Thousands of rare American songs from the Jazz Age and Great Depression are now available to the public through a partnership between UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) Library and the Dust-to-Digital Foundation. The collaboration aims to preserve music that might otherwise have been lost.
The UCSB Library’s Special Research Collections has started uploading music from Dust-to-Digital’s archive, which contains about 50,000 songs, into the university’s Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR) database. According to David Seubert, curator of the library’s performing arts collection, more than 5,000 songs have already been added. “Thousands more are in the pipeline,” he said.
“The Dust-to-Digital Foundation has digitized some of the most significant private collections in the country,” Seubert stated. “We are pleased to partner with them to make this rare content accessible.”
Dust-to-Digital was cofounded by Lance Ledbetter in 1999 as a commercial label focused on preserving hard-to-find music and producing box sets, vinyl records, CDs, DVDs and books that tell stories behind rare recordings. In 2010, Lance and his wife April established its nonprofit foundation.
April Ledbetter emphasized their dedication: “We share their passion to keep our musical heritage from being forgotten.” The process involves setting up special equipment in collectors’ homes and having technicians digitize each record individually—a process that can take months or years depending on collection size.
The foundation’s work has received recognition with Grammy Awards for Best Historical Album in both 2007 (“Art of Field Recording Volume 1: Fifty Years of Traditional American Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum”) and 2019 (“Voices of Mississippi: Artists and Musicians Documented by William Ferris”), as well as Best Liner Notes for the latter release. “We’ve built our reputation through storytelling,” Lance Ledbetter said.
Seubert described the partnership as mutually beneficial—combining an extensive music archive with UCSB’s established public-access platform. DAHR was launched in 2008 with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It documents over 440,000 master recordings made during the era when records spun at 78 rpm—a period spanning roughly sixty years starting in the late nineteenth century. The archive is recognized for detailed discographical information, artist biographies, free streaming for noncommercial use, high-quality digitization via UCSB’s Henri Temianka Audio Preservation Lab, and free downloads of public domain recordings.
“The clarity and sound speaks for itself,” Ledbetter commented.
Among notable releases are two tracks by blues guitarist Lane Hardin—“Hard Time Blues” and “California Desert Blues”—issued on Bluebird Records in 1936; only a few copies remain today. Other featured artists include Memphis Minnie, Eva Taylor, Reverend J.M. Gates, Fiddlin’ John Carson and his daughter Rosa Lee Carson (Moonshine Kate).
“We felt it was important that this music come out in some fashion,” April Ledbetter said. “DAHR is a great home for music that doesn’t necessarily have a commercial market but is no less valuable to history.”
Much of what has been uploaded comes from various collectors such as Roger Misiewicz, Frank Mare and Nathan Salsburg; however, most originated from Joe Bussard’s collection.
Joe Bussard began collecting records as a child growing up near Frederick, Maryland—a pursuit that lasted seventy-five years until his death in 2022. He amassed around fifteen thousand discs representing diverse regional genres like country string bands, jazz, bluegrass and gospel—many reflecting local musical traditions rarely recorded elsewhere.
In describing Bussard’s legacy Seubert noted: “Joe had an exceptional collection that was built at a time when you could actually build something like that… Even if you’re fabulously wealthy you could never end up with a collection that big and that good.” He added: “But you can’t create a culture of enjoyment if they’re all locked in archives… So Dust-to-Digital and UCSB have threaded that needle making the music accessible to the public for free.”
