could just sell the sets by the following September, he told himself, he’d be O.K. “And then the gates opened up.”


A month after the set was released, a review appeared in the Times: “Perhaps the season’s most astonishing boxed set.” Others, equally admiring, followed in the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Slate, and Entertainment Weekly. “It was overwhelming,” Ledbetter says. “It was just a media firestorm.” By December, the first shipment had sold out. By the next year, “Goodbye, Babylon” had been nominated for two Grammy Awards. Rolling Stone called it “the greatest anthology of antique Southern sacred song and oratory ever assembled.”

The more lasting response, though, came from musicians. With its rare recordings and careful transcriptions, Ledbetter’s set was the modern equivalent of Cecil Sharp’s songbooks. Gospel musicians like the Blind Boys of Alabama used it as a source for their own recordings, while others based new compositions on it. (The most widely praised album of last year, “Neon Bible,” by Arcade Fire, was written to the sound of “Goodbye, Babylon.”) For Ledbetter, the most memorable moment came one Saturday morning when he was listening to a Neil Young interview on NPR. “In the middle of it, he said, ‘I got this great boxed set from my friend Bob Dylan, and it’s called “Goodbye, Babylon.” ’ When I told April about it, she was, like, ‘We packed that one.’ ”

Ledbetter has produced eight collections since “Goodbye, Babylon”—from an album of old-time Christmas songs to one of Tuvan throat singing—all to glowing reviews and trickling sales. (The average Dust-to-Digital release sells about five thousand copies—roughly as many as Mariah Carey sells in a bad week.) When I visited, April had taken a job at an Italian lighting store in Atlanta to help make ends meet. “We’re just going at it so hard right now,” Ledbetter said. “We get up at six together, we pack orders for two hours, then April goes to work and I keep going. When she comes home at six, we sometimes keep working till midnight. It’s almost like we’re in a trance.”

Influential as Dust-to-Digital’s releases have been—Elvis Costello and others have cited recent releases, and the label’s MySpace page is crowded with “friends” from indie bands—there seems to be a natural limit to its audience. Vintage records, no matter how compelling, begin with a double handicap: their singers long dead, their sound no match for modern recordings. Few 78s are as pristine as the Charley Patton that Bussard played for me. And on some the noise threatens to overwhelm the singers.

One evening, Ledbetter and I went to visit his audio engineer, Michael Graves, who runs Osiris Studio from his home, across town. Graves, a thickset thirty-eight-year-old with a preternaturally calm manner, is a kind of sonic archeologist. He excavates songs from the layers of noise that overburden them. Like Bussard and Ledbetter, he works out of his basement, but his studio seems a century removed from theirs. A row of sleek black cabinets flanks one wall, a low-slung desk another. A pair of Aeron chairs glide between them, commanding an array of amplifiers, processors, flat-screen monitors, and reel-to-reel players—every surface neatly arranged and halogen-lit. It’s a control freak’s space for a business that allows only limited control.

Graves begins by peering at a record’s surface. Are the grooves worn along the sides or gouged out along the bottom? Depending on the pattern, he can fit his turntable with any of two dozen diamond needles, specially carved to ride at different heights within the groove. (At the Library of Congress, engineers have lately experimented with a more high-tech solution: a machine that takes a three-dimensional image of the groove, then plays it with a virtual stylus. The system can play even broken records, but sometimes picks up more noise than regular needles.) The song is then digitized and cleaned up.

To demonstrate, Graves played us a Congolese song from one of Ledbetter’s newest releases, “Victrola Favorites.” Recorded in the forties, it sounded as if the singer were standing in a field full of crickets and woodpeckers. A heavy layer of static lay over the music, punctuated by loud pops. Graves pointed to one of his screens, where the song appeared as a ragged sound wave. He magnified the wave till every inch represented a millisecond or so, then used his mouse to select and delete the sections with the pops—each one a vertical line, rising at a regular interval. The static, threaded through the music like a cross-stitch, was harder to see. To extract it, Graves relied on a twenty-thousand-dollar piece of software known as CEDAR. Developed at Cambridge University, in the late eighties, to clean up recordings at the British Library, CEDAR had evolved into a suite of more than a dozen algorithms, each targeted at a different kind of noise.

The effect was startling. When Graves played the song a second time, the crackles and pops were gone, the hiss barely audible. What had sounded like a curiosity—a historical artifact—now sounded like a recent radio broadcast. And yet something had also been lost. The drums sounded more muffled, I thought, the voice less present. The music had been made more listenable, but a little less worth listening to.

Vintage-music buffs have long railed against noise-reduction systems. (One early process was called Earwax—a case of truth in advertising.) “They’re just horrible,” Richard Nevins, of Yazoo, told me. “If you use CEDAR minimally, it has no effect. If you use it aggressively, it hollows out the music.” Graves admitted that the early systems sometimes did more harm than good. But these days, he said, the muffling effect I’d heard was mostly a matter of “psychoacoustics”—the mind mistaking high-pitched hiss for brightness and presence in the music. A few years ago, audio engineers played two versions of the same song for a panel of listeners. The first was free of noise. The second was the same recording, only with some random noise dubbed onto it. In almost every case, the listeners preferred the noisy version.

I glanced over at Ledbetter, slouched uneasily against the doorframe. The debate got at one of the essential dilemmas of his business: people liked old-time music to sound old, but not too old. Clean it up too much and it began to seem inauthentic. Leave it untouched, and no one would listen to it. “Goodbye, Babylon” had bridged the gap perfectly, combining subtle noise reduction with vintage packaging and music that seemed both ancient and timeless. But Ledbetter’s basement was full of unsold copies of “How Low Can You Go?,” a marvellous collection of early jazz not quite novel enough to overcome its obscurity and its low-fi sound.

Watching him, I could understand his excitement, three years earlier, when he first came upon Rosenbaum’s recordings at the University of Georgia library. They were that rare thing: modern folk that sounded centuries old. When Graves played us “Twenty Froggies Go to School,” from “Art of Field Recording,” the sound was both clear and amiably cluttered. You could hear a murmur of voices in the background and a clacking of pool balls, and suddenly you were with Rosenbaum in Dallas City, Illinois, in a bar along the Mississippi River, listening to an old woman recall the songs of her youth. “When I first got these tracks, I spent about a month just listening to them,” Ledbetter said afterward. “It made me wish that I’d met all these artists. And then it sort of dawned on me that Art had. Art was in the room with every one.”


The morning before I left Georgia, the Ledbetters and I drove into the hills north of Athens to meet the Rosenbaums for a last recording session. The house where we stopped was near the Chattahoochee River, set back from the road in a copse of spindly oaks. A faded blue Pontiac sat in the weeds out front and a rusted propane tank to one side. The house was patched together from tarpaper, scrap lumber, and corrugated steel, and perched, half askew, on cinder blocks. Above the door, a childlike portrait of Jesus peered at the road with unblinking eyes, as if scanning for sinners.

Rosenbaum had recorded several musicians in the previous weeks—among them a retired minister who’d sung with Mahalia Jackson, a gospel piano player who’d gone to blind school with Willie McTell, and a quartet of gray-haired ladies who sang songs about opossums. But he was most excited about that day’s visit. The two sisters waiting inside the house were his best hope that “the artless singing of American folk song,” as John Lomax once put it, had not died. Not quite yet.

Bonnie Loggins, eighty-seven, was said to be the artistic one. She had small, bright, ornery eyes, and long gray hair that she wore in a careless bun. She painted pictures of lost souls and leering Devils, and wrote haunting ballads of her own. (“In my mind, I was locked up in prison,” one of them began.) Mary Lomax, six years younger, was the more proper of the two—her back yardstick straight, her snow-white hair carefully permed. Yet she was the keeper of the old songs. Her father had taught her hundreds when she was a girl, and they seemed to hum along beneath everything she did. A drop of rain would bring to mind a Jimmie Rodgers song—“It’s rain-in’ here, stormin’ on the deep blue sea,” with its high, sweet yodel. Then the sun would come out and she’d sing “Sittin’ on Top of the World.”

Rosenbaum had met Mary two years before, and was startled to find that she knew ballads that even Francis Child hadn’t catalogued. In his boxed set, Rosenbaum described her as “perhaps the finest previously unrecorded old-time traditional Appalachian singer to emerge in the twenty-first century.” He hadn’t found a singer like her in twenty-seven years.

The house was soon crowded with listeners—Art and Margo, Lance and April, Mary’s great-grandson Jay and his girlfriend, Riley—all circled expectantly on couches and armchairs in the living room. And for a moment Mary seemed to lose her nerve. “I used to sing better than I do now,” she’d told me. “My voice cracks sometimes, and I can’t hardly play the guitar no more. My hands are so stiff.” Rosenbaum switched off the microphones. “Here, Mary,” he said. “Let’s listen to something you’ve already recorded.” He fished a CD from its case, and cued it to an English ballad called “The Drowsy Sleeper.” It was first transcribed in 1817, but Mary’s words were different from those, and more beautiful:

Wake up, wake up you drowsy sleeper!

Wake up, wake up it is almost day!

How can you bear to sleep and slumber

When your true love is goin’ away?

Oh don’t you see those dark clouds risin’?

They’re risin’ in a billowy dawn

I think we’ll have some fair weather

When these dark clouds are overblown.

Mary smiled, listening to it. Her voice was strong and reedy on the recording—halfway between a holler and a plaint. Then the words seemed to rouse her, and she began to sing. For the next two hours, she recorded half a dozen songs for Rosenbaum, some solo and some with Bonnie’s low, mumbling harmonies: “Uncle Noah’s Ark” and “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” a murder ballad called “William Bluett” and a tune about an old lady so mean that the Devil kicked her out of Hell.

I thought of a young folk singer I’d heard on the radio the week before. She was from a small island off the west coast of Canada, and her latest songs had been inspired by the music from “Goodbye, Babylon.” Like the souls redeemed in those songs, and in some of Mary’s ballads, the folk tradition had achieved a kind of immortality in passing away. The early recordings had entered the public domain, and were being gathered in collections like Ledbetter’s and in digital archives at universities like Baylor (for early gospel) and U.C.L.A. (for Mexican-American music). “It’s becoming more and more possible to have a musical memory for everything,” Ledbetter told me. “My eighty-gigabyte hard drive could fit every old-time record ever made.”

For Rosenbaum, that would never be enough. He would take the gains and losses of the oral tradition—the flubbed notes and faulty memories, the odd verses and improvisations—over any archive, no matter how complete. In folk music, he said, “everything kills something, but it doesn’t die.” It just takes another form.

When Mary was done, Rosenbaum turned to her great-grandson and asked if he’d like to sing. Jay nodded quickly, as if he’d been waiting his turn. Mary’s own children hadn’t taken to her songs, but Jay had loved them as a young boy. And though football now took most of his free time—he was a running back in high school, with a doughy build and a scar over his right eye—he’d started playing guitar recently and had a band called Every Mother’s Son. While Rosenbaum repositioned the microphones, Jay squinted at the fret board and carefully placed his fingers. He hummed something under his breath, then began to pick out a tune. Rosenbaum grinned. It had a sweet, melancholy air and a delicate line, like something from the Scottish Highlands. “There’s a lady who’s sure, all that glitters is gold,” the words began. “And she’s buying a stairway to Heaven.” ♦